Jeffrey R. Di Leo - Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory - An Overview-Bloomsbury Academic (2023)

CONTEMPORARY LITERARY AND
CULTURAL THEORY
i
ii
CONTEMPORARY LITERARY AND
CULTURAL THEORY
AN OVERVIEW
Jeffrey R. Di Leo
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks

of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2023
Copyright © Jeffrey R. Di Leo, 2023
Jeffrey R. Di Leo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Cover design by Annabel Hewitson

Cover image © miakievy/iStock, texture © Anatolii Kovalov/iStock
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in
this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased
to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-6616-9

ePDF: 978-1-3503-6613-8
eBook: 978-1-3503-6614-5
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
iv
CONTENTS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
Introduction 1
1 Early Theory 11
1.0 Introduction 11
1.1 Humanism 12
1.2 Rhetoric (or, the Quarrel Between Rhetoric and Philosophy) 17
1.3 Hermeneutics 24
1.4 Aestheticism 30
1.5 New Criticism 33
2 Structuralism and Semiotics 41

2.0 Introduction 41
2.1 Structure of the Sign (or, Saussure and Peirce) 43
2.2 Russian Formalism 50
2.3 Roland Barthes 56
2.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss 61
2.5 Narratology 67
3 Marxism 73
3.0 Introduction 73
3.1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 76
3.2 The Adorno–Benjamin Debate 83
3.3 Mikhail Bakhtin 91
3.4 Louis Althusser 96
3.5 Fredric Jameson 102
4 Psychoanalytic Theory 109

4.0 Introduction 109
4.1 Sigmund Freud 112
4.2 Jacques Lacan 118
4.3 Harold Bloom 124
v
vi CONTENTS
4.4 Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze 130

4.5 Slavoj Žižek 136
5 Poststructuralism 143
5.1 Jacques Derrida 147
5.2 Julia Kristeva 152
5.3 Jean-François Lyotard 157
5.4 Jean Baudrillard 163
5.5 New Historicism 169
6 Feminist Theory 175

6.1 First Wave 179
6.2 Second Wave 185
6.3 Third Wave and Beyond 192
6.4 Hélène Cixous 198
6.5 Luce Irigaray 203
7 LGBTQ+ Theory 209

7.1 Lesbian and Gay Theory 213
7.2 Lesbian Feminism 220
7.3 Judith Butler 225
7.4 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 229
7.5 Trans* Theory 235
8 Race and Justice 239

8.1 Critical Race Theory 244
8.2 Law and Literature 247
8.3 Human Rights 250
8.4 Intersectionality 255
8.5 Subaltern Studies 258
9 Biopolitics 261
9.1 Michel Foucault 263
9.2 Giorgio Agamben 268
9.3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 271
9.4 Surveillance Studies 275
9.5 Disability Studies 278
CONTENTS vii
10 Globalization 283
10.1 Postcolonial Theory 285
10.2 Border Studies 289
10.3 Neoliberalism 292
10.4 Translation 295
10.5 World Literature and Theory 298
11 Ecocriticism 303
11.1 Green Theory 306
11.2 Critical Climate Change 309
11.3 Anthropocene 313
11.4 Geocriticism 316
11.5 Blue Humanities 319
12 Posthumanism 323
12.1 Cyborg Theory 326
12.2 Animal Studies 329
12.3 Systems Theory 334
12.4 Cognitive Criticism 338
12.5 Speculative Realism 341
13 Affect Studies 347

13.1 Queer Affect 350
13.2 Materialism 353
13.3 Presentism 357
13.4 Trauma Theory 360
13.5 Holocaust Studies 364
14 Pop Culture 369

14.1 Cultural Studies 373
14.2 Media Studies 380
14.3 Sound Studies 385
14.4 Game Studies 388
14.5 Celebrity Studies 395
15 Against Theory 401

15.1 Antitheory 402
viii CONTENTS
15.2 Posttheory 405

15.3 Object-Oriented Ontology 406
15.4 Postcritique 412
15.5 New New Criticism 417
BIBLIOGRAPHY 419
I NDEX 443
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My primary debt of gratitude goes out to Ben Doyle of Bloomsbury for encouraging me to write an
overview of contemporary literary and cultural theory. I appreciate the time, care, and attention he
afforded this project, particularly with regard to shepherding it through the peer review and
publication process.
In addition, as editor of symploke– and executive director of the Society for Critical Exchange
and its Winter Theory Institute, I have had over the years the opportunity to converse with and
learn from many talented theorists. Their work has significantly impacted my views on contemporary
theory. I would like to thank these individuals for broadening and deepening my theoretical
horizons.
During the course of this project, I have benefited from the timely suggestions and insightful
conversations of many individuals that have challenged and inspired the work in this volume in
various ways: Frida Beckman, Jacob Blevins, Christopher Breu, Jane Gallop, Henry Giroux, Robin
Goodman, Peter Hitchcock, Vincent Leitch, Sophia McClennen, Paul Allen Miller, Christian
Moraru, John Mowitt, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Daniel T. O’Hara, Brian O’Keeffe, Jean-Michel Rabaté,
Kenneth Saltman, Nicole Simek, Henry Sussman, Robert T. Tally Jr., Harold Aram Veeser, Jeffrey
J. Williams, and Zahi Zalloua.
I am also grateful to Kristen M. Kelly, Darrion A. Garcia, and Vikki Fitzpatrick, for their efforts
in securing materials used for the development of this book; to Orlando Di Leo for his editorial
assistance; and to the late John Fizer of Rutgers University for introducing me to literary theory.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife Nina, for her unfailing encouragement, support, and
patience.
ix
x
Introduction
THE CITY OF THEORY

The aim of this book is to provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of contemporary
literary and cultural theory. But because it is such a sprawling and diverse area of concern, one
might regard the challenges of such an endeavor as similar to those involved in describing a major
city to someone. Some may have heard things about contemporary theory, but others may know
little to nothing about it. Of the former, some may have heard good things about it—things like it’s
a great place to live, and once you get settled in, you won’t want to live anywhere else. Others may
have heard that though it has some great neighborhoods where you will feel at home, it also has
some others where people often get lost. Still others will have been warned away from the city of
theory because it conflicts with their way of approaching the study of literature and culture.
All of which is to say—theory has quite a reputation. Depending on whom you ask, some will
steer you away from it, others will point you to one particular neighborhood, whereas others still
will encourage you to explore it openly. The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive
overview of contemporary literary and cultural theory so that the reader can make their own
informed decision. While I will do my best to be an impartial guide—and try not to influence your
opinion of what is presented—this will not always be possible because one of the ways new areas
of theoretical concern come about is by developing from alleged omissions or mistakes of another
theory. Such differences are frequently indicated with prefixes like “new-,” “post-,” and “anti-.”
Thus, part of becoming a scholar of theory is acquiring the ability to sort out what is actually “new”
about say the “ ‘New’ Criticism” (which we will turn to in Chapter 1) versus what is not—and then
perhaps also deciding whether “new” implies better.
It will also be difficult to be impartial because coming to understand and appreciate theory also
involves coming to terms with one’s own fundamental beliefs about its more general role in the
study of literature and culture. This task, when done well, has the effect of laying bare one’s web
of belief—a web that includes a vast range of beliefs ranging from ones about art (aesthetics),
morals (ethics), and truth (epistemology) to ones about society, politics, and the world. So, in spite
of my best efforts to be an impartial tour guide to the city of theory, the close observer will catch
glimpses of the author every now and again. The first one is that my approach to theory is pluralistic,
which is to say, I believe that there are a variety of contemporary theories of literature and culture,
and that each one has strengths and weaknesses that are always up for debate. Moreover, no effort
is made to hide this pluralistic view of theory. Rather, it is encoded in the very design of this book.
To wit, you might think of this book as a box of seventy-five snapshots of literary and cultural
theory. They range from some representative “early” literary and cultural theory to some of the
most current and cutting-edge work. Each snapshot will help you get a working picture of this area
of theoretical concern. To continue the metaphor of the city of theory, you might think of each of
them as a snapshot from one of theory’s many neighborhoods. As you dig deeper into this theoretical
neighborhood, you will find a community of people who have made contributions to it. Some of
these people agree with each other about the direction of the community, whereas others don’t.
1
2 CONTEMPORARY LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY
Some of these disagreements are so strong that people leave this community to form their own new
community in the city of theory.
Like any city, some neighborhoods have a long history, whereas others are of more recent origin.
There are also those that are flourishing communities today and others that have been virtually
abandoned. As this book focuses on “contemporary” theory, more emphasis is placed on snapshots
of flourishing or emerging communities rather than ones that have been abandoned.
To be sure, this book acknowledges that there are other ways to portray contemporary literary
and cultural theory. One of them is to take a less panoramic approach and to focus instead on a
much more limited number of neighborhoods. The most radical approach here is to choose to stay
in just one of these neighborhoods for the entirety of our visit to the city of theory. A more moderate
approach might be to focus on five or six neighborhoods. This book, however, will take you to
fifteen different neighborhoods (a number which corresponds with the number of chapters in this
book), and visit five different areas in each of these neighborhoods (a number which corresponds
with the number of sections in each chapter). Also, each chapter includes an introduction, which
prepares you for your neighborhood visits.
Chapter introductions and sections are noted throughout the book by a number in parentheses,
albeit only for material in higher numbered sections. So, for example, while related material from
8.4 (on intersectionality) would be noted in 7.2 (on lesbian feminism), material from 6.2 (on
second-wave feminist theory) would not be. These notes let you know you will be visiting this new
neighborhood in due course.
While some neighborhoods will be left out of this book, so too will some of the different areas
of neighborhoods that are included. While some effort will be made to inform you of these other
neighborhoods and missing areas, our goal here is not completeness. Rather, the aim is to offer an
overview of contemporary literary and cultural theory by taking you to some of the hottest areas of
the city, while also providing a sense of some of the more important older ones.
EIGHT WAYS OF LOOKING AT THEORY

As a stranger in a strange city, it is often hard to find your way. This is especially the case during
your initial time in the city, a period where you perhaps do not know anyone and are unable to
navigate well the terrain. But, if you ask someone who has lived there for a while to give you the
lay of the land and to show you around, you will quickly start to get a sense of the city. But this
emerging sense of the city comes with a price: namely, the sense of the city that one person gives
you may be very different from the one someone else gives you. This is especially true regarding
theory. Why? Because what theory is depends on whom you ask.
In general, there are eight different responses to the question “What is theory?” They are as
follows:
1
Theory is Professional Common Sense
Someone who teaches literature or culture for a living is a professional. Their knowledge of the
literary and cultural works that they teach is expressed to others through their classroom
performance. However, much of this knowledge is the same as that of other teachers of literature
INTRODUCTION 3
and culture. Theory is just another name for the professional common knowledge or common sense
of these teachers. It is what every professional teacher of literature and culture knows. Much of it,
however, goes without saying, and can only be shown through observation of professional practice.
2
Theory is Methodology
Theory is a set of general principles or procedures for studying literature and culture. These
general principles or procedures are clearly stated and when followed result in successful readings
of literature and culture. Unlike theory as professional common sense, which is largely unavailable
to the student of literature and culture, theory as methodology is something that is directly
available to students for them to learn and utilize in the study of literature and culture. The
methodology here can be derived from first principles or can be the direct consequence of literary
and cultural professionals self-reflecting on their professional practice—and then condensing it
into a methodology. Either way, theory as methodology is effectively a cookbook for the study
of literature and culture.
3
Theory is a Set of Movements or Schools
Theory is a set of schools or movements that often include Russian formalism (2.2), the New
Criticism (1.5), hermeneutics (1.3), phenomenology (1.3), structuralism and semiotics (2.0),
post-structuralism (5.0), psychoanalysis (4.0), Marxism (3.0), reader-response (or reception)
theory (Introduction, below), feminism (6.0), New Pragmatism (15.0), New Historicism (5.5),
postmodernism (3.0 & 5.0), postcolonialism (10.1), gender theory (6.0), and queer theory (7.0).
For the most part, this is the conception of theory used in the organization of this book, wherein
each of the seventy-five snapshots of theory either represent in themselves a school or movement
and/or are a sub-school or -movement of a larger movement. However, the difference between
identifying twelve or so major schools and movements, and identifying seventy-five areas of
interest, most of which were not identified in the aforementioned list and where potentially
many others could be identified, shows the wide range of this view of theory.
4
Theory is High Theory
Theory as high theory limits the number of schools and movements to only two: structuralism
and poststructuralism. Moreover, because the majority of the principal thinkers associated with
“high theory” are French, including Roland Barthes (2.3), Claude Lévi-Strauss (2.4), Jacques
Lacan (4.2), Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze (4.4), Jacques Derrida (5.1), Julia Kristeva (5.2),
Jean-François Lyotard (5.3), Jean Baudrillard (5.4), Hélène Cixous (6.4), Luce Irigaray (6.5),
and Michel Foucault (9.1), high theory is arguably even more specific: French structuralism and
poststructuralism. Of the eight ways of looking at theory presented here, this view of theory has
attracted both the strongest proponents and opponents. Fittingly, the latter includes calls for
Low Theory (14.1), which turns out to have none of the characteristics of High Theory.
5
Theory is a Toolbox
Theory as a toolbox regards it as a potentially useful set of concepts and devices. As tools,
concepts used by theorists such as affect (13.0), trauma (13.4), cyborg (12.1), postcolonial
(10.1), race (8.1), intersectionality (8.4), Anthropocene (11.3), law (8.2), disability (9.5),
surveillance (9.4), border (10.2), translation (10.4), and many others are judged by their
productivity and innovation in response to matters concerning literature and culture. Each tool
in the theorist’s toolbox is regarded as valuable not in itself, but only to the degree that it proves
to be productive and innovative in critical practice. The usefulness of each concept is contingent
upon its ability to work in a particular context. This is a maximally flexible and pragmatic
approach to theory that indiscriminately extracts concepts from a wide variety of schools and
movements for potential use in critical practice.
6
Theory is Cross- and Multidisciplinary
Theory as a cross- or multidisciplinary endeavor takes the standard concerns of the discipline of
literature and fuses them with those of other disciplines. The discipline of literature finds its
departmental homes not only in departments of English and Comparative Literature, but also in
those of every other language taught at the university (e.g., Chinese, French, German, Arabic, and
so on). A cross- or multidisciplinary approach to theory embraces other disciplines such as philosophy,
linguistics, sociology, history, anthropology, and politics, and fuses work in one or more of these
areas with that of the discipline of literature. Areas of theory in this book where this is explicitly at
work include race and justice (8.0), biopolitics (9.0), globalization (10.0), neoliberalism (10.3),
ecocriticism (11.0), posthumanism (12.0), affect studies (13.0), and pop culture (14.0). In short, at
least half of the theory presented in this book can be described as cross- and multidisciplinary theory.
7
Theory is a Way of Life
Theory as a way of life is a way to express the summation of the previous six ways of looking at
theory as something that is more than the sum of its parts. To say that theory is what theorists
do begs the question—but it also expresses one important way to look at theory. Rather than
trying to abstract the theory from the theorist by reducing them to their professional common
sense or methodology; to particular schools or movements, be they high or low; or to the
contents of their tool box or the disciplines from which they draw their theory—this approach
suggests that we should look at all of these things and more for their theory.
8
Theory is a Community
Theory is a community, or, more precisely, a set of communities. They may not go by recognizable
names like feminism (6.0), deconstruction (5.1), and psychoanalysis (4.0), but theory still is driven
INTRODUCTION 5
by communities of individuals who share common bonds of theoretical pursuit and interest. Like
all communities, theoretical ones go through periods of growth and popularity—and periods of
decline and unpopularity. Some become fashionable, while others languish in relative obscurity. For
example, few today seem to want to live in the structuralist (2.0) community. Though it was once
a thriving and active one, arguments and disagreements within the community led many to move
to other communities or to take part in the formation of new ones. And this, of course, is not a bad
thing. The legacies of structuralist community are widespread in the world of theory, including,
most directly, in poststructuralism (5.0), the roots of which still branch through many of the more
recent directions in theory.1
HOW TO APPROACH THE STUDY OF THEORY

If you are a new kid in town—and then again, even if you are not—you are sure to be approached
by folks with differing ways of looking at theory. They may fall into one of the ways outlined above
or they may have another way of looking at theory. Many will try to convince you that their way is
the only way to look at theory. It is at this point that one has an important decision to make. The
easy thing to do is to either embrace their way of looking at theory or reject it—and then just drop
the matter. I would suggest, however, that you consider doing something different. Rather than
embracing or rejecting it, try to understand better how it works by gauging its strengths and
weaknesses—and then leave the question of embracing or rejecting this approach to theory for a
later point. Why? Because there is something important that can be learned about theory from all
of these different ways of approaching it. You just have to be patient and let the accumulation of
greater knowledge do its magic.
As you consider their perspective—and come to form your own—I would encourage you to
every so often step back and reflect on the bigger question of “What is theory?” This question often
gets lost in the shuffle of moving to a new city with so many exciting things to do and memorable
places to visit.
The question that you might ask yourself every so often is what can theory do—not just for your
understanding of literature and culture, but also for your understanding of your own life and the
world in which you live. The study of theory is sure to lead you to questions about literature and
culture that you probably would not have thought about on your own. And this is a wonderful
thing. But it is just the beginning of what theory is capable of doing. If you keep an open mind in
your exploration of theory, it can and will bring you to pursue increasingly bigger and deeper
questions—questions that will not only enrich your appreciation of literature and culture, but also
of life and the world.
The possibilities for theory are limited more than anything else only by its disciplinary shape and
identity within the academy. If one only regards theory as professional common sense, then this is
all it will be. Learning it then only amounts to mimicking the behavior of your teachers with respect
to literature and culture. But if one is open, for example, to understanding why theory, especially
in the new millenium, is regarded by many as a multi- and interdisciplinary endeavor, then there
1
See Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “Running with the Pack: Why Theory Needs Community,” Intertexts 20.1 (2017): 65–79, for a
defense of theory as community.
are many more teachers to observe and mimic than just the ones that teach you literature and
culture.
Theory, as a multi- and interdisciplinary endeavor, operates within and among the humanities
(particularly, history, languages, linguistics, the arts, philosophy, and religion, in addition to
literature), the social sciences (including anthropology, ethnic and cultural studies, economics,
political science, psychology, and sociology), and many of the professions (for example, architecture,
business, communication, education, environmental studies, journalism, law, museum studies,
media studies, military science, public policy, and sport science, among others). In addition to its
now somewhat more standard-fare work in these areas, it has also made substantial inroads into the
natural sciences (for example, biology, physics, the earth sciences, and the space sciences) and the
formal sciences (especially mathematics, computer science, and systems science). To be sure, more
disciplines from across the academy have integrated theory into their practice than at any other
time in history. This, of course, is good news for theorists and theory at large. It is also good news
for pupils of literature and culture because it encourages them to get a fuller picture of their areas
of interest than just the one provided by the teachers in their discipline.
But if you are studying theory only to gain a better understanding of literature and culture, all of
these disciplinary possibilities for theory can become a distraction. For example, it may be difficult
to limit one’s theoretical questions to just literature and culture when considering the material in
this book on race and justice (8.0) while people are dying because of acts of violence done through
racial injustice; it may be difficult to do the same when considering the material on globalization
(10.0) while political refugees are being treated inhumanely or when reading about ecocriticism
(11.0) as thousands of dead turtles wash up to shore.
One of the powers of contemporary literary and cultural theory is that it often can and does
respond to much more than just literature and culture. Moreover, it often will take you well
beyond the central concerns of the study of literature and culture into those of many other disciplines
both within the humanities and outside of them. For those who take the time to delve into the
vast scope of theory today, it is difficult not to come away with the feeling that its concerns are
not only about the study of literature and culture. Rather, one comes away with a better understanding
of how the concerns of literature and culture are related to other ones that can range from those
of the LGBTQ+ and disability communities to the work of environmental and human rights
advocates.
Given the continuous pull of theory into areas that are not primarily concerned with literature
and culture—for example, animal studies (12.2) and game studies (14.4)—the study of theory can
be challenging for some. It helps to be a pluralist about such matters because this allows you to
enjoy the range of these theoretical interventions, rather than worry that one is being led astray
from their home discipline. But then again, such matters will be ones that you will have to come to
reckon with on your own as you become more familiar with the great variety of contemporary
literary and cultural theory.
HOW TO USE THEORY

Once you are no longer a stranger to theory and are able to find your way around some of its
locales, you will eventually start to think like a theorist. This means that you will gain the ability to
see literature and culture from the perspective of particular theories. So, for example, after studying
INTRODUCTION 7
a snapshot of postcolonial theory (10.1) or queer theory (7.4), a novel that you read or a movie that
saw may come to mind. These become opportunities for you to use these theories to think about
these texts. If you find that your thoughts lead to some type of interesting view of them, you might
consider sharing your ideas with others. This sharing of ideas is a vital aspect of theory and its
various communities.
But this organic approach to using theory is not always possible. Sometimes you will not have
read any literature or know of any films that speak to a particular theory that interests you. In this
case, you may want to carry the general assumptions or concepts utilized in the theory into some
research on literature or films that might bear some interesting fruits when thought through the
terms presented by this theory. Ideally, it will be a theory that is in some way interesting to you, so
the motivation to put other texts into dialogue with it will not be a chore. After all, seventy-five
different snapshots of theory provide plenty of options for using theory to think through literature
and culture.
But, as you now know, there are those that contend that using theory is less like bringing a
flexible toolbox to work on texts, and more like learning a methodology that can then be applied
to texts. At its most extreme, theory as a methodology reduces theory to a set of recipes that are
then used to interpret literature. Here is a sample of one of those recipes:
Reader-Response Criticism
Step 1
Move through the text in superslow motion, describing either your response or the response of
an informed reader at various points.
Step 2
React to the text as a whole, embracing and expressing the subjective and personal response it
engenders.
Lest you believe this recipe (or this type of criticism) is a joke, it is not. It comes from a widely-used
textbook for writing about literature with “critical theory.”2
Moreover, reader-response criticism, though without its own section in this book, was a well-
known and much discussed theoretical approach to literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Among others, it was grounded in the work of two major theorists: one of them was David Bleich,
whose main books on this topic were Readings and Feelings (1975) and Subjective Criticism (1978);
the other was Stanley Fish, whose Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities (1980) is representative of his reader-response criticism (Fish is discussed in the
general context of theories of interpretation—1.3).
2
This recipe is adapted from the one found inside the front cover of Steven Lynn’s Texts and Contexts: Writing About
Literature with Critical Theory, 2nd edition (New York: Longman, 1998). For those interested, Lynn also has recipes here
for New Criticism; deconstruction; biographical, historical, and New Historical criticism; psychological criticism; and
feminist criticism.
I use this example of a theoretical recipe because its methodology is one that can be followed by
anyone who can read and write. One way then to use theory is to first reduce it to a methodology
(or recipe) and then to apply the methodology to a text (or to make the recipe). However, because
there are no recipes for cooking with theory in this book, the opportunity to write some theoretical
recipes and to then to cook (or bake with) them is always a possibility. One way that theory as
methodology in use has been described is “Cookie-Cutter Theory,” wherein one presses the cookie-
cutter of a theoretical methodology to the “dough” of a text—and then bakes it.
What should be apparent from these descriptions of how to use theory is that they are often
connected to how one looks at theory. Each of the three examples above as to how to use theory is
connected to a specific way of viewing theory:
Theory as methodology implies that we use theory as a method (or recipe) to interpret texts;
Theory as a toolbox implies that we use this toolbox to work on texts; and
Theory as a way of life implies an organic approach to using theory wherein one just comes to
think like a theorist.
But to be fair, to ask how one uses theory assumes that how one looks at theory has a use (or
pragmatic) dimension. If we turn to the other five ways of looking at theory, we see that their use
dimension is less explicit:
Theory as professional common sense implies that we use professional common sense when
approaching texts—but if one is not a professional, then how does one know what this common
sense is? This limits the usability of this view of theory for the non-professional (or amateur)
theorist.
Theory as a set of movements or schools implies that there is a wide variety of schools or
movements that can be used to approach a text—but leaves it open as to how we should use
them. This view of theory is more about its historical or conceptual development than its
usefulness.
Theory as high theory implies that only structuralism and poststructuralism can be used to
approach a text—but still leaves it open as to how we should use them. This view of theory is
more about the contributions of two particular schools or movements than the usefulness of high
theory as an approach to literature and culture.
Theory as cross- and multidisciplinary implies that disciplines other than those directly associated
with the study of literary and cultural texts must be used to approach these texts—but still leaves
it open which disciplines should be used and how they should be used as approaches to literature
and culture.
Theory as a community implies that we use the tactics favored by the community when
approaching texts—but if one is not a member of this community, then how does one know the
tactics that they favor? This limits the usability of this view of theory for those who are not
members of a theory community.
INTRODUCTION 9
Still, while these five approaches to theory do not have a pragmatics built into them, all can quickly
be adapted for use by the fledgling theorist. To do this, all one has to do is act like a professional, a
high theorist, or a member of a theory community approaching a text. Whether this is preferable
to carrying around a theory toolbox, recipe box, or thinking like a theorist will be for you to decide.
The point that I want to emphasize here is that there is a gap between knowing what theory is
and knowing how to use it. Some approaches to theory bridge this gap (theory as methodology;
theory as toolbox; and theory as way of life) whereas others require you to take a leap before you
are able to use them (theory as professional common sense; theory as high theory; theory as cross-
and multidisciplinary; and theory as a community). For the tyro, making a leap is much more
difficult than taking a bridge across a gap. You should keep this in mind when and if you decide to
use the contemporary theory presented in this book to approach various works of literature and
culture.
ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is a book about contemporary literary and cultural theory. To accomplish this, a number of
major movements and schools of theory from the twentieth century are either deliberately not
included (for example, reader-response criticism) or they are included but are the topic of a section
(for example, hermeneutics [1.3], New Criticism [1.5]) rather than a chapter. In other cases, more
recent areas that one might expect to find such as postmodernism are discussed within chapters
under figures (for example, Fredric Jameson [3.5], Jean-François Lyotard [5.3], and Jean Baudrillard
[5.4]). This allowed for more coverage of more recent or emerging areas of theory, particularly
those in the last five chapters of this book.
Roughly speaking, the earlier chapters in this book are more firmly rooted in the twentieth
century, the middle chapters in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century theory, and the
later chapters in twenty-first century directions in theory. Still, in spite of the roughly historical
organization of the book, it is not a historical compendium of schools and movements. This is
especially in evidence in the middle chapters where the names of schools and movements (for
example, structuralism and semiotics [2.0], Marxism [3.0], psychoanalytic theory [4.0],
poststructuralism [5.0], feminist theory [6.0], and LGBTQ+ theory [7.0]) give way to the names of
key concepts and areas of interest (race and justice [8.0], biopolitics [9.0], globalization [10.0],
ecocriticism [11.0], posthumanism [12.0], affect studies [13.0], and pop culture [14.0]). Given our
earlier discussion of ways of approaching theory, this might be regarded as a shift from viewing
theory as a set of movements or schools to regarding theory as a toolbox, a view that also historically
parallels the dominant views of theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first
quarter of the twenty-first century. Arguably, then, the period before theory as covered in Chapter
1 (Early Theory) is referred to mainly by schools and movements; and an alleged period after
theory as covered in Chapter 15 (Against Theory) is referred to mainly by the names of key concepts
and areas of interest.
Given then the organization of this book, it may be read as a kind of “story” of contemporary
literary and cultural theory, which begins in Chapter 1 and concludes in Chapter 15. However, it
also may be read like a “shuffle novel” wherein its beginning, middle, and end is determined by the
reader. Not only can the chapters of this book be read (or used) in any order, so too may any of the
seventy-five sections of the book be read (or used) in any order. Finally, this book can be approached
as a “handbook,” wherein one turns to a chapter or section in order to fill in knowledge gaps
regarding contemporary literary and cultural theory. Which is the better way to read or use this
overview of theory really depends on your needs and interests.
Moreover, my Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (2019), which is the most
comprehensive available survey of the state of theory in the twenty-first century is intended to be a
companion volume to Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. The former features original
work by over 200 leading international scholars of theory, with individual chapters on the latest
thinking in traditional schools such as feminist, Marxist, historicist, and postcolonial criticism and
new areas of research in ecocriticism, biopolitics, affect studies, posthumanism, materialism, and
many other fields. In addition, the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory includes
a substantial A-to-Z compendium of key words and important thinkers in contemporary theory. It
is suggested that the curious reader turn to the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural
Theory for further insight into contemporary theory.
In many ways, this book is the direct consequence of my work on the Bloomsbury Handbook of
Literary and Cultural Theory. During the course of working on it, I noticed that there was no
single-authored book on literary and cultural theory that attempted to take stock of the entirety of
contemporary theory, that is, both theory’s traditional schools and areas of concern as well as
newer and emerging ones. This book is thus my response to this void in the scholarship. However,
in spite of its coverage of some traditional areas of theory, it is more than anything else the newer
and emerging work of theorists that I believe will convince one-time visitors to the city theory to
stay here for life. Theory today is stronger than ever because, among other things, it offers much
more than just cookie-cutter approaches to literature and culture. Rather, at its best, it offers insight
on not only how to understand the world, but also how to save it.3
Finally, the perspective on contemporary literary and cultural theory in this book is the result of
many years of studying, teaching, and writing about it. Also, as I said earlier, my view of contemporary
theory is a pluralistic one. More than any specific school, movement, or concept, it is the field of
literary and cultural theory that interests me—and that I want to share with you here. The endgame
though is not for you to drop everything that you are doing after reading this book and become a
theorist like me. Rather, it is for you to mediate your own worldview with the thought and work
of an area of interest that often gets lost in the shuffle of studying other things. In sum, I’d like to
try to convince you of the value and importance of contemporary theory—and of the potential
impact it can have on your life and our world.
3
For four responses to the question “Can Theory Save the World?,” see symplok e– 29.1/2 (2021): 521–59.
CHAPTER ONE
Early Theory
1.0 INTRODUCTION
If theory is a set of schools or movements, then who ran the first school or established the first
movement? This question often marks the fault line between a humanist conception of literary and
cultural theory and an antihumanist conception.
Broadly speaking, the humanist conception of literary and cultural theory is often traced back to
ancient Greece, when the seeds of the Western tradition were being sown by poets and philosophers,
and to ancient Rome, when the first empire was formed. It is a story that covers two millennia and
countless thinkers. The first chapter in such an overview of literary and cultural theory often begins
with Greek classics such as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics, and then moves on to Roman
classics such as Horace’s Art of Poetry and Longinus’s On the Sublime.
The humanist conception of literary and cultural theory, which is but a part of the greater
Western tradition, is contained in classic texts from the Greeks to the present. These texts are
sometimes referred to as the Great Books of the Western World, as they were eponymously titled
in the fifty-four-volume set of works ranging from Homer to Sigmund Freud, famously published
under the editorship of Robert Maynard Hutchins in 1952 by Encyclopedia Britannica. Hutchins,
who served as President and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, was a fierce proponent of
centering the university curriculum on these Great Books—and their Great Conversation on
perennial questions and themes.
The marker of these works as “Great Books” is their ability to carry forward the lines of thought
(or conversation) established in the classical period, which for those who are history-challenged
might be conveniently dated back to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE . It is a period that then
extends forward into the “late” classical antiquity of Augustine of Hippo, who completed his
Confessions around 400 CE , around 800 years later. I mention Augustine here because he is widely
regarded as the originator of hermeneutics, which is one of the sections in this chapter.
The classical period of literary and cultural theory, one that extends from the death of Socrates,
the founder of Western philosophy and the teacher of Plato, to Augustine, the originator of
hermeneutics (and, arguably, also semiotics [2.0]), is where we find the earliest “early theory.” Later
“early theory” might then be said to include Western thought after Augustine through Friedrich
Nietzsche. While the majority of this later period is dominated by the Middle Ages, a 1,000-year
period which extends from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries CE , it also includes the work of
Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic thinkers. Again, I point this out only to say that
depending on your view of literary and cultural theory, its beginnings range from the classical
period to the twentieth century.
However, regardless of one’s position here, it does not change the fact that classical thought (or
“early theory,” if you will) had an enormous impact on many of the schools and movements of the
11
twentieth century, particularly in psychoanalytic theory (e.g., Freud [4.1] and Jacques Lacan [4.2]),
poststructuralism (e.g., Jacques Derrida [5.1] and Julia Kristeva [5.2]), feminist theory (Hélène
Cixous [6.4] and Luce Irigaray [6.5]), and biopolitics (e.g., Michel Foucault [9.1]).
Nevertheless, because much of the impact of this early theory on these particular schools and
movements was, as we shall see, a negative one, their contributions are often termed antihumanism.
To get a sense of this antihumanism, consider that Michel Foucault announced the end of the
human era in the 1960s, and predicted in hindsight that man will turn out to have been relatively
unimportant. This all brings us back to the question of humanism and antihumanism as working
fault lines for the schools and movements associated with theory.
Generally speaking, the schools and movements that more or less positively embrace and develop
aspects of classical literary and cultural theory are called humanist. They include the work associated
with all five sections of this chapter—humanism (1.1), rhetoric (1.2), hermeneutics (1.3), aestheticism
(1.4), and New Criticism (1.5). However, in various ways, this is the only chapter in this book that
can be described as humanist. The second closest one is Chapter 15, “Against Theory.” Ever other
chapter, in one way or another, as we shall see, involves a significant dimension of antihumanism—
that is to say, the majority of the sections in these chapters might be described as antihumanist,
rather than humanist.
Therefore, before we head into these various critiques of humanism conducted by contemporary
literary and cultural theory, we need to reflect for a moment on humanism and some of its positive
critical legacies.
1.1 HUMANISM
When the roots of humanism are traced back to ancient Greece, its starting point is the thought of
a man who travelled from city to city for forty years offering instruction for a fee. When he visited
Athens, his great reputation preceded him, and the young men flocked to see him in a scene
described by Plato in his dialogue, Protagoras. Though Plato disagreed with Protagoras of Abdera,
calling him a Sophist because he took money for teaching, he greatly respected his thought. The
cornerstone of Protagoras’s philosophy is found in the opening line of a book that he wrote called
On Truth: “Of all things the measure is man: of existing things, that they exist; of non-existent
things, that they do not exist.”1 Unfortunately, however, the rest of On Truth has been lost. Still,
two major characteristics of humanism are quite clear from the line that survived: (1) By “man” he
means the individual; and (2) By “measure” he means judge. Consequently, at the heart of humanism
is the idea that the individual is the judge of whether a thing has a particular nature or not. So, if
something appears to have a particular nature, then it has that particular nature. In other words,
for Protagoras, all beliefs are true. Thus, at the origins of humanism is relativism, the view that no
absolutes exist and that human judgment is always conditioned by a number of factors including
our personal biases and beliefs.
What is immediately striking here is the opposition of Protagoras’s humanism to the thought of
Plato and Aristotle, who would never say that something is true just because we believe it to be true.
Plato believed that the world as it appears to us is but a reflection of an ideal world: the world of
1
John Mansley Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 245.
EARLY THEORY 13
becoming (or appearances) and the world of being (or reality) are two different things. He uses the
analogy of a cave to describe the difference between these two worlds.
In his dialogue, The Republic, Plato writes of cave-dwellers who discover that their senses have
led them to false knowledge about the world, and come to learn the impact of true knowledge and
education on a person. Plato’s general approach to knowledge is called rationalism, which means
that he believes that reason alone, without the aid of information from the senses, is capable of
arriving at knowledge. The allegory of the cave tells us that not having true knowledge of the world
is like being a person who mistakes shadows projected on the wall of a cave to be real things. The
prisoners in the cave are akin to ordinary persons who do not know how to distinguish appearance
from reality, false beliefs from justified true beliefs, or opinion from knowledge.
Once people are shown the source of the shadows on the cave wall, there is no going back to a
state of ignorance. While it is a painful journey out of the cave and into the sunlight, it changes us
for the rest of our lives. When we see things for what they really are, we will not want to lack true
knowledge ever again, even if it means being the subject of ridicule. Alluding to the trial of Socrates
on the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens, Plato adds the following touch: “As
for the man who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow lay their hands
on him and kill him, they would do so.”2
Plato’s philosophy makes a sharp distinction between the material world, perceived and known
through the senses, and a super-sensory world apprehended by reason. The material world is
correlated with matter, body, sense perception, many, opinion, particulars, and becoming. The
super-sensory world (or world of “Ideas”) is correlated with mind, soul, reason, knowledge, one,
truth, universals, and being. Plato rejects the concrete material world as a source of true knowledge.
For him, it yields only relative, individual truth (opinion) obtained through the senses. For example,
an object will be heavy to one person, light to another; opinion will vary about beauty. Such truth
is, therefore, subjective, temporary, changing like the “truth” of Protagoras.
True reality, however, is for Plato the super-sensory world of abstract ideas, apprehended only
by reason. It is the world of objective, eternal, unchanging truth. Ideas (universals, absolutes) such
as Beauty, Justice, and Courage have an independent character in this world. Concrete particulars
exist only insofar as the Ideas “participate” in them. In other words, concrete particulars should be
regarded as “copies” of Ideas. For Plato, all particulars, even all human beings, might cease to exist,
but the world of Ideas would continue to be. As all particulars are subordinated to and derive their
existence from the Ideas, so all Ideas, forming a pyramid, are subordinated to the highest idea, the
Idea of the Good, which is positioned at the top of the pyramid. The Good, the analog of which in
the cave allegory is the sun, is the supreme concept, and is the one absolute reality, self-sufficient
and perfectly harmonious; it is the creative cause of the universe; it is the end of all from which flow
all other Ideas, and through them the imperfect material world; it is pure reason and absolute
virtue.
While the eyes of the student of literature and culture might glaze over when Platonic metaphysics
(that is, the nature of reality, existence, and being) and epistemology (that is, the sources, types, and
limits of knowledge) are discussed, they always open wide when he discusses both the role of art in
his ideal state and the intrinsic nature of art. Plato argues that art ought to have positive influence
2
Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1974), Book V, 517a.
on its audience, and when it does not exert this type of influence, it must be censored. For Plato,
not even the great poets of Greek antiquity are beyond censorship. Furthermore, art is regarded as
an imitation of an imitation: something with much stronger ties to the world of appearances than
the world of reality and truth.
In The Republic, Plato explains why the censorship of art is especially important for children,
that is, those who are just forming their character and are much more amenable to taking in the
“desired impression.” He argues that we should keep them away from stories that contain “notions
which are the very opposite of those which are to be held by them when they are grown up.”3 Plato
says that children “cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal.”4 Consequently, given that
literature often does not represent things or events as they truly are, it can exert a bad moral
influence on the character development of the young. “Whenever an erroneous representation is
made of the nature of gods and heroes,”5 it must be kept away from the developing young minds
in Plato’s ideal state—even if the representation is made by Homer or Hesiod, the two cornerstones
of ancient Greek literature. In American culture, this would be the equivalent of keeping Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman away from schoolchildren.
This line of thought leads Plato to banish poets from his ideal state because “the mimetic poet
sets up in each individual soul a vicious constitution by fashioning phantoms far removed from
reality, and by currying favor with the senseless element that cannot distinguish the greater from the
less, but calls the same thing now one, now the other.”6 This latter attribute of the poets, that is,
calling “the same thing now one, now the other,” is precisely one of the flaws of Protagoras’s
humanism according to Plato. For Plato, poetry has the power to corrupt, therefore it along with
poets must be banished from the ideal state that is established by philosophy—and ruled by a
philosopher. Thus when considering the classical sources of humanism, the relativistic humanism
of Protagoras stands in opposition to the absolutist humanism of Plato. Furthermore, when one
takes into account the “quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, that is, its role in the state and
relation to truth and reality, one begins to see that there are several very different senses of
humanism.
In The Republic, though, Plato goes into much more detail about the metaphysical and
epistemological nature of poiesis, which in Greek literally means “making.” For him, poiesis refers
to all forms of artistic creativity including music, drama, poetry, prose fiction, painting, and
sculpture. And, to be sure, these areas are all associated with the humanities. Moreover, the allegory
of the cave can also be used to illustrate the limits of poiesis. Again, true reality for Plato is the
super-sensory world of abstract ideas or forms, apprehended only by reason. It is the world of
objective, eternal, unchanging truth. Ideas (universals, absolutes) such as Beauty, Justice, Courage—
and even “Bed”—have an independent character in this world. Concrete particulars exist only
insofar as the Ideas “participate” in them. A concrete, particular bed (for example, the one you slept
in last night) should be regarded as a “copy” of the Idea “Bed” which persists in the world of
3
Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 2nd edition, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1875), 249; Book II, 377.
4
Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 251; Book II, 378.
5
Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 250; Book II, 377.
6
Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), Book X, 605b.
EARLY THEORY 15
objective, super-sensory truth. Therefore, the bed you slept in last night is, for Plato, a second
removed from truth—the Idea of Bed.
Art (poiesis) then, being an imitation (mimesis) of the world around us, is a third removed from
truth. When we paint an image of the bed we slept in last night or tell a story about it or write a
song about it, we are producing an “imitation of an imitation.” Plato says then “must we not infer
that all the poets, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the
like, but the truth they never reach?”7 “The poet is like a painter who . . . will make a likeness of a
cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who
know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures.”8 For Plato, the artist is depicted
as one who continuously lives in the cave, and produces images based on their sensory observations
of images on the cave wall: “The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing of true existence;
he knows appearances only.”9
Whereas Aristotle agrees with Plato that art is a mode of imitation (mimesis), he disagrees with
him on what art imitates as well as on its psychological and moral effects on human beings. Plato
believes that art is an imitation of an imitation, a feature that makes art far removed from truth.
Aristotle, however, contends that while art is imitation, it is not an imitation of an imitation. For
him, the artist does not imitate particular characters, emotions, or actions, but rather imitates
universal characters, emotions, and actions. This places art in a closer relationship with truth, since
these universal characters, emotions, and actions are truer than particular ones. For Aristotle, art,
then, is an idealization of human life, not a direct copy. In addition, “it is not the function of the
poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of
probability or necessity.”10 “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than
history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”11
For Aristotle, works of art are created because “the instinct of imitation is implanted in man
from childhood”12 as is the instinct for “harmony and rhythm.”13 Furthermore, we enjoy observing
art because there is pleasure in seeing certain things and actions imitated (e.g., “dead bodies”)14 as
well as pleasure in observing the technical perfection of a work. There is also enjoyment in both
learning something new and in recognizing what we already know through a work of art.
Comedy involves the imitation of lower types of men whose faults are “ludicrous,”15 whereas
tragedy involves the imitation of the action of men of a higher type. The purpose of tragedy is to
arouse fear and pity, and to bring about a catharsis (purging) of these two emotions.16 In this latter
regard, Aristotle and Plato disagree. Plato rejects tragedy on the ground that it arouses pity and fear,
and that this, in turn, makes people emotionally weak. Aristotle believes that tragedy purges away
these emotions and makes people stronger.
7
Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 495–6; Book X, 600.
8
Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 496; Book X, 601.
9
Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 496; Book X, 601.
10
Aristotle, Poetics, 3rd edition revised, trans. S. H. Butcher (London: Macmillan, 1902) 35; 1451a, IX, 1–2.
11
Aristotle, Poetics, 35; 1451b, IX, 3–4.
12
Aristotle, Poetics, 15; 1448b, IV, 2.
13
14
15
Aristotle, Poetics, 21; 1449a, V, 1.
16
Aristotle, Poetics, 23; 1449b, VI, 3.
For Aristotle, tragedy has six elements: Spectacle (scenery, costumes), Song, Diction, Character,
Thought, and Plot.17 The most important element is plot, for a good plot is necessary to produce
the tragic effect of fear and pity. The second most important element is character. Even though
Aristotle only focuses on one imitative art (poetry) and, in particular, only one form of that art
(tragic drama), his Poetics, the source of these ideas, has come to be the single most influential work
on art. Nevertheless, the Poetics is not the only work by Aristotle that takes up the subject of art.
He also makes comments on art in general, and about tragedy in particular, in many of his other
writings. For example, in his Rhetoric, he describes pity and fear in greater detail; in his Politics, he
further discusses catharsis; in his Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics he comments on the general
nature of art; and in his Parts of Animals and Physics he notes the relationship of art to nature. In
brief, the early theory of Aristotle might be described today as both cross- and multidisciplinary.
Much humanist literary theory builds upon these basic ideas established by Protagoras, Plato,
and Aristotle. Some of these ideas concern the following:
Literature as a Source of Morality

Plato’s banishment of the poets is an extreme position of the view that literature has a moral
dimension. More moderate positions regard some works of literature as sources of moral
improvement and others move in the opposite direction. The latter direction raises issues of the
viability of censorship as a means of protecting society from immorality.
Literature as a Source of Truth

Whereas Plato’s metaphysics does not allow literature access to truth, Aristotle does provide for
some type of relationship. These issues raise more general ones for humanist literary theory
about the role of truth, fact, and history in literature.
Literature and the Emotions

Whereas both Plato and Aristotle agree that literature is related to human emotions, they disagree
on the specific role. Both of these thinkers open up broader questions though about the
relationship between human emotions and literature, including its ability to communicate
universal truths about love, joy, empathy, fear, hatred, and pity.
As such, humanism is often associated with the centrality of morality, emotions, and truth in
literature and culture—or more broadly, human (or better, humane) values. During the Renaissance,
emphasis was placed on a broad reading of classical thinkers, which were viewed as an antidote to
the religious authority and scholasticism of the Middle Ages. Still, the humanists of this period
tended to be Christians. Humanism that denies any role for religious authority, and claims that all
values are human values, is sometimes called secular humanism to distinguish it from humanism
associable with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Since the Renaissance, the term humanism has
generally signified a return to Greek sources like Plato and Aristotle as opposed to religious authority
and Scholasticism.
17
Aristotle, Poetics, 25; 1450a, VI, 7.
EARLY THEORY 17
Regardless though whether the source of human value and freedom is superhuman or secular,
humanism always come back to the individual identified by Protagoras. The question though is
whether the beliefs and values of that individual—the human—are sourced in God, nature, or are
of her own “measure.” This leads us to add a few more ideas associable with humanist literary
theory:
Literature as a Source of Pleasure

Literature has the ability to give humans pleasure. Whether this pleasure involves simple
fulfillment or a complex mix of emotions, satisfaction or sublimity, the point is that humans are
the measure of pleasure—not anyone or anything else. Hedonism, the view that the pursuit of
pleasure is the sole aim of life, can be traced back to Aristippus, who was a student of Socrates.
Literature as a source of pleasure is the most hedonistic element of all possible humanisms.
Literature as a Source of Spirituality

Literature has the ability to move humans beyond their personal experiences to those that bring
them closer to God, nature, and the world (or cosmos). These experiences are sometimes
described as beyond expression, description, and speech—and at their most (ineffable) extreme
are termed as a spiritual or sublime experience. This is the most superhuman element of all
possible humanisms.
Finally, it should be noted that the origins of the word humanism come from Roman, not Greek,
culture. Still, the Latin word humanitas is a combination of two Greek concepts: philanthropia,
which in Greek brings together philia (friendship, love) and anthropos (human), which merged
mean humanity or humane feeling; and paideia, which is the Greek word for education. For the
Romans, the Latin word humanitas referred to both the commitment to humane values, and a
broad education in subjects such as history, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and moral philosophy. These
subjects would come to form part of the core of what we call today “the humanities.”
1.2 RHETORIC (OR, THE QUARREL BETWEEN

RHETORIC AND PHILOSOPHY)
Rhetoric in Greek antiquity was regarded as the art of speaking and writing both persuasively and
well. It involved not only practical skills associated with delivering a persuasive speech—that is
“oratory”—but also laid out rules for good composition. Even though its domain, range, and
influence shifted over the years, rhetoric is commonly said to have flourished from Greek antiquity
up until the late nineteenth century.
Since the twentieth century, however, in spite of the influential work on literary rhetoric by most
notably Kenneth Burke (1.5) and Wayne Booth (2.5), it has ceded significant ground to or has been
incorporated into a number of other approaches to literature such as hermeneutics (1.3), narratology
(2.5), and cultural studies (14.1), which draw on its long history for influence and inspiration. Some
contemporary rhetoricians, however, find it extends to many other areas of literary and cultural
theory, including Marxism (3.0), psychoanalytic theory (4.0), feminist theory (6.0), critical race
theory (8.1), postcolonial theory (10.1), and even object-oriented ontology (15.3). This broader
influence is largely made possible by a broader conception of rhetoric: namely, rhetoric as “the use
of language in a context to have effects, language here understood to include not only words but
also physical gestures, visual images, and other symbolic instruments.”18
Yet, despite its almost continuous presence and influence from Greek antiquity to the present,
rhetoric has just about always been met with varying degrees of denunciation by philosophers. The
major exceptions here from the humanist tradition are as follows:
The Citizen Orator (Isocrates)

This notion was advanced by Isocrates, who said “Mark you, the man who wishes to persuade
people will not be negligent as to the matter of character; no, on the contrary, he will apply
himself above all to establish a most honourable name among his fellow citizens; for who does
not know that words carry greater conviction when spoken by men of good repute than when
spoken by men who live under a cloud, and that the argument which is made by a man’s life is
of more weight than that which is furnished by words?”19 Isocrates attacked the immoral teachers
of rhetoric. He also won the praise of Plato, who “prophesized” that Isocrates’ work in rhetoric
will make the work of “his literary predecessors look like very small-fry.”20 Plato even adds that
Isocrates’ work in rhetoric “contains an innate tincture of philosophy.”21
The Philosopher-Orator-Statesmen (Cicero)

This notion is advanced by Cicero, who said “no man can be an orator possessed of every
praiseworthy accomplishment, unless he has attained the knowledge of every thing important,
and of all liberal arts, for his language must be ornate and copious from knowledge, since, unless
there be beneath the surface matter understood and felt by the speaker, oratory becomes an
empty and almost puerile flow of words.”22 For Cicero, rhetoric is the art of thought—not
persuasion—relating to all of the sciences, especially philosophy.
Christian Rhetoric (Augustine of Hippo)

This notion is advanced by Augustine, who says “For since by means of the art of rhetoric both
truth and falsehood are urged, who would dare to say that truth should stand in the person of
its defenders unarmed against lying, so that they who wish to urge falsehoods may know how to
make their listeners benevolent, or attentive, or docile in their presentation, while the defenders
of truth are ignorant of that art? Should they speak briefly, clearly, and plausibly while the
defenders of truth speak so that they tire their listeners, make themselves difficult to understand
and what they have to say dubious? Should they oppose the truth with fallacious arguments and
assert falsehoods, while the defenders of truth have no ability to defend the truth or to oppose
18
Steven Mailloux, “Rhetoric,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo
(London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 102.
19
Isocrates, “Antidosis,” in Isocrates, Vol. 2, trans. George Norlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 339.
20
Plato, Phaedrus, in Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 1973), 279a.
21
Plato, Phaedrus, in Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters, 279a.
22
Cicero, De Oratore, in Cicero on Oratory and Orators, ed. and trans. J. W. Watson (London: George Bell & Sons, 1903),
148; Bk. 1, Ch. VI.
EARLY THEORY 19
the false?” Augustine concludes from this that “While the faculty of eloquence, which is of great
value in urging either evil or justice, is in itself indifferent, why should it not be obtained for the
uses of the good in the service of truth if the evil usurp it for the winning of perverse and vain
causes in defense of iniquity and error?”23
Topical Philosophy (Giambattista Vico)

This notion is advanced by Vico, who believed that topics, rather than physical facts, alter one’s
behavior through speech. Vico finds fault with René Descartes’ belief that rhetoric is able only to
communicate what is already known. For Vico, rhetoric is not beneath the level of philosophical
speculation, and is rooted in a probability-based reality. As such, by using topical philosophy,
rhetoric has the power to create knowledge. For Vico, rhetorical invention precedes
demonstration; rhetorical discovery precedes truth. Rhetoric creates data and hypotheses, and it
is only through rhetoric that we can communicate our ideas and impressions of others. Vico’s
thought, which comes at the end of the humanistic tradition, is an effort to argue for the pre-
eminence of his topical versus the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1.3) and others.24
Each of these thinkers—Isocrates, Cicero, Augustine, and Vico—are noteworthy because they did
not assume an opposition between philosophy and rhetoric. Still, to a great extent, the history of
rhetoric is co-extensive with a history of philosophers’ separating the pursuit of truth and virtue
from the “mere” art of speaking and writing both persuasively and well. The “reputation” of
rhetoric in philosophical circles has seldom been very strong, even if its reputation deteriorated
more drastically with the rise of modern philosophy after the death of Descartes in 1650.
Even so, why is it that most philosophers remember Plato’s attacks on the Sophists and
rhetoricians in the Gorgias, but forget that the Phaedrus presents dialectic as the highest form of
rhetoric? Furthermore, why is it that one finds in much philosophy, at least until the birth of
modern philosophy, a much more tolerant, even embracing, attitude towards matters of style and
eloquence in philosophy? Why as well is there an overtly “anti-rhetorical turn” in philosophy after
1650 or so?
Part of the answer is that many contemporary philosophers are interested in inquiry that draws
it closer to science than literature. The characteristics of this inquiry include the use of a perfectly
referential and transparent language, and a styleless style of writing that involves degree-zero point-
of-view, character, time, and emplotment—all characteristics aimed to keep philosophy at odds
with rhetoric. This is important because not only does science come to be treated by philosophers
as the model for objectivity and certainty, it also comes to be regarded as a refuge from rhetoric:
science is a sphere of inquiry free of the bad influence of rhetoric.
If one wants both to distance philosophical inquiry from rhetoric and maintain a set of conditions
as ideal as possible for objectivity and certainty, then science is the best available model within a
secular worldview. If in scientific inquiry, the heavens speak, for example, not Isaac Newton, then
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 118–19.
23
See, Giambattista Vico, On the Study of Methods of Our Time (1708–9), trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
24
University Press, 1990).

in philosophical inquiry modeled after scientific inquiry, truth will speak, not Descartes. However,
for some, it is not even a matter of drawing philosophy closer to science because early modern
philosophy was generally indistinguishable from science. Modern philosophers prior to Kant, says
Richard Rorty,
were not doing something distinguishable from science. Some were psychologists in the manner
of [John] Locke and [David] Hume—providing what Kant called a “physiology of the human
understanding” in the hope of doing for inner space what Newton had done for outer space,
giving a quasi-mechanical account of the way in which our minds worked. But this was a matter
of extending the scientific world-picture, rather than of criticizing or grounding or replacing it.
Others were scientific apologists for the religious tradition in the manner of Leibniz [5.4], trying
to smuggle enough Aristotelian vocabulary back into Cartesian science [i.e., the science of René
Descartes] to have things both ways. But this was, once again, not a matter of criticizing or
grounding or replacing science but of tinkering with it in the hope of squeezing in God, Freedom
and Immortality.25
This comment makes all the more interesting the ancient efforts of Aristotle, who aimed to combine
science, philosophy, and rhetoric.
Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, this rhetoric-free, scientific-like model for philosophical
inquiry may help us to understand why one interpretation of Plato’s view on the relationship
between philosophy and rhetoric has dominated the scene of modern philosophy. Plato’s work
takes on more relevancy in rhetoric-free modern philosophy when it is seen as favoring the side of
dialectic over rhetoric. In this interpretive climate, the modern philosopher finds himself or herself
compelled to push for the conclusion that Plato was a lifelong enemy of rhetoric, if he or she is at
all interested in maintaining Plato’s relevancy to modern philosophy.
Plato is here generally of great assistance to the modern philosopher: there is usually little
difficulty in mustering up a sufficient amount of evidence from his writings supportive of his disdain
for rhetoric. His main rhetorical dialogues—in particular, Gorgias and Phaedrus—contain enough
material to build a strong case against rhetoric. As one influential version of the account goes, Plato
was “[a]larmed by the role of oratory in what he saw as the decline of values in Athenian society,
and partly stung by the success of the Sophists, those rival teachers of philosophy, politics, and
eloquence,”26 and because of this, devoted considerable efforts to attacking rhetoric.
It is often claimed that Plato’s intent in the Gorgias and Phaedrus as well as other dialogues is not
just to oppose rhetoric to dialectic, but rather to encourage dialectic to triumph over rhetoric.
Further support for the case against rhetoric is commonly found in his equating of rhetoric with
cookery and the gratification of pleasure, his exclusion of rhetoric and poetry from his “ideal”
community, his devaluation of probability and opinion in comparison to certainty and knowledge,
and finally, in the unobtainably high standards he set for “true” rhetoric.27 Given these conditions,
25
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 144.
26
Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 84.
27
James L. Golden, “Plato Revisited: A Theory of Discourse for All Seasons,” in Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern
Discourse, eds. Robert J. Conners, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1984), 17.
EARLY THEORY 21
some maintain that Plato’s arguments against rhetoric are “not balanced and dispassionate
evaluations of rhetoric’s validity or contribution to society, but frank polemics against it.”28
However, while there is little doubt that Plato presents a strong case against rhetoric, what is
frequently left unsaid is that he also presents an argument in support of a role for rhetoric in
philosophy. One of the strongest defenses of Plato as a proponent of rhetoric’s importance to
philosophy comes from an historical interpretation of Plato’s Phaedrus (a general approach to texts
that is taken up in the next section of this chapter, on hermeneutics). On such an interpretation, his
critique of rhetoric is viewed against the backdrop of the historical situation in Athens at the time
of its composition. When this is done, one finds that “genuine” philosophical rhetoric is for Plato a
tool used by the philosopher-ruler of the state for shaping the polis, which is also to say, “genuine”
rhetoricians must be philosophers.29 Speech and rhetoric are necessary to the philosopher-ruler as
a means of persuading the citizens and shaping the polis in accordance with the standard of the
Good and the Beautiful.30 On this account, not only is rhetoric far from antithetical to philosophy,
it is not even denigrated in the slightest. The catch, of course, is that this is true only of one kind of
rhetoric: “genuine” rhetoric. The same does not hold for its’ opposite, “professional” rhetoric.
But, on this reading of Plato, the “professional rhetoric” that is the object of Plato’s scorn is less
that of Isocrates and Lysias than of leaders at the time such as Epaminondas, Callistratus, and
Timotheus—a point that can only be appreciated if one situates Plato’s critique of rhetoric in its
historical setting. Epaminondas, Callistratus, and Timotheus were political leaders who actually
delivered speeches in the 370s in Athens, whereas Isocrates and Lysias, like “most professionals,”
were “ill-equipped to deliver speeches effectively and especially in political contexts, in the boule
[a council of citizens] and ecclesia [an assembly of citizens], where the situation required that the
political leader himself do the speaking.”31
This reading suggests that given the historical condition of Athens in the 370s, and given Plato’s
ideal of a philosophical-rhetoric put to the ends of political action, it is most likely that “political
rhetoricians” such as Epaminondas, Callistratus, and Timotheus are the real object of his scorn
rather than the “professional” rhetoricians such as Isocrates and Lysias—that is, someone who
“writes but does not speak, who teaches but does not criticize.”32 Thus, rhetoric, in its “genuine”
or “real” sense, will be used “as a vehicle for philosophical rule and political persuasion,”33 whereas
in its “false” or “ingenuine” sense it becomes a tool for political persuasion without the direction
of the Good and the Beautiful, that is to say, without philosophy.
“Rhetoric,” says Socrates, “taken as a whole,” is the art of influencing the mind or winning the
soul “by means of ” (dia) “discourses,” “speeches,” or “words” (logon).34 Moreover, because
Socrates also adds that rhetoric is important “not only in the courts of law and other public
gatherings, but in private places also,”35 it might also be concluded—by following a lead from
28
Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 84.
29
Michael Morgan, Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Athens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1990), 181.
30
Morgan, Platonic Piety, 180.
31
32
33
34
Plato, Phaedrus, 261a.
35
Quintilian on how to interpret this passage—that rhetoric also plays a role in dialectic. In his
Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian observes the following:
Plato in his Sophist in addition to public and forensic oratory introduces a third kind which he
styles προσομιλητικń, which I will permit myself to translate by “conversational.” This is distinct
from forensic oratory and is adapted for private discussions, and we may regard it as identical
with dialectic.36
Dialectic then—if Quintilian’s comments apply as well to the Phaedrus, allowing it to be seen as a
kind of conversational “oratory” for private places—is encompassed as well by rhetoric.
Nevertheless, dialectic is more than just ordinary conversation, and its connection to rhetoric is a
matter of much more speculation when the method of collection and division is discussed outside
of the dialectical knowledge of the philosopher-rhetorician. How, then, is dialectic inseparable
from rhetoric outside of the philosopher-rhetorician scenario?
One response is that in addition to definition, collection, and division, the dialectical method
includes four rhetorical strategies: the first involves phrasing of questions in such a way that they
allow for a wide range of responses; the second rhetorical strategy comes into play when the
respondent develops an answer “which sets forth hypotheses and demonstrates them through
reasoning supported by examples, analogies, and parallel cases”; the third involves effective and
responsible refutation and cross-examination; and the fourth strategy involves modification of the
original position.37 All told, on this view, Plato’s theory of dialectic “draws upon science for its
definition and structure, upon philosophy for its subject matter, and upon rhetoric for its strategies.”38
Furthermore, beginning almost from where our historical reading of rhetoric in the Phaedrus
leaves off, this view takes the two senses of rhetoric at work in the Phaedrus and argues that they
are indicative of a more general theory of “true” or “genuine” rhetoric at work, not only in the
Phaedrus but also in many of Plato’s other writings. At its core, this theory of genuine rhetoric
involves three basic functions: the “epistemological” function—to create knowledge; the “ethical”
function—to promote values; and the “active” function—to produce or lead us to certain types of
action.39 In Plato’s work, then, one finds “a theory that provided the basic structure and inspiration
for Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and for many of the ideas later developed in the writings of Cicero and
Quintilian” as well as others such as Vico.40
If the aim of this section was to look at rhetoric as a form of early theory, then not only has a
possible fruitful relationship between rhetoric and philosophy been uncovered, but the way has
been paved for reducing philosophy to little more than a form of rhetoric. If even the dialectical
method—the allegedly ultimate philosophical strategy—is grounded in rhetorical strategies, then
what space if any is left for philosophy and philosophical strategies that are rhetoric-free? While
this account will not convince many contemporary philosophers to abandon themselves to rhetorical
studies, it is a prequel to Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralism (5.1), where not only is the traditional
36
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Vol. 1, trans. H. E. Butler (New York: Putnam’s, 1920), 395 (III, iv, 10).
37
Golden, “Plato Revisited,” 30–1.
38
Golden, “Plato Revisited,” 32.
39
Golden, “Plato Revisited,” 19–29.
40
Golden, “Plato Revisited,” 35.
EARLY THEORY 23
quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric turned inside out—so too is the relationship of speech to
writing.
In many respects, though, determining the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in
Aristotle is much easier than in Plato. The incompatibility of rhetoric and philosophy as well as the
general devaluation of rhetoric in Plato is relevant only from the perspective of a specific conception
of rhetoric: that is, the kind of oratorical rhetoric practiced in the 370s by political leaders such as
Timotheus, Epaminondas, and Callistratus. Otherwise, on the basis of another type of rhetoric—
“genuine,” “real,” or “true” rhetoric—quite the opposite situation results. Not only is genuine
rhetoric neither antithetical to philosophy nor disparaged in any way, but Plato actually argues that
it is closely connected with the successful life of the philosopher-ruler: rhetorical strategies are
necessary for the philosopher-ruler to be politically effective. The only thing “scandalous” about
rhetoric in Plato is that too many people do not recognize its double nature, and merely associate
rhetoric with sophistry and trickery.
For Aristotle, on the other hand, rhetoric is a practical art, and an inevitability present in any
discourse that seeks to persuade. Rhetorical example is a form of induction (the progression from
particulars to a universal), and the rhetorical uses of enthymemes (a syllogism where one of the
premises or the conclusion is implicit) are really syllogisms (a form of reasoning wherein a conclusion
necessarily follows from two premises). “Every one who effects persuasion through proof does in
fact use either enthymemes or examples: there is no other way.”41 In general, Aristotle defines
rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”42 Its
function is “not simply to succeed in persuading, but rather to discover the means of coming as near
such success as the circumstances of each particular case allow.”43
The spoken word, according to Aristotle, has three modes of persuasion: “The first kind depends
on the personal character of the speaker [ethos]; the second on putting the audience in a certain
frame of mind [pathos]; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the
speech itself.”44 A good speaker then will be able to reason logically, understand human character
and goodness in its various forms, and understand the emotions.45 It is no secret that philosophers
have traditionally attempted to avoid philosophical practices that rely heavily on ethos and pathos.
Moreover, it might even be argued that products of philosophical inquiry that rely on ethos and
pathos are much less desirable than those that avoid them. The ideal is, rather, a non-rhetorical
presentation that aims not at persuading its audience, but rather gaining the inward assent of the
audience. Most definitely, such an audience will be able to follow long chains of reasoning, and will
readily be able to comprehend complicated arguments—conditions that clearly do not necessitate
any other modes of persuasion.
Furthermore, unlike Plato, Aristotle lays out the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy
in such a way that there should be little disagreement among his readers. As the “counterpart” to
dialectic, rhetoric “is an offshoot of dialectic and also of ethical studies.”46 Nonetheless, Aristotle,
41
Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. Lane Cooper (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), I.2.1356b5–b7.
42
Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1355b26.
43
Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.1.1355b9–b11.
44
Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1356a1–a4.
45
46
Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1356a25.
like Plato, belittles “rhetoric when it masquerades as political science, and the professors of it as
political experts—sometimes from want of education, sometimes owing to other human failings.”47
In rhetoric, “the term rhetorician may describe either the speaker’s knowledge of the art, or his
moral purpose. In dialectic it is different: a man is a sophist because he has a certain kind of moral
purpose, a dialectician in respect, not of his moral purpose, but of his faculty.”48
The value of rhetoric is further diminished by Aristotle by regarding as its duty to “deal with
such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us” and to concern itself with
“the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long
chain of reasoning.”49 In addition to being restricted to matters which cannot be dealt with in a
systematic way and being a tool for popular communication, rhetoric is also limited to subjects
which “present us with alternative possibilities,” that is, subjects in which the issue itself seems to
be uncertain. No one wastes time deliberating on certainties, that is, “things that could not have
been, and cannot now or in the future be, other than they are.”50 While rhetoric is clearly related
to dialectic by Aristotle and is not without value,51 its province differs greatly from that of dialectic.
Yet for all of his alleged “belittling” of rhetoric in comparison to dialectic, Aristotle’s efforts are
to be admired not only for their attempt to position rhetoric vis-à-vis dialectic as carefully and
systematically as possible, but also for situating rhetoric within a larger philosophical program. It is
for these reasons and more that twentieth-century literary rhetoricians will turn more to the early
theory of Aristotle than to Plato. Still, the positions of both on rhetoric and its relationship to
philosophy are vital to understanding many of the directions taken by contemporary literary and
cultural theory.
1.3 HERMENEUTICS
Hermeneutics is about interpretation and understanding. It comes from the Greek word hermeneía,
which means “interpretation” or “explanation.” In the context of literary and cultural theory, its
major question is how do we interpret and understand texts from the past? Moreover, hermeneutics
asks whether interpreting and understanding texts from the past is more an art or a science? For
some, like Friedrich Schleiermacher, who describes it as “the art of understanding,” and Hans-
Georg Gadamer, who calls it “the art or technique of understanding and interpretation,” it is more
like the former. However, for others, like Wilhelm Dilthey, who aimed to establish a scientific basis
for hermeneutics that could be used in the study of the “human sciences,” that is, the humanities
and the social sciences, it is more like the latter.
While the origins of hermeneutics are often traced back to the work of sixteenth-century German
theologians, Augustine of Hippo was concerned with the interpretation of the Bible in late antiquity.
Around 396 CE , he began On Christian Doctrine, a work that is basically an introduction to the
47
48
Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.1.1355b17–b22.
49
50
51
Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1355a20–1355b8. Rhetoric is useful because it prevents the triumph of fraud and injustice
(1355a20–1355a24), instructs when scientific instruction fails (1355a25–1355a27), makes us argue both sides of a case
(1355a28–1355a40), and is a means of defense (1355b1–1355b8).
EARLY THEORY 25
interpretation and explanation of the Bible. It is also the work quoted above in the previous section
with relation to Christian rhetoric. Completed in 427 CE , On Christian Doctrine is an approach to
the hermeneutics of Scripture that is in part grounded in Augustine’s early training in rhetoric,
specifically the work of Cicero. This is most evident in the Book IV, where Cicero’s rhetoric is
adapted to the needs of Christian orators.
For Cicero, there are five separate general tasks that the orator must attend to when preparing a
speech: (1) invention, the collection of materials; (2) dispositio, the arrangement of materials; (3)
elocution, the verbal expression of materials; (4) memoria, the memorization of speech; and (5)
actio, the technique of delivery.52 But whereas Cicero said that the mere study of rules such as these
is not enough in oratorical education, Augustine said that the rules are not necessary at all. It is
enough for the wise person to just study the Bible and the masters of Christian eloquence. Here
hermeneutics is found to be in Augustine more of an “art” than a “science.”
But Augustine does something much more here than adapt Roman rhetoric to the needs of
Christian orators. He provides a way of interpreting and explaining the Bible grounded in both a
theory of language and a theory of signs. He was the first in the Western tradition to do this, and
his work here has strong resonances in twentieth-century structuralism and semiotics (2.0) as they
also take up both theories of language and signs, particularly Ferdinand de Saussure (2.1) and
Charles Peirce (2.1). For Augustine, a “sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond
the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses.”53 Some of these signs are “natural,” like
smoke as a sign of fire, “which, without any desire or intention of signifying, make us aware of
something beyond themselves”;54 and some of them are “conventional” like the ones “living
creatures show to one another for the purpose of conveying, in so far as they are able, the motion
of their spirits or something which they have sensed or understood.55 Conventional signs, such as
words, are found, for example, in the Bible. They are further distinguished as literal and figurative.
So “ox” as a literal conventional sign is a type of animal, but as a figurative conventional sign in the
New Testament symbolizes one of the four evangelists.
So, as a work of hermeneutics, On Christian Doctrine was composed as a kind of textbook for
Christian orators. It aimed to assist them in both their orations and in their interpretations and
explanations of the words in the Bible. It includes both general principles about signs and language
as well as practical advice for handling the difficulties encountered in Biblical exegesis. As a Christian
hermeneutics, Augustine emphasizes that the interpreter keep in view their love of God and their
neighbor, and be guided by faith, hope, and love. Allegory came to play an important role in
Augustine’s hermeneutics, particularly as it allowed for the Christian love of God and neighbor to
be implied by various characters, actions, and ideas found in the words of the Bible. For Augustine,
writes one of his contemporary biographers,
the Bible was literally the “word” of God. It was regarded as a single communication, a single
message in an intricate code, and not as an exceedingly heterogeneous collection of separate
books. Above all, it was a communication that was intrinsically so far above the pitch of human
52
D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Translator’s Introduction,” in Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, xviii.
53
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 34; Bk. 2, §1.
54
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 34; Bk. 2, §1.
55
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 34–5; Bk. 2, §2.
minds, that to be made available to our senses at all, this “Word” had to be communicated by
means of an intricate game of “signs.”56
Augustine wrote that “everything was said exactly as it needed to be said” in the Bible.57 Therefore,
for him, the first question of hermeneutics is not “What does this mean?” but rather “Why does this
word or this incident occur here and not some other?” It is here that allegory is most useful in
providing a response to the question “Why?”
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, however, moves in a different direction as compared to Augustine’s.
For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics is the art of avoiding misunderstandings. To accomplish this, we
must reconstruct the original context of the work in order to avoid misunderstanding it. This
contextual reconstruction aims to eliminate the prejudices and interests of the interpreter. In the case
of Plato’s Phaedrus discussed earlier, the move to understand this text within the context of Athens in
the 370s moves in the direction of this type of contextual reconstruction. Schleiermacher required
that the interpreter identify with the mindset of the author. This hermeneutics held for any written
texts comprised of language, including the Bible. Moreover, it also held for the interpretation of any
human manifestation ranging from conversations to works of art. For Schleiermacher, contextual
reconstruction solved a basic problem of hermeneutics: namely, the words of a text such as the Bible
remain constant but the context that produced them has changed.
Dilthey held, though, that it was not enough to just reconstruct the original context in its own
terms. Rather, he believed that historians are always bound by the judgments of their own age. This
position, called historicism, requires those who want to understand texts from the past to bring the
past back to life in order to understand them. But for Dilthey there is another problem: individual
features of a text are only intelligible in terms of the entire context of the text, and the entire
context of the text is only intelligible through the individual features. This problem, called the
hermeneutic circle, is resolved for him by the interpreter entering into a constant interplay and
feedback between text and context. It is important to note that the hermeneutic circle assumes that
the text is a unity or an organic whole. Why? Because without the assumption of an organic whole
(or whole meaning or context) the part–whole circularity is not maintained. Finally, the difference
between the human sciences and the natural sciences for Dilthey is that the former aim for
understanding (Verstehen) whereas the latter focuses on explanation (Erklären).
For both Schleiermacher and Dilthey, hermeneutics aims for the original meaning of a text. But
Gadamer offered a different vision of hermeneutics. For Gadamer, understanding is not just a
mental activity, but a basic fact of human existence. Furthermore, language is a common ground for
understanding. Still, the historical or temporal situation of the interpreter is unavoidable. Therefore,
there is no escape from the hermeneutic circle. In his major work, Truth and Method (1960),
Gadamer argues that works from the past question our present concerns, and that we in turn
question the past. Understanding involves our ability to reconstruct the question to which the past
work was an answer. Thus, unlike the first question of Augustine’s hermeneutics which asked
“Why?”, the first question of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is more like “What?” Specifically, “What was
the question to which this work was the answer?”
56
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 252–3.
57
Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 145, 12; cited by Brown, Augustine, 253.
EARLY THEORY 27
But reconstructing this question involves neither reconstructing the past (Schleiermacher) nor
bringing the past back to life (Dilthey). Rather, for Gadamer the past can only be understood by
relating it to the present. Consequently, all interpretation is a dialogue of the past with the present.
Gadamer sees this process as one wherein there is a fusion of horizons: understanding the past
involves fusing past experiences with present interests and prejudices. Therefore, unlike
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, one that strives to eliminate the prejudices and interests of the
interpreter, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is built upon embracing the prejudices and interests of the
interpreter. Additionally, whereas both Schleiermacher and Dilthey assume that meaning is
exhausted by the author’s intentions (otherwise there would be no need to reconstruct a context or
bring the past back to life), Gadamer argues that meaning is never exhausted by the intentions of
the author. New cultural and historical contexts add new possibilities for the meaning of texts
through the fusions of horizons.
The idea that prejudice in interpretation is good goes against the grain of much modern
epistemology. However, in some ways, the embrace of prejudice by Gadamer is true to the roots of
humanism in Protagoras, wherein “man is the measure.” For Gadamer, all interpretation is
situational—that is, it is not possible to know a literary text as it is (for example, in its Platonic
ideal). Consequently, understanding for Gadamer is not a passive activity (wherein one leaves
“home” to interpret a text). Rather, it is a productive one (wherein one “comes home” in textual
interpretation). Finally, from Gadamer’s perspective, the hermeneutic circle is not one that spins
endlessly in the past. Rather, it is one that spins productively between the past and the present: the
present is only ever understandable through the past with which it forms a living continuity; and
the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
The relativism at the core of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is one that is also attributed to Martin
Heidegger, who shares with Gadamer a similar view of the relationship of understanding to human
existence. We will turn to Heidegger later, when we take up object-oriented ontology (15.3). For now,
suffice it to say that the notion that meaning is always historical found in Gadamer (and Heidegger)
is one that goes against the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, wherein meaning is always
absolute. The line between the relativity and absoluteness of meaning of a literary or cultural text
marks one of the big divides in contemporary literary and cultural theory. One of the more robust
efforts to defend the absoluteness of meaning in hermeneutics was done by E. D. Hirsch.
In Validity in Interpretation (1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (1976), Hirsch argues that the
interpreter has a moral duty to understand the text in relation to its original context. While every
text has a number of valid interpretations, all of them must move with a typical system of
expectations and possibilities. Hirsch established this point by making a distinction between
meaning and significance. Meaning is constant over time and was put in the text by the author. For
Hirsch, it is located in the consciousness of the author, not the words of the author. Significance,
however, changes in relation to the interests of the interpreter. For Hirsch, a work can at different
times have different significances, but only one meaning. This is because its significance is assigned
to a work by a reader, but its meaning is placed in it by its author.
Like Schleiermacher and Dilthey, a work is an organic whole. However, unlike them, its
“wholeness” resides in the intention of its author. For Hirsch, authorial intention is never multiple
or self-contradictory; rather, it is always singular and unified. Hirsch explains the nature of this
meaning by drawing on the thought of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. As
phenomenologists, both Husserl and Hirsch aim to understand the world as it is presented to us
through the structure of our understanding. Phenomena as a concept here refers back to a distinction
made by Immanuel Kant between the world of phenomena (or the phenomenal world), the world
as it is presented to us through the structure of our understanding (rather than the world as it
actually is), and the world of noumena (or the noumenal world), things as they actually are (rather
than only as presented to us through the structure of our understanding). While Husserl’s
phenomenology aimed to describe the general contents of experience, Hirsch’s phenomenology,
which stresses the mediation between an interpreter and the interpreted, is often called
phenomenological interpretation, or simply, hermeneutics.
For Hirsch (following Husserl), meaning is an intentional object. As an intentional object, it is
neither reducible to the psychological acts of the speaker or listener, nor is it independent of mental
processes. For Hirsch, meaning is unchangeable because it is always intentional to someone at some
time. Meaning is not objective (in the same way that the chair that you are sitting on is objective),
but neither is it subjective (like an imaginary friend). Rather, for Hirsch, meaning is an ideal object.
As an ideal object, it can be expressed in a number of different ways and still mean the same thing.
For Hirsch, literary meaning is fixed to an author’s mental object when it is intended in the act of
putting words on the page. Augustine had a similar idea in his philosophy of language where he
made a distinction between the inner word and the outer word. The former is pre-linguistic and
determined by, writes Tzvetan Todorov, “on the one hand, the imprints left in the soul by the
objects of knowledge, and, on the other hand, immanent knowledge whose only source can be
God”58; and the latter, is linguistic and associated with our thoughts and speech. Because Hirsch’s
ideal object is pre-linguistic, it is more like Augustine’s inner word, rather than his outer word,
which is linguistic.
But there are also echoes of Plato’s cave in Hirsch, particularly when one begins to speak of Ideal
Objects. One of the major differences, however, is that Plato’s Ideal Objects are unchanging and not
the creations of human intentionality, whereas Hirsch’s Ideal Objects, though unchanging, are the
creations of human intentionality. In brief, for Hirsch, we never get out of Plato’s cave—reading the
images on the cave wall comes down to distinguishing their meaning from their significance without
reference to any absolute knowledge. This is interesting given that Hirsch was also the author of
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), a book that lists around 5,000
names, phrases, dates, and concepts that fit this description. In effect, these 5,000 items become the
Ideal Objects of Hirsch’s cave of America.
Hermeneutics as the science and art of interpretation is often presented as though it were the
work of individuals working in isolation on texts. But Stanley Fish argues that it is only because
interpretation is a community affair that texts appear to be the same to different interpreters.
“Interpretive communities,” writes Fish, “are made up of those who share interpretive strategies
not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties
and assigning their intentions.”59 For Fish, “these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and
therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way
Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol (1977), trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 43.
58
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
59
Press, 1980), 171.

EARLY THEORY 29
around.”60 In other words, it is not an Ideal or Intentional Object that gives a text its stability and
meaning, as Hirsch argues; rather, it is a community of interpreters. This position allows Fish to
argue that the “notions of the ‘same’ and ‘different’ texts are fictions.”61 For Fish, the identity of a
text is bestowed upon it by its interpreter, and is not an inherent property of the object. Fish’s
position that textual identity is a social construction implies that authorial intention plays little role
in the identity of the text. It also implies that different interpretations entail different texts. For Fish
there is no difference between explaining a text and changing it.
In looking back over the long history of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur observed “there is no general
hermeneutics, no universal canon for exegesis, but only disparate and opposed theories concerning
the rules of interpretation.”62 This latter point could not be more obvious in the case of Fish
compared say to Augustine. Nevertheless, Ricoeur proposed two general directions for interpretation
in Freud and Philosophy (1970). One direction seeks to “purify discourse of its excrescences,
liquidate the idols, go from drunkenness to sobriety, realize our state of poverty once and for all.”63
The other direction “use[s] the most ‘nihilistic,’ destructive, iconoclastic movement so as to let
speak what once, what each time, was said, when meaning appeared anew, when meaning was its
fullest.”64 For Ricoeur, all textual interpretation is “animated by this double motivation: willingness
to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience,” a “tension” and “extreme
polarity” that is the “truest expression of our ‘modernity.’ ”65
One direction he calls the “school of reminiscence” and the other the “school of suspicion.”66 If
the aim of the school of reminiscence is the restoration of meaning, then the aim of its opposite, the
school of suspicion, is the demystification of meaning. For Ricoeur, the school of reminiscence calls
for interpretation to listen to conscious meaning and then spell it out. It is the kind of hermeneutics
described by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Hirsch. The school of suspicion, however, works
differently.
For Ricoeur, the three “masters” that dominate the school of suspicion are Karl Marx (3.1),
Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud (4.1).67 Though their lines of thought are “seemingly
mutually exclusive,” “[a]ll three begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and
then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering” (34). Thus, for Ricoeur, “the Genealogy of
Morals in Nietzsche’s sense, the theory of ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideals
and illusions in Freud’s sense represent three convergent procedures of demystification.”68 In short,
the hermeneutics of suspicion generally characterize the interpretative approaches of both Marxism
(3.0) and psychoanalytic theory (4.0)—that is to say, a large chunk of twentieth-century literary and
cultural theory. Ricoeur’s observations on the hermeneutics of suspicion—as we shall see—have
recently become a negative focal point in the postcritical attack on theory (15.4).
60
Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 171.
61
Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 169.
62
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 26–7.
63
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27.
64
65
66
67
68
1.4 AESTHETICISM
Oscar Wilde contends that art should be valued for itself alone, and not for any purpose it may
serve. His position, called aestheticism, is encapsulated in the French phrase “l’art pour l’art,”
which is translated as “art for art’s sake.” Aestheticism grew in influence in the first half of the
nineteenth century in France through the work of writers such as Théophile Gautier, Charles
Baudelaire, and Gustave Flaubert, and in the second half of the nineteenth century it became
fashionable in England through the work of Walter Pater, Aubrey Beardsley, John Addington
Symonds, and, most notably, Wilde.
In the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde encapsulates the aesthete’s
position with the famous line, “All art is quite useless.”69 For Wilde, the effect that art has on its
perceivers is outside the scope of art. “All art is at once surface and symbol,”70 writes Wilde. Attempts
to “read the symbol” or “go beneath the surface” of art are beyond the proper sphere of art.71
For Wilde, aestheticism—“the new aesthetics”—is comprised of three basic doctrines. The first
is that “Art never expresses anything but itself.”72 Art does not necessarily express the social,
political, religious, or philosophical conditions in which it was produced. For Wilde, art always
merely expresses itself, and nothing beyond itself. The second doctrine is that “All bad art comes
from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.”73 Here Wilde is rejecting both
realism in art (the return to “Life”) and romanticism in art (the return to “Nature”). Both realism
and romanticism are alternative views of art that are critical of Wilde’s own aestheticism. The third
doctrine is that “Life imitates Art far more that Art imitates Life.”74 Wilde believes that nature
imitates art far more than the opposite. His position here is that the effects we see in life and nature
are more often than not ones that we have previously seen in art. The fourth, and final, doctrine of
aestheticism is that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”75
According to aestheticism, art is unified and autonomous, which is to say, cut off from life. For
Wilde, this also applied to criticism. This leads him to posit that some criticism was more lasting
than the artworks that were its topic. Referring to the criticism of John Ruskin, Wilde contended
that his descriptions of the paintings of J. M. W. Turner’s would outlive his “corrupted canvases.”76
But not because they see the art object for what it really is. Rather, for just the opposite reason: “the
proper aim of criticism is [not] to see the object as in itself it really is,” but rather “criticism’s most
perfect form . . . is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the
secret of another.”77 “Who cares,” continues Wilde
69
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), in The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington (New York: Viking,
1946), 139.
70
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 139.
71
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 139.
72
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1891), in Intentions: The Writings of Oscar Wilde, Volume 5, intro.
Edgar Saltus (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1925), 61.
73
Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 61.
74
75
76
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist (1890),” in The Portable Oscar Wilde, 84.
77
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist (1890),” 83–4.
EARLY THEORY 31
whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and
majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-colored in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate,
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least
as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted
canvases in England’s gallery.78
To be sure, the highest criticism is itself autonomous art. For Wilde, as
the purest form of personal impression, [the highest criticism] is, in its way, more creative than
creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason
for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never
trammeled by any shackles of verisimilitude.79
The phrase “least reference to any standard external to itself ” refers to Plato’s metaphysics,
specifically, the forms of knowledge that are imitated in art and criticism. Here, Wilde is adapting
Plato’s thought to raise the status of criticism as art. As unified and autonomous art, literary criticism
in its highest form can outlast the literature that is its subject.
While more moderate versions of aestheticism can be cited, they did not exert as powerful an
influence over twentieth-century literary and cultural theory as the “new aesthetics” of Wilde. The
notion of art as autonomous and constituting its own ontological realm, that is, realm of being,
would be taken up not only in the New Criticism, discussed in the next section of this chapter, but
would also be central to the poststructuralist notions of textuality that sought to challenge the
autonomy of art and literature (5.0). This complicated relationship with aestheticism can also be
found in the modernist writers who are often viewed as the direct heirs of this position on art.
These writers include Henry James, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot (1.5),
and Wallace Stevens—each of whom “would seek to minimize or obscure or deny their debt, so
compromised had the aestheticist inheritance become by the late extreme mode of aestheticism
known as fin de siècle decadence, notoriously symbolized by the homosexual practices for which
Wilde was tried and imprisoned in 1895.”80
This decadence, however, did not concern the autonomous ontology (or, being) of aestheticism;
rather, it is connected to Wilde’s claim that art is neither moral nor immoral, even if vice and virtue
may be part of the material or subject matter of art. Wilde’s position on art is in direct opposition
to positions on art like Plato’s that claim for art both a strong moral and social function. Plato’s
moral position is exemplified in the banishment of poets from his ideal state.
But perhaps even better than Plato, we might look to one of Wilde’s contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy,
for comparative insight. Tolstoy’s approach to aesthetics is both moralistic and practical. He asserts
that art must be justified on moral grounds, and rejects any position on art that conflicts with this
fundamental principle. For Tolstoy, real or true art “is a means of union among men joining them
78
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist (1890),” 84.
79
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist (1890),” 82.
80
Linda Dowling, “Aestheticism,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 36.
together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of
individuals and of humanity.”81 False or “counterfeit” art has the opposite effect: it is divisive and
elitist.
“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external
signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings
and also experience them,”82 writes Tolstoy. He believes that real art is infectious, and that “The
stronger the infection the better the art.”83 Furthermore, the degree of infectiousness of art depends
on three conditions: first, the more individual the feeling communicated by the art, the higher the
degree of infection; second, the clearer the feeling communicated by the art, the higher the degree
of infection; and third, and most importantly, the more sincere the artist, the higher the degree of
infection. By this third point, Tolstoy means that better or more infectious art derives from artists
who really feel what they are communicating through their art.84 For Tolstoy, these are the “three
conditions which divide art from its counterfeits, and which also decide the quality of every work
of art considered apart from its subject-matter.”85
In addition to the “internal” conditions of art noted above, Tolstoy also considers what may be
termed the “external” conditions of art. He considers the great amount of time, energy, expense,
and personal sacrifice that an opera or ballet demands, and asks “whether all that professes to be
art is really art, whether (as is presupposed by our society) all that which is art is good, and whether
it is important and worth those sacrifices which is necessitates.”86 For Tolstoy, arts such as opera and
ballet as well as concerts, printed books, exhibitions, circuses, and painting are not self-evidently
valuable and are not self-justifying. They are only valuable if they satisfy the moral and practical
conditions he lays out for real art.
Tolstoy’s position on art puts him at odds with aestheticism which argues that art is self-justifying
or that its value is self-evident. Moreover, Tolstoy does not presume to know before he undertakes
his analysis of art what is and is not good art. Rather, he aims to establish the principles upon which
good art may be ascertained, and then applies those principles to particular artworks in order to
determine their value. One of the implications of his position is that most of the “great” artists such
as the operatic composer Richard Wagner, the artist Michelangelo, and the dramatist William
Shakespeare fail to live up to Tolstoy’s principles of aesthetic value. In addition, some of Tolstoy’s
own writings, such as Anna Karenina (1878) and War and Peace (1867), also fail to meet his
conditions for real art, an implication that has led some to reject his theory. While Tolstoy does
reject most of the traditional “canon” of fine arts, there are a few noteworthy exceptions, such as
the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and some of the works of Charles Dickens.
Tolstoy’s differences with Wilde regarding the connection between art, life, and morality though
are but one chapter of a much larger topic that can either be traced back to Greek antiquity or
forward to the eighteenth century, when Alexander Baumgarten introduced the term “aesthetics”
for the area of philosophy dealing with sense-knowledge or sensible knowledge. The words “sense”
and “sensitive” here refers to the Greek root of the word aesthetic, which is aesthesis, meaning
81
Leo N. Tolstoy, What is Art? (1897), trans. Aylmer Maude (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 51–2.
82
Tolstoy, What is Art? 51.
83
84
85
86
EARLY THEORY 33
“sensation.” For Baumgarten, aesthetic knowledge was opposed to logic that dealt with “higher” or
“intellectual” knowledge. With Baumgarten, aesthetics dealt with all sensible knowledge, not just
knowledge of art. However, knowledge of art, as a specific area of aesthetics, dealt with artistic
genius and sensible knowledge. For him, the beautiful in art involved a sensitive knowledge of the
truth.
However, it would be Georg W. F. Hegel who would establish the meaning of the term to be
limited to art as he used it to refer to his own writing on art. Prior to Baumgarten, there were many
theories of the nature of the beautiful in art (and nature). However, the term aesthetics was not
applied to them. So, the term aestheticism is really of quite limited scope compared to philosophical
speculation on the nature of beauty in art (and nature) that dates continuously back to the Greeks.
For example, for Plato, beauty referred to the symmetry and proportion of form exemplified in
abstract Ideas, whereas for Aristotle, beauty depended on an organic unity wherein each part
contributes to the quality of the whole. Later, Kant found beauty in whatever produced a sense of
harmony in the relations between the faculty of the will and the understanding, and Friedrich
Schiller regarded the aesthetic as a basic category of life, stemming from the play of impulse, and
allowing morality and feeling to coexist in unity. The point here is not to rehearse the history of
ideas of truth and beauty in art and literature, but to point out the following: while aestheticism
refers to a very specific approach to literature, the possibilities for an aesthetic view of literature are
not limited to aestheticism.
1.5 NEW CRITICISM

New Criticism originated in early twentieth-century Britain through the work of T. S. Eliot, I. A.
Richards, and William Empson and later would take root in the US through the contributions of
John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and
W. K. Wimsatt. Moreover, the rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke is also often associated with the
New Criticism, though his work remains something of an outlier compared to his British and
American peers.
Unlike aestheticism, which can be centered on the work of one dominant figure—Oscar Wilde—
New Criticism is much less amenable to this type of centralization. The work of each of these
literary critics represents an incredibly diverse range of ideas. Efforts to establish a general set of
principles for New Criticism are often challenged when considered through the contributions of
individual new critics. Like many of the movements in twentieth-century literary criticism, so-
called New Critics often held differing beliefs about criticism. For example, New Criticism is often
characterized as politically conservative and opposed to Marxism (3.0). However, these two
characteristics cannot be claimed for Burke, who is often characterized as politically radical and an
American Marxist.
Nevertheless, the New Criticism is often said to be an alternative to historical and impressionistic
approaches to literature and culture. Instead of relying on the impressions of the critic or the
historical context of the literary work, New Criticism aims for a more scientific approach to
literature. One sees this particularly in the major British New Critics, whose backgrounds were not
in literary studies or history, but rather mathematics (Empson), philosophy (Eliot), and semantics
(Richards). This scientific approach is evident in its championing of an intrinsic approach to
criticism, rather than an extrinsic one. Intrinsic criticism approaches the literary work impersonally
as an independent or autonomous object, whereas extrinsic criticism regards the literary work as a
dependent or non-autonomous object that is the site of authorial intention replete with political,
moral, and historical concerns.
Moreover, while New Criticism shares with aestheticism the view that literary works are
autonomous objects, the New Critics value irony, tension, paradox, and ambiguity in these objects,
whereas aestheticism (1.4) does not. Still, compared to hermeneutics (1.3), which is built upon
history and authorial-intention, New Criticism is far closer in character to aestheticism than
hermeneutics. Part of the reason for this is that the New Critics focus their efforts on poetic language
rather than non-poetic language. Poetic language is language as it functions within and only within
the context of a poem, whereas non-poetic language is language that refers beyond itself or the
work. Thus, unlike hermeneutics, which concerns the interpretation of any text including poetic
and non-poetic ones, the New Criticism limits its primary focus to poetry.
But even though the focus of New Critics may be on the relative irony, tension, paradox, and
ambiguity, they approach it in the autonomous poem in a number of radically different ways. For
example, Richards examines poetry in relation to the emotions and psychology of the reader,
whereas Brooks investigates the objective structure of the poem. What binds all of these different
strands of New Criticism together though is an extreme reverence for the text, which oddly enough
is captured best in a line from Jacques Derrida (5.1): “there is nothing outside of the text.”87
Though the New Critics are at odds with Derrida regarding whether texts are coherent, unified,
organic wholes, they are in total agreement with the general idea that there is nothing outside of
the text that is of any concern to the literary critic.
Of the British trio of New Critics noted above, Eliot is by far the most influential. Part of his
influence comes from bringing the work of Matthew Arnold to bear on the New Criticism. Arnold
argued in Culture and Anarchy (1869) that the wellbeing of society and political progress depends
upon culture, which he defined as “the best knowledge and thought of the time.”88 For Arnold,
“culture” makes “reason and the will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of
perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of whatever is new, from getting
acceptance for its ideas, simply because they are new.”89 As perfection, culture is not only “harmonious,”
but also exhibits the characteristics of “the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.”90 For Arnold,
“sweetness” is the Greek idea of beauty and “light” their idea of truth, for “Greece did not err in having
the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, so present and paramount.”91 For Arnold,
the best poetry of the Greeks is that in which “religion and poetry are one.”92
So for Arnold, ordinary popular literature and culture, that is, literature and culture that does not
have perfection as its ideal, works against both the wellbeing of society and political progress. In
short, it creates anarchy. Culture, however, in the form of “real thought and real beauty; real sweetness
and real light,”93 transforms and improves human character by working against the Philistine views of
87
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976),
158.
88
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1955), 70.
89
Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 46.
90
91
92
93
EARLY THEORY 35
the middle class to prevent both anarchy and democracy. In their stead, class conflict would wane and
a more egalitarian social order would prevail. All of this is possible contends Arnold simply through
education and training centering on classical texts—or what we might call “the canon.”
Eliot follows Arnold’s lead by focusing his attention on poetry and the canon. However, for
Eliot, particularly in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), the question of to what extent
the poet can be found in their poetry is central to his New Criticism. Against the romantic ideals of
originality and self-expression, Eliot argues that the poem is neither an expression of the personality
of the poet nor a sign of originality. For Eliot, once we stop viewing poetry romantically, that is as
a function of the cult of originality and poetic self-expression, “we shall often find that not only the
best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poet, his ancestors,
assert their immorality most vigorously.”94 In other words, a great poem always asserts its relation
to the works of dead poets and artists. For Eliot, the poet must develop a sense of the presentness
of the past, that is, a sense of the tradition in which they are writing:
Tradition . . . cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves,
in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensible to anyone who
would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a
perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels
a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling of the whole
of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.95
Eliot’s comments here on the “pastness” and presentness of the past recall our discussion of
hermeneutics wherein one foot moves backward to Schleiermacher (pastness of the past) and one
forward to Ricoeur (presentness of the past). Ultimately, though, the mature poet is like the great
musician who after absorbing trumpet composition and performance from Bach to bebop
incorporates all of it into their own composition and performance à la Miles Davis and Wynton
Marsalis—or, perhaps more recently, is like a great remix artist (e.g., DJ Spooky).
But the practice of developing a sense of the presentness of the past in poetry (or the other arts)
leads Eliot to regard the poem (or other artworks) as a medium, not the expression of the personality
of the poet (or the artist). For Eliot, the poet surrenders to “something which is more valuable.”96
“The progress of an artist,” writes Eliot, “is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality.”97 This depersonalization is necessary for the poet to reach the impersonalization
of science. Eliot’s position on the extinction of personality view lines up well with the general aim
of New Criticism for a more scientific approach to literature. The position is further deepened by
Eliot’s view of emotion in poetry: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”98 But in recognition
94
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1932), 4.
95
Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 4.
96
97
98
of the difficulty of both these tasks, Eliot comments that “only those who have personality and
emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”99
But to be clear, while poetry may be an “escape from emotion,” as an art form it still can express
emotion. Eliot explains how in his formulation of the “objective correlative”:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”;
in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.100
For Eliot, one finds this objective correlative in some of the tragedies of Shakespeare:
If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact
equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been
communicated to you by a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of
Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words
were automatically released by the last event in the series.101
One must recall too in this context that one of Eliot’s complaints about poetry from John Donne
to Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson was the dissociation of sensibility, that is, during
this period thought and feeling were pulled apart. Before this, however, thought and feeling were
together. Eliot is here trying to link poetry to revelation, not explanation. By equating feeling with
sensation, rather than emotion, he wants poetry to evoke thoughts (or ideas) directly through
feelings (or sense images). The goal here is to make the associations of sensuous imagery alone
imply content.
Criticism for Eliot was neither ethical, nor historical, nor linguistic studies. Rather, it was “the
disinterested exercise of intelligence,”102 “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of
taste,”103 and “the common pursuit of true judgment.”104 Eliot’s vision of the “disinterested”
criticism of specific passages and poems would become the calling card of New Criticism.
“Comparison and analysis are the chief tools of the critic,” said Eliot.105 “Honest criticism and
sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet,” wrote Eliot, “but upon poetry.”106 Eliot’s
focus on the words on the page would become a key part of the New Critical approach to literature.
So too would his denigration of the Romantic tradition in poetry and criticism—a tradition that
Harold Bloom (4.3) would later pluck and save from the fires of Eliot and the New Criticism.
99
Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 10–11.
100
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), in Selected Essays, 124–5.
101
Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 125.
102
T. S. Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921),
11.
103
T. S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism” (1923), in Selected Essays, 13.
104
Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 14.
105
Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 21.
106
EARLY THEORY 37
As one of the earliest New Critics, I. A. Richards aimed for literary criticism to emulate science. In
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), he offered a scientific approach to the mental events that
occurred during the reading of a literary work. One item that he focuses on are the attitudes that are
triggered by our emotional responses when reading a literary work. This approach closely parallels a
phenomenological approach wherein one studies the cognition of a literary work of art. By focusing
on “imaginal and incipient activities or tendencies to action”107 rendered through the act of reading a
literary work of art, Richards comes to the conclusion that bad poems elicit stock responses from their
readers, whereas good poems elicit a diverse set of impulses. But in studying the responses to
undergraduate students reading a range of poems in a controlled environment, he concludes in Practical
Criticism (1929) that students, even advanced ones, are generally unsophisticated readers. They must
be taught not only how to read poetry, but must develop through education a more diverse set of tastes.
Richard’s debt to Eliot is substantial. In fact, in the second edition of his Principles of Literary
Criticism (1926), Richards added an appendix on the poetry of Eliot. The value of Eliot’s poetry
for Richards “lies in the unified response which this interaction creates in the right reader.”108 In
terms of Eliot’s extinction of the personality of the poet in poetry, Richards imagines a parallel
process in the ideal reader of literary art. For Richards, the ideal reader must be both detached like
Eliot’s poet and disinterested like his perfect critic. Still, for Richards, this leads to a paradox for
the ideal reader, namely, “to say that we are impersonal is merely a curious way of saying that our
personality is more completely involved.”109
Finally, Richards provides a powerful image of the autonomous nature of literary works as
books: “A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore usurp the functions either of
the bellows or the locomotive.”110 To this statement, “to experience a broader range of impulses”
should be added: a book is a machine to think with and to experience a broader range of impulses.
For Richards, the fate of society depends upon our ability to recognize a fuller range of impulses,
and books are the major machinery that provide us with this opportunity. Of his own book, Richards
says, it “might better be compared to a loom on which it is supposed to re-weave some ravelled
parts of our civilization.”111 Like Arnold and Eliot, the aspirations of the critic extend far beyond
the realm of mere literature—to nothing less than civilization itself.
It would be Eliot, however, not Richards, who would speak most directly to the American New
Critics, whose origins can be traced back to the Fugitive poets at Vanderbilt University in the early
1920s. Here, Davidson, Ransom, Tate, and Warren attempted to create a modern Southern literature
through an engagement with the poetry and criticism of Eliot. Politically conservative, this group
argued in a 1930 segregationist collection of essays112 that the South is “the last best hope for the
European tradition of the educated gentleman farmer.”113 In general, they regarded the literary text
as a coherent, unified, organic whole. Moreover, the unified, organic whole of American New
Criticism functions as its “god-term,” wherein to a certain extent, these critics “exchange the
107
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 1st edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924), 112.
108
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), 2nd edition, with two new appendices (New York: Routledge,
2001), 274.
109
Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 1st edition, 252.
110
Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), 2nd edition, vii.
111
Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), 2nd edition, vii.
112
Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand (1930) (New York: P. Smith, 1951).
113
John N. Duvall, “New Criticism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 593.
inerrancy of the biblical word for that of the poetic word,” with ambiguity along with metaphor and
irony becoming “the holy trinity of New Critical reading.”114 As a result, the New Critics tended to
find the coexistence of ambiguity and coherence in an object not to be contradictory characteristics.
One of the more noteworthy aspects of the American New Criticism came to be encapsulated in an
argument made by Wimsatt and the philosopher Monroe Beardsley in the Sewanee Review in 1946. In
“The Intentional Fallacy,” they argue that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor
desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.”115 “The poem is not the critic’s
own and not the author’s,” they continue, “(it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the
world beyond his power to intend it or control it).”116 The New Criticism firmly rejects the idea that
literary texts convey a message from the author. For them, literary texts involve the coming together
of a signifier and a signified, and are autonomous verbal artifacts where devices such as irony, ambiguity,
and metaphor reveal to the close reader a rich and complex meaning. In short, the identity and meaning
of the literary object does not have any relation to the intention of the author, who, for the New
Critics, only functions as a critical diversion from the real object of attention: the text.
But the same year Wimsatt and Beardsley published another article in the same journal. This one
was entitled “The Intentional Fallacy.” In it, they took direct aim at Richard’s thesis in Principles of
Literary Criticism, namely, the notion that the value of a poem can be determined by the psychological
responses of its readers. “The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it
is and what it does),”117 write Wimsatt and Beardsley. “It begins by trying to derive the standard of
criticism from psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism.”118 Similarly,
they also say that the intentional fallacy ends in relativism though substitute “biography” for
“impressionism” as the second negative outcome. “The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or
the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.”119
As the affective fallacy specifically targets one of the pioneering works of New Criticism, one
finds a potential fault line between its American and British versions. The idea that Richards
confused the poem and its results, pointed out by Wimsatt and Beardsley, leads some to associate
the work of this British New Critic with reader-response criticism. Recall that for Stanley Fish (1.3),
who is often associated with reader-response criticism, the identity of a text is bestowed upon it by
its interpreter, and is not an inherent property of the object. Again, for Fish, the “notions of the
‘same’ and ‘different’ texts are fictions,”120 which is another way of saying that in reader-response
criticism, “the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.” Wimsatt
and Beardsley set up a wall between relativistic theories such as those of Richards and Fish by
terming their own view “objective criticism,” wherein the objectivity of the criticism is built upon
the objective status of the literary text. Meaning for them is not the reader’s emotive response to
the text; rather, it inheres in the coherent, verbal structure of the poem.
114
Duvall, “New Criticism,” 594.
115
W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), in W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in
the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), 3.
116
Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” 5.
117
Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” 21.
118
119
120
EARLY THEORY 39
According to the American New Critics, the nature and limits of literature and the literary are
always decidable on exclusively textual grounds; there is never any need to draw on context (e.g.,
history, biography, politics, etc.) in the analysis and understanding of literature. This was a sharp
turn from philological approaches to the text, that is, approaches that center on the history of
language, wherein the intentions of the author were a key component to understanding it. Also
important for the philologists, that is, those who study the history of language (2.1), were the
material boundaries of the text, which the New Critics also decided played no role in understanding
the text. Rather than relying on the biography of the author, the New Critics foregrounded the
relationship between form and content in literary criticism.
Close reading for the New Critics became then the means of unlocking the dynamics between
the form and the content of a text. The relationship between form and content for the New Critics
was such that content could not be extracted from form (or structure), which together formed an
organic unity. Brooks expressed this idea in “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (1947), where he says:
The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the
“statement” which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern
of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the
structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions
and balances and harmonizations, developed though a temporal scheme.121
But still, Brooks means something quite specific when he uses the terms “structure” and “form”:
The structure meant is certainly not “form” in the conventional sense in which we think of form
as a kind of envelope which “contains” the “content.” The structure obviously is everywhere
conditioned by the nature of the material which goes into the poem. The nature of the material
sets the problem to be solved, and the solution is the ordering of the material.122
Thus, for Brooks, proper criticism responds to the structure or form of the poem (which includes
irony, tension, paradox, and ambiguity), whereas improper criticism will attempt to paraphrase the
propositional content or statement of the poem.
For New Critics, the text was an object of aesthetic appreciation whose beauty could be
determined through a close reading of the complexities and uniqueness of its language. Given its
emphasis on the beauty of literary language, Northrop Frye called the New Criticism “the aesthetic
view”—which, by the way, he did not intend as a compliment, but rather as a scathing criticism.123
Looking ahead, in semiological terms (2.0), the form of a text for the New Critics was its signifier
and its content the signified. However, in opposition to semiology, which dismantled the form/
content distinction, the New Critics championed it.
The New Criticism emerged in American universities in the 1920s and held sway in them until
the mid-1970s when it was displaced by forms of theory and criticism with more affinities to a
121
Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (1947), in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 203.
122
Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” 194.
123
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 350.
different type of text, that is, one that was not autonomous, stable, coherent, or a source of identity.
It is generally contended that the New Criticism rose to dominance in the American university
because it was an approach to literature that suited well the expanded base of students attending the
university through the GI Bill after World War II. As the New Criticism did not require any context
or knowledge external to the text such as literary history, author biography, and philology, it served
to equalize or democratize educational access with regard to the study of literature. Everything that
a student needed to know about a poem was provided to them through a close reading of the formal
organization and language of the poem. With this approach, the New Critics believed that the text
revealed to the close reader the appropriate critical method, rather than the other way around. It
was not that students were applying New Critical methods to the text; rather, it was the text that was
supplying to them through close reading the requisite critical methodology. What the student
was seeking was not the meaning of the poem; rather they were listening for how a text speaks itself.
The differences between British and American New Criticism might be said to boil down to
differences regarding the role of psychological factors in literary formalism. For the most part, this
holds, especially if the contributions of Richards are weighed against those of Wimsatt and Beardsley.
However, there is one American New Critic whose theory of literary form goes against both the
characteristics of the British and American New Criticism described above—this American New
Critic is Kenneth Burke. Not only does Burke’s work incorporate psychological factors into his
literary formalism, but he also incorporates sociological, anthropological, rhetorical, and semantic
factors in addition to Marxist ideas. In The Philosophy of Literary Form, which first appeared in
1941, with a second edition in 1967, and a third in 1973, Burke makes a key distinction between
“semantic meaning” and “poetic meaning.”
Semantic meaning has as its ideal “the aim to evolve a vocabulary that gives the name and address
of every event in the universe.”124 “An ideal definition of a chair,” writes Burke, “would be such that,
on the basis of the definition, people know what you wanted when you asked for one, a carpenter
knew how to make it, a furniture dealer know how to get it, etc.”125 Poetic meaning, however, is
not exactly the opposite of semantic meaning. Poetic meanings “cannot be disposed of on the true-
or-false basis. Rather, they are related to one another like a set of concentric circles, of wider and
wider scope. Those of wider diameter do not categorically eliminate those of narrower diameter.
There is, rather, a progressive encompassment.”126 Moreover, for Burke, there are five levels of
meaning production in literature: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. He calls this his theory of
dramatism, and it marks a break with both the British and American New Criticism. For Burke,
literature is an expression of human motives and desires, and these five terms allow him to speak of
literary structure in terms of motivation.127 In short, Burke’s view that human action is symbolic
and his interest in human motivation make his work an outlier for both British and American New
Criticism—and straddle in important ways ideas we will see in the next two chapters, on semiotics
and structuralism (2.0) and Marxism (3.0).
124
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd edition (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973), 141.
125
Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 141–2.
126
Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 144.
127
Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 106, n. 25.
CHAPTER TWO
Structuralism and Semiotics
2.0 INTRODUCTION
Often termed the linguistic turn, structuralism was rooted in some of the implications of the
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose posthumously published Course in General Linguistics
(1916) laid the groundwork for both the structuralist and poststructuralist (5.0) movements. For
Saussure, the linguistic and philosophical foundations of language are determined by material and
non-material differences among signs. Language on this view is not a representation of reality, but
rather is a system of signs with no existential or analogical relation to anything outside of the sign
system. On this revolutionary and powerful approach to language, awareness of reality is only
possible through functional structures. Structuralism contends that form is imposed on nature by
language, and nature in turn is manifested as the given of a particular structure. Hence, literary art
as language under structuralism is abstracted from its existential, historical, and aesthetic context.
As the term semiotics refers to the study of signs, it along with structuralism is also used in
association with the work of Saussure. Moreover, as we saw earlier with Augustine of Hippo, semiotics
need not be limited to the study of linguistic units or words (which for Augustine are “conventional”
signs), but may also include “natural” signs like smoke as a sign of fire. Therefore, the study of
semiotics often moves well beyond the use of language to other sign systems ranging from fashion and
theater to gardens and countries. Roland Barthes, for example, wrote books on both the semiotics of
fashion (The Fashion System [1967]) and Japan (Empire of Signs [1970]), the latter of which took up
gardens, theater, and more. Because of his huge contributions to the development of both semiotics
and structuralism, this chapter includes a separate section on Barthes (2.3).
Nevertheless, while semiotics is related to structuralism in that both areas of study are grounded
in the structure of the sign, there are two fundamentally different structures that may be attributed
to signs: the binary structure of Saussure and the triadic structure of Charles Peirce. Structuralism
is generally limited only to work based in the linguistics of Saussure, whereas semiotics can be based
in either a binary conception of the sign (à la Barthes) or in a triadic conception of the sign (à la
Umberto Eco). The differences here are quiet radical: if the structuralist proposes that language is
not a representation of reality, but rather is a system of signs with no existential or analogical
relation to anything outside of the sign system, then semiotics based on Peirce’s conception of the
sign moves in the opposite direction by maintaining a strong existential and phenomenological
relationship between signs and reality. Unlike the structuralists, who contend that language, in
effect, imposes form on nature, and makes it manifest as the given of a certain structure, semioticians
who work in the tradition of Peirce do not believe that language imposes form on nature, but rather
that the form of nature pre-exists signification.
Mediating between the structural linguistics of Saussure and the formalism of the New Critics
was a movement that came to be know as Russian Formalism. Like the pioneering New Critic I. A.
41
Richards, Russian Formalism aimed for the scientific study of literature. However, it also participated
in the linguistic turn by turning to analytic models of language, plot, character, and larger textual
structures. The early contributions of Russian Formalism would come to reverberate through a
large chunk of twentieth-century literary and cultural theory including in the work of Mikhail
Bakhtin (3.3), who is often associated with this movement.
One of the Russian Formalists, Vladimir Propp, became influential in the field of narratology,
which is the study of narrative and narrative structure. This field, which is heavily influenced by
structuralism, counts Barthes as one of its early representatives. Because of their associations with
structuralism—and continued significance to contemporary literary and cultural theory—sections of
this chapter are respectively devoted to Russian Formalism (2.2) and narratology (2.5). There is also
a section devoted to the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (2.4), who put structuralism
in general and Saussure’s linguistics in particular to use in the study of systems of marriage alliance.
Like Barthes, the contributions of Lévi-Strauss to semiotics and structuralism are enormous. His
work has also come to influence a number of other areas of contemporary literary and cultural
theory including cultural studies (14.1), systems theory (12.3), and cognitive criticism (12.4).
Unlike the New Criticism, which, as we already noted, did not revere the materiality of the text,
the tradition passed down through the work of Saussure followed the philological tradition in its
reverence for the materiality of the text. Nevertheless, the structuralists did not adopt the idealism
of the philologists, that which gave the philological text a stable and fixed meaning. Through the
innovative work of Louis Hjelmslev in the 1960s, who regarded text as a process, the structuralist
depiction of text clearly came to differentiate itself from the text of the New Critics. For Hjelmslev,
processes are the starting point in defining and individuating language, and it is only against the
background of systems that texts come into existence.1
As the text of the New Critics was of classical origin, it might be termed the classical depiction
of text to differentiate from the text that was the result of structuralism, which might be termed the
contemporary depiction of text. Whereas the classical depiction of text stresses autonomy, stability,
coherence, and identity, the contemporary depiction of text emphasizes non-autonomy, non-
stability, non-coherence, and non-identity. The three masters of the contemporary depiction of
text—Barthes, Julia Kristeva (5.2), and Jacques Derrida (5.1)—each contributed their own unique
takes on the non-autonomy, non-stability, non-coherence, and non-identity of the text.
One of the keys to understanding the shift from early theory to structuralism and its legacies is
through the advent of the contemporary depiction of text. Not only does it represent the rejection
or negation of the classical depiction of text, but it is also a reconceptualization of the linguistic and
philosophical foundations of language. The New Criticism held sway in American universities until
it came to be displaced by forms of theory and criticism with more affinities to a different type of
text, that is, one that was not autonomous, stabile, coherent, or a source of identity. The
contemporary depiction of text, like its classical counterpart, is articulated through a diverse range
of theories and notions. Also, as with the classical depiction of text, a number of unlikely theories
and notions can be grouped under this set of characteristics including structuralism and (Saussurean)
semiotics, and later, poststructuralism (5.0) and cultural studies (14.1).
1
See Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943), trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1962).
STRUCTURALISM AND SEMIOTICS 43
While not an exclusive characteristic of the contemporary depiction of text, the extension of the
domain of text to both written and non-written entities by semiotics and structuralism had a huge
impact on the articulation of contemporary theories and notions of text. By the 1960s, the domain
of text had extended from its traditionally delimited space of written discourse to that of any object
whatsoever—written or spoken, aesthetic or otherwise. Whereas the New Criticism regarded the
domain of literature to be a fairly narrow one, the contemporary depiction of text radically widened
its domain with its limit cases—as for example in Jurij Lotman’s The Structure of the Artistic Text
(1970) and Derrida’s Dissemination (1972)—regarding the world itself as text. In short, the
influence of semiotics and structuralism has revolutionized and shifted the study of literature and
culture for over a century.
2.1 STRUCTURE OF THE SIGN (OR, SAUSSURE AND PEIRCE)

Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) is based on lecture notes from students who
attended his courses on general linguistics in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1907 to 1911. In these
lectures, Saussure aimed to create a true science of language—something that was not accomplished
by his predecessors. Though the discipline of grammar, that is, the establishment of rules that
distinguish between “correct and incorrect forms,” can be traced back to the Greeks, Saussure
views it as flawed because “it is a prescriptive discipline, far removed from any concern with
impartial observation, and its outlook is inevitably a narrow one.”2 He has similar concerns too
with philology, which “seeks primarily to establish, interpret and comment upon texts,” and is
preoccupied with “literary history, customs, institutions, etc.”3 For Saussure, philology is flawed
because “it is too slavishly subservient to the written language, and so neglects living language.”4
In contrast to the grammarians and philologists, Saussure’s linguistics “takes for its data . . . all
manifestations of human language.”5 The aims of linguistics are:
(a) to describe all known languages and record their history. This involves tracing the history of
language families and, as far as possible, reconstructing the parent languages of each family;
(b) to determine the forces operating permanently and universally in all languages, and to
formulate general laws which account for all particular linguistic phenomena historically
attested; and,
(c) to delimit and define linguistics itself.6
In the pursuit of these aims, the “linguist must take the study of linguistic structure as his primary
concern, and relate all other manifestations of language to it.”7 Moreover, for Saussure, linguistic
structure is not the equivalent of language, but only one part of it. In brief, linguistic structure is that
which “gives language what unity is has,” and at its core involves a number of elements including
2
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916), ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with the collaboration
of Albert Riedlinger, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983), 1.
3
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1.
4
5
6
7
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 9; my emphasis.
the structure of the sign. “Linguistic structure is no less real than speech,” says Saussure, “and no
less amenable to study.”8 He continues:
Linguistic signs, although essentially psychological, are not abstractions. The associations,
ratified by collective agreement, which go to make up the language are realities localized in the
brain. Moreover, linguistic signs are, so to speak, tangible: writing can fix them in conventional
images, whereas it would be impossible to photograph acts of speech in their details.9
Language, on the other hand, is
a system of signs expressing ideas, and hence comparable to writing, the deaf-and-dumb alphabet,
symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signs, and so on . . . It is therefore possible to
conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as a part of social life. It would form part of
social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek
se–mîon [σημεῖον], “sign”). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them.
Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist,
a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science.10
So, linguistic structure is an element of linguistics that in turn is but one branch of semiology. We
might consider them as concentric circles, where Saussure by far did the most work on the innermost
circle (linguistic structure) and the least on the outermost (semiology). As a note on terminology,
semiology is Saussure’s preferred term for the science of signs, which may also, more generically, be
called semiotics.
At the core of Saussure’s linguistic structure is the sign, which is the coming together of a signifier
and a signified. The signifier and the signifier represent the division of language into two parts, but
neither the signifier nor the signified is distinct before they come together in the sign. In other
words, the signifier and the signifier are inchoate by themselves and become signs when articulated
together. Saussure’s signifier is a sound image, and his signified is a thought image.
In the case of the linguistic sign dog, the signifier (sound image) is the sequence of sounds
“d-o-g,” and the signified (thought image) is the conceptual or mental image dog. For Saussure,
A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound
pattern. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound
pattern is the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of
the senses. This sound pattern may be called a “material” element only in that it is the
representation of our sensory impressions. The sound pattern may thus be distinguished from
the other element associated with it in a linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more
abstract kind: the concept.11
8
9
10
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 15–16.
11
FIGURE 1: Nature of the Linguistic Sign, Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68.
Saussure wants us to think of the coming together of the signifier and the signified like the two sides
of a sheet of paper, wherein each side of the paper is only definable in relation to the other side. In
short, the sound image is only meaningful when connected with a thought image, and the thought
image is only meaningful when connected with a sound image. Again, the sound image and the
thought image are inchoate or indistinct before they come together in the sign.
Moreover, the linguistic sign for Saussure is completely arbitrary. In the case of the word “dog,”
for Saussure it has no dog-like qualities. Saussure says:
There is no internal connexion between the idea “sister” and the French sequence of sounds
s-ö-r which acts as its signal. The same idea might as well be represented by any other sequence
of sounds. This is demonstrated by differences between languages, and even by the existence of
different languages. The signification “ox” has as its signal b-ö-f on one side of the frontier
[between France and Germany], but o-k-s (Ochs) on the other side.12
Rather, the idea “dog” and the English sequence of sounds d-o-g, which acts as its signal, is
established by convention or cultural agreement. That is, it is by convention the idea “dog,” and the
English sequence of sounds, d-o-g, are a linguistic sign.
In addition, the meaning of linguistic signs is not an essential one. That is to say, meaning is not
the result of a correspondence between a word and a thing. Rather, meaning is the result of difference
and relationship within a sign system. So, for Saussure, the signifier “dog” means that it is not every
other signifier in the sign system, that is, it, “dog,” means not “cog,” “log,” “jog,” and so on. For
Saussure, the meaning of a linguistic sign is determined through both its difference from the other
linguistic signs in the system, and its relationship to all of the other linguistic signs in the system.
In addition, meaning is the result of combination and selection within a sign system. So, for
Saussure, a red light means “stop” because it is a system of three light colors: red, yellow, and green.
12
There is nothing in the color red that means stop. The color for stop could just as well be yellow or
green. However, it is not, because this would be a different system of combination and selection.
Combination and selection are important for Saussure’s linguistics because it allows him to
explain how sentences come to have meaning. At the level of selection, each of the words in a
sentence function along the paradigmatic axis of language, whereas at the level of combination, all
of the words in a sentence function along the syntagmatic axis of language. Take for example the
sentence, “I saw a dog today.” Each of the words in this sentence—“I,” “saw,” “a,” “dog,” and
“today”—have their own paradigmatic axis from wherein they are selected. So, while “dog” was
selected in this particular instance, it could have been “cat” or “frog.” The paradigmatic axis is the
plane of both selection and association. But the meaning of the sentence is only complete after the
final word is spoken or written. All of the words in this sentence form the syntagmatic axis of
language. Different combinations of words yield different meanings for the sentence.
What should be evident by this point is that Saussure has not provided any connection yet between
language at either the level of signifier/signified or syntagmatic/paradigmatic axes to reality or the
world. For that matter, he has not alluded to anything outside of language or sign systems. The
closest we came to this is with “sound pattern,” but Saussure quickly qualifies that it “is not actually
a sound; for a sound is something physical.” It should be no surprise then that Saussure believes that
language constructs and organizes our “access” to reality. But even the word “access” here is
misleading, as language for Saussure does not represent an already existing reality in the way that
Plato’s philosophy posited the world of becoming (appearances) and the world of being (reality).
One of the most distinctive theses of the linguistic turn via Saussure is that different languages
produce different mappings of the real. An example that is often used to motivate this point is that
whereas Europeans see “snow,” Inuits, that is, people from Alaska and across the Arctic, have a
large number of words for snow. Similarly, Aborigines have many words for desert. Therefore, the
thinking goes, Europeans, Inuits, and Aborigines each have a different linguistic mapping of the
real—or, more simply, have a different reality.
Two further sets of distinctions are important for considering Saussure’s contributions to the study
of language. The first is his distinction between a diachronic and a synchronic theoretical approach to
linguistics. A diachronic theoretical approach to linguistics studies the historical development of a
language, whereas a synchronic approach studies language at a particular moment of time. The
synchronic approach is necessary for a science of language, and would become the way of structuralism.
It is an approach that is an ahistorical one that focuses on the structural properties of language.
The second distinction is the division of language between langue and parole. Langue is the
system of language, that is, the rules and conventions that organize it. On the level of langue,
language is a social institution. In his Elements of Semiology, Barthes describes langue as a “collective
contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate.”13 Parole is language
at the level of the individual utterance, that is, the use of language. Saussure compares the division
of language into langue and parole to a game of chess: langue is analogous to the rules of the game,
whereas parole is analogous to an actual game of chess. Langue is homogeneous in structure,
whereas parole is performative and heterogeneous. In sum, for Saussure, structure makes meaning
13
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1964), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968),
14.
possible both in language and chess, for imagine watching a game of chess and not knowing the
rules. Language like the game of chess only becomes meaningful through rules (langue), and rules
are only meaningful through performance (parole).
Structuralism derived from Saussure’s linguistics comes to view literature as analogous to
language (and chess). Meaning is always the result of the interplay of relationships of selection and
combination made possible by the underlying structure. Moreover, on the same principles that
Saussure sought to create a science of language, structuralists sought to create a science of literature.
Narratology (2.5) was one of the major efforts in this regard. Related to work in the vein is the
poetics of Russian Formalism (2.2). But before turning to them, let’s briefly examine Peirce’s
alternative to Saussure’s conception of the sign.
Peirce’s semiotic (or, as he sometimes termed it, semeiotic) was part of a systematic philosophy
that incorporated logic, rhetoric, and grammar. He believed that “[l]ogic, in its general sense, is . . .
only another name for semiotic, the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.”14 For Peirce,
logic was “the science of the general necessary laws of Signs” and had three branches: Critical Logic
or “logic in the narrow sense”—“the theory of the general conditions of the reference of Symbols
and other Signs to their professed Objects, that is, it is the theory of the conditions of truth”;
Speculative Grammar—“the doctrine of the general conditions of symbols and other signs having
the significant character”; and Speculative Rhetoric—“the doctrine of the general conditions of the
reference of Symbols and other Signs to the Interpretants which they aim to determine.”15
This division of logic or semiotic is reflected today in the semantics–syntactics–pragmatics
distinction primarily attributable to the work of Charles Morris, a logical positivist, who sought to
eliminate all metaphysical elements from philosophy, and to reorganize it along the lines of logical
analysis.16 Others that follow Morris’s division of semiotic include Rudolf Carnap, another logical
positivist, who defined “semiotic” as “a general theory of signs and their applications, especially in
language; developed and systematized within Scientific Empiricism.”17 According to Carnap,
semiotic has three branches: Pragmatics—“theory of the relations between signs and those who
produce or receive and understand them”; Semantics—“theory of the relations between signs and
what they refer to”; and Syntactics—theory of the formal relations among signs.”18 As Peirce wrote
around 1897:
A sign is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It
addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a
more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign
stands for something, its object.19
14
Charles Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (CP), six volumes, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–5), vol. 2, paragraph 227 (2.227).
15
Peirce, CP 2.93.
16
Charles Morris, Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and Scientific Empiricism (Paris: Hermann and Cie, 1937), 4ff.
17
Rudolph Carnap, “Semiotic; Theory of Signs,” in Dictionary of Philosophy, 16th edition, revised; ed. Dagobert D. Runes
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 288.
18
Carnap, “Semiotic; Theory of Signs,” 288–9.
19
Peirce, CP 2.228.
That is to say, a sign is the subject of a triadic relation, involving the sign itself, an object or what
the sign stands for, and an interpretant or the equivalent sign that the first sign creates in the mind
of the person apprehending it. Of this definition of a sign, Morris observed the following significant
features: “it does not limit signs to language signs; it does not introduce the term ‘meaning’; the
interpretant is said to be ‘in the mind’; the term ‘sign’ is not completely clarified since the interpretant
of a sign is itself said to be a sign; there is no reference to action or behavior.”20
Peirce embedded his semiotic in the metaphysics of his categories. He held that all phenomena
or experiences whatsoever possess three modes (or aspects) of being, specifiable under the categories
of firstness or the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to
anything else; secondness or the mode of being of fact, struggle, or “hereness and nowness” whose
very essence is its “thisness”; and thirdness or the mode of being of that which is such as it is in
bringing firstness and secondness into relation with each other. His definition of the sign from
around 1902 better reflects the relationship between semiotic and the categories, although it is
more obscure to those who are unfamiliar with the categories. “A Sign, or Representamen,” wrote
Peirce, “is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to
be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its
Object in which it stands itself to the same Object.”21 One virtue of this definition of the sign as
opposed to the earlier definition is that the interpretant is not necessarily “in the mind.” It should
be noted that Peirce thought that in order “to get more distinct notions of what the Object of a Sign
in general is, and what the Interpretant in general is, it is needful to distinguish two senses of
‘Object’ and three of ‘Interpretant.’ It would be better to carry the division further; but these two
divisions are enough to occupy my remaining years.22 It would have been interesting to see how
Peirce would have further developed the senses of interpretant and object, for it is not altogether
obvious how he would have done this or what theoretical significance this extension of the senses
of interpretant and object would have served.
For Peirce, the three senses of interpretant are the immediate interpretant, dynamical interpretant,
and final interpretant. He described the immediate interpretant as “the interpretant as it is revealed
in the right understanding of the Sign itself, and is ordinarily called the meaning of the sign.”23 The
dynamical interpretant “is the actual effect which the Sign, as a Sign, really determines”;24 “it is the
volitional element of Interpretation.”25 The final interpretant is that “which refers to the manner in
which the Sign tends to represent itself to be related to its Object”26—it is “that which would finally
be decided to be the true interpretation if consideration of the matter were carried so far that an
ultimate opinion was reached.”27
On the other hand, the two senses of object are called the immediate object and dynamic object.
The former is “the Object as the Sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon
20
Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 19.
21
Peirce, CP 2.274.
22
Charles Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics (NEM), 4 vols. (in 5 books), ed. Carolyn Eisele (The Hague: Mouton,
1976), vol. 3, 842 (3:842).
23
Peirce, CP 4.536.
24
Peirce, CP 4.536.
25
Peirce, NEM 3:844.
26
Peirce, CP 4.536.
27
Peirce, NEM 3:844.
the Representation of it in the Sign”;28 it is “the Object as cognized in the Sign and therefore an
Idea.”29 The latter “is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the Sign to its
Representation”;30 “the Object as it is regardless of any particular aspect of it, the Object in such
relations as unlimited and final study would show it to be.”31
In discussing Peirce’s distinction between the object and the interpretant of a sign, it is hard not
to recall Gottlob Frege’s distinction between the Sinn (sense) and Bedeutung (denotation or
reference) of a sign. It is also interesting to note here that Frege was working out these ideas around
the same time as Peirce, for his “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” was first published in 1892.32 Yet
although Frege’s distinction between the Sinn and Bedeutung of a sign (word, sign combination,
expression) is similar in some respects to Peirce’s distinction between the interpretant and the
object of a sign, the two doctrines are quite different. The most obvious difference would be that
Peirce’s three senses of interpretant and two senses of object do not directly correspond with
Frege’s Sinn and Bedeutung distinction. This results in the possibility of parallels on a number of
different levels. For example, it might be argued that Peirce’s immediate/dynamic object distinction
parallels Frege’s Sinn and Bedeutung, or that one sense of Peirce’s interpretant and one sense of his
object parallel Frege’s distinction. Which of these or others is the most parallel is not entirely
obvious.
The triadic character of the sign relation led Peirce to distinguish three main divisions of signs:
(1) the sign in itself, (2) the sign as related to its object, and (3) the sign as interpreted to represent
its object. In turn, (1), (2), and (3) are phenomena which each possess three aspects of being and as
such are specifiable under the categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. As a result, each
of the three divisions become a trichotomy.
The first division (trichotomy) specifies three types of representamens. It is subdivided into the
qualisign, a quality that is a sign; the sinsign, an actual existent thing or event which is a sign; and
the legisign, a law which is a sign. The second division demarcates three ways the sign may be
related to its object. This division is subdivided into the icon, a sign which refers to the object that
it denotes merely by virtue of the sign’s own characters, and which the sign possesses just the same
whether the object exists or not; the index, a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue
of being really affected by that object; and the symbol, a sign which refers to the object that it
denotes by virtue of a law. Finally, the third division distinguishes three ways in which interpretants
may represent signs as related to their objects. It is subdivided into the rheme, a sign of qualitative
possibility for its interpretant; dicisign, a sign of actual existence for its interpretant; and argument,
a sign of law for its interpretant.33
Consequently, the application of Peirce’s principle, which claims that a first determine only a
first; a second can determine only a second or a first; and a third can determine only a third, a
second, or a first,34 to the three trichotomies yields Peirce’s ten classes of signs: (1) (rhematic iconic)
28
Peirce, CP 4.536
29
Peirce, NEM 3:842.
30
Peirce, CP 4.536.
31
Peirce, NEM 3:842.
32
Gottlob Frege, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892): 25–50.
33
Peirce, CP 2.233–72.
34
qualisign; (2) (rhematic) iconic sinsign; (3) rhematic indexical sinsign; (4) dicent (indexical) sinsign;
(5) (rhematic) iconic legisign; (6) rhematic indexical legisign; (7) dicent indexical legisign; (8)
rhematic symbolic (legisign); (9) dicent symbolic (legisign); and (10) argument (symbolic legisign).35
For completeness sake, it should also be noted that Peirce further divides signs into sixty-six and
59,049 classes.
For the purposes of literary and cultural theory, Peirce’s semiotic and Saussure’s semiology yield
completely different approaches to meaning. Structuralism, following Saussure, would come to
view meaning as the interplay of relationships of selection and combination made possible by an
underlying structure. Semiotics, following Peirce, would come to view meaning through the
relationships among the sign itself, an object, and an interpretant, which are made possible by an
underlying being—or reality, if you will. For general purposes of distinction, semiology is the
science of signs based on Saussurean principles, whereas semiotics is the philosophy of signs based
on Peircean phenomenology.
2.2 RUSSIAN FORMALISM

Russian Formalism originated in early twentieth-century Russia through the work of Viktor
Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Vladimir Propp, and Roman Jakobson. From the
1910s to the 1930s, this group of Russian critics argued for the autonomy of poetic language and
literature. Moreover, they urged the separation of literature and politics until the group was
suppressed around 1930 by the Soviets. The communists regarded this literary theory to be in
conflict with Marxism (3.0) as it excluded social matters from the study of literature. After it was
disciplined by the Soviets, the center of the formalist study of literature moved from Moscow to
Prague, in Czechoslovakia. The Prague Linguistic Circle included Jakobson, who emigrated there
from Russia, Jan Mukarovsky, and Réne Wellek. Though a relatively short-lived school of literary
theory and criticism, Russian Formalism would come to exert a major influence on structuralism
and poststructuralism as well as individual thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin (3.3) and Yuri Lotman.
Moreover, because Jakobson and Wellek would emigrate to the US in the 1940s and taught at major
American universities, Russian Formalism and the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle would come
to be highly influential abroad as well.
The Russian Formalists attacked previous scholarship in literary studies because they thought
that it avoided literature. This prior scholarship fell into three types: (1) Philological, which included
historical and linguistic studies of folklore and literature; (2) Historical, which focused on the
historical background of literature; and (3) Moral and Social, which treated literature as the locus
of moral and social improvement. For the Russian Formalists, each of these approaches was lacking
because they expected the wrong things from literature and because by focusing on the message of
literary works, they missed examining specifically literary problems.
The “formalism” of Russian Formalism refers to its focus on the formal patterns and technical
devices of literature, rather than philological, historical, moral, and social matters. In this regard, it
shares a kinship with New Criticism, which is also described as a type of formalism. In general,
formalism regards literature as a special type of language. Much of the theoretical effort of
35
formalism is directed at establishing what exactly constitutes the distinctiveness of literary or poetic
language from ordinary language. For the formalist, whereas ordinary language is concerned with
communication by reference to a world outside of language, poetic language is not concerned with
communication or reference to a world outside of language. Rather, poetic language calls attention
to itself, that is, to its formal features as language or a sign system. However, while the general
features of formalism may be attributable to both New Criticism and Russian Formalism, the
conceptual contributions of the latter, specifically as they were developed by the Prague Linguistic
Circle, structuralism, Marxism (3.0), and poststructuralism (5.0) are significantly different.
Russian Formalism sought out the universals of poetic language. It strove for the scientific study
of literature. Writes Jakobson:
The object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness—that is, that which makes
a given work a work of literature. Until now literary historians have preferred to act like the
policeman who, intending to arrest a certain person, would, at any opportunity, seize any and all
persons who chanced into the apartment, as well as those who passed along the street. The
literary historians used everything—anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a
science of literature, they created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines. They seemed to
have forgotten that their essays strayed into related disciplines—the history of philosophy, the
history of culture, of psychology, etc.—and that these could rightly use literary masterpieces only
as defective, secondary documents.36
Their aim was to increase our ability to read literature with an eye toward what makes literature
literature, that is, literariness.
The method of Russian Formalism, articulated below by Eichenbaum, anticipates the hypothetical
deductive method of Karl Popper, in that all assertions about literature coming from this science are
subject to falsification:
Our scientific approach has had no such prefabricated program or doctrine, and has none. In our
studies we value a theory only as a working hypothesis to help us discover and interpret facts;
that is, we determine the validity of the facts and use them as the material of our research. We
are not concerned with definitions, for which the late-comers thirst; nor do we build general
theories, which so delight eclectics. We posit specific principles and adhere to them insofar as the
material justifies them. If the material demand their refinement or change, we change or refine
them. In this sense we are quite free from our own theories—as science must be free to the
extent that theory and conviction are distinct. There is no ready-made science; science lives not
by settled truth, but by overcoming error.37
Utilization of a method of investigation akin to the scientific method led the Russian Formalists to
focus on analytic models of language, plot, character, and larger textual structures. With regard to
36
Roman Jakobson, Modern Russian Poetry (1921); cited by Boris Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method” (1927),
in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1965), 107.
37
Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method,” 102–3.
language, their work was squarely in line with the linguistic turn of structuralism, which became
even more apparent in the work of Jakobson and the Prague Linguistic Circle; with regard to plot,
their work was squarely in line with what came to be known as narratology (2.5), wherein the
fundamental Russian Formalist distinction between story (the temporal-causal sequence of narrated
events) and plot (the way the story is told, that is, the transformation through literary devices of the
temporal-causal sequence of narrated events) was further developed.
Jakobson’s work mediated between the synchronic structural linguistics of Saussure and the
formalist diachronic study of literary forms. He sought out the universal linguistic features of poetic
language, which he located in rhyme and meter. The notion of founding the study of literature as
literariness on science meant for Jakobson that it would become more reliable. But in the process
of increasing the reliability of literary studies, Jakobson transformed it into a science where the
patterns it located were many times too subtle to have any effect on the average reader. However,
for Jakobson, this was of no consequence because literary science was to focus only on linguistic
matters in literature, and not social and moral ones. Whether or not the reader could appreciate or
recognize the findings of Jakobson’s science did not matter because his science had no social or
moral obligation to be meaningful to readers—his audience were only fellow scientists of literature.
One of the differences of Jakobson’s late formalism from earlier work in this area was that for
him a poetic work has a multiplicity of functions where one dominates, whereas earlier formalists
took a more monistic point of view, that is to say, the view that one function dominates. For
aestheticism, the traces of which could still be found in early Russian Formalism, the poetic work
has only one function: the aesthetic function. But, argues Jakobson in 1935, this view is wrong:
Equating a poetic work with an aesthetic, or more precisely with a poetic, function, as far as we
deal with verbal material, is characteristic of those epochs which proclaim self-sufficient, pure
art, l’art pour l’art. In the early steps of the Formalist school, it was still possible to observe
distinct traces of such an equation. However, this equation is unquestionably erroneous: a poetic
work is not confined to aesthetic function alone, but has in addition many other functions.38
For Jakobson, a poetic work can also have other functions such as an expressive function and a referential
one. The difference though between a poetic work and a non-poetic one is that “a poetic work is
defined as a verbal message whose aesthetic function is its dominant [function].”39 According to
Jakobson, the dominant is “the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms
the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure.”40 His
notion of the dominant is meant to bridge the gap between those who say that the work has only one
function (monists) and those that say it has many functions (pluralists). This way Jakobson can
acknowledge that the poetic work can referentially function as a “straightforward document of cultural
history, social relations, or biography,”41 and that the “aesthetic function is not limited to the poetic
work; an orator’s address, everyday conversation, newspaper articles, advertisements, a scientific
38
Roman Jakobson, “The Dominant” (1935), in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, eds. Ladislav
Matě jka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), 83.
39
Jakobson, “The Dominant,” 84.
40
41
treatise—all may employ aesthetic considerations, give expression to aesthetic function, and often use
words in and for themselves, not merely as a referential device.”42
It should be noted that for Jakobson (and Mukarovsky too), the aesthetic function is a shifting
category, not a fixed one. It is related to society, social acts, and ideologies. Jakobson rejects
mechanistic formalism and contends that the way in which a literary system develops historically
cannot be understood without understanding the way in which other systems impinge upon it. In
this way, the work of Jakobson, Mukarovsky, and the Prague Linguistic Circle, which regarded
literature not as a closed system but one with significant social relations, would come to separate
itself from Russian Formalism, which treated literary works as unified organic wholes wherein
social and political matters were not relevant to the science of literariness. The work of Bakhtin
(3.3) will come to exemplify the Marxist implications of treating literature as not a closed
system.
It is interesting to note that Jakobson’s notion of the dominant itself became dominant in literary
studies around the world through Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature, which first
appeared in 1948. The book, which is a mash-up of Russian Formalism and New Criticism, went
through several editions and has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, German,
Portuguese, Hebrew, Danish, Serbocroat, modern Greek, Swedish, Romanian, Finnish, Hindi,
Norwegian, Polish, French, and Hungarian. In it, they write:
An artifact has the structure proper to the performance of its function, together with whatever
accessories time and materials may make it possible, and taste may think it desirable, to add.
There may be much in any literary work which is unnecessary to its literary function, though
interesting or defensible on other grounds.43
Thus, “poetry has many possible functions,” however, “[i]ts prime function and chief function is
fidelity to its own nature.”44 Also, the Russian Formalist (and New Criticism) notion that philological
and historicist approaches to literature are limited is also developed here as in other works by
Wellek. Still, Wellek’s approach, one that views literature as a multilayered system of signs, and
defends the importance of philosophical ideas in the study of literature, is a very different approach
to literature from the linguistic approach of Jakobson.
One of the key concepts introduced by the Russian Formalists is defamiliarization (ostranenie, a
Russian word, that is also translated as estrangement). By focusing on the linguistic devices that
make language new to us, they showed how literariness can work to break down our automatized
responses to the world. “If we start to examine the general laws of perception,” wrote Shklovsky in
1917, “we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.”45 He continues,
Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole
complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.”
42
Jakobson, “The Dominant,” 83–4.
43
René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 1st edition, 1948; 2nd edition, 1955; 3rd edition, 1962 (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 29.
44
Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 37.
45
Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism, 11.
And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to
make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived
and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is
an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an
object; the object is not important.46
The formalists held that perception through artistic form restores our awareness of the world and
brings things to life. Shklovsky illustrates defamiliarization at work in literature with an example
from Tolstoy:
[I]n “Shame” Tolstoy “defamiliarizes” the idea of flogging in this way: “to strip people who have
broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and to rap on their bottoms with switches,” and, after
a few lines, “to lash about on the naked buttocks.” Then he remarks: “Just why precisely this
stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other—why not prick the shoulders or any part
of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vise, or anything like that?”47
For Shklovsky, this particularly “harsh example” shows how “[t]he familiar act of flogging is made
unfamiliar both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its
name.”48 The technique of defamiliarization is one that Tolstoy constantly uses. In fact, for
Shklovsky, “defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found.”49 The early Russian
Formalist study of defamiliarization would develop with Mukarovsky and the Prague Linguistic
Circle into the study of foregrounding, the aesthetically intentional distortion of linguistic
components.
Related to defamiliarization is Shklovsky’s notion of laying bare, wherein the novelist explicitly
makes reference to the structuring technique of their novel. Shklovsky found in Laurence Sterne’s
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (1759) an exemplary use of the technique of
laying bare. Rather than defamiliarizing our perception of the world, Sterne lays bare his novelistic
technique, which is to say, he often explicitly tells us what he is structurally doing in the novel. Here
is an example from Tristam Shandy cited by Shklovsky:
What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of its due course;—for it should have been
told a hundred and fifty pages ago, but that I foresaw then ’twould come in pat hereafter, and be
of more advantage here than elsewhere.50
Shklovsky believes that laying bare is the most literary thing a novel can do, and admires Sterne
because he does it a lot. “Sterne,” writes Shklovsky,
46
Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 12.
47
48
49
50
Viktor Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristam Shandy: Stylistic Commentary” (1921), in Russian Formalist Criticism, 30.
even lays bare the technique of combining separate story lines to make up the novel. In general,
he accentuates the very structure of the novel. By violating the form, he forces us to attend to it;
and, for him, this awareness of the form through its violation constitutes the content of the
novel.51
The Russian Formalist notion of laying bare would come to take on special importance in the
analysis of the metafictional (and postmodern) novels of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the very term
metafiction, which means fiction about fiction, is arguably an extension of Russian Formalist ideas
about the technique of laying bare.
Like the New Critics, who had their “Heresy of Paraphrase,” the Russian Formalists also
disapproved of paraphrasing literature. Shklovsky expresses this idea well, and again with an
example from Tolstoy. In a letter, Tolstoy said the following about Anna Karenina (1877):
If I would want to say in words all that I intended to express in the novel, then I would have to
rewrite the very novel which I have written . . . In all, or almost all I have written, I was guided
by the need to collect thoughts, which were linked to each other in order to express myself.
Every thought expressed in words loses its sense and becomes extremely banal, when it is isolated
from the concatenation to which it belongs.52
This approach to paraphrase recalls Mozart’s response to King Leopold’s criticism that his operas
had too many notes in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984). Mozart said his operas had just the right
number of notes: not one note more, nor one note less was needed. The idea that new form
produces new content is premised on the Russian Formalist belief that a text is a unified organic
whole such that to change its wording (or notation) is to produce a different text. While the devices
of literature can be studied apart from literature, there is no discussion of the content of literature
without also a discussion of its form.
Finally, at the origins of Russian Formalism was a social hope for art grounded in humanism. In
1914, Shklovsky wrote:
At present the old art is dead already, whereas the new art is not yet born. Things are dead as
well—we have lost a feeling for the world. Only the creation of new artistic forms may restore
to man awareness of the world, resurrect things and kill pessimism.53
Of course, as the seeds of Russian Formalism developed into structuralism, semiotics, and
narratology in the twentieth century, its originary humanism came to be increasing less apparent or
relevant. But, as we shall see, a century later, the Russian Formalist aim of restoring our awareness
of the world and killing pessimism would resurface as a major area of concern in the debates over
antitheory (15.0).
51
Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristam Shandy,” 30–1.
52
Viktor Shklovsky, “Svjas’ priëmov sjužetosloženija s obšč imi priëmami stilja” (1916), cited in Douwe Fokkema, “Continuity
and Change in Russian Formalism, Czech Structuralism, and Soviet Semiotics,” PTL 1 (1976): 156.
53
Viktor Shklovsky, “Voskrešenie slova” (1914), cited in Fokkema, “Continuity and Change,” 153.
2.3 ROLAND BARTHES

Barthes has been described as a “man of prodigious learning, unflagging mental energy, and acutely
original sensibility, [who] has established his credentials as aesthetician, literary and theatre critic,
sociologist, metapsychologist, social critic, historian of ideas, and cultural journalist.”54 His thought
proceeds through four major periods: social mythology, semiology, textuality, and morality. He
regarded literature as one sign system among many, and in his early work on social mythology he
showed how diverse cultural phenomena from wrestling and autos to food and film function as sign
systems.
From 1954 to 1956, Barthes wrote a series of monthly essays analyzing “some of the myths of
French daily life.”55 Taking up topics ranging from wrestling and striptease to Einstein’s brain and
Greta Garbo’s face, they were, in Barthes words, the “first attempt to analyze semiologically the
mechanics of language.”56 Following the lead of Saussure, Barthes treated “so-called mass-culture”
as a sign-system in these essays. His hope was that by showing how contemporary French mass
culture functioned as a sign-system he would as well “account in detail for the mystification which
transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.”57
In 1957, Barthes published all fifty-four short essays as a book entitled Mythologies.58 “The
starting point of these reflections,” writes Barthes in his preface to Mythologies, “was usually a
feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense
constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined
by history.”59 As a whole, Barthes’ analyses of the myths of French daily life show how cultural
artifacts “at every turn” confuse “Nature” with “History.” What this means is that culture has a way
of presenting contingencies of meaning (History) as though they were necessities of meaning
(Nature). It is important to recognize that Barthes’s mythological analysis, though grounded in
Saussurean linguistic theory, was also indebted to his earlier rift with Jean-Paul Sartre.
In his first book, Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes took issue with Sartre’s treatment of writing
in What is Literature? (1948). For Sartre, the mission of the writer is to bear witness to the world
in transparent prose that is engaged with reality, that is, to reveal the world, not to call attention to
him- or herself. According to Sartre, literature is “a form of social action,” or more precisely, “a
secondary form of action, action by disclosure.”60 Based on these ideas, Sartre finds modernist
writing to be a “cancer of words.”61 Barthes, however, strongly disagrees with Sartre.
54
Susan Sontag, “Preface,” in Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1968), vii.
55
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 11.
56
Barthes, Mythologies, 9.
57
58
Fifty-four short chapters in the original French, twenty-eight in Annette Lavers’ translation, another twenty-five in Richard
Howard’s translation, with one L’operation Astra remaining untranslated. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (France, Editions
de Seuil, 1957), Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1972), translated by Annette Lavers, and The Eiffel Tower and Other
Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), translated by Richard Howard.
59
60
David Caute, “Introduction,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (1948), trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen,
1978), xii.
61
Sartre, What is Literature? 210.
In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes argues that transparent prose, that is, prose that reveals reality
(as it is) is not possible. Literary language is part of the institution of literature, and the institution
of literature is one of the ways that culture organizes the world—or dresses up reality. For Barthes,
writing promotes the myth that literature has a moral obligation to demystify itself by pointing to
its own artifice, that is to say, to the arbitrariness of the sign. Consequently, good writing is writing
that contends with itself as literature, that is, writing that is self-reflexive. “Zero-degree writing”
points to its own surface, makes no pretense of depth, and is non-referential. For Barthes, the
writings of Gustave Flaubert (which are self-conscious of their fabrication), of Marcel Proust (which
are a postponement of literature, that is, an endless declaration to write), and of Alain Robbe-
Grillet (which aim at a neutrality of language) become exemplary. Writers such as Flaubert, Proust,
and Robbe-Grillet, in Barthes’ view, do not confuse nature with history. Rather, their writing simply
reveals how meaning is possible—albeit a meaning that is never completed or absolute. This early
rift with Sartre is at the source of Barthes’ subsequent realization that he also has a rift with Saussure.
Though Barthes at first believes that he is using a Saussurean model to analyze culture and
language, he soon discovers that his mythanalyses add a level of signification not found in his
mentor. Whereas the Saussurean model of signification is always already trapped in a signifier/
signified language scheme, Barthes comes to the conclusion that this is only one level of signification,
which he terms “primary signification” or “denotation.” Barthes’ analyses of culture and literature
reveal to him that semiological analyses of culture and language also reveal another level of
signification not taken up by Saussure’s semiology, namely, “secondary signification” or
“connotation.” At the level of connotation or secondary signification, Saussure’s sign, which is the
combination of a signifier and a signified, in turn becomes a signifier. When this (secondary) signifier
combines with a (secondary) signified, a secondary sign comes about.
For example, consider again the case of the linguistic sign dog wherein the signifier (sound
image) is the sequence of sounds “d-o-g,” and the signified (thought image) is the conceptual or
mental image dog. Whereas for Saussure, this is the only level of signification, for Barthes, it is one
of two levels of signification. As primary signification (or denotation), this level sets the stage for
secondary signification (or connotation) wherein the linguistic sign dog becomes a signifier in a
secondary sign relation with a different signified. This secondary signifier “d-o-g” can be, for
example, the one attributed to the Cynic philosophers wherein the signified is “the man with the
staff, the beggar’s pouch, the cloak, the man in sandals or bare feet, the man with the long beard,
the dirty man.”62 Thus, Barthes is able to provide an account of how the connotation dog comes to
be associated with the Cynics. And, of course, this secondary level of signification is subject to
further (and unlimited) levels of signification: connotations of connotation.
For Barthes, the level of secondary signification is where myth is produced. Moreover, this
secondary-order semiological system is also where ideology is produced. For Barthes, myth is
ideology as a body of ideas and practices which defend the status quo and actively promote the
interests of the dominant group. In the case of the Cynics, the secondary-order semiological system
of associating them with dogs is reflective of an ideology aimed at marginalizing their values against
those of the dominant group, which, in this case, was Greek and Roman society. The Cynics aimed
Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–
62
1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 128.
at undermining the status quo of Greek and Roman society and connoting them with dogs, reflective
of an ideology aimed at marginalizing their social and political vision.
In “Myth Today (1957),” the essay which he appends to his early mythanalyses in Mythologies,
Barthes comments that “myth is a type of speech,”63 and that its study “is but one fragment of this
vast science of signs which Saussure postulated some forty years ago under the name semiology”—
and “[s]emiology has not yet come into being.”64 These ideas would become the germ for his book,
Elements of Semiology (1964). Barthes’ semiological approach to myth differed not only from its
Greek and Roman counterparts, but also from that of his structuralist contemporary, Levi-Strauss
(2.4). For Barthes, exposing myths was a form of political action, and semiology was the tool to
accomplish this. Writing itself also promotes its own myths: chief among them is the myth of a
literature which can have social significance—the kind of view which we saw earlier promoted by
Tolstoy against the view of art for art’s sake and above by Sartre against modernist writing.
From the perspective of Barthes’ semiology, writing is non-referential activity. It is also a marginal
activity that he views as an exercise in negation tending toward silence. In terms of the progress of
writing, Barthes views it here as moving toward the time where literature is no longer necessary.
Writing aims to destroy itself, that is, to exist as a figure of its own problem. If there is truth in
literature, it does not come from denotation or connotation much less than from representing
reality. Rather, its truth lies in asking questions to which it is powerless to respond. Finally, the
dream of literature is a world exempt from meaning, and the novel should be considered as the
intentional murder of meaning. The question for Barthes thus becomes not what is the meaning of
the novel, but rather how is meaning even possible? That is, upon what conditions can we say that
there is meaning—albeit incomplete meaning?
In “The Death of the Author (1968),” Barthes brashly asserts that all writing is “the destruction of
every voice, every origin.”65 “Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our
subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the
body that writes.”66 “No doubt,” continues Barthes, “it has always been so: once a fact is recounted—
for intransitive purposes, and no longer to act directly upon reality, i.e., exclusive of any function
except that exercise of the symbol itself—this gap appears, the voice loses its origin, the author enters
into his own death, writing begins.”67 For Barthes, the announcement of the death of the author aims
to recall a time before the invention of the “author,” who he says is “a modern character, no doubt
produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, inflected by English empiricism, French
rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the
individual, or, as we say more nobly, of the ‘human person.’”68 Barthes also reminds us in his
provocation of the connection between the rise of capitalism and the birth of the author. “Hence,”
writes Barthes, “it is logical that in literary matters it should be positivism, crown and conclusion of
capitalist ideology, which has granted the greatest importance to the author’s ‘person.’”69
63
64
65
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1986), 49.
66
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 49.
67
68
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 49–50.
69
The death of the author must be understood in the context of the birth of the text. In some ways,
Barthes’ provocation was announcing a death that had already occurred over the past half-century
with the advent of the New Criticism—and a birth that was emerging in the contemporary depiction
of text. Oddly enough, with regard to authorship, there is some similarity between the New Critical
position and the view on authorship that was presented by Barthes in “The Death of the Author,”
even if their depictions of text differ radically.
For Barthes, the reader is a product of the text, not a consumer of it. In addition, the author is
not the source of meaning of a text. Rather, as Barthes demonstrates in S/Z (1970), the reader
supplies codes to lexias (reading units). These codes for Barthes range from the hermeneutic (or
code of enigmas, which gathers the semantic units which pertain to the formulation and solution of
a problem—the voice of truth), semic (or connotative code, which gathers all the features of textual
referents and builds their mental image—the voice of the person), and symbolic (which establishes
networks of relations among signifieds and links these networks to universal themes) to the
proairetic (or code of actions, which organizes the actions of characters into narrative sequences—
the voice of empirics), cultural (or referential code, which is invoked whenever the text invites the
reader to use their knowledge of the real world in the formation of meaning—the voice of science),
and, arguably, many others (there is some disagreement on this point).70 For some structuralists, like
Michel Foucault (9.1), codes are the sum total of a discourse, while for others, like Barthes, the
forms of the already given order themselves into the codes of the language. For Barthes, then, codes
are the forms imposed by language on reality that determine the perception of it, and the text of
art amounts to nothing more than a set of codes which control its production. All told, then, the
structuralist text can be said to be motivated by three elements: a) the sign; b) the codes that order
the signs into the already said of a culture; and c) the discourses to which sets of codes belong.
His prolegomenon on morality is The Pleasure of the Text (1973), where he effectively and
innovatively introduces hedonism into literary criticism and theory. Barthes does this by uniting
notions about textual generation with then current work in literary theory and psycholinguistics
with his own lifelong intuitions. In broad terms, he proposes three distinct kinds of pleasure: the
first is the pleasure and comfort that comes from Readerly textual fufillment, which he terms
“plaisir”; the second is the rapture and ecstasy that comes from Writerly textual unsettlement and
discomfort, which he terms “jouissance”; and the third is the textual pleasure that comes from
finding ecstatic moments in Readerly texts. Barthes’ distinction between “plaisir” and “jouissance,”
draws on the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan (4.2). However, the distinction between
Readerly (lisible) and Writerly (scriptible) texts is wholely his own: the Readerly text is easy to read,
predictable, transparent, un-self-conscious, and meets our expectations, whereas the Writerly text
must be composed as it is read and calls attention to the structuring activity of the reader. In The
Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes:
Text of pleasure [plaisir]: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text comes from
culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss
[jouissance]: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point
70
See Marie-Laure Ryan, “Narrative Codes,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars,
Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 599–600.
of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the
consistency of tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.71
But when compared to the passage that follows this passage, we see Barthes the textualist under the
intertext of Julia Kristeva (5.2), Jacques Derrida (5.1), and Lacan transforming into Barthes the
moralist under the intertext of hedonists spanning from Aristippus and Epictetus to the Marquis de
Sade and Arthur Schopenhauer. Or, more significantly, Barthes transforming his attention from the
concerns of literary theory and cultural criticism (which, for purposes of parallelism, might be
termed, art de textualité) to philosophy in its broadest and most ancient sense, namely, one
concerned with the art of living (art de vivre), the knowledge of how to enjoy life. Barthes continues:
Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure
[plaisir] and bliss [jouissance] is an anachronistic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily
participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under cover
of an art de vivre shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the
consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure [plaisir]) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss
[jouissance]). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.72
For Barthes, texts are structures of language in which authorial intention has no role in the meaning
of the text. Meaning not only is produced independently of the author, but also resists closure. The
reader interacts with the text to produce meaning that is many times a source of jouissance. Barthes
makes a sharp distinction between this type of entity, which he calls a text, and something he calls
a work. The latter is laden with authorial intent, finitely meaningful, and ultimately interpretable.
Whereas a text is an unstable entity that is produced by the reader, a work is a stable entity consumed
by the reader.73 It should be noted that Barthes restricts the domain of text to written entities only,
and treats spoken entities as the domain of discourse.
Semiology is not concerned with interpretation, but rather with analyzing texts. If interpretation
or understanding is the fundamental human activity or a basic fact of human existence in the
hermeneutics of Gadamer and Heidegger, then analysis is the fundamental activity of semiology.
For Barthes, the move from “work” to “text” is a passage from hermeneutics to semiology.
Semiology aims to leave aside the interpretation of objects. As Barthes says, the text “is not a
coexistence of meaning, but passage, traversal; hence, it depends not on an interpretation, however
liberal, but on an explosion, on dissemination.”74 While semiology in some way parallels
hermeneutics by emphasizing that a text cannot be known as it is or that meaning is never exhausted
by the author’s intentions, ultimately they are dissimilar theoretical enterprises.
As a structuralist, Barthes’ goal was to reconstitute the literary work in order to reveal its rules
of functioning, that is, the set of conventions that make meaning possible. He said, “Watch who
uses signifier and signified, synchrony and diachrony, and you will know whether the Structuralist
71
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14.
72
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 14.
73
Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (1971), in The Rustle of Language Rustle of Language, 56–64.
74
Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 59.
vision is constituted.”75 Against the New Criticism, which took for granted the fullness of meaning
in literary works, Barthes argued that language is empty—and that the author is dead. His
contributions are generally regarded as exemplary of the antihumanism of structuralism, though
arguably his turn to morality in the last stages of his career was also a turn back to early Greek
humanism in its hedonist, philosophical form.
2.4 CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS

Structuralism is often said to have originated with the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-
Strauss. It is also often said to mark the beginning of the end of the dominance of the New Criticism.
In Structural Anthropology (1958), Lévi-Strauss defines structure as follows:
First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made up of several elements,
none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements.
Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a series of transformations
resulting in a group of models of the same type.
Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or
more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications.
Finally, the model should be constituted so as to make immediately intelligible all the observed
facts.76
Whereas Saussure proposed the use of linguistics as the basis for the study of other sign systems,
Lévi-Strauss considered phonology the paradigm for the study of the sciences of man. Phonemes are
the perceptually distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a language. So,
in English, for example, the sounds p, b, d, and t in the words pat, pad, bat, and bad are phonemes.
Lévi-Strauss learned structural phonology from Jakobson, who in the 1950s worked out a
structural description of phonemes and phonological systems. In turn, Jakobson’s work on
phonemes incorporated both the binary oppositions of Saussure and the semiotics of Peirce. Lévi-
Strauss even attended a course taught by Jakobson at the New School for Social Research in New
York in 1941. Though his aim in taking the course was to improve his linguistics for his work on
the languages of central Brazil, Jakobson’s modifications of Saussure inspired him to draw an
analogy between kinship systems and language, both of which he viewed as forms of communication.
Moreover, in terms of social communication, for Lévi-Strauss, there are three basic modes: the
exchange of goods and service, the exchange of women, and the exchange of messages.77 In his
view, both kinship and economic systems share an analogous relationship with language.
In short, structural linguistics, particularly the “phonological revolution” of Jakobson, had an
enormous influence on the development of the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss (as well as on
structuralist narrative [2.5], in particular, the work of Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov).
75
Roland Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity” (1963), in Critical Essays (1964), trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1972), 214.
76
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1958), trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York:
Basic Books, 1963), 279–80.
77
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 296.
“Structural linguistics,” writes Lévi-Strauss, “will certainly play the same renovating role with
respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played in the physical sciences.”78
Lévi-Strauss regarded the principles of analysis of Saussurean linguistics to be the most highly
developed ones in the social sciences, and believed that they should be applied to all of the social
sciences including anthropology.
Lévi-Strauss’s four principles of structural analysis are as follows:
First, structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to study of
their unconscious infrastructure; second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking
instead as its basis of analysis the relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of
system—“Modern phonemics does not merely proclaim that phonemes are always part of a
system, it shows concrete phonemic systems and elucidates their structure”; finally, structural
linguistics aims at discovering general laws, either by induction “or . . . by logical deduction,
which would give them an absolute character.”79
The study of the relations between terms was of particular importance to Lévi-Strauss: “The error
of traditional anthropology, like that of traditional linguistics, was to consider the terms, and not
the relations between the terms.”80
Lévi-Strauss applies these principles of analysis drawn from linguistic structuralism to kinship patterns,
marriage rules, totemism, customs, rites, and other anthropological phenomena. Key to his thought is the
analogous relationship between language and culture. He finds these analogies in the religion, myth,
ritual, art, music, and cuisine of different societies. In terms of cuisine, he discovers systems of semantic
oppositions such as raw/cooked, sweet/sour, and so on, and derives from these differential structures
minimal culinary elements for which he proposes the term gusteme. Writes Lévi-Strauss,
Like language . . . the cuisine of a society may be analysed into constituent elements, which in
this case we might call “gustemes,” and which may be organized according to certain structures
of opposition and correlation. We might then distinguish English cooking from French cooking
by means of three oppositions: endogenous / exogenous (that is, national versus exotic ingredients);
central / peripheral (staple food versus its accompaniments); marked / not marked (that is, savory
or bland). We should then be able to construct a chart, with + and – signs corresponding to the
pertinent or non-pertinent character of each opposition in the system under consideration.81
ENGLISH FRENCH
CUISINE CUISINE
endogenous / exogenous + –
central / peripheral + –
marked / not marked – +
78
79
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 33. Both quotes in this passage are from Nikolai Troubetzkoy’s “La Phonologie
actuelle,” in Psychologie du language (Paris: Alcan, 1933), 243.
80
81
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 86, including the cuisine opposition chart.
In terms of kinship systems, he discovers another system of semantic oppositions that are analogous
to language.
Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning
only if they are integrated into systems. “Kinship systems,” like “phonemic systems,” are built by
the mind on the level of unconscious thought.82
Kinship systems express rules of prohibited marriage (for example, the incest taboo) and in some
cultures prescribe certain categories of relatives who should be married. In primitive societies, these
rules form a system of exchange, where women are exchanged by men. Thus, Lévi-Strauss interprets
kinship as a system of communication, a language, in which the women are the messages exchanged
between clans, lineages, or families.83
Within these systems, Lévi-Strauss identifies minimal units of kinship as the elementary structures
of a society.84 These structures are not the product of nature, but the result of culture, that is, they
represent a cultural symbolism. Writes Lévi-Strauss,
Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But what confers upon kinship
its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in
which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent
or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary
system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation.85
Thus, a kinship pattern is not only a system of communication with binary structures such as
father–son, brother–sister, and so on, but is also, like language, characterized by the feature of
arbitrariness.
Lévi-Strauss also developed a structural method for the analysis of myths. His key contribution,
“The Structural Study of Myth (1955),”86 appeared a few years before Barthes’ “Myth Today”
(1957), and is quite different from the latter’s approach. For Lévi-Strauss, myths are messages
based on a code with structures similar to those of language.87 Therefore, Lévi-Strauss applies the
methods of linguistic structuralism to the analysis of myth. These methods include segmentation,
classification, and the identification of binary oppositions. In his study of the Oedipus myth, Lévi-
Strauss breaks down the text into basic units consisting of summarizing sentences. These express a
relation in the form of a subject–predicate structure. Here are the summarizing sentences of the
Oedipus myth as a syntagmatic chain:88
82
83
84
85
86
Lévi-Strauss’s article first appeared in the Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 428–44, and was republished as Chapter
11 of his Structural Anthropology (1958), 206–31.
87
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 206–31.
88
i. Cadmos seeks his sister Europa, ravished by Zeus.

ii. Cadmos kills the dragon.
iii. The Spartoi kill one another.
iv. Oedipus kills his father, Laios.
v. Oedipus kills the Sphinx.
vi. Oedipus marries his mother, Jocasta
vii. Eteocles kills his brother, Polynices
viii. Antigone buries her brother, Polynices, despite prohibition.
Lévi-Strauss also includes three peculiar proper names:
ix. Labdacos (Laios’ father) = lame (?)
x. Laios (Oedipus’ father) = left-sided (?)
xi. Oedipus = swollen-foot (?)
He now asks us to treat the myth “as an orchestra score would be if it were unwittingly considered
as a unilinear series.”89 If we do so, the best arrangement, “for the sake of argument . . . (although
it might certainly be improved with the help of a specialist in Greek mythology),” says Lévi-Strauss,
is the following:
i.
ii.
iii.
ix.
iv. x.
v.
xi.
vi.
vii.
viii.
“Bundles” of such relations within a myth form the “gross constituent units” of myth analysis,
which he calls mythemes.90 These mythemes are then arranged on a syntagmatic and paradigmatic
axis. The syntagmatic axis follows the narrative sequence of mythical events shown in the textual
combination of the mythemes. The paradigmatic axis represents the semantic equivalences of the
textual units in the form of columns. It should be noted that unlike Vladimir Propp, who focused
on syntagmatic sequences (2.5), Lévi-Strauss’s method adds a significant paradigmatic dimension.
89
90
The Oedipus myth, which contains four mythemes (1, 2, 3, 4) occurring in the textual sequence
1, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 1, 2, 1, is then represented as follows by Lévi-Strauss:
1
3
2
4
2 4
3
4
1
2
1
With this form of analysis, a semantic reduction of the text from eleven to four content units
becomes possible. With such procedures of textual reduction, Lévi-Strauss arrives at specific deep
structures in which he discovers a hidden logic of myth.
The first column (the 1s) combines the three segments concerning a ritual offense of the nature
of incest, that is, “an overrating of blood relations.”91 The second column (the 2s) “expresses the
same thing, but inverted: underrating of blood relations.”92 The third column and fourth column
concern autochthones, that is, mortals who have sprung from the soil, rocks and trees. Thus, the
third column (the 3s) refers to “monsters being slain . . . . denial of the autochthonous origin of
mankind.”93 And the fourth column (the 4s), are the men who are to some extent monsters, what
he calls, “the persistence of the autochthonous origin of man.”94 Pulling all of this together, Lévi-
Strauss summarizes the meaning of the Oedipus myth based on his structural analysis as follows:
The myth has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the belief that mankind is
autochthonous (see, for instance, Pausanias, VIII, xxix, 4: plants provide a model for humans), to
find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually
born from the union of man and woman. Although the problem obviously cannot be solved, the
Oedipus myth provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem—born from one or
born from two?—to the derivative problem: born from different or born from same? By a correlation
of this type, the overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt
to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it. Although experience contradicts
theory, social life validates cosmology by its similarity of structure. Hence cosmology is true.95
91
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 215; original emphasis.
92
93
94
95
For Lévi-Strauss, every myth, not just the Oedipus myth, is “a kind of logical tool” which contains
a kernel of four mythemes related by opposition and equivalence. He expresses this universal
feature of myth with a formula:96
Fx(a) : Fy(b) ⯝ Fx(b) : Fa – 1(y)
In this formula, x and y are functions representing actions, and a and b refer to two terms representing
agents. The formula states that term a is replaced by its opposite a – 1 and that an inversion occurs
between the function value y and the term value a. In the Oedipus myth, this means that the killing
(Fx) done by the Sphinx (a) is related to the rescue of the men (Fy) by Oedipus (b), as the murder (Fx)
committed by Oedipus (b) is related to the final rescue of the men (y) by the destruction of the
Sphinx (a – 1). Fx : Fy is the conflict between good and evil. It is resolved by the hero committing a
negative act, the destruction of the villain. This nevertheless results in the inverse, namely, a victory.
In this way, “mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their
resolution.”97 But, states Lévi-Strauss, this can be impossible if the contradiction is real:
[T]he purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an
impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number
of slates will be generated, each one slightly different from the others. Thus, myth grows spiral-
wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted. Its growth is a continuous
process, whereas its structure remains discontinuous. If this is the case, we should assume that it
closely corresponds, in the realm of the spoken word, to a crystal in the realm of physical matter.
This analogy may help us to better understand the relationship of myth to both langue on the
one hand and parole on the other. Myth is an intermediary entity between a statistical aggregate
of molecules and the molecular structure itself.98
Thus, by allowing us to eliminate contradictions, myth makes the world more livable for humans.
In sum, Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis strives to reveal the structural pattern that gives deep
meaning not only to the myths of different societies but also their religion, ritual, art, music, and
cuisine. Myth, religion, ritual, art, music, and cuisine, at this deep level of meaning, is like a
collective dream that is hidden and can only be revealed through structural analysis. But revealing
the phonemic structure of these things does something further: it reveals the structure of the human
mind. For Lévi-Strauss, the analysis he is undertaking reveals the structure that governs the very
way human beings shape artifacts, institutions, and knowledge. He strives to determine the
principles of thought formation that are universally valid for all human minds. The formula stated
above represents a universal logic concerning myth that is shared by all humanity, and one that can
only be revealed by the structural study of myth.
96
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 228. Note: the character ⯝ means “asymptotically equal to.” It is different from
both “almost equal to” (≈) and “approximately equal to” (⬵).
97
98
2.5 NARRATOLOGY
Narratology, or structuralist narrative, is the structural study of narrative. It consists of general
statements about the structure of story, plot, and the genres of narrative. Narratology studies what
all narratives have in common and how narratives differ. It aims to describe the general rules used
in the production and processing of narratives.
Narrative itself can be defined as “an entity taken to constitute the representation of at least two
related asynchronous events (or one state of affairs and one event) that do not presuppose or imply
each other.”99 Barthes, for example, termed these events “functional units,” and made a distinction
between two types of narrative events in his structural narratology: Cardinal Functions (or Kernels)—
“real hinge-points of the narrative,” which are logically necessary to the causal structure of the plot;
and Functional Catalyzers (or Satellites)—“merely ‘fill in’ the narrative space separating the hinge
functions,” which, while they do not move the plot forward, add vividness to the narrative.100
“Narrative,” writes Barthes, “is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves
distributed amongst different substances [including] articulated language, spoken and written, fixed
or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances.”101 Moreover, for
Barthes, “narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama,
comedy, mime, painting . . ., stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, [and] conversation.”102
As a field of structuralist study, its early representatives (1960 to 1980) include Claude Bremond,
Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, Tzvetan Todorov, and, of course, Barthes, who
contributed a theory of narrative codes and events. The field also includes among its most influential
later representatives Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman, and Gerald Prince. Its immediate precursors,
however, include the Russian Formalists, particularly the work on plot by Shklovsky and Propp,
and Saussurean linguistics.
Nevertheless, the study of narratology can be traced back to Aristotle’s comments in the Poetics on
two different ways of representing the same object: mimesis (μίμησις), which is translated as “imitation,”
is the showing of the object by means of characters; and diegesis (διήγησις), which is translated as
“narration,” is the telling of the object by a narrator. For Aristotle, when the object is shown (mimesis),
the text is dramatic, whereas when it is told (diegesis), the text is narrative. Nevertheless, diegesis can
embed mimetic elements such when the narrator lets characters tell the story.103
Aristotle’s comments fueled a variety of theories of the novel wherein mimesis came to be
favored over diegesis. This was most explicit in the realism of Gustave Flaubert, where he attempted
to reproduce in the novel a “slice of life” through a detached and objective point of view which
utilized concrete detail, emotional restraint, and economy of expression; and the naturalism of
Émile Zola, where he attempted to go beyond the photographic realism of his friend Flaubert, by
turning the novel into a scientific experiment, where mechanistic and materialistic principles
determined events, not the novelist. To create the appearance of truth, Flaubert’s narrator was
invisible (giving way to his characters), whereas Zola’s was scientifically objective (giving way to
99
Gerald Prince, “Narrative and Narratology,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 43.
100
Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966), in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text,
trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 93.
101
Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” 79.
102
Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” 79.
103
Aristotle, Poetics, 1448a; Chap. 3, ll. 19–23.
mechanism and materialism). Henry James’s “free indirect discourse,” wherein the thoughts of the
characters were said to be presented to be given without the mediation of a narrator, offered yet
another technique to limit the role of the narrator (and diegesis) and maximize the opportunities
for faithful representation and credible imitation (mimesis). The focus on mimesis, diegesis, and the
role of the narrator in fiction led to the formation of the Chicago School of literary criticism, where
Wayne Booth systematized the study of narrative technique grounded in Aristotelian principles in
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).
But the long history of commentary on narrative dating back to the Greeks and extending through
the Chicago School is significantly different from the approach to narratology grounded in the principles
of Saussurean linguistics and Russian Formalism. Here the work of Shklovsky and Propp stand out, both
of whom did pioneering work on plot formation. Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization is relevant
here because the variety of devices he identified to achieve this aesthetic effect—embedding, emplotment
of puns and riddles, framing, juxtaposition, parallelism, repetition, and so on—amount to the basic
elements of narrative technique. While Shklovsky said that the laws of plot formation are “still unknown
to us,”104 he provided a storehouse of narrative techniques for structural narratologists to explore.
Propp’s contribution to the study of plot was the identification of thirty-one different functions
that can be present in folktales. In Morphology of the Folktale (1928), he defined function as “an
act of character defined from the point of view of the significance for the course of the action.”105
“Functions of characters,” writes Propp, “serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent
of how and by whom they are fulfilled.”106 The functions are as follows: (1) Absentation—one of
the members of a family absents himself from home; (2) Interdiction—an interdiction is addressed
to the hero; (3) Violation—the interdiction is violated; (4) Reconnaissance—the villain makes an
attempt at reconnaissance; (5) Delivery—the villain receives information about his victim; (6)
Trickery—the villain attempts to deceive his victim; (7) Complicity—the victim submits to deception;
(8) Villainy—the villain causes harm to a member of a family; (8a): Lack—one member of a family
lacks something); (9) Mediation—misfortune or lack is made known; (10) Beginning Counteraction—
the seeker agrees to counteraction; (11) Departure—the hero leaves home; (12) First Function of
the Donor—the hero is tested which prepares the way for his receiving a magical agent or a helper;
(13) The Hero’s Reaction—the hero reacts to the actions of the future donor; (14) Provision or
Receipt of a Magical Agent—the hero acquires the use of a magical agent; (15) Spatial Transference,
Guidance—the hero is transferred to the whereabouts of an object of search; (16) Struggle—the
hero and the villain join in direct combat; (17) Branding, Marking—the hero is branded; (18)
Victory—the villain is defeated; (19) Restoration/Lack Liquidated—the initial misfortune or lack is
liquidated; (20) Return—the hero returns; (21) Pursuit, Chase—the hero is pursued; (22) Rescue—
rescue of the hero from pursuit; (23) Unrecognized Arrival—the hero, unrecognized, arrives home
or in another country; (24) Unfounded Claims—a false hero presents unfounded claims; (25)
Difficult Task—a difficult task is proposed to the hero; (26) Solution—the task is resolved; (27)
Recognition—the hero is recognized; (28) Exposure—the false hero or villain is exposed; (29)
Transfiguration—the hero is given a new appearance; (30) Punishment—the villain is punished; and
104
Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (1925), trans. Benjamin Scher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990), 18.
105
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928), 2nd revised edition, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1968), 21.
106
Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 21.
(31) Wedding—the hero is married and ascends the throne.107 While all or some of these may
appear in any one folktale, the functions always appear in the same order. Moreover, these functions
are fulfilled by seven different “spheres of action”: villain, donor, helper, princess (“sought-for
person”), dispatcher, hero, and false hero.108 Propp argues that stories are character driven, and that
plots stem from the actions and decisions of the characters, and how they function in the story.
Greimas, who drew on both Saussure and Propp developed what he called structural semantics.
His aim in Structural Semantics (1966) was to produce a universal grammar of language through a
semantic analysis of sentence structure. Universal grammar is the grammar that underlies all
languages and is the common basis of experience. It denies the possibility that particular languages
have unique effects on our experience. Moreover, like Propp, Greimas’s aim was not to determine
the meaning of texts, but rather to understand how meaning is produced in texts. Structural
semantics (sometimes also called semiotic reduction) regards the content of a text as a superficial
expression of a deeper relation between actants and functions, which are two interrelated structures.
Greimas’s actants are a modification of Propp’s “spheres of action.” Actants are defined as beings
or things that participate in processes in any form whatsoever. They comprise three sets of binary
opposition: subject–object, sender–receiver, and helper–opponent. From these three sets of binary
opposition, all of the individual actors and roles of a story can be derived: if the actants are given
social and cultural qualities, they become roles; if the actants are provided individuating qualities,
they become actors (or, alternately, characters). Moreover, these three basic pairs describe the three
basic patterns that recur in all narrative: desire, search, or aim (subject–object); communication
(sender–receiver); and auxiliary support or hindrance (helper–opponent). For Greimas, there are
three types of fundamental narrative sequences (or syntagms): disjunctional, that is, syntagms
involving various kinds of movements and displacements, departures, and returns; contractural,
that is, syntagyms pertaining to establishing or breaking a contract; and performative, that is
syntagyms relating to tests and struggles. These three sequences are groupings for twenty narrative
functions identified by Greimas—a significant reduction from Propp’s thirty-one functions. “The
result,” writes Greimas, “is that if the actors can be established within a tale-occurrence, the actants,
which are classifications of the actors, can be established only from the corpus of all the tales: an
articulation of actors constitutes a particular tale; an articulation of actants constitutes a genre.”109
This method allows Greimas to treat a wide range of texts as narrative, and to show that content is
independent of narrative. A particular actant can be fulfilled by a wide range of content.
Todorov, who served as Greimas’s research assistant and wrote his doctoral dissertation under
the direction of Barthes, was, like them, a structuralist and a semiotician. Like Greimas, Todorov’s
narrative grammar takes its cue from and develops on the work of Propp. The starting point for
Todorov in Grammaire du Décaméron (1969) is the grammar of language, which is the linguistic
capacity of speakers. The grammar of language includes morphology, semantics, phonology, syntax,
and the lexicon of the language. Whereas Propp focuses on morphology and Greimas on semantics,
Todorov will direct his attention to syntax, where his aim, like that of Greimas, will be a universal
107
Bengt Holbek, Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a European Perspective (Helsinki: Suomalainen
Tiedeakatemia, 1987), 335.
108
Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 79–80.
109
A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966), trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan
Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 200.
grammar of narrative. In Todorov’s narrative grammar, derived from an analysis of the short stories
in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1348–53), narrative elements function as syntactic
categories: characters are assimilated to nouns; qualities and attributes of characters are assimilated
to adjectives; and the actions of characters are assimilated to verbs. Characters are defined by their
relationship to an adjective or a verb, wherein narrative adjectives are predicates which describe
states of equilibrium or disequilibrium, and narrative verbs are such that all actions are reduced to
three: to punish, to transgress, and to disguise. Each of these syntactical elements (nouns, adjectives,
verbs) is combined into propositions, which are the basic elements of syntax. Propositions represent
irreducible actions and are the fundamental units of narrative. There are two types of propositions:
indicative, that is, actions which happened, which are associated with the real; and “all the other
moods,” that is, actions which have not happened or been performed, which are associated with
the unreal. These other moods are further subdivided into moods of will (renunciation, optative)
and moods of hypothesis (condition, predictive). Sequences (viz., paragraphs) are collections of
propositions (viz., sentences) and are a syntactic unit that is superior to the proposition. There are
three types of sequences: logical, that is, cause and effect, which are further subdivided into
alternative (exclusion), optional (disjunction), and obligatory (conjunction); temporal, that is,
succession in time; and spatial, that is, parallelism with multiple divisions. For Todorov, a story (or
récit) must have at least one sequence of propositions, and universal grammar aims to determine the
rules for the formation of propositions and sequences. When all of this narrative grammar is applied
to Boccaccio’s The Decameron, it yields two types of story (or récit): transgression from equilibrium
to disequilibrium to equilibrium provoked by a verb (actions of a character); and transgression
from disequilibrium to equilibrium to disequilibrium provoked by an adjective (qualities of a
character).
Of all of the early figures noted above, it is the work of Genette that has set the terms for the
next generation of narratologists. His Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972) is a systematic
theory of narrative, where he aims to identify the basic elements and techniques of narrative. One
of his most basic distinctions is between story (histoire, the set of narrated events), narrative (récit,
the narrative text itself), and narrating (narration, the act of narrative énonciation which produces
the text). Or, more fully,
I propose, without insisting on the obvious reasons for my choice of terms, to use the word story
for the signified or narrative content (even if this content turns out, in a given case, to be low in
dramatic intensity or fullness of incident), to use the word narrative for the signifier, statement,
discourse or narrative text itself, and to use the word narrating for the producing narrative
action, and by extension, the whole of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes
place.110
Given these three basic concepts, Genette then surveys the relationships among them. The first area
concerns tense, which deals with the temporal relations between story and narrative. Tense is then
subdivided into three subcategories: order, which concerns the relations between the temporal
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972), trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
110
Press, 1980), 27.

events in the story and their arrangement in the narrative; duration, which concerns the pace or
speed of the narrative events; and frequency, which concerns the relationship between the number
of times an event takes place in the story and the number of times this event is narrated in the text.
The second area concerns mood, or the types of discourse used by the narrator to recount the story,
and the forms and degrees of narrative representation. Here Genette makes a distinction between
narrative perspective, that is, who “sees” the story, and narrative voice, who recounts the story. The
third and final area is voice, which refers to the relationships between narrative and narrating. Each
of these areas includes many additional distinctions and associated terminology. Moreover, Genette
also coins new terminology for some old concepts. For example, instead of using the terms flashback
and flash-forward, Genette respectively terms them analepsis and prolepsis. Also, telling and scene
are respectively termed diegesis and mimesis by Genette. In short, the extensive terminology used
by Genette has become the common language of contemporary narratology.
Among the contemporary alternatives to structuralist narratology are what might generally be
termed postclassical narratology.111 These contemporary forms of narratology do not necessarily
negate the contributions of structuralist narratology—unless, of course, they are grounded in
poststructuralism like the work of Jacques Derrida (5.1), whose “grammatology” is contrary to the
aim of a universal grammar of narrative. Rather, postclassical narratology expands and diversifies
this structuralist field by bringing more than just linguistics to bear on the study of narrative. These
contemporary developments in narratology are often the result of different areas of literary and
cultural theory intersecting with the findings of structural narratology. For example, the cognitive
narratology of David Herman’s edited volume, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003)
brings cognitive criticism (12.4) into the study of narrative; the affective narratology of Patrick
Colm Hogan’s Affective Narratology (2011) brings affect studies (13.0) into the study of narratology;
the feminist narratology of Ruth Page’s Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology
(2006) brings feminist theory (6.0) into the study of narrative; and the rhetorical narratology of
James Phelan’s Narrative as Rhetoric (1996) brings rhetoric into the study of narrative. Moreover,
work on narratology has intersected with modal logic theory in Thomas Pavel’s Fictional Worlds
(1986); with artificial intelligence and possible world theory in Marie-Laure Ryan’s Possible Worlds,
Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991); with hermeneutics and phenomenology in Paul
Ricoeur’s three-volume Time and Narrative (1984–8); and with history in Hayden White’s The
Content of the Form (1987). In sum, most of the major areas of twentieth-century literary and
cultural theory, from Marxism (3.0) and psychoanalytic theory (4.0) to poststructuralism (5.0) and
postcolonial theory (10.1), have to varying degrees utilized the work of structuralist narrative. Also,
in terms of more recent directions in literary and cultural theory, narrative theory has made
significant contributions, as discussed below, to game studies (14.4).
111
This term was coined by David Herman in “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology,”
PMLA 112 (1997): 1046–59, and its usage is supported by Gerald Prince (“Narrative and Narratology,” 46).
72
CHAPTER THREE
Marxism
3.0 INTRODUCTION
As a revolutionary social movement and functional political discourse inspired by the work of Karl
Marx, the history of Marxism dates back to the founding of the International Workingmen’s
Association in 1864. This international organization, often called the First International, strove to
unite a variety of communist, socialist, and anarchist groups and trade unions that were based on
class struggle. Major mileposts in the history of Marxism are the successful revolutions in Russia
(1917), Korea (1948), China (1949), and Cuba (1959), as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
While 1989 did not bring about the end of Marxism, it was for some the last major milepost in its
social and political history.
Marxism can be associated with a number of general ideas. They are as follows:
(1) Dialectical Materialism—the basic notion that concrete reality moves through a dialectical
process that utilizes a thesis–antithesis–synthesis pattern wherein as oppositions are
overcome, new qualities are introduced. It consists of three laws: The Law of the
Transformation of Quantity into Quality, wherein slow changes in quantity result in
revolutionary changes in quality; The Law of the Unity of Opposites, wherein the unity of
concrete reality consists in a unity of oppositions; and The Law of the Negation of Negation,
wherein as oppositions negate each other, they are in turn negated by a higher level of
historical development that preserves aspects of both of the negated oppositions.
(2) From Primitive Communism to Class Struggle—whereas society was originally in a condition
of primitive communal unity, by moving through a series of oppositions, it has reached its
climax in a condition wherein there is a class struggle between the bourgeoisie, that is, the
capitalists who own the means of production, and the proletariat, that is, the workers, who
do not own the means of production.
(3) The End of Capitalism—the process of dialectic ends when the proletariat triumph over the
bourgeoisie. This triumph marks the end of capitalism and the end of dialectic because
society will be rid of its internal oppositions or contradictions when it is rid of capitalism.
(4) Revolution is a Law of History—it is a law of history that at a certain stage of the struggle
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that is, at a certain stage of industrial society,
there will be an international revolution.
(5) Dictatorship of the Proletariat—whereas this process is one that results in utopia, that is, an
age of harmony, there must be an intervening stage wherein the proletariat rule and through
a process of re-education, eliminate all vestiges of capitalist ideology from society.
73
(6) End of the State—as this process develops, the state, as an organized entity that functions
through coercion, will become gradually less important and eventually disappear into a
communal situation similar to the originary condition of society.
(7) Dominance of the Mode of Production—in societies where there is high degree of alienation,
literature and culture is controlled by the mode of production. Therefore, when there is a
change in the mode of production, there is a resultant change in the literature and culture of
society—which is to say, literature and culture can only be understood in economic terms.
While these themes are typical of Marxism, neither Marx nor his close friend and lifelong
collaborator, Friedrich Engels, nor any of their followers, espoused all of these ideas. Still, most of
them can be associated in one way or another with the writings of Marx and Engels. However, the
notion of dialectical materialism is clearly the contribution of Engels, not Marx.
Marxist literary and cultural theory is founded upon the view that literature and culture must be
understood in economic and social terms. While these terms are established in general accordance
with Marxist principles, there are no general principles of Marxist literary and cultural theory.
Much Marxist literary and cultural theory turns on one’s approach to the relationship between the
economic base of society, that is, the relations of production (class relations of those engaged in
production) and the forces of production (raw materials, tools, technology, workers), and the
superstructure of society, that is, its legal, political, educational, and cultural institutions and
practices. This superstructure generates particular forms of social consciousness, and it is from
within this context that literature is taken up by Marxist literary and cultural theorists.
As a theory of economic determinism, the superstructure of society is said to express or legitimate
the base, whereas the base of society conditions or determines the superstructure. This position,
called vulgar Marxism, reduces literature and culture to the economic conditions of society. In
short, vulgar Marxism amounts to a reflection theory of literature and culture, that is, the position
that the literature and culture of a society are reflections of its economic base. A less deterministic
version of the relationship between base and superstructure with respect to literature and culture is
limit Marxism, which says that economic conditions tell us what kind of literature and culture is
likely as well as what is unlikely.
Georg Lukács believed that literature could be read in accordance with the patterns and forces
of society espoused by Marx. Like Marx and Engels, who said in the Manifesto of the Communist
Party (1848), “All that is solid melts into air,”1 Lukács believed that contrary to our ordinary ways
of thinking, institutions and everyday objects are less solid than we think because they are embedded
in the historical forces that produced them. For Lukács, literature must reflect these underlying
forces. It does this by reflecting reality through typical characters, by which he means, characters
that reflect the inescapable conflicts between historical forces that reach a decisive point of intensity
and clarity. Here Lukács’s position on literature echoes Aristotle’s position on imitation (mimesis),
namely, that art does not imitate particular characters, emotions, or actions, but rather imitates
universal ones.
Moreover, for Lukács, modern literature was bad because the simple flow of ideas is not enough.
Great literature records our conscious response to our historical situation. For Lukács, history is
1
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), intro. Tariq Ali (London: Verso, 2016), 10.
MARXISM 75
not a meaningless play of forces, but leads to a classless society—and great literature shows this.
Moreover, the greatest literature does not merely reproduce the dominant ideology, but rather
incorporates in its form a critique of these ideologies. Rather than rejecting nineteenth-century
realism and naturalism like, for example, Oscar Wilde, Lukács favors a realism that reveals the
oppositions or contradictions of bourgeois society. Critical realism achieves this, argues Lukács,
through the use of typical characters, rather than untypical ones.
Whereas Lukács’s realism and anti-modernism points to one possible direction for Marxist
literary and cultural theory, critics of his position, who favor modernism in the arts and literature,
such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht, point to another direction. Brecht’s
epic theater used alienating or distancing effects to push his audiences to think objectively about
both his plays and social reality. Rather than present typical characters (à la Lukács) with which the
audience could empathize, Brecht wanted his audience to avoid this and instead to reflect on the
social realities presented on the stage. Epic theater avoided the illusions of realism and often
addressed the audience directly. Benjamin too believed that a conventional literary form like realism
did not have the potential to be an effective critique against the dominant ideology, as audiences
would be lulled into complacency by it. Rather, revolutionary art for Benjamin would break with
conventional form in order to produce a more effective form of ideological critique. He also
believed, contrary to Adorno, that technology could aide in the politicization of mass culture, and
thus provide it with the potential to be used as a tool for political ends.
Mikhail Bakhtin also did not regard literature as a direct reflection of social forces, but rather
focused on the ways in which language was related to ideology. His work explored the ways
language can disrupt authority and allow alternative voices to be heard. His concept of heteroglossia
was central here as it showed how multiple voices can coexist in the literature and the ways in
which this contributes to class struggle. Whereas the ruling class aims to narrow the meanings of
words or discourse, the multi-accentuality identified by Bakhtin allows for class interests to wage
battles within language for control over meaning. His work is closely associated with that of Pavel
Medvedev and Valentin Vološinov to the point where some work with their names on it, such as
Vološinov’s Freudianism (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), and
Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), are often said to have been written
by Bakhtin in an effort to avoid Stalinist censorship.
Whereas Bakhtin’s thought has its roots in Russian Formalism, Louis Althusser’s is grounded in
structuralism and psychoanalytic theory (4.0). His concept of ideology argues that we are all
“subjects” of ideology that operates through interpellation, that is, by summoning us to take our
places in the social structure. State apparatuses are the means through which interpellation takes
place. The Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) comprise the religious, educational, family, media,
legal, political communication, and cultural apparatuses, and the Repressive State Apparatuses
(RSA) comprise the government, the administration, the army, the police, the courts, and the
prisons. For Althusser, literature is not simply a form of ideology. Rather, it “makes us see . . . the
ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which
it alludes.”2
2
Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971), trans. Ben
Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 152.
One of the fault lines in Marxism is its indebtedness to the philosophy of Hegel, particularly as
it is transmitted through the notion of dialectical materialism. There are those like Althusser who
argue that Marx’s real contribution is breaking from Hegel, whereas others like Fredric Jameson
fully embrace a Marxism that explores “the great themes of Hegel’s philosophy—the relationship
of part to whole, the opposition between concrete and abstract, the concept of totality, the dialectic
of appearance and essence, the interaction between subject and object.”3 For Jameson, Marxism
must utilize Hegel’s dialectic of thesis–antithesis–synthesis because “in the post-industrial world of
monopoly capitalism” it is “the only kind of Marxism which has any purchase on the situation.”4
With Jameson, the Marxist work of Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin as well as Sartre, Herbert
Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch is explored as dialectical theories of literature—and utilized by him to
establish his own unique form of Marxist literary and cultural theory.
In short, the impact of Marxism on the literary and cultural theory of the twentieth century has
been considerable, as it offered one of the major pathways to incorporating social, political, and
economic concerns into the study of literature and culture. Moreover, as we shall see in later
chapters, some of the general ideas of Marxism have been taken up either directly or indirectly in
more recent literary and cultural theory. Still, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked a turning
point in Marxist literary and cultural theory in the same way that—as we will see later—the events
of the international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” at Johns
Hopkins University in 1966 marked a turning point in structuralist literary and cultural theory
(5.0). Whereas the later change came to be called poststructuralism, the former might likewise be
termed post-1989 Marxism.
3.1 KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Marx and Engels argue that the history of society is the history of class struggles. In each historical
period classes are formed as the result of the prevailing economic conditions, and when one looks
back over the course of history, one sees much variation in class formation. Over the course of
history, there are no fixed, ahistorical classes, rather “we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians,
slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in
almost all of these classes . . . subordinate gradations.”5 Moreover, these subordinate gradations are
based on the prevailing economic conditions. For Marx and Engels, economics determines just
about everything in the society, including the nature of its legal, religious, philosophical, and artistic
institutions: to understand each of these one must study the economic structures of which they are
the products.
In modern times, two classes have been produced by the Industrial Revolution: the bourgeoisie—
who are the capitalists, those who own the means of production such as the factories; and the
proletariat—who are the workers, those who are employed as wage-laborers by the bourgeoisie,
and who do not own the means of production. Within a capitalist economic system, the proletariat
3
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), xix.
4
Jameson, Marxism and Form, xix.
5
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 4.
MARXISM 77
are the subjects of increasing exploitation by the bourgeoisie. In the Manifesto of the Communist
Party (1848), Marx and Engels describe the proletariat as “a commodity like every other article of
commerce, [who] are consequently exposed to the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations
of the market.”6 “Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and of the bourgeois state,” write
Marx and Engels, “they are [also] daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker,
and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.”7 These conditions push the
proletariat into a struggle with the bourgeoisie, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the entire
capitalist system. Marx and Engels view the proletariat as a “revolutionary class.”8 Whereas “other
classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and
essential product.”9 The aim of the communists is the “formation of the proletariat into a class,
overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”10
Nevertheless, Marx and Engels are quite clear that the overthrow of capitalism will come about
both through the revolutionary actions of the proletariat and through the economic progress of
capitalism itself, which contains the seeds of its own destruction. The success of capitalism leads,
for example, to overproduction, which in turn brings about its ruin. The communist’s push to
organize the proletariat is aimed at bringing about a faster demise of capitalism, and is not the
primary cause of capitalism’s downfall and demise. “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists
are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that
would-be universal reformer,”11 write Marx and Engels. “In short,” they conclude, “the Communists
everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing [capitalist] social and
political order of things.”12 According to Marx and Engels, capitalism as an economic system will
fail—it is just a matter of time. The role of the communists is to hasten capitalism’s demise, and to
bring about a system of political power controlled by the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie. Such a
system will, among other things, abolish private property and inheritance, and centralize banking,
communication, and transportation. Under communism, the means of production will be controlled
by the state.
The basic notion that concrete reality moves through a dialectical process that utilizes a thesis–
antithesis–synthesis pattern described earlier as dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Marxism.
It is often contrasted with historical materialism, which is described as the science of Marxism.
Historical materialism, or the materialist conception of history, is the social-scientific core of
Marxism. In the German Ideology (1845–6), Marx and Engels work to distinguish it from the
materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach and the idealism of Hegel. Unlike, for example, the philosophical
speculation of Feuerbach and Hegel, Marx and Engels ground their science in material premises:
In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here one ascends
from earth to heaven. In other words, to arrive at man in the flesh, one does not set out from
6
7
8
9
10
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 31–2.
11
12
what men say, imagine, or conceive, nor from man as he is described, thought about, imagined,
or conceived. Rather one sets out from real, active men and their actual life-processes and
demonstrates the development of ideological reflexes and echoes of that process. The phantoms
formed in the human brain, too, are necessary sublimations of man’s material life-process which
is empirically verifiable and connected with material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics,
and all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer seem
independent. They have no history or development. Rather, men who develop their material
production and their material relationships alter their thinking and the products of their thinking
along with their real existence. Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines
consciousness.13
By taking as their starting point “man’s material life-process which is empirically verifiable and
connected with material premises,” Marx and Engels are able to demonstrate that all social
institutions and practices, including legal, political, educational, and cultural ones, must be
understood in terms of prevailing material conditions. This institutional superstructure is the level
of consciousness or ideology, which in turn is a reflection of the material base of society. These are
the foundations of a different kind of philosophy, a science aimed at changing the world, for, as
Marx famously puts it in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), “The philosophers have only interpreted
the world in various ways; the point is, to change it.”14
The base of society includes the relations of production and the forces of production. A
contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production is the basis for
history existing as a succession of modes of production. This contradiction leads to the collapse of
one mode of production and the succession of another mode. The main modes of production
identified by Marx and Engels are primitive communism (hunter/gatherer society), slave (the
ancient mode, master/slave society), feudal (lord/peasant), and capitalist (bourgeois/proletariat).
The relations of production are the economic ownership of the forces of production, and the forces
of production include the means of production and the labor power. These production forces
comprise a wide area that includes changes in labor processes; education of the proletariat; the
development of machinery, technology, and raw materials, and so on. In his “Preface” to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx summarizes his guiding principle:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are
independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life . . .
The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole
immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish
13
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845–6), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 111–12.
14
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 101.
MARXISM 79
between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be
determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or
philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out.15
Thus, for Marx and Engels, the intellectual life of society, including its literature and culture, is
located in the superstructure of society with all of its other ideological materials or forms.
Marx and Engels contend that ideology grows out of and conceals economic interests. It consists
of the ideas and beliefs of the ruling class. In The German Ideology, they write,
In every epoch the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, that is, the class that is the ruling
material power of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual power. The class having the
means of material production has also control over the means of intellectual production, so that
it also controls, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of intellectual
production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material
relationships grasped as ideas, hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one
and therefore the ideas of its domination.16
Moreover, the ruling class represents its ideology as the common interest of society:
Each new class which displaces the one previously dominant is forced, simply to carry out its
aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society, that is, ideally
expressed. It has to give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational,
universally valid ones.17
Finally, ideology conceals the contradictory character of economic relations. In Capital, Volume
Three (1894), Marx describes this as follows:
The finished configuration of economic relations, as these are visible on the surface, in their
actual existence, and therefore also in the notions with which the bearers and agents of these
relations seek to gain an understanding of them, is very different from the configuration of their
inner core, which is essential but concealed, and the concept corresponding to it. It is in fact the
very reverse and antithesis of this.18
By focusing on the surface of economic relations, ideology conceals or distorts the contradictions
that lie below the surface, and thereby serves the interest of the ruling class.
Subsequent theorists developed the ideology of Marx and Engels in different directions. For
example, whereas the concept of ideology noted above is a negative one, that is, it conceals or
15
Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 211.
16
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 129.
17
18
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three (1894), trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin,
1991), 311.
distorts economic relations, others have developed a more positive sense of ideology, by terming
ideology the totality of forms of social consciousness. This sense can be gleaned from A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy, noted above, where Marx and Engels associate ideology with
“the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic . . . ideological forms,” which makes ideology
into an all-encompassing superstructure rather than a narrowly negative one.
Because of the importance of ideology to Marxist literary and cultural theory, a few of the major
refinements of Marx and Engels’ ideas on this topic will be noted. First, in History and Class
Consciousness (1923), Lukács points out that “the dialectical method does not permit us simply to
proclaim the ‘falseness’ of . . . consciousness and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and
false.”19 He corrects this by examining “ ‘false consciousness’ concretely as an aspect of the historical
totality and as a stage in the historical process.”20 For Lukács, ideology is a form of false consciousness
that occurs when the subjective consciousness of a particular class is taken to be the objective
consciousness of the society as a whole. Lukács comments,
For only when this relation is established does the consciousness of their existence that men have
at any given time emerge in all its essential characteristics. It appears, on the one hand, as something
which is subjectively justified in the social and historical situation, as something which can and
should be understood, i.e. as “right.” At the same time, objectively, it by-passes the essence of the
evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately. That is to say, objectively, it
appears as a “false consciousness.” On the other hand, we may see the same consciousness as
something which fails subjectively to reach its self-appointed goals, while furthering and realizing
the objective aims of society of which it is ignorant and which it did not choose.21
For Lukács, the twofold identification of false consciousness allows for a dialectical determination
of society as a concrete totality.
Second, Antonio Gramsci proposed in his Prison Notebooks (1929–35) that the ideological
superstructure of society be subdivided into civil society and political society, and thereby connected
to hegemony:
What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural “levels”: the one that can
be called “civil society,” that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private,” and that
of “political society” or “the State.” These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function
of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand
to that of “direct domination” or command exercised through the State and “juridical”
government. The functions in question are precisely organisational and connective. The
intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social
hegemony and political government.22
19
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 50.
20
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 50.
21
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 50.
22
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1929–35), ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12.
MARXISM 81
Hegemony for Gramsci is a process wherein the dominant groups in society through a process of
intellectual and moral leadership win the consensus and consent of the subordinate groups in
society. For Gramsci, there are two main reasons for this consensus and consent:
(1) The “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general
direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is
“historically” caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group
enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.
(2) The apparatus of state coercive power which “legally” enforces discipline on those groups
who do not “consent” either actively or passively.23
In short, the dominant group achieves hegemony over the subordinate group by extending its
ideology to every level of society including corporations, universities, political parties, and state
bureaucracies. While Marx and Engels did not develop a specific form of literary and cultural
criticism, through the work of thinkers like Lukács, Gramsci, and Althusser (3.4), ideology has
become one of the major conceptual tools of Marxist literary and cultural theory. Through
ideological analysis, literature becomes a site where class struggle is played out.
Ultimately, for Marx, the material foundation of society provides everything that is needed to
understand literature and the other arts. However, when we look back in socio-economic history,
we find that there is no direct link or even relationship between the material foundation of society
and its artistic production. This is particularly evident with the Greeks, whose artistic productions
are “out of all proportion to the general development of [their] society, hence also to the material
foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization.”24 Nevertheless, comments Marx,
is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention
the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end
with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?25
The problem for him is not that the Greek arts are “out of all proportion to the general development
of [their] society”—something that he believes can be easily understood. Rather, the problem is that
the literature and arts from this era still provides us with pleasure. In Grundrisse (1858), he writes:
[T]he difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain
forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in
a certain respect they count as a norm and as an attainable model.26
Marx’s explanation of the attraction of literature and the arts from this era of social-economic
development is as follows:
23
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 12.
24
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857–8), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London:
Penguin, 1973), 110.
25
Marx, Grundrisse, 111.
26
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find a joy in the
child’s naiveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not
the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the
historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise
an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples
[are] in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in
contradiction to the undeveloped society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is
inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it
arose, and could alone arise, can never return.27
The value of Marx’s comments from Grundrisse is not his explanation of why we still appreciate
Greek literature and art. Rather, it is the way he complicates the relationship between base and
superstructure with regard to artistic production by acknowledging that there is no direct link or
even relationship between social-economic development and artistic production. Still, regardless of
the uneven relationship, according to Marx, it is not difficult understand. Some, however, would
differ with his conclusion here. The character of the relationship between the material base of
society and the artistic productions of the superstructure is open to a number of different lines of
interpretation, including, but not limited to, versions of vulgar and limit Marxism.
Engels regarded Marx’s discovery of historical materialism as one of his greatest discoveries. The
other was his theory of surplus value. For Marx, exploitation occurs under capitalism when a net
product can be sold for more than the wages received by the worker. Capitalist production is a form
of commodity production where products are produced for sale as values. As the products of
capitalist production belong to the capitalist, surplus value becomes the difference between the
value of the product and the value of the capital involved in the production process. For Marx,
value is a social relation among people, and under capitalism it takes on a particular form. As
commodities are anything produced for the purpose of exchange, they have an exchange value,
which corresponds to the form of appearance of something distinguishable from it; they also have
a use value, which corresponds to their content. Exchange value is always contingent upon its
circumstances, and any commodity has as many different exchange values as different commodities
for which it can be exchanged. Use value is always constant and is derived from the labor expended
in creating the commodity. There is no logical or intrinsic relation between use- and exchange
value. “I discovered,” comments Marx, “that exchange-value is only an ‘appearance-form,’ an
independent mode of manifestation of the value which is contained in the commodity.”28
Ultimately, for Marx, as he says in Capital, Volume One (1867), the commodity has a “mystical”
and “mysterious” character:
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the
commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of
the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also

27
Karl Marx, “Marginal Notes on [Adolph] Wagner” (1879-1880), in Value: Studies by Karl Marx, trans. and ed. Albert
28
Dragstedt (London: New Park Publications, 1976), 214.

MARXISM 83
reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between
objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution,
the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time
suprasensible and social.29
The mysterious thing here is the transformation of intangible human qualities into physical objects.
This process is called reification, and for Marx it can be located throughout capitalism. The section
of Capital in which this passage occurs concerns the “fetishism of the commodity.” In short, for
Marx, the process of reification is obscured by commodity fetishism, wherein the socially produced
value of things is mistaken for their natural value. Marx uses an analogy from “the misty realm of
religion” to describe it:
There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of
their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in
the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which
attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is
therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.30
Commodity fetishism is the most basic way in which capitalism conceals underlying social relations.
For Marx, “it is . . . precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—
which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual
workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing
them plainly.”31 Commodity fetishism sets up a basic relationship between appearance and concealed
reality, which can then be examined through ideology. “So far,” concludes Marx, “no chemist has
ever discovered exchange-value in either a pearl or a diamond.”32 But commodity fetishism leads us
to believe otherwise.
3.2 THE ADORNO–BENJAMIN DEBATE

Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin were friends who corresponded with each other from 1928
until the death of the latter in 1940. They shared an interest in studying society from a Marxist
perspective, though their work was largely focused on the superstructure of society, that is, ideology,
class formation, and culture, rather than its material base, that is, the relations, forces, and modes
of production. Together with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, they analyzed
and critiqued the discourses, media, ideologies, and institutions of modern society. Their work,
which was largely associated with the Institute for Social Research, has come to be called critical
theory, or, because the Institute came to be part of Frankfurt University in 1923, the Frankfurt
School. Even though Benjamin was not an official member of the Institute, he was in agreement
29
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990),
164–5.
30
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, 165.
31
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, 168–9.
32
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, 177.
with its general approach to culture, which in its early years (1930–64) aimed to produce a general
social theory that would provide an account of domination and power in society while at the same
time strive for the social transformation of society.
In general, critical theory has come to be associated with the systematic study of mass and
commodity culture, authoritarianism, capitalist ideology, anti-Semitism, and modernity. Specifically,
both Adorno and Benjamin wrote extensively on music, literature, aesthetics, and philosophy. Their
debate, which occurred in the 1930s, concerned the emancipatory potential of mass art. At the
center of this debate was the question of whether technologically reproduced art was useful for the
purposes of fascism, with Benjamin contending that it is “completely useless”33 and Adorno
disagreeing with him.
Their debate was conducted against the background of the rise of Nazism in Europe, which both
Adorno and Benjamin regarded as part of the groundwork of modernity and its misuse of technology.
It was also conducted against the backdrop of Adorno emigrating to England in 1934 and then to
New York in 1938 because of his political beliefs and Jewish heritage, and Benjamin during the
same period trying to flee from Europe and the Nazis, who he believed were pursuing him. Whereas
Adorno returned to Germany in 1949, Benjamin, in the words of Hannah Arendt (who fled
Germany in 1933), “chose death in those early fall days of 1940 which for many of his origin and
generation marked the darkest moment of the war—the fall of France, the threat to England, the
still intact Hitler–Stalin pact whose most feared consequence at that moment was the close co-
operation of the two most powerful secret police forces in Europe.”34
While Benjamin was a Marxist literary and cultural critic, his connection with Marxism and
dialectical materialism was described by Arendt as “remote.”35 “Benjamin,” comments Arendt,
probably was the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement, which God knows has
had its full share of oddities. The theoretical aspect that was bound to fascinate him was the
doctrine of superstructure, which was only briefly sketched by Marx but then assumed a
disproportionate role in the movement as it was joined by a disproportionately large number of
intellectuals, hence by people who were interested only in superstructure. Benjamin used this
doctrine only as a heuristic-methodological stimulus and was hardly interested in its historical or
philosophical background.36
A prime example of this is Benjamin’s “angel of history.” Whereas the Marxist doctrine of historical
materialism regards history as moving forward into the future through a process of dialectic,
Benjamin’s angel of history moves in the opposite direction, with his face “turned toward the past.”
In “Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940),” Benjamin depicts this angel as similar to the
one in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920), which
33
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 218.
34
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 153.
35
Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 164.
36
Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 163.
MARXISM 85
. . . shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it
in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence
that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to
which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what
we call progress.37
Benjamin’s messianism, that is, his belief in the advent of a personal Messiah who would usher in
the Kingdom of God, is more in evidence here than his Marxism. If anything, Benjamin’s “angel of
history” recalls not Marx but rather the philosophy of Hegel, who said “The owl of Minerva
spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”38 By this Hegel means that history presents the
world to philosophy for understanding. Contra Marx, who believed that the task of philosophy was
to change the world, Hegel said that philosophy cannot provide “instruction as to what the world
ought to be.”39 Rather, “as the thought of the world, [philosophy] appears only when actuality is
already there cut and dried after its process of formation has completed.”40 Benjamin’s “angel of
history” neither dialectically moves forward into the future (like historical materialism), nor does
it view the aim of philosophy to change the world (like Marx’s view of philosophy). Rather, with
its back to the future into which it is propelled, it faces the past, which is piled at its feet like
wreckage. Benjamin’s vision of history, philosophy, and social transformation is ultimately a
messianic mystical one rather than a dialectical materialist one.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Benjamin points out that
when “Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its
infancy.”41 “The result,” continues Benjamin, “was that one could expect it not only to exploit the
proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it
possible to abolish capitalism itself.”42 But the “transformation of the superstructure,” he observes,
“takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure,” or base, of society.43 Benjamin’s task
here is to examine how the technological advances in reproduction that have occurred in the more
than fifty years since Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production have
changed and are changing the function of culture in society. “Around 1900 technical reproduction
had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus
to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public,” writes Benjamin, “it also had
captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.”44
37
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Illuminations, 257–8.
38
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 13.
39
Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 12.
40
Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 12.
41
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217.
42
43
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217–18.
44
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 219–20.
FIGURE 2: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920). Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner.
Benjamin argues that the technical reproducibility in photography and film withers and destroys
the aura and authenticity of artworks. He notes that while it has always been possible in principle
to reproduce a work of art, the age of the mechanical reproduction of works of art “represents
something new.”45 The advent of lithography at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which was
surpassed in only a few decades by photography, allowed for the reproduction of the work of art.
According to Benjamin, this technological advance in art reproduction resulted in “the most
profound change”46 in the impact of the work of art upon the public—the loss of authenticity.
45
46
MARXISM 87
For Benjamin, authenticity is lost in the reproduction of works of art. “Even the most perfect
reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique
existence at the place where it happens to be,”47 says Benjamin. “The presence of the original is the
prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”48 He contends that not only are mechanically reproduced
works of art more independent of the original work of art than manually reproduced works of art,
but “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of
reach of the original itself.”49 Reproduction detaches artworks from “the domain of tradition” and
destroys their “aura.”50 Once the work of art is detached from its aura, and its traditional and
ritualistic significance, it can take on a significance unconnected to them. Comments Benjamin, “the
instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function
of art is reversed.”51 “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—
politics.”52 For some, under these conditions, the work of art risks being attributed with political
significance, which in the hands of repressive governments is particularly dangerous. But not for
Benjamin, which is the crux of his debate with Adorno.
“The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in [The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction] are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism,”53 remarks Benjamin.
“They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics
of art.”54 The technical reproduction of the work of art marks a decided shift from an older
aesthetics marked by authenticity and the presence of the original to a new aesthetic of
“reproducibility” and disconnection from the original. For Benjamin, a work of art is neither the
result of individual creativity or genius nor is it an autonomous object disconnected from politics
as it was for aestheticism. Rather, by striving to understand it in relation to its modes of production,
Benjamin finds in the reproducibility of art emancipatory political potential. In contrast to fascism,
which aestheticizes politics in its older, ritualistic sense, Benjamin offers a new aesthetics where the
politicization of art involves its de-aestheticization, which involves breaking its link with aura,
ritual, autonomy, and genius. Benjamin writes that “for the first time in world history, mechanical
reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual,” and “the work
of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”55 For Benjamin, film
signals the greatest break from the older aesthetic of presence and authenticity: “for the first time—
and this is the effect of the film—man has to operate with his whole living person, yet foregoing its
aura.”56 “For aura is tied to presence,” continues Benjamin, “there can be no replica of it.”57
Both Adorno and Benjamin recognize that technological advances are inseparable from consumer
culture and have the potential for politicization. However, whereas Benjamin was hopeful that the
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
technology of aesthetic reproduction could transform mass consumer culture into an emancipatory
force for the proletariat by providing them with an effective source of resistance to social and political
oppression, Adorno fiercely opposed this idea. So impassioned was Adorno’s opposition to his friend
on this subject that he would continue to refine his reply to Benjamin for the rest of his life.
In 1947, Adorno published the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he co-wrote with Horkheimer.
While Adorno would serve as director of the Institute of Social Research from 1958 to 1969,
Horkheimer was its director from 1930 to 1958, an organization established in 1923 to look into
the future of Marxism after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Under Horkheimer’s direction, the
Institute came to focus on social philosophy and critical theory, and attacked positivism, an approach
to philosophy that positively values science and the scientific method. The most celebrated version
of positivism at the time (circa 1930) was the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, which included
Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Herbert Feigl, Alfred Tarski, and its founder, Moritz Schlick, who was
assassinated in 1936. “Our conception of history does not presume any dispensation from it; nor
does it imply a positivistic search for information,”58 write Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1969
preface. “It is a critique of philosophy, and therefore refuses to abandon philosophy,”59 they
continue. Their discussion of the culture industry in this work is a rebuttal to Benjamin’s position
on the emancipatory power of the technology of aesthetic reproduction.
Horkheimer and Adorno argue here that movies are not art; rather, they are commodities
produced by the culture industry. “Film, radio, and magazines make up a system which is uniform
as a whole and in every part,”60 write Horkheimer and Adorno. This system is subservient to the
“absolute power of capitalism.”61 The interests of the motion picture, broadcasting, and publishing
industries are “economically interwoven”62 with other, more powerful, capitalist industries such as
the banking, petroleum, utility, and chemical industries. The culture industry “is the triumph of
invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in
the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production team
may have selected.”63
The culture industry produces homogeneous and monotonous commodities: “art for the masses.”
“Not only are hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but
the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change,”64
write Horkheimer and Adorno. “The details are interchangeable.”65 Film, for example, is comprised
of a series of “ready-made clichés to be slotted anywhere.”66 “As soon as the film begins, it is quite
clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten.”67 According to Horkheimer
and Adorno, the homogeneity of art produced by the culture industry serves an important social and
58
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury
Press, 1972), x.
59
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, x.
60
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120.
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
MARXISM 89
political function: it maintains the status quo and destroys individuality. “The culture industry as a
whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product.”68 Mass art aims to
produce, control, and discipline its consumers. It even aims to deprive them of amusement by
stunting their “powers of imagination and spontaneity.”69 “The culture industry does not sublimate;
it represses” the desire for happiness, write Horkheimer and Adorno.
By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of
the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation
has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while
insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far.
The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that the culture industry established
anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and
prudish. Love is downgraded to romance.70
The Hays Office here is a reference to the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, which was a
set of guidelines developed by the motion picture industry to regulate the moral standards presented
in movies. Will H. Hays was the head of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association
(MPPDA) that was formed in 1922 to project a positive image of the movie industry. In the 1920s,
Hollywood was dubbed “Sin City,” and it was the task of the Hays Office and the MPPDA to
promote a more morally upright image of Hollywood. Adorno and Horkheimer, however, find
their efforts to control and discipline sexuality on the screen as contradictory: ascetic and unashamed,
pornographic and prudish.
The world depicted by mass culture is a “realistic” one that is a combination of clichés, propaganda,
and advertising. “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies,”71 write Horkheimer and
Adorno. “The sound film, far from surpassing the theater of illusions, leaves no room for imagination
or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film,
yet deviate from its precise detail with losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims
to equate it directly with reality.”72 On the basis of this, Horkheimer and Adorno conclude, “If most
of the radio stations and movie theaters were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose
very much.”73 “To walk from the street into the movie theater is no longer to enter a world of dream;
as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there
would be no great urge to do so.”74 Ultimately, true art is art that goes beyond existing social relations
and reality, something that the art produced by the culture industry never achieves.
“Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite,”75 comment Horkheimer and Adorno.
“Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him.”76
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
The “freedom to choose an ideology” under late capitalism “everywhere proves to be freedom to
choose what is always the same.”77 As Horkheimer and Adorno conclude,
The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of
anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality
scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and
emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to
buy and use its products even though they see through them.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, the technology of aesthetic reproduction does not transform mass
consumer culture into an emancipatory force for the proletariat. Rather than providing the
proletariat with an effective source of resistance to or escape from social and political oppression,
it does the opposite: the culture industry shuts down all pathways to emancipation from late
capitalism. “Amusement under late capitalism,” observe Horkheimer and Adorno, “is the
prolongation of work”:78
It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit the strength in
order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over
man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement
goods, that his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself.79
Contra Benjamin, the only thing the mechanical reproduction of the work of art reproduces for
Horkheimer and Adorno is late capitalism—and along with it, authoritarianism and bourgeois
privilege.
While they agree with Benjamin that technological reproducibility strips the work of art of its
uniqueness, they do not think that technologically reproducible art is emancipatory because it
originates from the same economic conditions and the same technological process that brought
about fascism and totalitarianism. “The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with special
designations links advertising with the totalitarian watchword,”80 comment Horkheimer and
Adorno. “When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a word—say, ‘intolerable’—over the
loudspeakers the next day the whole nation is saying ‘intolerable.’ ”81 Hence, advertising, the culture
industry, and Hollywood films are associable with fascism, totalitarianism, and political propaganda:
Advertising and the culture industry merge technically as well as economically. In both cases the
same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical repetition of the same culture
product has come to be the same as that of the propaganda slogan.82
77
78
79
80
81
82
MARXISM 91
In short, they regard the Hollywood film as similar to Nazi propaganda—that is, it is based in a
repressive aesthetic, rather than an emancipatory one.
3.3 MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

One of the first issues one approaches in considering the work of Bakhtin is what to include. While
his classic work is Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), there has been some controversy as to
whether he also wrote Valentin Vološinov’s Freudianism (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language (1929) and Pavel Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928). Michael
Holquist, for example, says “ninety percent of the text of the three books in question is indeed
Bakhtin himself.”83 However, others disagree. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, for example,
“deem it unlikely that Bakhtin wrote these three remarkable books.”84 Bakhtin himself was silent
on the topic. For example, on the occasion of Bakhtin’s 75th birthday in 1973, V. V. Ivanov declared
that these works were written by Bakhtin. When Bakhtin was asked whether Ivanov’s declaration
was true, he remained silent and never made a public statement. However, when the Soviet
publishing agency asked Bakhtin to sign a statement shortly before his death that he was the author
of these works, he refused.85
At stake here is the degree to which Bakhtin was a Marxist literary and cultural theorist. Whereas
Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship attempts to reconcile formalism with
Marxism, Vološinov’s Freudianism brings together Freudian psychology and Marxism, and Marxism
and the Philosophy of Language explores the relationship between language and ideology. In short,
Marxism is built into the structure of each of these works, and Medvedev and Vološinov “explicitly
declare and implement a Marxist orientation” in all of their work.86 The question, however, is
whether this Marxism is just “window-dressing” aimed at insuring publication in the Soviet Union.
This is the view of Holquist, for example. For others, such as Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin had a
“lifelong dislike of Marxism,” and the Marxism of these books is “in no sense window dressing to
be removed by a skillful reader.”87 Still others, like Fredric Jameson (3.5), hail Bakhtin as an
outstanding Marxist writer. Finally, there is Todorov, who attributes all of the work to Bakhtin, but
sees the question of his Marxism as a moot point. In brief, the work of Bakhtin has been claimed
by both Marxist and non-Marxist lines of literary and cultural theory.
Bakhtin’s work can be broken down into four periods. The first period, which concludes in
1924, consists of writings on ethics and aesthetics wherein language is not central to his thought;
the second, which coincides with his encounter with Russian Formalism (1924–9) and culminates
in the publication of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, consists of the introduction of the concept
of polyphony and his efforts to create a new model of language; the third period, which extends
83
Michael Holquist, “Introduction,” in M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), xxvi.
84
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul
Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 2.
85
Ladislav Matě jka and I. R. Titunik, “Translators’ Preface,” in V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
(1929), trans. Ladislav Matě jka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), ix.
86
Matě jka and Titunik, “Translators’ Preface,” ix.
87
Morson and Emerson, “Introduction,” 2.
from the 1930s into the 1950s, is defined by his work on the novel and the development of the
concepts of carnival and chronotope, a category used in the analysis of texts that accounts for their
precise spacio-temporal ratio; and the fourth period marks a return to the philosophical problems
of the first period.88 It is the work from his second and third periods that has proven to be the most
impactful to literary and cultural theory—even if Bakhtin’s philosophical and aesthetic contributions
are considerable. For that matter, it might even be argued that a fundamental philosophical position
on all human acts underlies his entire intellectual development: namely, one between “inside (‘I’/
myself) and outside (‘you’/others), and between open (laughing, unfinished, mobile: a personality)
and closed (serious, completed, static: a thing).”89
Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony is a characteristic of literature wherein several contesting voices
take part equally in dialogue. These voices represent not only a number of different ideological
positions, but are also allowed to present these positions without authorial judgment or constraint.
The author here is said by Bakhtin to be “alongside”90 the speech of the characters in a way that
affords all voices equal position and does not privilege one voice over another. In literature that
exhibits polyphony, any tension among these voices remains unresolved because there is no worldview
that is imposed upon the text by the author. Texts that exhibit polyphony focus on process rather than
product. This means that the polyphonic text resists closure though achieves a special type of unity:
“the unity of an event,”91 which describes “a dialogic concordance of unmerged twos and multiples.”92
As long as polyphony continues, that is, there are utterances to establish it, there is neither a final truth
to the text, nor is a single interpretation of the text possible. Opposed to the conception of the
polyphonic text is the monophonic text, a text where one voice dominates. Bakhtin finds the novels
of Tolstoy to be monophonic, whereas the novels of Dostoevsky exhibit the ideal of polyphony.
As Bakhtin investigates deeper into the history of the novel, he determines that polyphony is a
potential characteristic of all novelistic discourse, and the term comes to be another word for
dialogism—a term he comes to use in two distinct senses. One sense of dialogism is when the
speaker wants the listener to hear words as though they were spoken with quotation marks. This
allows for two voices to persist in a single spoken utterance. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,
Bakhtin makes the distinction between utterances spoken without quotation marks, which are
monologic and single-voiced, and utterances spoken with quotation marks, which are dialogic and
double-voiced. When quotation marks are not used, there is no recognition that there is another
perspective on this discourse; when they are used, there is recognition of another perspective that
is an equally valid one. When quotation marks are used, the voice of another is included along with
the voice of the speaker. The voice of another in dialogism is part of the intention of the speaker,
that is, the speaker intentionally enters into a dialogue with the voice of another.
The second sense of dialogism is that no discourse exists in isolation from other utterances.
Rather, all discourse is part of a greater whole, or “concrete living totality,”93 and always draws
88
See, Morson and Emerson, “Introduction,” 5–6.
89
Caryl Emerson, “Mikhail Bakhtin,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 382.
90
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), 6.
91
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 21.
92
93
MARXISM 93
from the world of language that precedes it. Here dialogism is the notion that language is a social
phenomenon, and as such, it is never dissociable from the intentions of others. It is the notion that
everything must be understood as a part of a greater whole in which multiple meanings are in
constant interaction or process with each other. What an utterance does is settle how these multiple
meanings affect each other. Holquist calls this the “dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-
existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants.”94 This dialogic imperative
“insures that there can be no actual monologue,” even though some can be deluded, like
“grammarians, certain political figures and normative framers of ‘literary languages,’ ” into thinking
that there are ways for language to be monological.95
What ensures that language is always dialogical—and never monological—is the force of what
Bakhtin terms heteroglossia. It is that which, writes Holquist,
insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set
of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word
uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different that it would have under any
other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces
practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close up
a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide;
as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress.96
For Bakhtin, the novel is the best place to see dialogism because novels are both polyphonic and
heteroglossic. In “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–5), Bakhtin writes,
The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of
languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification
of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional
jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages,
languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the
specific sociopolitical purpose of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own
vocabulary, its own emphases)—this internal stratification present in every language at any given
moment of its historical existence is the indispensible prerequisite for the novel as a genre. The
novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and
expressed by it, by means of the social diversity of speech types [or heteroglossia] and by the
differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of
narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional
unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of
social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less
dialogized). These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this
movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the
94
Michael Holquist, “Glossary,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 426.
95
Holquist, “Glossary,” 426.
96
Holquist, “Glossary,” 428.
rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing
feature of the stylistics of the novel.97
While Bakhtin came under the influence of Russian Formalism in the late 1920s, by the time this
passage was written in the mid-1930s, he was very far from endorsing their view of language as a
closed system. Rather, his work emphasizes the social role of language, something more akin to an
open and dynamic sign-system.
Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to literature finds every utterance as standing against a background
of other utterances as reply, polemic, allusion, and parody. This approach does not regard texts as
organic unities, but promotes the notion that texts are multilayered and resistant to unification.
Under this broad conception of text, he regards all cultural phenomena—from film and dance to
music and carnival—as text. Bakhtin regards text, both written and oral, as the primary given of all
of the disciplines comprising the human sciences, including literary studies and philosophy. For
Bakhtin, text is the unmediated reality of thought and experience, and the only reality from which
the disciplines of the human sciences can emerge. Where there is no text, claims Bakhtin, there is
no object of study, or even an object of thought. A text is any complex of signs. The structure of the
sign complex is such that in itself it reflects all texts within the bounds of a given area—texts are a
type of monad. According to Bakhtin, the study of the arts is the study of texts whose structures are
a mosaic. Through his close readings of writers like Dostoevsky and François Rabelais, Bakhtin
shows how literary texts not only have a dialogical or polyphonous structure because they are both
a layered mosaic of other texts98 and because of what he calls their carnivalization.
In his discussion of carnival in Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin shows how carnival
works to subvert authority by overturning hierarchies (e.g., fools become wise) and bringing
together oppositions (e.g., heaven and hell). Writes Bakhtin,
Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because
its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During
carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal
spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which
all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by its participants.99
Bakhtin says that carnival “was a consecration of inequality”100 that was collective and popular. In
addition, it “led to the creation of special forms of marketplace speech and gesture, frank and free,
permitting no distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating from
norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times.”101 All of this he finds abundantly
97
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–5), in The Dialogic Imagination, 262–3.
98
Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in
Philosophical Analysis” (1959–61), in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
99
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),
7.
100
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10.
101
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10.
MARXISM 95
represented in the writings of Rabelais—even though the earliest carnivalized literary forms can be
traced back to the dialogues of Socrates and the ancient Greek satires of Menippus of Gardara.
Dostoevsky is noteworthy here too because his work brings together the various traditions of
carnivalized literature.
Bakhtin’s approach to literature and language reveals a deep concern for their material conditions
and political ramifications. Still, he did not regard literature as a direct reflection of social and
economic forces, but rather focused on the ways in which language was related to ideology. In
“Discourse in the Novel,” he tells us that the
speaking person in the novel is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are
always ideologemes. A particular language in a novel is always a particular way of viewing the
world, one that strives for social significance. It is precisely as ideologemes that discourse
becomes the object of representation in the novel, and it is for the same reason novels are never
in danger of becoming a mere aimless verbal play. The novel, being a dialogized representation
of an ideologically freighted discourse (in most cases actual and really present) is of all verbal
genres the one least susceptible to aestheticism as such, to a purely formalistic playing with
words.102
Language cannot be separated from ideology for Bakhtin both at the level of the speaker and the
utterance. Consequently, because the novel is dialogical, it makes it much more difficult to separate
from ideological concerns—and struggles. The fundamentally ideological nature of language is at
the center of Bakhtin’s philosophy of language. But it is Vološinov who closes the loop between this
conception of language and Marxism:
First and foremost, the very foundations of a Marxist theory of ideologies—the bases for the
studies of scientific knowledge, literature, religion, ethics, and so forth—are closely bound up
with problems of the philosophy of language.
Any ideological product is not only itself a part of reality (natural or social), just as in any
physical body, any instrument of production, or any product for consumption, it also, in
contradistinction to these other phenomena, reflects and refracts another reality outside of it.
Everything ideological possesses meaning: it represents, depicts, or stands for something lying
outside itself. In other words, it is a sign. Without signs there is no ideology. A physical body
equals itself, so to speak; it does not signify anything but wholly coincides with its particular,
given nature. In this case there is no question of ideology.103
...
[Moreover,] every sign is subject to ideological evaluation (i.e., whether it is true, false,
correct, fair, good, etc.). The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They
equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything
ideological possesses semiotic value.104
102
Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 333.
103
V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 9.
104
Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 10.
For Vološinov, “consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material
embodiment of signs,”105 which in turn, might be regarded as a semiotic recasting of Marx’s formula,
“Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.” While Vološinov’s
position on ideology is at odds with the reflection theory of ideology of classical Marxism, it does
provide a pathway for a Marxist philosophy of language grounded in material reality—even though
the material reality is not the forces and means of production, but rather language as a socially-
constructed system of signs.
In sum, Bakhtin’s literary and cultural theory explored the ways language can disrupt authority
and allow alternative voices to be heard. His concept of heteroglossia shows how multiple voices
can coexist in the literature, and the ways in which this exhibits a form of ideological struggle.
Whereas the ruling class aims to narrow the meanings of words or discourse, the multi-accentuality
identified by Bakhtin allowed for class interests to wage battles within language for control over
meaning.
3.4 LOUIS ALTHUSSER

Althusser’s main project was a rereading of Marx. While the empiricism of Marxist theory appealed
to him, its humanism did not. He saw this humanism in the efforts of Marxist thinkers like Sartre,
whose existentialism claimed that when humans do not accept responsibility for their freedom,
alienation occurs. Marxist humanism, which places human freedom and self-determination at the
center of Marxist theory, is a bourgeois model of the subject. It claims that humans are the source
of knowledge and meaning, and that history is the result of human actions.
Althusser describes this as the view that “it is man who makes history.”106 For Althusser, this
bourgeois-humanist model of history disarms the labor movement and prevents the scientific
investigation of history, the very science that Marx founded. Writes Althusser,
Marx founded a new science: the science of history. Let me use an image. The sciences we are
familiar with have been installed in a number of great “continents.” Before Marx, two such
continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the
continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a
third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History.107
For Althusser, the philosophical problem with the bourgeois-humanist model of history of Sartre,
Lukács, and others is that it effectively preserves the Cartesian subject (that is, Descartes’ thinking
thing, or res cogitans [12.4]), a subject that is the centered and fixed agent of history. In its stead,
Althusser presents another view of the subject, one that might be described as antihumanist.
The conception of the subject developed by Althusser is deeply grounded in both structuralism
and psychoanalytic theory (4.0). In addition to Marx, some of his major influences are Lévi-Strauss
105
Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 11.
106
Louis Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis” (1972), in Essays in Self-Criticism (1974), trans. Grahame Lock (London: New
Left Books, 1976), 41.
107
Louis Althusser, “Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon” (1968), in Lenin and Philosophy, 4.
MARXISM 97
and Jacques Lacan (4.2). Also, it might be noted that Michel Foucault (9.1) was one of his students
at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where Althusser taught until 1980. Althusser’s rereading
of Marx rejected both vulgar Marxism, which reduces ideology, literature, and culture to reflections
of the economic conditions of society, and the Hegelian view of the social totality, in which the
essence of the whole is expressed in its parts. Rather, Althusser offered in their stead the concept of
social formation, which consists of the combination of economic, political, and social practices. For
Althusser, rather than superstructure being a mere reflection or expression of the economic base of
society, he regards it as necessary to the existence of the base of society. This allows Althusser to
treat the superstructure of society as not completely determined by the economic base of society.
The determinism of the economic base that remains in Althusser’s model is described as the
“structure in dominance (structure à dominante).”108
On this view, while the economic base of society always determines its superstructure, at any
particular moment in history it may not dominate. For Althusser, the dominant of a particular social
formation depends on the form of economic production. He uses the concept of overdetermination
“to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice constituting the social formation on the
social formation as a whole, and hence back on each practice and each contradiction, defining the
pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and non-antagonism of the contradictions in
the structure in dominance at any historical moment.”109 For Althusser, economic contradictions are
always overdetermined “because the existence of overdetermination is inevitable and thinkable as
soon as the real existence of the forms of the superstructure and of the national and international
conjuncture has been recognized—an existence largely specific and autonomous, and therefore
irreducible to a pure phenomenon.”110 Moreover, overdetermination is not an aberrant historical
phenomenon, but rather a universal one. Writes Althusser,
[T]he economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in history, these instances, the
superstructures, etc.—are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when
the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides
along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the
“last instance” never comes.111
Thus, Althusser’s social formation is not a social order or system, but rather a kind of decentered
structure where there is no overall unity or organizing principle. His revision of the idea of dialectical
contradiction, a revision that emphasizes the condition of overdetermination, allows for the relative
autonomy of each of the elements within the social formation. While these elements are determined
by the economic level in the “last instance,” as he says above, it is one which “never comes.”
One of Althusser’s aims was to transform Marxism into a science dedicated to the structural
analysis of ideology. To achieve this, Althusser revises the standard Marxist notion of ideology as
“false consciousness,” that is, a false understanding of the way in which society functions. This false
108
Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic” (1963), in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970), 204.
109
Ben Brewster, “Overdetermination,” in Louis Althusser, For Marx, 253.
110
Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962), in For Marx, 113.
111
Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 113.
consciousness is exemplified, for example, in the way we suppress the fact that the goods purchased
on the open market are the result of the exploitation of labor. For Marx in The German Ideology,
writes Althusser,
Ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality is
external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like
the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For these writers, the dream was
the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of “day’s residues,” presented in an arbitrary arrangement
and order, sometimes even “inverted,” in other words, in “disorder.” For them, the dream was
the imaginary, it was empty, null and arbitrarily “stuck together” (bricolé), once the eyes had
closed, from the residues of the only full and positive reality, the reality of the day.112
Althusser, however, following Lacan, offers a very different account of ideology than Marx.
“Ideology,” argues Althusser, “is a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals
to their real conditions of existence.”113 The “imaginary” used here by Althusser is part of Lacan’s
three orders that constitute the human psyche (4.2): the Imaginary Order, that is, the preverbal
order wherein the infant identifies itself as an entity unified with both its biological dependence on
its mother and its surroundings; the Symbolic Order, the order that emerges with the acquisition of
language, wherein the subject only interacts with the world through various forms of representation
and structures of meaning; and the Real Order, that is, the order beyond the Imaginary and the
structure and representation of the Symbolic, which is only accessible in jouissance (fleeting
moments of joy and terror). For Althusser, ideology functions similar to Lacan’s understanding of
the Real Order, that is, the world we construct around us after our entrance into the Symbolic
Order. Namely, it is not possible for us to access the “real conditions of existence” because of our
reliance on language in the Symbolic Order.
Nevertheless, the structural science developed by Althusser allows us to understand how we are
inscribed in ideology by a complex process of recognition, which is as close as we can come to
understanding the “real conditions of existence.” For him,
all ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of
production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary)
relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from
them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which
govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real
relations in which they live.114
Thus, for Althusser, we cannot get outside of ideology as our consciousness is constructed under
the form of an imaginary subjection, and we are always within ideology because of our reliance on
112
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” (1969), in Lenin and
Philosophy, 108.
113
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 109.
114
MARXISM 99
language. Ideology does not reflect the world, but rather is a “representation” of our imaginary
relationship to the world.
In addition to his thesis about our imaginary relationship to the world, Althusser posits a number
of others. One is that “Ideology has a material existence,” by which he means “an ideology always
exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices” and that this form of existence is material, not
spiritual or ideal (idéale or idéelle).115 For Althusser, the state has two types of apparatuses: the
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), which comprise the religious (the system of the different
churches), educational (the system of the different public and private schools), family, media, trade
union, legal, political (the political system, including the different parties), communications (press,
radio, and television) and cultural (literature, the arts, sports, etc.) apparatuses; and the Repressive
State Apparatuses (RSA), which comprise the government, the administration, the army, the police,
the courts, and the prisons.
The ISAs though seemingly disparate are actually unified by the common ideology of the ruling
class that they serve. The educational ISA plays a particularly important role in the reproduction of
the system, that is, “is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology.”116 For Althusser,
“what the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e., as its dominant ideological State
apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has in fact replaced in its functions the previously
dominant ideological State apparatus, the Church.”117 Moreover, the educational apparatus conceals
its ideological function through its alleged neutrality: “an ideology which represents the School as
a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is . . . lay), where teachers respectful of the
‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by
their ‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to
the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature
and their ‘liberating’ virtues.”118
“To my knowledge,” comments Althusser, “no class can hold State power over a long period
without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses.”119
Ruling class hegemony over the ISAs helps to ensure the longevity of the RSA. Writes Althusser,
“the Repressive State Apparatus functions ‘by violence,’ whereas the Ideological State Apparatus
function ‘by ideology,’ ”120 which should be qualified with “primarily,” as the RSA functions
secondarily through ideology, and the ISA secondarily through punishment or repression. For
Althusser, ideology is manifested through actions that are “inserted into practices.”121 We act out
the beliefs given to us to think. Althusser asks us to think of this in terms of Blaise Pascal’s conception
of belief, which Althusser summarizes “more or less” as “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and
you will believe.”122
115
116
117
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 103–4.
118
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 105–6.
119
120
121
122
Another thesis, which Althusser calls his “central thesis,” is that “Ideology interpellates individuals
as subjects,”123 that is to say, ideology conscripts subjects into ideological discourses. For Althusser,
we are all “subjects” of ideology that operates through interpellation, that is, by summoning us to
take our places in the social structure. Althusser contends that ideology functions through
recruitment:
[I]deology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals
(it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that
very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined
along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”124
Althusser says that if this “takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round.”125 And,
when the individual does turn around, “he becomes a subject” because he recognizes “that the hail
was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).”126
For Althusser, the fact that we do not recognize the act of being “hailed” as ideology attests to the
power of ideology.
State apparatuses are the means through which interpellation takes place. For Althusser, “the
category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately . . . the
category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function
(which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.”127 Althusser’s notion of
interpellation explains how ideology calls individuals into place and confers on them their identity.
It also shows that as subjects of ideology, we are not free centers of initiative as humanism would
have us believe. We exist as subjects only in ideology. We are constituted in ideology as subjects that
are responsible, centers of initiative tied to an imaginary identity. Ideologies are systems of meanings
that install us in imaginary relations to the real relations in which we live. For Althusser, there is no
ideology in general; rather, there exist ideologies set up though their antagonisms with each other.
State Ideology does not exist without some opposing ideology, and opposing ideologies are shaped
by each other.
Finally, for Althusser, we are “always-already subjects,”128 by which he means that we are a
subject before we are born. While this might sound paradoxical, Althusser believes that it is not
because “individuals are ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects which they always already are.”129
For Althusser, this is “the plain reality, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all.”130 To make
this argument, Althusser again appeals to Lacan, specifically his notion of the “Name-of-the-
Father”:
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
MARXISM 101
Everyone knows how much and in what way an unborn child is expected. Which amounts to
saying, very prosaically, if we agree to drop the “sentiments,” i.e. the forms of family ideology
(paternal/maternal conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected: it is certain in
advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.
Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by
the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is “expected” once it has been
conceived.131
For Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father is the fundamental signifier that permits signification to proceed
normally. It both confers identity on human subjects and signifies the “no” of the incest taboo, that
is, the Oedipal prohibition.132
Overall, Althusser contends that ideological formations “govern paternity, maternity, conjugality,
and childhood: what is it ‘to be a husband,’ ‘to be a father,’ ‘to be a mother’ in our present world?”133
They are ideological formations that substitute for the Real Order that we cannot know, and
disguise the Symbolic Order, that is, the real nature of social relations. Moreover, the possibilities
for critique of the Symbolic Order of ideology are represented by the Real Order. For Althusser, the
psychoanalysis of Lacan provides him with a conceptual field to explore the relationship of the
unconscious and language to ideology: “Only since Freud have we come to suspect what listening,
and hence what speaking (and keeping silent) means (veut dire); that this ‘meaning’ (vouloir dire)
of speaking and listening reveals beneath the innocence of speech and hearing the culpable depth
of a second quite different discourse, the discourse of the unconscious.”134 For Althusser, the
unconscious of a society is revealed through its ideology. Moreover, the structure of Althusser’s
ideology might also be viewed through the structure of Saussure’s linguistics: ideologies are like a
langue that remains unconscious in parole, or, alternately, ideologies act as langue, and the subject
that is constituted in ideology acts as parole.
Lastly, literature, for Althusser, is not simply a form of ideology. Rather, as a type of art, the
relationship between literature and ideology “is a very complicated and difficult one.”135 First of all,
Althusser does not “rank real art among the ideologies.”136 By “real art,” he means “authentic art,”
that is, “not works of an average or mediocre level,”137 which, of course, is a sense of authenticity
very different from that of Benjamin. For Althusser, real art “does not replace knowledge in the
strict sense, it therefore does not replace knowledge (in the modern sense: scientific knowledge),
but what it gives us does nevertheless maintain a specific relationship with knowledge.”138 He
describes this relationship as one of “difference,” not “identity”:
131
132
See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan III: The Psychoses, 1955–56, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell
Grigg (New York: Routledge, 1992).
133
Louis Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, eds. Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, trans. Jeffrey
Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 177, n. 4.
134
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968) (London: New Left Books, 1970), 16.
135
Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 151.
136
137
138
I believe the peculiarity of art is to “make us see” (nous donner à voir), “make us perceive,”
“make us feel” something which alludes to reality. . . . What art makes us see, and therefore gives
to us in the form of “seeing,” “perceiving” and “feeling” (which is not the form of knowing), is
the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to
which it alludes.139
As such, “real” literature has a kind of special value akin to Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization
or estrangement by allowing us to “see . . . the ideology from which it is born.” Nevertheless, for
Althusser, like all ideology, all literature exists in an apparatus, which, in its case, is part of the
Ideological State Apparatuses. So, because in the final analysis, these apparatuses—publishing,
media, and communications institutions—serve the interests of the ruling class, so too does
literature. Ultimately, Althusser does not develop in much detail this “difficult and complex”
relationship between literature and ideology. However, it is something that will be taken up by
several major contemporary literary and cultural theorists, including Fredric Jameson (3.5) and
Slavoj Žižek (4.5), and developed in a number of different directions.
3.5 FREDRIC JAMESON

In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson argues for “the priority of the political interpretation
of literary texts.”140 To achieve, this we must heed the imperative “Always historicize!”141 Jameson
calls this the “moral” of his book, “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative
of all dialectical thought.”142 It is also one of his most important contributions to contemporary
literary and cultural theory, whose implications were carried out most explicitly (albeit with a
different concept of history) by the New Historicism (5.5).
Jameson’s imperative “turns on the dynamics of the act of interpretation and presupposes, as its
organizational fiction, that we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a
thing-in-itself.”143 “Rather,” for him, “texts come before us as the always-already-read; we
apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-
new—through sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive
traditions.”144 This object-centered notion of history rejects the position that history can be grasped
from the perspective of a single individual, that is, phenomenologically.
Rather, for Jameson, there is only one “philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling”
notion of history: the one provided by Marxism. For him, it the only notion of history that provides
a refuge from the “blind zones in which the individual seeks refuge, in pursuit of [a] purely
individual, a merely psychological, project of salvation.”145
139
140
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1981), 17.
141
Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9.
142
143
144
145
MARXISM 103
“Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past,
which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed
once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it.”146
Marxism liberates us from the refuges of the individual “with the recognition that there is nothing
that is not social and historical—indeed, that everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.”147 Jameson
regards the political perspective on literary texts as “not some supplementary method, not as an
optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the myth-
critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and
all interpretation.”148
In The Political Unconscious, Jameson utilizes Althusser’s theory of structural causality and
theory of ideology in an analysis of the early Modernist novels of Honoré de Balzac, George
Gissing, and Joseph Conrad. For him, the novel is a source of ideological codes that are accessible
through readings of the text’s political unconscious. This method, called dialectical criticism, is
accomplished through the deployment of Althusser’s structural causality as a means of interpretation.
For Althusser, there are three forms of causality that might be utilized by historical determination:
mechanical causality, “the billiard-ball model of cause and effect”149; expressive causality, which
“presupposes in principle that the whole in question be reducible to an inner essence, of which the
elements of the whole are no more than the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner principle
of the essence being present at each point in the whole”—the view that “dominates Hegel’s
thought”150; and structural causality, which “can be entirely summed up in the concept of
‘Darstellung,’ the key epistemological concept of the whole Marxist theory of value, the concept
whose object is precisely to designate the mode of presence of the structure in its effects, and
therefore to designate structural causality itself.”151
For both Althusser and Jameson, the only form of causality in the science of history is structural
causality, which they also describe as absent causality because the “cause” comes from “outside” of
the effects.152 It is a view that encourages us to look at the world by means of structural effects (or
effectivity) that Althusser contends are manifested in both the ISA and the RSA. History on this
model is driven by necessity but not the type of historical determinism utilized in classical Marxism.
The necessity of absent causality is the necessity of structural relations and the interpellation of the
subject by these relations. In sum, for Jameson, “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or
otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our
approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its
narrativization in the political unconscious.”153
Like Althusser, whose Marxist theory is less interested in the analysis of the modes of production
than in their effectivity in State Apparatuses, Jameson’s work is focused on politics and culture
146
147
148
149
150
Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 186–9; quoted by Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 24.
151
Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, quoted by Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 24.
152
Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, quoted by Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 24.
153
rather than economic analysis. This was particularly in evidence in his approach to postmodernism,
wherein he argues that it is not a cultural style, but rather a periodizing concept. In his analysis of
postmodernism, Jameson constructs a model that would describe a whole series of different cultural
phenomena and at the same time show the ideological function of these phenomena in relation to
late capitalism. It is a systematic theory of postmodernism as the dominant that exists at a particular
historical moment—with history, of course, defined as absent causality. In this model, postmodernism
is said to have features that are characteristic of the cultural logic of late capitalism.
According to Jameson, there was a radical break that took place around the end of the 1950s and
the early 1960s that marked the end of high modernism. This break is made evident by several
factors. One is the institutionalization and canonization of works of high modernism in the
university. Another is the emergence of a new type of art that positions itself as a reaction against
the older generation of modernists and everything for which they stood. Still another is the rise of
poststructuralism in literary and cultural theory (5.0). And finally, this break is in evidence by the
arrival of late capitalism as a third and purer stage of capital.
Regarding the latter, Jameson follows the general thesis of Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism
(1972), which he says “for the first time theorized a third stage of capitalism from a usably Marxist
perspective.”154 For Jameson, it was a thesis that “made my own thoughts on ‘postmodernism’
possible, and they are therefore to be understood as an attempt to theorize the specific logic of the
cultural production of that third stage, and not as yet another disembodied culture critique or
diagnosis of the spirit of the age.”155 Still, the term late capitalism did not originate with Mandel,
but rather was first used by the Frankfurt School to refer to the form of capitalism that developed
during the modernist period.
In Mandel’s view, there are three stages of technological development under capital. The first is
market capitalism, which begins in 1848 with the machine production of steam driven motors; the
second is monopoly capitalism, which begins in the 1890s with the machine production of electric
and combustion motors; and the third is late capitalism (or, alternately, multinational capitalism or
consumer capitalism), which begins in the 1940s with the expansion of capital into previously
uncommodified areas (including other nations and other areas of life) through machine production
of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses. For Jameson, these three stages of technological
development under capital correspond (or, are homologous) to three cultural stages: realism
(market capitalism); modernism (monopoly capitalism); and postmodernism (late capitalism),
wherein aesthetic production has been integrated into commodity production. “Capitalism,” writes
Jameson, “is the first genuinely global culture and has never renounced its mission to assimilate
everything alien to itself—whether that be the African masks of the time of Picasso, or the little red
books of Mao Tse-tung on sale in your corner drugstore.”156 Moreover, multinational capitalism,
that is, the rise of American capital on a global scale, entails the colonization of the Third World by
the First World, both industrially and culturally.
154
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991),
400. Mandel’s book was first published as Der Spätkapitalismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972) and then translated into
English in 1975.
155
Jameson, Postmodernism, 400.
156
Fredric Jameson, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism” (1975), in The Ideologies of Theory
(London: Verso, 2008), 417.
MARXISM 105
Jameson regards the postmodern as “the force field in which very different kinds of cultural
impulses—what Raymond Williams has usefully termed ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ forms of cultural
production—must make their way.”157 According to Williams, at any social formation at any
particular moment in history, three different cultural forces are in play. Reactionary and progressive
forces are in interrelation with dominant forces such that the latter never attains complete power.
Writes Williams,
In authentic historical analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex

interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific effective
dominance. It is necessary to examine how these relate to the whole cultural process rather than
only to the selected abstracted dominant system.158
He describes “residual” cultural forces as what “has been effectively formed in the past, but . . . is
still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past”159 and
“emergent” ones as the culture forces where “new meanings and values, new practices, new
relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created.”160 With regard to the latter,
though, Williams concedes that “it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are
really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense ‘species-specific’) and
those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather
than merely novel.”161 Hence, by adopting Williams’s “emergent–dominant–residual” distinction,
Jameson’s position on culture is caught somewhere between homogeneity and heterogeneity. “If we
do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant,” contends Jameson, “then we fall back
into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of
distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable.”162 In short, for Jameson, the cultural dominant
allows for the presence of diverse (or heterogeneous) features which various texts will exhibit in
various combinations, but these features make up a cultural force field called the dominant which
exercises some degree of cultural hegemony; that is, it dominates the production of culture.
Jameson uses the polemic in architecture as a model for what happens in the other arts because
the reaction against high modernism in architecture, that is, the International Style, and the
discourse on the failure of architectural modernism is most visible in the writings and works of the
new architects. He points out that while the features he enumerates as constitutive of postmodernism
can be found in the works of artists we think of as modernists, for example, Raymond Roussel and
Gertrude Stein, the difference is the social position or reception of these works. Whereas modernist
texts were considered scandalous, obscure, subversive, immoral, and anti-social, but are now
normative and canonical, postmodern texts which attempt to be oppositional in relation to the old
modernism no longer scandalize anyone. Rather, postmodern texts, contends Jameson, are received
with complacency.
157
158
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121.
159
Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122.
160
161
162
However, Jameson proposes many other features for the postmodern than just our complacent
reception of it. Some of them are as follows:
(1) Collapse of High- and Mass-Culture—postmodernism collapses the boundary between
high-culture and mass culture by incorporating material from both realms not just as
“quotation,” but in their structure and substance.
(2) Flatness and Depthlessness—postmodernism effects a kind of superficiality or flatness that
resists interpretation, that is, is an anti-hermeneutic. Moreover, it effects a kind of addiction
to the image or reproduction without a model or referent in the real, that is, the logic of
Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra (5.4).
(3) Repudiation of Models of Depth—postmodernism replaces oppositions such as inside/
outside, appearance/essence, latent/manifest, authenticity/inauthenticity, subject/object,
truth/false consciousness, and signifier/signified with notions of practices, discourses,
textual play, multiple surfaces, and intertextuality.
(4) From Work to Text—postmodernism replaces the concept of the work of art with concept
of text—recalling Barthes’s distinction.
(5) Commodity Fetishism—postmodernism commodifies the human subject and body.
(6) Death of the Subject—postmodernism displaces the themes of anxiety and alienation of the
subject with the fragmentation of the subject.
(7) Pastiche—postmodernism renders individual styles impossible and incorporates previous
“styles” as codes to be incorporated in the text along with many other discourses. These
previous styles are mimicked, but not in order to be parodic or satiric. Rather, postmodernism
is a type of blank parody or imitation of “dead” styles.
(8) Retro and Nostalgia—postmodernism transforms the past into a series of stereotypical
images as in the nostalgia film, e.g., George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). The stylistic
connotation of the past replaces “real” history with pseudo-history in texts that leave us
“condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history,
which itself remains forever out of reach.”163
(9) Time and Affect Schizophrenia—postmodernism breaks down temporality, leaving us to live
in a continual present that is a series of unrelated moments where we are not able to imagine
the future. Experience of intensities, not memories or development. The materiality of the
signifier overwhelms us to the point that language becomes fragmented along with the
fragmentation of the subject. Euphoria replaces the older affects of anxiety and alienation.
(10) Collage—in postmodernism culture the perception of radical difference (or collage)
becomes a meaning in itself because unity, similarity, and notions of form no longer apply.
(11) The Hysterical Sublime—postmodernism is the inability to think or represent the immense
communicational and multinational networks of late capitalism. The hysterical sublime is
related to Kant’s notion of the sublime wherein the mind cannot represent the cultural

163
MARXISM 107
forces that shape our existence. The hysterical sublime leads to conspiracy theories and
high-tech paranoia in literature and film, and the obsession with representing technology.
(12) Hyperspace—postmodernism is where buildings aspire to be total spaces, complete worlds,
miniature cities, which corresponds to a new mode of collectivity, but still lacks the Utopian
impulse of the International Style. In the hyperspace of the postmodern the human body
cannot position itself in the depthlessness, such that it becomes impossible to perceive
place in hyperspace. The dislocation and dissociation of hyperspace results in the
impossibility of cognitively mapping our position relative to the external world.
(13) Loss of Critical Distance—postmodernism results in the loss of all critical distance. All
oppositional practices are immediately recuperable such that distance becomes impossible.
There is no way to escape the logic of late capitalism as it is a system that is totalizing and
global.
The features of the postmodern as the cultural dominant under late capitalism are predominately
spacial. For Jameson it is important for us to find a way to cognitively map the space of postmodernism
because this is necessary in order for effective political change to occur with regard to the logic of late
capitalism. A cognitive map would “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual
subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures
as a whole.”164 However, as the features of postmodernism demonstrate, this is very difficult.
To illustrate this, Jameson cites as an example, Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), which
“taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their
minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as
those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries,
Assertion Negation
(e.g. life) (e.g., death)
FIGURE 3: Greimas’s Semiotic Square.

164
built perspectives) obtain.”165 Thus, without a cognitive mapping of the present, effective political
change is not possible. Moreover, the “new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating
and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered
extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity,”166 comments Jameson. Efforts to
contest the dominant ideology under late capital, “even overtly political interventions like those of
The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves
might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.”167
Finally, as a way to produce this cognitive mapping, Jameson turns to Greimas’s semiotic square,
which he believes can not only provide a map of ideological and narrative closure, but also the
emergence in both narrative and historical situations of the new or the unexpected.
The four corners of the square (s1, s2, s–1, s–2) represent different positions in the production of
meaning. The logical relations between the terms are contradiction and contrariety. However,
when put together in the square, they produce a new level of meaning: complementarity (or
implication). Whereas the contradiction between “life” and “non-life” and the contrariety between
“life” and “death” are not new relations, the relation of “life” to “non-death” as one of implication
adds a new level of meaning. When one or more of the terms in the semiotic square do not have a
word associated with it (as in the case of “non-life” and “non-death”), a deeper-structural character
is said to be revealed. Jameson deploys this square with Lacan’s three orders (4.2) overlain
(Imaginary–Symbolic–Real) to reveal even deeper relations in narrative, historical, and ideological
situations.
Thus, as utilized by Jameson, the semiotic square becomes a productive tool used in the cognitive
mapping of the dominant ideological contradictions of the present. An example from him would
be the contrariety between “universal” and “particular,” where the complementarity of “particular”
is termed “singular” but the complementarity of “universal” is an “empty slot,” “which remains
enigmatic and unfilled, mysterious, the object of conjecture and philosophical speculation.”168 Here
the semiotic square is able to identify one of the major political enigmas of our time—and points to
a site of conjecture and speculation regarding a cognitive map of the present. Another opposition
to place in this square is the contrariety between “philosophy” and “theory,” as Jameson contends
that philosophy “is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of
interlocking concepts which are its own cause,” and “theory, on the other hand, has no vested
interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of
itself and its ‘truths’: indeed, always itself complicit in the being of current language, it has only the
vocation and never-finished task of undermining philosophy as such, by unraveling affirmative
statements and propositions of all kinds.”169
165
166
167
168
Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia,” in An American Utopia: Variations on the Need to Censor Our Dreams, ed. Slavoj
Žižek (London: Verso, 2016), 11–12.
169
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), 59.
CHAPTER FOUR
Psychoanalytic Theory
4.0 INTRODUCTION
Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis, which he says is “the name (1) of a procedure
for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a
method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection
of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into
a new scientific discipline.”1 In addition to being “a procedure,” “a method,” and “a collection,” it
is also “a theory”—psychoanalytic theory. Freud’s theory has become one of the most celebrated
and controversial of the twentieth century. Moreover, psychoanalytic theory has had a broad and
deep influence on many different areas of twentieth-century literary and cultural theory.
“The whole of psychoanalytic theory,” writes Freud, “is in fact built up on the perception of the
resistance exerted by the patient when we try to make him conscious of his unconscious.”2 This
resistance exerted by the patient occurs in a form of psychological analysis which “aims at laying
bare the complexes which have been repressed as a result of the painful feelings associated with
them, and which produce signs of resistance when there is an attempt to bring them into
consciousness.”3 Whereas Shklovsky’s notion of laying bare is one wherein the novelist explicitly
makes reference to the structuring technique of their novel, Freud’s notion is one wherein the
analyst aims to “lift the veil of amnesia which hides the earliest years of childhood and to bring to
conscious memory the manifestations of early infantile sexual life which are contained in them.”4
Though not the same notion, both notions share the aim of “lifting the veil” which respectively
shrouds the literary text and the human psyche, that is, the aim of revealing what is hidden. The
complexes, fears, and anxieties that are repressed in the unconscious identified by Freud demarcate
the conceptual field of psychoanalytic theory.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory provides an account of the human psyche that he developed in the
course of his practice as a medical psychologist. As a practicing psychological therapist, Freud
found it necessary to develop a hypothesis about human nature in terms of which he could conduct
his therapy. He settled upon psychoanalysis after rejecting both hypnosis and hysteria (or, seduction
theory) as methods of therapeutic practice. Hypnosis was rejected because he found that what
1
Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), in Collected Papers, Volume 5, Miscellaneous Papers, 1888–1938, ed. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 107.
2
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1965), 68.
3
Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law” (1906), in Collected Papers, Volume 2,
trans. Joan Rivière (London: Hogarth Press, 1948), 22; my emphasis.
4
Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 28.
109
people say in a hypnoid state, that is “dream-like states of consciousness with diminished capacity
for association,”5 provided less information about their unconscious than what they said to the
analyst without suggestion. Hysteria, that is, the position that all neuroses are the product of
childhood sexual abuse, was rejected when he came to the conclusion that many of the accounts
told to him by his patients were not true. Of the latter rejection, though, it has been argued that just
the opposite was the case: namely, that Freud gave up on seduction theory not because what his
patients were telling him was not true, but because it was true. By covering up his patient’s abuse,
the argument goes, he was able to maintain the credibility of his theory and protect his medical
practice.6
As Freud saw it, psychoanalysis was a contribution to the science of psychology, which might be
traced backward to 1590, when Rudolf Goclenius introduced the term “psychology” for “the
science of the soul” in his eponymously titled book—and then forward to 1879, when Wilhelm
Wundt established the first experimental laboratory of psychology. The contribution of
psychoanalysis—“a depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious”—to science, according to
Freud, “consists precisely in having extended research to the region of the mind,”7 extensions that
were made possible by identifying the nature and function of the unconscious.
Generations of psychoanalysts and psychologists would either take up Freud’s theory or use it as
a springboard for their own theories. This group includes Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm,
Karen Horney, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Wilhelm Reich. In this
chapter, we will take up the thought of Lacan, who, from the perspective of literary and cultural
theory, has become one of the most important interpreters of Freud—and whose work has in many
ways eclipsed in contemporary impact that of the founder. But there is also Kristeva (5.2), who, in
additional to being a psychoanalyst, is also a major poststructuralist philosopher, who will be taken
up later.
But in addition to influencing the work of psychoanalysts and psychologists, Freud was also an
important influence on the hermeneutics of Ricoeur, the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, and the
Marxisms of Adorno, Althusser, Marcuse, and Sartre. In addition, his impact can be found in the
work of literary and cultural theorists ranging from the performance theory of Judith Butler (7.3)
and the feminist theory of Luce Irigaray (6.5) to the poststructuralisms of Jacques Derrida (5.1) and
Jean-François Lyotard (5.3).
In this chapter, in addition to Lacan, who stated that the purpose of his work was to “return to
Freud,” though in applying Saussurean linguistics to an understanding of the unconscious took
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory in a radically different direction, we will also take up the work of
Slavoj Žižek, who was in turn greatly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis. Like Kristeva, Žižek
is also a psychoanalyst, but his work is also noteworthy for his commitment to Marxism. Žižek, the
most high-profile and popular Marxist philosopher in the world, is a prolific writer and wide-
ranging thinker. In many ways, his work epitomizes the popular potential of psychoanalytic
5
Sigmund Freud, “The Defence Neuro-Psychoses” (1894), in Collected Papers, Volume 1, trans. Joan Rivière (London:
Hogarth Press, 1948), 60.
6
See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1984).
7
Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 158.
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY 111
criticism, that is, the application of psychoanalytic theory to the understanding of literary and
cultural texts (including film), to reach a mass audience.
Prior to Žižek, however, this distinction was perhaps held by the recently-deceased literary critic,
Harold Bloom, whose Freudian-based literary criticism and theory of literary influence is spread
throughout his more than fifty books of literary criticism and appreciation as well as hundreds of
anthologies on literary and philosophical works and figures he constructed with Chelsea House
publishing. While the uses made of psychoanalytic theory by Bloom and Žižek could not be more
different, the wide audiences that they have reached is perhaps similar in number, but not
international range: Bloom’s primary reach is in the English-speaking world, particularly the US,
whereas Žižek’s is the entire world.
If Žižek is the most prominent proponent of psychoanalytic theory in the world, then perhaps
Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze are its most prominent opponents—or are they? While Guattari
and Deleuze follow psychoanalytic theory by offering that all texts are rehearsals of unconscious
fantasies, they regard these texts as machines that perform psychic work. Guattari, like Žižek (and
Kristeva), is also a psychoanalyst. However, his work is more akin to the so-called anti-psychiatry
of David Cooper, R. D. Laing, Michel Foucault (9.1), and others, than to the psychoanalysis of
Freud and Lacan. Described as schizoanalysis, Guattari sought to reinvent both Freudian and
Lacanian psychoanalysis. He sought out Deleuze, who was by then an influential philosopher in his
own right, in the summer of 1969. The two agreed to work together to rethink the work of both
Freud and Marx in view of the events of May 1968. The result was schizoanalysis and its core
concept of the desiring-machine, a very different approach to psychoanalytic theory from the ones
articulated by Freud and Lacan.
In sum, psychoanalytic theory is a specific contribution to the science of psychology, whose
history pre-dates by many centuries the work of Freud. Moreover, psychology is a field with many
different theories about the nature and function of the human psyche. Some of those theories have
found and continue to find their way into literary and cultural theory. Anti-psychiatry, a term
coined by Cooper in 1967, is the view that psychiatric treatment is often more damaging than
helpful to patients. A movement that was popular in the 1960s, anti-psychiatry counts Foucault,
one of the most important theorists of the second half of the twentieth century, as one of its
proponents. There is also more recently the development of positive psychology and happiness
studies, two fields that have been working to shift the focus of psychology from mental illness to
emotional wellbeing. Martin Seligman’s presidential address to the American Psychological
Association in 1998 is the widely accepted origin of positive psychology, in which he called on
professional psychologists to emphasize wellbeing instead of mental illness. Specifically, Seligman
encouraged his colleagues “to shift the focus in psychology from illness, misery, and pessimism to
well-being, happiness, and optimism.”8 Whereas work in this area has been the subject of blistering
criticism of psychoanalytic theorists such as Žižek, when paired with other areas of literary and
cultural theory, for example, cognitive criticism (12.4), affect studies (13.0), and presentism (12.5),
it becomes a far more productive form of psychology for utilization in contemporary literary and
cultural theory. To be sure, while psychoanalytic criticism is not the only form of psychological
Daniel Horowitz, Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement that Aspired to Transform America (New York: Oxford
8
University Press, 2018), 18.

criticism, it has been the dominant form of psychological criticism of literary and cultural texts in
the twentieth century.
4.1 SIGMUND FREUD

In 1922, Freud asserted that the “assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the
recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, [and] the appreciation of the importance of
sexuality and of the Oedipus complex” are “the principal subject-matter of psycho-analysis and the
foundations of its theory.”9 “No one who cannot accept them all,” he states, “should count himself
a psycho-analyst.”10
For over a ten-year period, Freud was the sole representative of psychoanalytic theory, with
these principles as its “cornerstone.” However, in 1911 and 1913 two divergent movements in
psychoanalytic theory took place: one direction, headed by Carl Jung, “divested the Oedipus
complex of its real significance by giving it only a symbolic value, and in practice neglected the
uncovering of the forgotten and . . . ‘prehistoric’ period of childhood”; the other direction, led by
Alfred Adler, while reproducing many factors from psychoanalysis under other names, nevertheless
“turned away from the unconscious and the sexual instincts, and endeavored to trace back the
development of character and of the neuroses to the ‘will to power,’ which by means of
overcompensation strives to check the dangers arising from ‘organ inferiority.’ ”11 Moreover, since
the theoretical divergences of Jung and Adler, many others followed. In short, psychoanalytic
theory represents a diverse body of work wherein even some of the core tenets of its founder—the
Oedipus complex, the unconscious, and sexual instincts—were altered or rejected by his early
colleagues.
But the practice of adding and subtracting theoretical procedures, methods, and notions was also
one that led Freud to both the establishment of psychoanalytic theory and to continuously refine it
over the course of his life. Intrigued by earlier work on hysteria (viz., paralyses, faints, deliriums,
spells, etc.) using hypnosis by Josef Breuer, Freud convinced him to take it up again after a ten-year
hiatus. Their joint studies in this area, published as Studies in Hysteria (1895), yielded two important
results: “first, that hysterical symptoms have sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal
mental acts; and secondly, that the uncovering of thus unknown meaning is accompanied by the
removal of the symptoms.”12 Freud’s early collaboration with Breuer foregrounded the factor of
affect, which he defines as “pertaining to the feeling bases of emotion.”13 “[H]ysterical symptoms,”
writes Freud, “came into existence when a mental process with a heavy charge of affect was in any
way prevented from equalizing that charge by passing along the normal paths leading to
consciousness and movement.”14 With treatment, however, “ ‘catharsis’ came about when the path
to consciousness was opened and there was a normal discharge of affect.”15 Nevertheless, while
Breuer contended that the cathartic treatment of patients was only possible through hypnosis,
9
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 122.
10
11
Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 123–4.
12
13
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Knopf, 1939), 217.
14
15
Freud disagreed and abandoned hypnosis as a technique. He found that free association of
unhypnotized patients provided all the material needed to “find the path leading to what had been
forgotten or warded off.”16
The transition in technique from hypnosis to free association “altered the picture of the treatment
so greatly, brought the physician into such a new relation to the patient and produced so many
surprising results that it seemed justifiable to distinguish the procedure from the cathartic method
by giving it a new name”17—psycho-analysis. Freud regarded his new technique, psychoanalysis, as
“an art of interpretation,”18 a description that connects psychoanalysis to the traditions of
hermeneutics in the same way that the early technique of catharsis connects it to the thought of
Aristotle. The technique was dubbed a
triumph for the interpretive art of psychoanalysis when it succeeded in demonstrating that
certain common mental acts of normal people, for which no one had hitherto attempted to put
forward a psychological explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of
neurotics: that is to say, they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject but which could
easily be discovered by analytic means. The phenomena in question were such events as the
temporary forgetting of familiar words and names, forgetting to carry out prescribed tasks,
everyday slips of the tongue and of the pen, misreadings, losses and mislayings of objects, certain
mistakes, instances of apparently accidental self-injury, and finally habitual movements carried
out seemingly without intention or in play, tunes hummed “thoughtlessly,” and so on.19
These parapraxes (which are also called Freudian slips) and chance actions are a means of uncovering
the unconscious. However, for Freud, they are of secondary importance compared to “the
immeasurably more important interpretation of [free] associations,”20 which became even more
important when psychoanalysis was applied to dreams.
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, which was first published in 1899, demonstrates that “the
greater and better part of what we know about the processes in the unconscious mind is derived
from the interpretation of dreams.”21 The technique of free association when applied to our own
dreams or to those of a patient in analysis results in two types of content: manifest dream-content,
which is just the recollected dream; and latent dream-thoughts, which are the “residues of the
[previous] day,”22 discovered by interpretation. “By the operation of the dream-work (to which it
would be quite incorrect to ascribe any ‘creative’ character) the latent dream-thoughts are condensed
in a remarkable way,”23 contends Freud. Namely, “they are distorted by the displacement of psychical
intensities, they are arranged with a view of being represented in visual pictures; and besides all of
this, before the manifest dream is arrived at, they are submitted to a process of secondary elaboration
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
which seeks to give the new product something in the nature of sense and coherence.”24 The dual
concepts of condensation and displacement would come to be utilized by a number of literary and
cultural theorists, including, most significantly, Lacan (4.2) in his theory of metaphor and metonymy,
and Kristeva in her dialectical logic of contradiction (5.2).
The motive for the formations of dreams comes from “an unconscious impulse, repressed during
the day, with which the day’s residues have been able to establish contact and which contrived to
make a wish-fulfillment for itself out of the material of the latent thoughts.”25 Every dream is the
fulfillment of both a wish on the part of the unconscious and the wish to sleep.
If we disregard the unconscious contribution to the formation of the dream and limit the dream
to its latent thoughts, it can represent anything with which waking life has been concerned—a
reflection, a warning, an intention, a preparation for the immediate future or . . . the satisfaction
of an unfulfilled wish. The unrecognizability, strangeness and absurdity of the manifest dream
are partly the result of the translation of the thoughts into a different, so to say archaic, method
of expression, but partly the effect of a restrictive, critically disapproving agency in the mind,
which does not entirely cease to function during sleep. It is plausible to suppose that the “dream-
censorship,” which we regard as being responsible in the first instance for the distortion of the
dream-thoughts into the manifest dream, is a manifestation of the same mental forces which
during the day-time had held back or repressed the unconscious wishful impulse.26
Thus, dreams on this model are a compromise-formation resulting from a struggle between an
unconscious trend toward wish-fulfillment and a disapproving and repressive trend. It should also
be noted that the dream-work also utilizes dream-symbols that are analogous to folklore and
mythology, and that these dream-symbols have to be translated by the analyst.
By Freud’s account, he rejected the position that all neuroses are the product of childhood sexual
abuse (or seduction) because the accounts from his patients all “assumed a uniform character and
it became inevitable to bow before the evidence and recognize that at the root of the formation of
every symptom there were to be found traumatic [but not necessarily sexually abusive] experiences
from early sexual life.”27 The rejection of hysteria (or seduction theory) led him to infer that
“neuroses in general are an expression of disturbances in sexual life, [with] the so-called actual-
neuroses being the consequences (by chemical agency) of contemporary injuries and the psycho-
neuroses the consequences (by psychical modification) of bygone injuries to a biological function
which had hitherto been gravely neglected by science.”28 As Freud writes, the result of the rejection
of hysteria was that “sexual trauma stepped into the place of ordinary trauma,” with the latter
owing its significance to “an associative or symbolic connection with the former.”29 Nevertheless,
Freud’s formative contributions in this area were—and still are—met with, in his words, “tenacious
24
25
26
27
28
29
skepticism” and “embittered resistance.”30 The areas of contemporary literary and cultural theory
where this resistance is most in evidence are feminist theory (6.0), LGBTQ+ theory (7.0), and
affect studies (13.0).
Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality would serve as his account of the traumatic experiences
from early sexual life. However, for Freud, these traumatic experiences are standard aspects of the
development of the libido, that is, the sexual instinct, which is made up of component instincts
sourced to various organs of the body. Freud proposes three phases for the development of the
libido: the oral phase, which is a pre-genital one, focuses on the desire to use one’s lips and mouth;
the sadistic-anal phase, which is also a pre-genital one, is one “in which the anal zone and the
component instinct of sadism [that is, obtaining sexual pleasure through the infliction of suffering]
are particularly prominent,” and “the difference between the sexes is represented by the difference
between active and passive”;31 and the phallic phase, where there is a “primacy of the genital
zones,”32 and “in which for both sexes the male organ (and what corresponds to it in girls) attains
an importance which can no longer be overlooked.”33 During the oral stage,
the oral component instinct finds satisfaction by attaching itself to the sating of the desire for
nourishment; and its object is the mother’s breast. It then detaches itself, becomes independent
and at the same time auto-erotic, that is, it finds an object in the child’s own body. Others of the
component instincts also start by being auto-erotic and are not until later diverted on an external
object. It is a particularly important fact that the component instincts belonging to the genital
zone habitually pass through a period of intense auto-erotic satisfaction. The component instincts
are not all equally serviceable to the final genital organization of the libido; some of them (for
instance, the anal components) are consequently left aside and suppressed, or undergo
complicated transformations.34
In the early years of the childhood of boys, which is usually between two and five, sexual impulses
converge on the mother as an object. This choice of an object, coupled with hostility toward
another object, the father, is the basic content of the Oedipus complex, which, for Freud, “is of the
greatest importance in determining the final shape of his [that is, the boy’s] erotic life.”35 And, if
this were not enough, “the beginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus
complex” and “the nucleus of all neuroses as far as our present knowledge of them goes is [also this]
complex.”36 Freud describes the Oedipus complex as one
in which he desires his mother and would like to get rid of his father as being a rival, [and
which] develops naturally from the phase of his phallic sexuality. The threat of castration compels
30
31
32
33
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (1933), in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 98–9.
34
35
36
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), trans. A. A.
Brill (New York: Vintage, 1946), 202.
him, however, to give up that attitude. Under the impression of the danger of losing his penis,
the Oedipus complex is abandoned, repressed and, in most normal cases, entirely destroyed, and
a severe super-ego is set up as its heir.37
For Freud, the role of castration in the Oedipus complex, as noted above, is also linked to Sophocles’
tragedy. Freud says that “the blinding with which Oedipus punished himself after discovery of his
crime is, by the evidence of dreams, a symbolic substitute for castration.”38
It is also worth noting that the Oedipus complex is not just reserved for boys. It also occurs in
girls; however it “is almost the opposite” in girls to what it is in boys. Writes Freud,
The castration complex prepares for the Oedipus complex instead of destroying it; the girl is
driven out of her attachment to her mother through the influence of her envy for the penis and
she enters the Oedipus situation as though into a haven of refuge. In the absence of fear of
castration the chief motive is lacking which leads boys to surmount the Oedipus complex. Girls
remain in it for an indeterminate length of time; they demolish it late and, even so, incompletely.
In these circumstances the formation of the super-ego must suffer; it cannot attain the strength
and independence which give it its cultural significance, and feminists are not pleased when we
point out to them the effects of this factor upon the average feminine character.39
For Freud, these Oedipus complexes (of which the female Oedipus complex is also called the
Electra Complex)40 mark the first time that “the differences between the sexes find psychological
expression.”41
According to Freud, in the course of psychoanalytic treatment,
a special emotional relation is regularly formed between the patient and the physician. This goes
far beyond rational limits. It varies between the most affectionate devotion and the most obstinate
enmity and derives all of its characteristics from earlier erotic attitudes of the patient’s which
have become unconscious.42
Freud calls this emotional relation transference, and says it serves as additional proof “that the
motive forces behind the formation of neurotic symptoms are of a sexual nature.”43
One of the central distinctions in Freudian psychoanalysis, as already noted, is the that between
conscious and unconscious. However, there is also a third distinction: preconscious. The preconscious
is that which is “latent, which is unconscious only descriptively, not in the dynamic sense,” whereas
“we restrict the term unconscious to the dynamically unconscious repressed; so that now we have
three terms, conscious (Cs), preconscious (Pcs), and unconscious (Ucs), whose sense is no longer
37
Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” (1933), in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 129.
38
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), 92, n. 11.
39
Freud, “Femininity,” 129.
40
Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 99.
41
Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 88–9.
42
43
purely descriptive.”44 However, this tripartite division would become the more common one, that
is, the “new topography,” the ego, the id, and the superego. Freud says that the ego controls voluntary
movement and that its task is self-preservation. It is “principally determined by the individual’s own
experience, that is to say by accidental and current events.”45 He describes it as being developed out
of the “cortical layer”46 of the id, which is the great reservoir of the libido and the “core of our
being.”47 The id, which has no direct relationship with the external world, only obeys one principle,
the pleasure principle. The ego seeks to distinguish itself from the id through a variety of forms of
repression. “The sole quality that rules in the id is that of being unconscious,”48 comments Freud.
“Id and unconscious are as intimately united as ego and preconscious; indeed, the former connection
is even more exclusive.”49 Finally, the superego is “the heir to the Oedipus complex and only arises
after that complex has been disposed of.”50 It arises from an identification with the father and is
“the successor and representative of the parents (and educators) who superintended the actions of
the individual in his first years of life; it perpetuates their functions almost without change.”51 In
sum, the superego is “the self-criticizing part of the mind out of which the conscious develops.”52
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was first published in 1920, Freud introduces the death
instinct: “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for
internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the goal
of all life is death,’ and, looking backwards, that ‘what was inanimate existed before what is
living.’ ”53 He would later formally link the “love instinct” (Eros) to the “death instinct” (Thanatos).
Together, they are the only basic instincts. “The aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish
even greater unities and to preserve them thus—in short, to bind together; the aim of the second,
on the contrary, is to undo connections and so to destroy things.”54 For Freud, “the final aim of the
destructive instinct is to reduce living things to an inorganic state.”55 Along with these two primal
forces is the “pleasure principle,” which Freud describes as “a tendency operating in the service of
a function whose business it is to free the mental apparatus from excitation or to keep the amount
of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible.”56 As to whether the pleasure principle
“requires a reduction, or perhaps ultimately the extinction, of the tension of the instinctual needs
(that is, a state of Nirvana) leads to problems that are still unexamined in the relations between the
pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct.”57
44
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), ed. James Strachey, trans. Joan Rivière (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 5.
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 184.
52
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 218.
53
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1950), 50.
54
55
56
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 86.
57
4.2 JACQUES LACAN

“If psycho-analysis is to be constituted as the science of the unconscious,” observes Lacan, “one
must set out from the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language.”58 The context for
this comment was a seminar series from 1964 on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.
It would be the eleventh annual seminar he gave in Paris from 1952 to 1980, and he thanks his
friend, Lévi-Strauss, who he is “delighted to see here today and who knows how precious for me
this evidence of his interest in my work is—in work that has developed in parallel with his own.”59
This expression of gratitude is both a public acknowledgment of the role of structuralism in the
development of his psychoanalytic theory, as Lévi-Strauss is regarded as its originator, and a sign of
one of the major divergences of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory from that of Freud, its originator,
whose scientific models were in the life sciences, that is, the study of living organisms and life
processes, rather than linguistic science.
To many professional psychoanalysts, Lacan’s version of psychoanalytic theory was not only
unorthodox but heretical to the doctrines of its major professional organizations. So much so that
in 1953, Lacan and his followers were expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association
for what were termed deviant practices. Nevertheless, for the next decade or so, Lacan engaged in
a project that might be called the “return to Freud,” where he claims that the discoveries he made
regarding structure and language with respect to the unconscious were actually discoveries made by
Freud, who did not have access to the linguistic theory of Saussure or the structuralism of Lévi-
Strauss. While theoretically it might be argued that Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory is only possible
against the backdrop of the discoveries of Freud, his clinical practices deviated enough from
professional norms that in 1963—after two years of negotiations with representatives of the
International Psychoanalytical Association—he was stricken from the list of training analysts of the
Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). Stripped of the right to train students, Lacan was then
obliged to break with the SFP, which itself was dissolved in 1965. The resources and membership
of the SFP was then split between the two new bodies, the Association Psychanalytique de France
and the École Freudienne de Paris, founded by Lacan. The long and short of this is that while
the concepts he lectured on in 1964—the unconscious, repetition, transference, and drive—had the
same names as some of Freud’s major concepts, Lacan’s approach to them (and most others in the
Freudian lexicon) was very different. Still, as Jameson put it, “Lacan’s work must be read as
presupposing the entire content of classical Freudianism, otherwise it would simply be another
philosophy or intellectual system.”60 “The linguistic materials are not intended,” continues Jameson,
“to be substituted for the sexual ones; rather we must understand [Lacan’s work] as an attempt to
create mediations between libidinal analysis and the linguistic categories, to provide, in other
words, a transcoding scheme that allows us to speak of both within a common conceptual
framework.”61
58
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1973), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 203.
59
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 2.
60
Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977; revised 1988), in The Jameson Reader, eds. Michael Hardt
and Kathi Weeks (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 96.
61
Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” 96–7.
One of the central differences between Lacan and Freud are their approaches to psychosexual
development. For Lacan, psychosexual development involves the subject’s entry into language and
emergence into consciousness. At the earliest stage of this development, which Lacan calls the
Imaginary Order, there is no distinction for the infant between self and Other. The infant, who is
no older than six months of age at this point, is a chaotic mix of feelings, images, perceptions, and
needs. At this stage, the infant identifies itself with its surroundings and its biological dependence
on the mother, who meets its biological and instinctual needs. The infant at this stage also starts to
become fragmented into erogenous zones—specifically, mouth, anus, penis, and vagina—because of
the attention given by the mother to these organs of the body. Because there is no boundary between
self and Other, everything that is experienced by the infant is pleasurable. This earliest stage of
existence in the Imaginary Order is when the subject is closest to the pure materiality of experience,
or what Lacan will term the Real. The Imaginary Order exists in the preverbal, that is, it exists
before the entry of the subject into speech and language.
However, between six and eighteen months of age the infant becomes able to recognize “his own
image in a mirror.”62 Whereas a monkey at the same age can also recognize their image in a mirror,
they quickly tire of the experience. Infants, however, react differently. “Unable as yet to walk, or
even to stand up,” observes Lacan, “and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial
. . . he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and,
fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, bring back
an instantaneous aspect of the image.”63 Termed by Lacan as the mirror stage, it is “an identification,
in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the
subject when he assumes an image—whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently
indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.”64 The child’s identification with
its own image, what Lacan calls the Ideal-I, is a primordial form of identification that “discloses
libidinal dynamism,” one that occurs “before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with
the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.”65 According
to Lacan, the mirror stage “situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a
fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone.”66 The mirror
stage, which also exists before the entry of the subject into speech and language, creates an ideal
version of the self that will later come to play a role in the narcissistic phantasies of the subject. The
formation of the “Ideal-I” in the mirror stage, which is a bounded and simplified self, contrasts
greatly with the unbounded and chaotic world of the infant. Also, the gaze of the mirror stage will
come to refer to the uncanny sense that the object of our eye’s look is somehow looking back at us.
Lacan will associate the affect of this as akin to that of the castration complex. While we may
believe that we are in control of the eye’s look, Lacan shows that this is not the case because pure
materiality of experience, or what Lacan will term the Real, always exceeds the structures of the
next stage of development after the Imaginary Order, that is, the Symbolic Order.
62
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (1949), in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan
63
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 2; my emphasis.
64
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 2; my emphasis.
65
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 2.
66
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 2.
For Lacan, the Symbolic Order emerges with the acquisition of language. The infant, who is
between eighteen months and four years of age, interacts with the world through various forms of
representation and structures of meaning characterized by the rules and constructs of language
acquisition. It is here that the system of language described by Saussure’s linguistics begins to play
a central role in the development of the infant. For example, in Saussure’s system, father only
makes sense through an internal linguistic logic of difference, that is, father defined with or against
other terms in the system, including mother, me, and law. Lacan identifies the Symbolic Order with
the Law of the Father. However, because the entire linguistic system of Saussure that Lacan draws
upon makes no reference to a reality outside of the system, father in the Symbolic Order has no
relationship to a physical father. Rather, father is part of a network of signifiers that include mother,
phallus, and law.
The subject that comes about in the Symbolic Order is a fragmented self that desires the undivided
self of the Imaginary Order but can never achieve again this wholeness. Rather, what the subject is
left with are only illusory representations of wholeness in others that the subject mistakes for the
ultimate Other. The other with a small “o” here is what Lacan terms the object petit a, whereas the
Other with a big “O” names the social order, the symbolic realm where meaning happens. For
Lacan, the Other is deeply implicated in the production of my desire. As Žižek describes Lacan’s
view, “the problem with human desire is that . . . it is always ‘desire of the Other’ in all the senses
of the term: desire for the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what
the Other desires.”67 The Other is the unattainable source of desire for wholeness, which is a kind
of transcendental signifier for the manifestation of desire. The Other is also within the realm of the
inarticulable Real and underlies the limitations of representation. However, as there is no “Other
of the Other,” there is no final guarantee of the Symbolic Order. There are just contingent and
fragile points of stability. This “lack” in the Other allows the Symbolic Order to function and offers
a way of thinking an outside or beyond the Symbolic Order. Ideology works by covering over this
“lack” in the Other by phantasmatically projecting the possibility of wholeness. So, whereas the
Other is the ultimate unattainable desire, the object petit a is the object on which the subject
projects their desire—one that is characterized as the unattainable object of desire.
Finally, there is the order of the Real that is only accessible to us in fleeting moments of joy and
terror he terms jouissance—a notion that is very difficult to capture descriptively. Jouissance is the
only possible way out of subjectivity, language, and the Symbolic Order of the phallus. Writes Lacan
commentator Néstor Braunstein, “If desire is fundamentally lack, lack in being, jouissance is
positivity, it is a ‘something’ lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure.”68 “ It is a plus,”
he continues, “a sensation that is beyond pleasure.”69 Jouissance is a sort of illusion that affords an
out-of-language experience, or as some contend, just a case of the Imaginary mistaking the Symbolic
for the Real.
The order of the Real is beyond both the self-projection of the Imaginary Order and the
representation and structure of the Symbolic Order. The Real is the order of the unattainable
67
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 87.
68
Néstor Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-
Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 104.
69
Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” 104.
materiality of existence and primal needs—one that “resists symbolization absolutely.” Lacan
locates the “high point” of “the feeling of the real . . . in the pressing manifestation of an unreal,
hallucinatory reality.”70 As such, human existence is distanced from the order of the Real, and for
Lacan can be located somewhere between the desire for the self of the Imaginary Order and the
fragmented self of the Symbolic Order.
In Lacan, the Oedipus complex is mapped onto the acquisition of language. The phallus signifies
all that the subject loses with the acquisition of language. It is neither an organ of the body, an
object, or a fantasy. It signifies the power, authority, and rationality associated with the Name-of-the
Father, the fundamental and transcendental signifier that permits signification to proceed normally.
Name-of-the Father both confers identity on human subjects and signifies the “no” of the incest
taboo, that is, the Oedipal prohibition.71 It is analogous to the knowledge and laws that control our
lives. As such, Lacan reinterprets the tragedy of Oedipus to show the conflict between happiness
and knowledge:
[Oedipus] doesn’t know that in achieving happiness, both conjugal happiness and that of his job
as king, of being the guide to the happiness of the state, he is sleeping with his mother. One
might therefore ask what the treatment he inflicts on himself means. Which treatment? He gives
up the very thing that captivated him. In fact, he has been duped, tricked by reason of the fact
that he achieved happiness. Beyond the sphere of the service of good and in spite of the complete
success of this service, he enters into the zone in which he pursues his desire.72
For Lacan, the tragedy of Oedipus is not the desire for his mother, but rather his desire to know.
Happiness then leads Oedipus to pursue the desire to know to its end, which then leaves him “to
deal with the consequence of that desire that led him to go beyond the limit, namely the desire to
know.”73 “He has learned,” comments Lacan, “and still wants to learn something more.”74
Ultimately, for Lacan, “in a sense Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex.”75 “He simply
killed a man,” continues Lacan, “whom he didn’t know was his father.”76
Acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father by the male subject entails knowledge of his systemic
relation to others and the denial of sexual needs. However, the socialization of females differs from
males for Lacan. Whereas the male subject experiences the castration complex, whereby he gives
up the plenitude of bodily drives in order to access the symbolic power of the phallus, the female
subject does not have the same experience. The female subject is both more full than the male
because she does not fully experience the loss of the penis, and less full than the male because she
70
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
John Forester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 66.
71
See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan III: The Psychoses, 1955–56, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New
York: Routledge, 1992).
72
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter
73
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 305.
74
75
76
can never fully access the phallus. While both the male and female subjects are defined by a lack, it
is different for each.
For Lacan, the role of women is to serve as object petit a through which man constitutes himself
in the Other. Still, none of this means that Lacan regards women as inferior. Rather, his position is
that they are subjected:
The fact that the woman is thus bound up in an order of exchange in which she is object is really
what accounts for the fundamentally conflictual character, I wouldn’t say without remedy, of her
position—the symbolic order literally subdues her, transcends her . . . For her, there’s something
insurmountable, let us say unacceptable, in the fact of being placed in the position of an object
in the symbolic order, to which, on the other hand, she is entirely subjected no less than the
man. It is indeed because she has a relation of the second degree to this symbolic order that
the god is embodied in man or man in the god, except for conflict, of course, there is always
conflict.77
Lacan’s commentary on feminine sexuality is intended to be a contribution to a field ignored by

Freud, who Lacan says, “argues that there is no libido other than masculine.”78 At the foundation
of his view on feminine sexuality is the belief that sexual difference is assigned according to whether
the subject possesses a phallus. Thus, for Lacan, writes Jacqueline Rose, “this means not that
anatomical difference is sexual difference (the one as strictly deducible from the other), but that
anatomical difference comes to figure sexual difference, that is, it becomes the sole representative
of what that difference is allowed to be.”79
Finally, even though “the unconscious is structured like a language,” its signifier is not latent, but
is always manifest. In other words, the signifier or “letter” of the unconscious is always in plain
sight like the “purloined letter” of Edgar Allen Poe. However, because the signifier (S) is always in
plain sight, that which it signifies or creates in the act of signification—the signified (s)—is not. This
leads Lacan to propose the algorithm S/s, which places that which is signified below the signifier—a
reformulation of Saussure’s linguistic sign. For Lacan, the “topography” of the unconscious is
defined by this algorithm:
FIGURE 4: The signifier over the signified is Lacan’s algorithm for the topology of the unconscious.
Source: Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 149.
77
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis,
1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 262.
78
Jacques Lacan, Encore (1972–3); cited by Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction-II,” in Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne,
Feminine Sexuality, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 43.
79
Rose, “Introduction-II,” 42.
For Lacan, “this primordial distinction goes well beyond the debate over the arbitrariness of the
sign.”80 Lacan visually represents his formula with the classic (but faulty) diagram of Saussure’s
“tree”:
FIGURE 5: Lacan’s diagram of Saussure’s “tree.” Source: Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious
or Reason since Freud,” 151.
In addition, he provides another diagram of his formula:
FIGURE 6: Lacan’s diagram of how the signifier enters the signified. Source: Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter
in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 151.
Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” (1957), in Écrits, 149.
80
Here, in Figure 6, “we see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier concerned in
the experiment, that is, by doubling a noun through the mere juxtaposition of two terms whose
complementary meanings ought apparently to reinforce each other, a surprise is produced by an
unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning.”81 What the diagram shows is that there is no
direct exchange between signifier and signified, that is, “the illusion that the signifier answer to the
function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to answer for its existence in
the name of any signification whatever.”82 Additionally, it shows “how in fact the signifier enters the
signified, namely, in a form which, not being immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality.”83
If this is all seems too “contrived,” then Lacan asks us to consider “a memory of childhood”:84
A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a
compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station
platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. “Look,” says the brother, “we’re at
Ladies!”; “Idiot!” replies his sister, “Can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”85
For Lacan, “the rails in this story materialize the bar in the Saussurean algorithm”86 in that the boy
sees “Ladies” and the girl sees “Gentlemen.” “For these children,” comments Lacan, “Ladies and
Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent
wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same
country and neither can compromise on its own superiority with detracting from the glory of the
other.”87 For Lacan, this story and its diagram are sexuality, the phallus, and the unconscious as
language. It reveals how each sex is placed in a structure through language that they are unable to
see: “two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings” that “are
actually the same country.”88 None of this is latent, argues Lacan, it is all manifest—all in plain sight.
4.3 HAROLD BLOOM

Bloom argues that the task of the critic is to uncover the repressed influences of the author’s
predecessors. Even though these repressed influences are arrived at through a process that utilizes
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Bloom does not consider his approach to the criticism of poetry
“Freudian literary criticism.”89
To say that a poem’s true subject is its repression of the precursor poem is not to say that the later
poem reduces to the process of that repression. On a strict Freudian view, a good poem is a
sublimation, and not a repression. Like any work of substitution that replaces the gratification of
81
Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 151.
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 25.
prohibited instincts, the poem, as viewed by the Freudians, may contain antithetical effects but
not unintended or counterintended effects. In the Freudian valorization of sublimation, the
survival of those effects would be flaws in the poem. But poems are actually stronger when their
counterintended effects battle most incessantly against their overt intentions.90
For Freud, sublimation is the “process . . . through which the powerful excitations from individual
sources of sexuality are discharged and utilized in other spheres,”91 whereas the essence of repression
“lies simply in the function of rejecting and keeping something out of consciousness.”92 “Through
repression,” writes Freud, “the ego accomplishes the exclusion from consciousness of the idea
which was the carrier of an unwelcome impulse.”93 “Analysis frequently demonstrates,” continues
Freud, “that the idea has been retained as an unconscious formation.”94 Thus, for Bloom, the critic
must deal with repression in order to understand literature; that is, the task of the critic is to locate
the works of precursors that have been retained as unconscious formations.
Bloom uses repression as the center of his theory of literature instead of sublimation because he
believed that the latter concept had played itself out whereas the former was Freud’s new word and
vision. For Freud, sublimation was “the highest human achievement,” and one that “allies him to
Plato and to the entire moral traditions of both Judaism and Christianity,”95 comments Bloom.
Nevertheless, “[t]o equate emotional maturation with the discovery of acceptable substitutes may be
pragmatic wisdom, particularly in the realm of Eros, but this is not the wisdom of the strong poets.”96
For Bloom, if sublimation worked for strong poets, it would only place and organize the dead poet.
Repression, however, allows the dead poets to return and speak our most secret desires which we are
loathe to recognize except in new tropes, that is, figures of thought wherein words take on a meaning
other than the standard one. Thus, for Bloom, “the proper use of Freud, for the literary critic, is not
so to apply Freud (or even revise Freud) as to arrive at an Oedipal interpretation of poetic history.”97
This Oedipal interpretation regards poems as “defensive processes in constant change, which is
to say that poems themselves are acts of reading.”98 For Bloom, poems are not things, psyches,
renewable archetypes, or “architectonic units of balanced stresses,” and in studying these poems we
are not “studying the mind, nor the Unconscious, even if there is an unconscious.”99 Considering
that Freud believed that psychoanalytic theory is “built up on the perception of the resistance
exerted by the patient when we try to make him conscious of his unconscious,”100 Bloom’s latter
claim squarely puts his literary criticism in tension with psychoanalytic theory—similar to the way
that Freud’s work might be regarded in tension with biology.
90
Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 25.
91
Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905), trans. A. A. Brill (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 94.
92
Sigmund Freud, “Repression” (1915), Collected Papers, Volume 4, Papers on Metapsychology and Applied Psycho-Analysis,
trans. Joan Rivière (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 86.
93
Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety (1926), trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1936), 17.
94
Freud, The Problem of Anxiety, 17.
95
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 9.
96
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 9.
97
98
99
100
Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), 68.
What Bloom believes we are studying as literary critics who focus on repression is a “kind of
labor that has its own latent principles, principles that can be uncovered and then taught
systematically.”101 For Bloom, these principles reveal strong poems as “a dance of substitutions, a
constant breaking-of-the-vessels, as one limitation undoes a representation, only to be restituted in
its turn by a fresh representation.”102 “Every strong poem,” writes Bloom “has known implicitly
what Nietzsche taught us to know explicitly: that there is only interpretation, and that every
interpretation answers an earlier interpretation, and then must yield to a later one.”103 Along with
Freud, Nietzsche is the other “prime influence” on Bloom’s “theory of influence,” particularly his
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which Bloom says “is the profoundest study available to me of
the revisionary and ascetic strains in the aesthetic temperament.”104
For Bloom, repression is a primal struggle between a young “citizen of poetry,” which he calls an
ephebe105 (in ancient Greece, a young man of eighteen to twenty years undergoing military training),
and an old master, who is both a strong poet and a precursor. However, the primal scene of this
struggle does not take us back to the primal scene of the Oedipus complex, but rather to what he
calls the Scene of Instruction, “a six-phased scene that strong poems must will to overcome, by
repressing their own freedom into patterns of a revisionary misinterpretation.”106 Bloom’s Scene of
Instruction is described as follows:
a Primal Scene of Instruction [is] a model for the unavoidable imposition of influence. The
Scene—really a complete play, or process—has six stages through which the ephebe emerges:
election (seizure by the precursor’s power); covenant (a basic agreement of poetic vision between
precursor and ephebe); the choice of a rival inspiration (e.g., Wordsworth’s Nature vs. Milton’s
Muse); the self-presentation of the ephebe as a new incarnation of the “Poetical Character”; the
ephebe’s interpretation of the precursor; and the ephebe’s revision of the precursor. Each of
these stages then becomes a level of interpretation in the reading of the ephebe’s poem.107
This six-stage “birth” cycle of the strong poet—one that is analogous to the primal scene of
Oedipus—is repeated in each part of a six-part revisionary “life” cycle of the strong poet.
For Bloom, the six revisionary ratios that comprise the life cycle of the strong poet are: (1)
Clinamen, which is a poetic misreading that appears as a corrective movement in the poem implying
that “the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved,
precisely in the direction that the new poem moves”;108 (2) Tessera, which is completion and antithesis
wherein a “poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain
its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough”;109
(3) Kenosis, which is “a breaking-device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyches employ
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 27. This summary is attributed by Bloom to Thomas Frosch.
108
109
against repetition compulsions,” wherein the later poet, “apparently emptying himself of his own
afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet,
but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor’s poem-of-ebbing that the precursor is
emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems”;110 (4) Daemonization,
which is “a movement towards a personalized Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s
Sublime”;111 (5) Askesis, a movement of self-purgation that intends the attainment of a state of
solitude which is attained by yielding part of his own “human and imaginative endowment, so as to
separate himself from others, including the precursor”;112 and (6) Apophrades, or the return of the
dead, wherein the “later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude
that is almost solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first sight
we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded
apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios.”113
For Bloom, each of the six stages of the life-cycle movement (viz., the Clinamen–Tessera–
Kenosis–Daemonization–Askesis–Apophrades sequence) of the later poet is a multifaceted agon,
that is, an intellectual conflict or apparent competition of ideas, that Bloom’s Scene of Instruction
details. But while each poem can be seen as primarily either a Clinamen, Tessera, Kenosis,
Daemonization, Askesis, or Apophrades poem (as for example, in the case of T. S. Eliot, with “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” [1917] as a Clinamen poem, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”
[1920] as Tessera, The Waste Land [1922] as Kenosis, The Hollow Men [1925] as Daemonization,
Ash-Wednesday [1930] as Askesis, and Four Quartets [1935–42] as Apophrades), each poem as read
repeats the entire revisionary “life” cycle. The “wheel” mentioned above is a double one: the inner
wheel is the individual poem and the poet; and the outer wheel is the general life cycle.
After agon, most of the revisionary machinery goes away so that what is left is the basic revisionary
interplay between the returning tropes of the master poet and those of the would-be master such
that the master’s tropes appear as haunted by the would-be master’s revisionary variants. Bloom
compares the life cycle of the would-be-master poet to that of the blind Oedipus “on the path to
oracular godhood.”114 Comments Bloom, “the strong poets have followed [Oedipus] by transforming
their blindness towards their precursors into the revisionary insights of their own work.”115
Bloom’s position here is essentially a humanist one regarding how new poems originate from old
ones. The ephebe clears imaginative space through creative misreadings of strong poets of the past.
“It is only by repressing creative ‘freedom,’ through the initial [or primal] fixation of influence, that
a person can be reborn as a poet,” comments Bloom. “And,” he continues, “only by revising that
repression can a poet become and remain strong.”116 In short, only strong poets, that is, “major
figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death,”117 can
overcome the anxiety of influence. Lesser poets, for Bloom, merely “idealize.”118 “Poetry,
110
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14–15.
111
112
113
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 15–16; my emphasis.
114
115
116
117
118
revisionism, and repression verge upon melancholy identity,” concludes Bloom, “an identity that is
broken afresh by every new strong poem, and mended afresh by the same poem.”119
In claiming that poems are not things, Bloom is pushing back on the notion that a poem is an
organic whole, in the way, for example, that the New Criticism regarded them. Rather, he says that
they are “only words that refer to other words, and those words refer to still other words, and so on,
into the densely overpopulated world of literary language.”120 “A poem is not writing,” he continues,
“but rewriting, and though a strong poem is a fresh start, such a start is a starting-again.”121
While Bloom spent much of his career aiming to distinguish his work from the likes of Allen Tate,
Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren and the legacies of the New Criticism, his work has more in
common with it than the cultural and gender studies, and ideological criticism, that he often attacks.
His critical disagreements with T. S. Eliot, whose work is widely championed by the New Criticism,
center in part on Eliot’s “scorn for Emerson,” whom Bloom regards as the Ursuppe of American
literature: everything that is great about American literature stems back to Emerson—and everything
that is not so great about it ignores or rejects Emerson. Bloom views Eliot’s scorn for Emerson “so ill-
informed that some personal bias has to be noted in it”122 Though Eliot’s poetry “ravished” Bloom’s
ear when he was a “child,” his prose “still displeases [him].”123 The complexities of Bloom’s love–hate
relationship with Eliot serves as a thin line that distances his work from the New Criticism. Nevertheless,
with the passage of time, the joint devotion to the aestheticism of Bloom and the New Critics has
drawn their work closer together in the historical imagination of the critical tradition.
Bloom was one of the most well-read, original, and prolific critics of any generation. He was also
a literary industry who edited hundreds of anthologies for Chelsea House and who produced scores
of popular literary books over a ten year period in late twentieth- and early-twenty-first century,
with titles such as The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), How to Read and
Why (2000), Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (2001), and Genius: A
Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003)—until his death in 2019. In these works,
many written for a general audience, Bloom’s critical gift is reduced to pronouncements of
“greatness” or “canonicity,” distantly underwritten by his theory of influence. His work here in
defense of the literary tradition often put him at odds with other critics who sought to diversify the
canon along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
In both his literary criticism and his theory, however, Bloom steadfastly refused to bring in
considerations of intersectional issues (8.4) such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. This is only
mentioned here because Bloom frequently berated others for their socially and politically informed
criticism—criticism that since at least the mid-1970s brought a whole new perspective on the
literary canon. Bloom would have nothing of this “new” canon. Passing growls at political
correctness are commonplace in his writing (e.g., of Marianne Moore, “Some day she will remind
us also of what current cultural politics obscure: that any distinction between poetry written by
women or poetry by men is a mere polemic, unless it follows upon an initial distinction between
119
120
121
122
Harold Bloom, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, ed. David Mikics (New York: Library of
America, 2019), 213.
123
Bloom, The American Canon, 213.
good and bad poetry”).124 Plentiful too were ad hoc attacks on various forms of contemporary
literary theory (e.g., of Toni Morrison, who is described as “a self-proclaimed African American
Marxist and feminist”125 in whose work he “hear[s] a totalizing ideology,” but believes that “to read
in the service of any ideology is not to read at all”).126
Bloom’s lifelong model for his criticism is Samuel Johnson, who taught him “that criticism, as a
literary art, belongs to the ancient genre of wisdom writing.”127 “The deepest lesson,” he learned
from Johnson, “is that any authority of criticism as a literary genre must depend on the human
wisdom of the critic, not upon the wrongness or rightness of either theory or praxis.”128 Bloom also
believed, following Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” (1890), that “the highest criticism really is,
the record of one’s own soul.”129 For Bloom, just as for Wilde, this type of criticism is both “more
fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself,” and “more delightful than
philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real not vague.”130 But, by Wilde’s own
contention, the “highest criticism” is also merely “autobiography, as it deals not with events, but
with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with
the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.”131 Mix Johnson and Wilde along with
some Emerson, Ruskin, Pater, William Hazlitt, William James, and Kenneth Burke, and you have
Bloom’s self-professed form of criticism—criticism that ultimately is accountable only to him.
Bloom spent a lifetime in search of revelation through literature. As a type of secular rabbi, the
religion of literature took him on an inward journey through readings of the words of others to a
discovery of his own humanity. His literary criticism amply demonstrates that high literature can be
a religion that brings richness to individual lives, but the cost of it is turning your back on the
problems of society and the world. For Bloom, literature ends when its bewilderment ceases for him:
I must have been nine or ten when I first read Shakespeare. I went from Julius Caesar; which I
almost understood, on to Hamlet, where I was both fascinated and baffled. Hamlet still changes
for me each time I return to it. How can you come to the end of it? Dante’s Paradiso still defeats
me. Old age has not reconciled me to it. I am a Jew who evades normative Judaism. My religion
is the appreciation of high literature. Shakespeare is the summit. Revelation for me is Shakespeare
or nothing.132
“Criticism,” states Bloom, “is as much a series of metaphors for the acts of loving what we have read
as for the acts of reading themselves.”133 “I am an experiential and personalizing literary critic,” he
writes, “which certainly rouses up enmity, but I go on believing that poems matter only if we matter.”134
124
Bloom, The American Canon, 203–4.
125
126
127
Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 170.
128
Bloom, Possessed by Memory, 170.
129
Bloom, Possessed by Memory, epigram; Bloom citing Wilde.
130
131
132
Bloom, Possessed by Memory, 144.
133
134
4.4 FÉLIX GUATTARI AND GILLES DELEUZE

Guattari and Deleuze are independent thinkers who collaborated to rethink psychoanalytic theory
and Marxism in the long shadow of the events of May 1968. It was a period where various
discourses such as structuralism, feminism (6.0), Marxism, and psychoanalysis were interacting
both to understand why the revolutionary moment of 1968 had failed as well as to rethink
institutions such as the family, the state, and education. Their collaboration is one of the most
fruitful and influential ones in contemporary literary and cultural theory.
Guattari was a philosopher, political activist, and psychoanalyst with a clinical practice. He
trained under Lacan, and in 1969 became a member analyst who remained with the École Freudienne
de Paris founded by Lacan until its dissolution in 1980. However, his relationship to Lacan and the
École was ambivalent, as Guattari’s aim was to reinvent Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic
theory.
Deleuze studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and taught at a number of institutions including the
Sorbonne, the University of Lyons, and finally at the University of Paris VIII until his retirement in
1987. In the 1960s, and before he began his collaboration with Guattari, he published books on
Nietzsche (1962), Kant (1963), Proust (1964), Bergson (1966), and Spinoza (1968), in addition to
Masochism (1967), Difference and Repetition (1968), and The Logic of Sense (1969). A major
philosopher in his own right, Deleuze began his friendship with Guattari through an exchange of
letters in 1969. Though it was Guattari who first sought out Deleuze, it was Deleuze who initiated
their collaboration.135 Deleuze was attracted to Guattari’s aim to reinvent Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory and to his ideas about non-Oedipal sexuality among other things. Their first
book together, Anti-Oedipus (1972) “took shape first with the help of ‘long, disorderly letters’ and
then by meeting ‘for several days or weeks at a time’ ”—a process where “Deleuze saw Guattari as
the diamond miner and himself as the polisher.”136
In Anti-Oedipus, they offer an account of the relationship between psychoanalysis and capitalism,
which they call “schizoanalysis.”137 “The schizoanalytic argument is simple,” claim Deleuze and
Guattari,
desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement—desiring machines. The

order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and
social production. We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of
production, for having shunted it into representation. Far from showing the boldness of
psychoanalysis, this idea of unconscious representation marks from the outset its bankruptcy or
its abnegation: an unconscious that no longer produces, but is content to believe. The unconscious
believes in Oedipus, it believes in castration, in the law.138
135
Frida Beckman, Gilles Deleuze (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 48.
136
Beckman, Gilles Deleuze, 49.
137
See especially, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 273–382.
138
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 296.
So, what then becomes of Oedipus under schizoanalysis? Here Deleuze and Guattari are very clear:
Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction—a whole scouring of the
unconscious, a complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the
superego, guilt, the law, castration. It is not a matter of pious destructions, such as those
performed by psychoanalysis under the benevolent eye of the analyst. For these are Hegel-style
destructions, ways of conserving. How is it that the celebrated neutrality, and what psychoanalysis
calls—dares to call—the disappearance or the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, do not make
us burst into laughter?139
For Deleuze and Guattari,
we have been triangulated in Oedipus, and we will triangulate in it in turn. From the family to
the couple, from the couple to the family. In actuality, the benevolent neutrality of the analyst is
very limited: it ceased the instant one stops responding daddy-mommy. It ceases the instant one
introduces a little desiring-machine—the tape recorder—into the analyst’s office; it ceases as
soon as a flow is made to circulate that does not let itself be stopped by Oedipus, the mark of the
triangle.140
Thus, the connection between psychoanalysis and capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari is not merely
an ideological one. Rather,
it is infinitely closer, infinitely tighter; and that psychoanalysis depends directly on an economic
mechanism (whence its relations with money) through which the decoded flows of desire, as
taken up in the axiomatic of capitalism, must necessarily be reduced to a familial field where
the application of the axiomatic is carried out: Oedipus as the last word of capitalist consumption
sucking away at daddy-mommy, being blocked and triangulated on the couch; “So it’s . . .”141
Deleuze and Guattari challenge here the dominant themes of psychoanalytic theory. The psychoanalytic
concept of desire as lack is replaced by them with a new concept: desiring machines, which produce
intensities and flows of libido through systems. These intensities and flows spurn both the logic of
Freud’s Oedipus, wherein the mother launches both a complex and repression, and the Symbolic
Order of Lacan, the Law of the Father, wherein the primary motivation of desire is a lack.
However, for all of their ostensive anti-Oedipus, anti-Freud, and anti-Lacan positions, they
reinvent psychoanalytic theory by offering that all texts are rehearsals of unconscious fantasies. The
major difference for them is that they regard these texts as machines that perform psychic work.
For them, texts produce free-floating and impersonal intensities that are not anchored to stable,
autonomous subjectivity.
139
140
141
The late paintings of J. M. W. Turner (the same ones Ruskin described earlier as “corrupted
canvases”) are exemplary in this regard: whereas the paintings of Turner’s first period are “end-of-
the-world catastrophes, avalanches, and storms” and those of the second period reconstruct the
world through “archaisms having a modern function,”142 those of his third and final period are very
different. Write Deleuze and Guattari,
The canvas turns in on itself, it is pierced by a hole, a lake, a flame, a tornado, an explosion. The
themes of the preceding paintings are to be found again here, their meaning changed. The canvas
is truly broken, sundered by what penetrates it. All that remains is a background of gold and fog,
intense, intensive, traversed in depth by what has just sundered its breadth: the schiz [that is, the
split of schizophrenia]. Everything becomes mixed and confused, and it is here that the
breakthrough—not the breakdown—occurs.143
A similar thing occurs for Deleuze and Guattari in “strange” literature. In Anglo-American literature
this strange literature includes Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Henry Miller,
Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, “men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause
flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs.”144
The latter phrase is one they borrow from Antonin Artaud, but coin with a new meaning. For
Deleuze and Guattari, the body without organs is a multiplicity of unconscious differences in which
desire is constituted as an active process. The body without organs is defined by its power to be
affected or to affect various external relations. It is a body that is neither defined by its subject, its
object, or its parts, yet it is one that is nevertheless coherent and exists. The body without organs
“is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass.”145 “It has nothing
to do with phantasy,” claim Deleuze and Guattari, “there is nothing to interpret.”146 In brief, the
body without organs is the schizophrenic subject who because of their persecution by desire,
renounces it altogether and becomes a body without organs. Or, more precisely, desire is the body
without organs, a
[d]esire that stretches far: desiring one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate.
Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever
there is the constitution of a BwO [body without organs] under one relation or another.147
Deleuze and Guattari’s work on affect and the body will become a key contribution to the affect
studies (13.0) that will later come to the fore in literary and cultural theory.
When these “strange” Anglo-American writers “overcome a limit” and “shatter a wall, the
capitalist barrier,” they are said to be deterritorializing and reterritorializing the libidinal economy in
142
143
144
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 132–3; my emphasis.
145
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi
(London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 153.
146
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 153.
147
society. For Deleuze and Guattari, territorialization refers to the demarcation of social and cultural
spaces by principles of law and rationality, that is to say, the Symbolic order. The cultural, physical,
and biological world for them is comprised of strata, that is, layered regulatory systems. These strata
preserve unity and cancel out variations that arise as the products of experience. Still, potentials and
qualities of matter give rise to new systems and structures, which are said to overflow the strata. The
strata constitute the matter they order, but are not dependent on this matter. Additionally, these
strata have an abstract or virtual existence alongside the matter they affect, which Deleuze and
Guattari describe as territorialized, that is, embodied instances of abstract or virtual functions.
Deterritorialization occurs when differences exceed territorialized functions, and reterritorialization
occurs when old systems are reformed in new situations or where new systems are formed.
Whereas Plato believed that the world as it appears to us is but a reflection of an unchanging
ideal world, Deleuze and Guattari contend that there is no unchanging ideal world. But still, there
is an ideal world. Difference for them is that while the process of territorialization gives it unity, the
processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization subject it to change. Moreover, for Deleuze
and Guattari, while individuals and social institutions can deterritorialize and reterritorialize, there
are limits.
We see this explicitly noted, for example, in reference to the “strange” writers noted above—
writers who in spite of their efforts to overcome a limit, “of course . . . fail to complete the process
. . . [and] never cease failing to do so.”148 Deleuze and Guattari explain why by reference to
territorialities and fascism:
The neurotic impasse again closes—the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to
the native land—or else the perversion of exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol—or worse
still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through
the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage,
inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that
is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-
sense erected as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations. How poorly the problem
of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-optation of it by a
social order. People are co-opted, not works, which will always come to awake a sleeping youth,
and which never cease extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion
because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary machine with a field of production,
and the moment when the emitted sign breaks through this “form of the content” that was
attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier.149
For Deleuze and Guattari, while it is possible for the flows of desiring machines such as the strange
writers noted above and social institutions to create new forms of social control, one of the old
ones—fascism—proves to be a territoriality difficult to overcome. In fact, according to Foucault,
their “strategic adversary is fascism”:150
148
149
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 133; my emphasis.
150
Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiii; my emphasis.
And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize
and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in
our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that
dominates and exploits us.151
In short, Foucault describes Anti-Oedipus as the “art of living counter to all forms of fascism.”152
This art of living is one where the fight against fascism is waged by desiring machines through
deterritorializations that exceed the territorialized functions of fascism, and reterritorializations
that form new systems. For Deleuze and Guattari, the territorialized space of the state is the body,
and the body is governed by the logic of fascism. Deterritorialization breaks down the boundaries
of this fascist territorialization and maps democratic flows of intensities from different points of the
social matrix, which Deleuze and Guattari characterize as a rhizome.
The term, rhizome, adapted from plant biology, is Deleuze and Guattari’s way of characterizing
the multiplicity of the non-linear relations of thought and the everyday. It was introduced in a 1976
pamphlet, after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, which was republished as the introduction to their
1980 collaboration, A Thousand Plateaus. Here, they express the rhizome as n-1, “the only way the
one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted.”153 “As a subterranean stem,” a rhizome is
absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots and
radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in
its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are
rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and
breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all
directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome
includes the best and the worst: the potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant,
couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we
enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.154
Those characteristics, in brief, are: Principles of Connection and Heterogeneity—“any point of a

rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be”;155 Principle of Multiplicity—“it is only
when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, ‘multiplicity,’ that it ceases to have any
relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world”;156 Principle
of Asignifying Rupture—“A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up
again on one of its old lines, or on new lines”;157 and, Principle of Cartography and Decalcomania—
“a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model.”158 “A rhizome has no beginning
151
Foucault, “Preface,” xiii.
152
Foucault, “Preface,” xiii.
153
154
155
156
157
158
or end,” comment Deleuze and Guattari, “it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing,
intermezzo.”159
Deleuze and Guattari offer a radical style of doing philosophy that they characterize as
nomadology. Their use of the term, though, does not refer to nomadic peoples, but rather to the
tendency toward deterritorialization that may be found to a greater and lesser extent in all
phenomena. Nomadology then is a philosophical approach where rather than focusing on totalizing
territorialities that unify phenomena, emphasis is placed on finding and enhancing deterritorializations,
that is, in the construction of new concepts that multiply difference and variation in thought.
In A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari introduce nomadology, they term artistic
and political creativity and dissidence the war machine, which they say is the “exterior of the State
apparatus”—“first attested to in mythology, epic, drama, and games”160 and “also attested to by
epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a ‘nomad’ or ‘minor science.’ ”161
This “nomad” science is one of two: “nomad, war machine science” and “royal, State science.”162
One of the distinctions between them is that nomad science produces structures that collapse,
which for them is something to be celebrated, because of the creative lines of flight they produce in
contrast to “royal, State science.” “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal
circles,” comment Deleuze and Guattari, “but a war machine is necessary to make something
round.”163
Finally, one of the concepts that has been greatly utilized in contemporary literary and cultural
theory was introduced in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). For Deleuze and
Guattari, minor literature has three characteristics: Deterritorialized Language—“In [minor
literature] language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization”;164 Political—
“[E]verything in a [minor literature] is political”;165 and Collective Value—“[I]n [minor literature]
everything takes on a collective value.”166 One of the effects of the deterritorialization of language
in minor literature is the dissolution of cultural codes. Also, as a collective activity, the writers of
minor literature are not the strong authors of major literature as they are, for example, in Bloom.
Rather, by contrast, the writers of minor literature are almost imperceptible and anonymous.
In sum, schizoanalysis and its core concept of the desiring-machine is a very different approach
to psychoanalytic theory from the ones articulated by Freud and Lacan, and nomadology and its
core concept of deterritorialization, one that emphasizes the inhuman world of desire and force, is
a very different approach to philosophy from the one articulated by Marx. Deleuze and Guattari
offer a new path for the study of literature and culture that is not grounded in either the stability
of the subject, the autonomy of the object, or the coherence of a structure. Rather, it is one actualized
in the lines of flight of the free floating and impersonal intensities of the rhizome.
159
160
161
162
163
164
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), trans. Dana Polan (London: University of
165
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16.
166
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16.
4.5 SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

One of the reasons for the continuing relevance of both psychoanalysis and Marxism in contemporary
literary and cultural theory is Slavoj Žižek. Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and educated at the
University of Ljubljana, Žižek did not support the communist orthodoxies of his homeland. This
limited his employment options and put him into conflict with the Communist Party, which he
resisted joining until 1977. In 1981, he studied psychoanalysis with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s
son-in-law, and the 1980s took an active part in politics. He also ran for president of Slovenia,
which is a four-member collective, when Slovenia was on the cusp of its independence from
Yugoslavia in 1991. His project can be described as reconciling psychoanalysis with collectivist
politics.
In How to Read Lacan (2006), Žižek acknowledges the perception held by many that both
psychoanalysis and Marxism are dead. Writes Žižek, “with the new advances in brain sciences,
[psychoanalysis] is buried where it always belonged, in the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist
quest for hidden meanings, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers.”167 As one critic of
Freud puts it, “no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all its fundamentals,”
to which Žižek notes, “with the exception of Marx, some would add.”168 Žižek contextualizes this
attitude toward psychoanalysis by pointing out that Freud situated his discovery of the unconscious
as one of three successive humiliations of man, the “three narcissistic illnesses”: the first was the
Copernican revolution that deprived man of a place at the center of the universe; the second was
Darwinian evolution that took away man’s privileged place among living beings; and the third his
own discovery of the unconscious, which shows that man’s ego is not in control of his psychic
house. The humiliation continues this century, says Žižek, with the position that “our mind itself is
a mere computing machine, processing data; our sense of freedom and autonomy is the user’s
illusion of this machine.”169
Žižek then asks the central question: is psychoanalysis outdated? From three connected levels,
he says, it seems to be: (1) The Level of Scientific Knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist
model of the human mind appears to supersede the Freudian model; (2) The Level of the Psychiatric
Clinic, where psychoanalytical treatment is rapidly losing ground to pills and behavioural therapy;
and, (3) The Level of Social Context, where the Freudian image of a society and social norms that
repress the individual’s sexual drives no longer seems a valid account of today’s predominant
hedonistic permissiveness.170 But, against all of this “evidence,” Žižek draws the exact opposite
conclusion but with a twist: “my aim is to demonstrate that it is only today that the time of
psychoanalysis has come.”171 He makes this argument through Lacan, whose “return to Freud” was
not “a return to what Freud said, but to the core of the Freudian revolution of which Freud himself
was not fully aware.”172 This revolution was revealed by Lacan who showed how the unconscious
“obeys its own grammar and logic: the unconscious talks and thinks”—in distinction from Freud
167
Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 1.
168
Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 1. Žižek is citing here Todd Dufresne, Killing Freud: 20th Century Culture and the Death of
Psychoanalysis (London: Continuum, 2004).
169
Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 2.
170
171
Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 2; my emphasis.
172
who regarded the unconscious as “the preserve of wild drives that have to be tamed by the ego.”173
“Lacan’s thesis,” comments Žižek, “is that Freud was not aware of the notion of speech implied by
his own theory and practice, and that we can only develop this notion if we refer to Saussurean
linguistics, speech acts theory and the Hegelian dialectics of recognition.”174
For Žižek, Lacanian psychoanalysis is not about the ego taming the id, but rather about daring
“to approach the site of my truth.”175 It is about “an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live
with,” rather than “a deep Truth that I have to identify with.”176 For Žižek, psychoanalysis for
Lacan is at its core “not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and
practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence.”177 In
much of his work, Žižek uses Lacan’s ideas such as the triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real,
and the big Other as the Symbolic Order to explain our social and libidinal predicament. Moreover,
the “unbearable truth” (with a small “t”) that arises in his explanations of our social and libidinal
predicament is always a partial one—following the “Lacanian theory that every truth is partial.”178
Also, the strategy of positing counter-intuitive arguments against seemingly overwhelming evidence
to the contrary is a trademark of Žižek’s argumentative style.
One of the ways that Žižek utilizes the psychoanalytic tradition to explain our social and libidinal
predicament is by reflecting on our obsession with happiness. Psychoanalysis, he points out, is a
theory grounded upon the rejection of happiness. In its place, Freud developed the concept of the
“death drive,” arguing that while unhappiness is readily attainable, happiness is not. To expect
otherwise goes against the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. Freud’s position on happiness as
transformed by Lacanian psychoanalysis then becomes the basis of one of Žižek major lines of
argument: namely, the counter-intuitive one that we must reject the pursuit of happiness. It is an
argument that showcases the basic elements of his antihumanism at work as well as his debt to
psychoanalysis. Moreover, it showcases a number of the major themes of Žižek’s literary and
cultural theory.
Žižek argues that if the goal of life is happiness, then we are in for big problems. It is an argument
that he has consistently made for the past thirty years, along the way adding to it additional layers
of political and cultural evidence. Though heavily steeped in Lacanian psychoanalysis, his argument
is not just directed to fellow analysts and philosophers, but rather to anyone who will listen to him.
He draws our attention to his position on happiness by swimming against the strong American
current in celebration and pursuit of happiness.
A recent example is the sold-out debate he had with the psychologist Jordan Peterson on the
topic of happiness. Called the “duel of the century,” Žižek defends a Marxist position on happiness,
whereas Peterson takes the capitalist side. But Žižek finds it ironic that the participants in this duel
“are both marginalized by the official academic community.”179 He says that though he is “supposed
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson, “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism,” YouTube video, 2:37:47, April 20, 2019, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT1vutd4Gnk.
to defend here the left, liberal line against the neo-conservatives,” he is most often attacked by left
liberals. The politics of his position on happiness get even more complicated when one takes into
account that he follows Lacan in regarding happiness as a “political factor.”
In an early work, For They Know Not What They Do (1991), Žižek says, “What Saint-Just meant
by ‘happiness’ has of course little to do with enjoyment: it implies revolutionary Virtue, a radical
renunciation of the decadent pleasures of the ancient regime.”180 Ten years later he wrote in On Belief
that “liberalism tries to avoid (or, rather, cover up)” a paradox at the center of this line of thought,
namely, the idea that “‘totalitarianism’ imposes on the subject his or her own good, even if it is against
his will—recall King Charles’ (in)famous statement: ‘If any shall be so foolishly unnatural as to oppose
their king, their country and their own good, we will make them happy, by God’s blessing—even
against their wills.’”181 Liberals avoid the paradox of happiness as a political factor by “clinging to the
end to the fiction of the subject’s immediate free self-perception (‘I don’t claim to know better than
you what you want—just look deep into yourself and decide freely what you want!’).”182 In short,
following Lacan, Žižek’s proclamation of happiness as a political factor can be expressed by the
formula: “There is no satisfaction for the individual outside of the satisfaction of all.”183
Žižek chooses the example of China in his debate with Peterson to illustrate the coming together
of the three notions from the title of the debate: Happiness, Communism, and Capitalism. It also
allows him to show how the Left in the twentieth century defined itself through opposition to two
“fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capital with its aggressive market competition,
[and] the authoritarian bureaucratic state power.”184 For Žižek, China combines these two features
of modernity “on behalf of the majority of the people” in an extreme form: a “strong totalitarian
state” and “state-wide capitalist dynamics.”185 He then asks, “Are the Chinese any happier for all
that?” The answer here is of course “No,” which Žižek says is determined by psychoanalysis, not
philosophy or economics.
Psychoanalysis shows us that “humans are very creative in sabotaging our pursuit of happiness,”
says Žižek. He continues by telling the audience,
Happiness is a confused notion, basically it relies on the subject’s inability or unreadiness to fully
confront the consequences of his/her/their desire. In our daily lives, we pretend to desire things,
which we do not really desire, so that ultimately the worst thing that can happen is to get what
we officially desire.186
In short, for Žižek, “we don’t really want what we think we desire.”187 Ultimately, for him, happiness
is an “unethical category.”188
180
Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991) (London: Verso, 2008), 253–4.
181
Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 119.
182
Žižek, On Belief, 119.
183
184
Žižek and Peterson, “Happiness.”
185
186
187
Slavoj Žižek, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?” YouTube video, 2:01, June 25, 2012, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w.
188
Slavoj Žižek, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?”
While Žižek rails against happiness from many different directions and contexts, the core tenets
of his approach remain consistent: psychoanalysis establishes happiness as “the betrayal of desire.”189
As psychoanalysis, at least for Žižek, “is a kind of anti-ethics,”190 happiness is regarded by him as an
“unethical category” both in the sense that he doubts its veracity as a mere category and that he
does not see it as constitutive of morality like, for example, Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, and John
Stuart Mill (6.1). For Žižek, happiness is “not a category of truth, but a category of mere Being,
and, as such, confused, indeterminate, inconsistent.”191 It is also a term used everywhere. Thus, it
is hard for Žižek not to hit something or someone every time he swings his argument against
happiness.
His targets include not just the philosophical tradition regarding the pursuit of happiness (for
example, Aristotle, Locke, and Mill), but also revered religious figures like the Dalai Lama, who he
says “has had much success recently preaching the gospel of happiness around the world, and no
wonder he is finding the greatest response precisely in the USA, the ultimate empire of the (pursuit
of) happiness.”192 Other major targets include fundamental Christian beliefs such as the idea of
living “happily ever after,” which he says is “a Christianized version of paganism.”193 Happiness is
“a pagan concept,” writes Žižek, noting that pagans believe happiness is the goal of life and
“religious experience and political activity are considered the highest forms of happiness (see
Aristotle).”194 “In short,” concludes Žižek, “ ‘happiness’ belongs to the pleasure principle, and what
undermines it is the insistence of a Beyond of the pleasure principle.”195 The politics, though, of his
position on happiness defy easy Left/Right classification.
For example, of conservatives, Žižek says they are “fully justified in legitimating their opposition
to radical knowledge in terms of happiness: knowledge ultimately makes us unhappy.”196 For Žižek,
there “is deep within each of us a Wissenstrieb, a drive to know.”197 However, he also notes, “Lacan
claims that the spontaneous attitude of a human being is that of ‘I don’t want to know about it.’ ”198
As one Lacan commentator bluntly summarizes this position, “happiness amounts to the stupidity
of ‘not wanting to know’ the truth about symbolic castration, the inconsistency of the Other, and
the actual lack of the Other.”199 As a consequence of our “stupidity,” happiness not only becomes,
as noted earlier, a political factor and can mean only that “everybody is identical with everyone
else,” but also that “it is only the phallus which is happy and not its bearer.”200 Thus, by fully
justifying the conservative argument for stupidity and grounding it in their pursuit of happiness,
Žižek appears to be siding against liberals who fully reject this argument because they believe that
knowledge leads to happiness.
189
Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 58.
190
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Routledge, 2008), 16.
191
Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 59.
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
Lorenzo Chiesa, “Lacan with Artaud: j’ouïs-sens, jouis-sans, jouis-sens,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek
(London: Verso, 2006), 336–364.360n17 & 361n18.
200
Lorenzo Chiesa, “Lacan with Artaud,” 360n17 & 361n18.
If conservatives find an ally in Žižek’s assault on happiness, then liberals find an enemy. For
example, one of the casualties of Žižek’s assault on happiness is Jürgen Habermas. Žižek identifies
Habermas as “the great representative of the Enlightenment tradition.”201 However, Žižek finds
hidden in Habermas’s argument advocating biogenetic manipulation the underlying premise “that
the ultimate ethical duty is that of protecting the Other from pain,” which would include in some
cases keeping the Other “in protective ignorance.”202 Žižek says that keeping knowledge away from
the Other is not about autonomy and freedom, as Habermas would have us believe, but is really
about happiness, which thus places this “great representative of the Enlightenment tradition” on
“the same side as conservative advocates of blessed ignorance.”203 In short, both conservatives and
liberals become targets in Žižek’s critique of happiness because “the opposition between Rightist
populism and liberal tolerance is a false one.”204 For Žižek, they are “two sides of the same coin.”205
What then should we be striving for if not happiness conservative- or liberal-style? Žižek’s answer
here is clear: “not the Fascist with a human face, but the freedom fighter with an inhuman face.”206
To go along with this “inhuman face,” he also calls for an “ ‘inhuman’ ethics, an ethics addressing
an inhuman subject.”207 This direction for ethics is part of his critique of the humanist ethics of the
Western philosophical tradition predicated on its use of “Man” and “human person,” which for
Žižek “is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbor,”208 an account of subjectivity
irreducible to the gentrified social ego. For him, until the mask of “Man” and “human person” are
taken off the Neighbor, its pure subjectivity is obfuscated in ethics. When the mask of these concepts
is removed through the ethics of psychoanalysis, the Neighbor is revealed to have all of the
connotations commonly found in horror fiction: behind every homely face lurks an evil monster
waiting to come out. Žižek uses the example of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining (1977),
where “a gentle failed writer . . . gradually turns into a killing beast [who] with an evil grin, goes
on to slaughter his entire family.”209 This is the “pure subjectivity” that humanist ethics masks with
terms like “Man” and “human person.”
To make this argument, Žižek reminds us that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the “Neighbor”
is so traumatic and monstrous that Lacan applied Thing (das Ding) to the term—a term he borrowed
from Freud who used it to designate “the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity
and impenetrability.”210 Both Freud and Lacan find the Judeo-Christian injunction to “love thy
neighbor” problematic because it domesticates the inhuman dimension of the Neighbor, that is, its
pure subjectivity as “Thing.” Though humanist ethics masks this problem with terms like “Man”
and “human” (which transforms the Neighbor into an image of the self), Žižek argues for the
rejection of all ethics that universalize disavowing the inhuman subjectivity of the Neighbor
including the Judeo-Christian tradition. So, Žižek’s anti-ethics (so termed to disassociate itself from
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 16.
208
209
210
both the Western philosophical and Judeo-Christian traditions), which serves as a base for his
rejection of happiness, is also a rejection of humanism and the majority of Western ethics dating
back to the Greeks.
So, if taking on humanism, ethics, and the conservative and the liberal political establishment
were not enough, Žižek’s critique of happiness also takes on the institution of psychology. Here he
is directly following in the footsteps of his mentor, Lacan, in rejecting behavioural psychology and
its contemporary instantiations, such as “positive” psychology and the new discipline of “happiness
studies.” For Žižek, we live in “era of spiritualized hedonism,”211 where happiness is regarded “as
the supreme duty.”212 “No wonder,” he says, “over the last decade the study of happiness emerged
as a scientific discipline of its own: there are now ‘professors of happiness’ at universities, ‘quality
of life’ institutes attached to them, and numerous research papers; there is even the Journal of
Happiness Studies.”213 Žižek then beckons us to expand the critique of the happiness industry:
The predominant critique proceeds in the way of demystification: beneath the innocent-sounding
research into happiness and welfare, it discerns a dark, hidden, gigantic complex of social control
and manipulation exerted by the combined forces of private corporations and state agencies. But
what is urgently needed is also the opposite move: instead of just asking what dark content is
hidden beneath the form of scientific research into happiness, we should focus on the form itself.
Is the topic of scientific research into human welfare and happiness (at least the way it is practiced
today) really so innocent, or is it already itself permeated by the stance of control and
manipulation?214
From Lacan’s complaints about the rise of behavioural psychology in America to Žižek’s
identification of the happiness research at the core of the military industrial complex today, there
are plenty of reasons to be suspicious about the pursuit of happiness. But Žižek makes an even more
important point about the rise of the happiness industry, one that should not get lost in the shuffle
of his theoretical arguments against happiness: though we live in an era wherein “the goal of life is
directly defined as happiness,” we still see an explosion in “the number of people suffering from
anxiety and depression.”215 “It is the enigma of this self-sabotaging of happiness and pleasure,”
comments Žižek of this rise in cases of anxiety and depression in an age devoted to happiness, that
“makes Freud’s message more pertinent than ever.”216 Freud’s “death drive” might be regarded as a
mediation of Nietzsche’s affirmation of the will and Schopenhauer’s negation of it. Žižek, however,
argues that the death drive should not be confused with the return to the inorganic absence of any
life-tension or with the craving for self-annihilation. For Žižek, “the death drive, on the contrary,
is the very opposite of dying, it is a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of
being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.”217
211
Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 54.
212
213
214
Slavoj Žižek, A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name (Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), 246–7.
215
Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 54–5.
216
Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 55; my emphasis.
217
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 292.
In sum, Žižek aims to disrupt the comfortable appearances of our social reality. He is critical of
capitalism, humanism, liberalism, globalism, and multiculturalism. His approach has been termed
both radical emancipatory universalism and postfoundationalism, though neither term really
captures his unique mixture of Marxism and psychoanalysis. His use of psychoanalysis (particularly
Freud and Lacan) and German idealism (particularly Kant and Hegel) allows him to explore a
certain failure or excess in the order of being. Finally, one of his most well-known contributions is
an inversion of the Marx’s thesis that ideology is false consciousness, which he famously states in
Capital as “They do not know it, but they are doing it.”218 Utilizing psychoanalysis, Žižek rewrites
this as “They know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still they are doing
it.”219 In other words, rather than concealing or distorting reality, for Žižek, reality cannot be
reproduced without the mystification of ideology. Moreover, ideology operates most often at the
level of the unconscious. Žižek has applied Lacanian theory to everything from Kant to Alfred
Hitchcock and developed a unique perspective on how to interpret literary and cultural theory, in
particular in relation to film. His work not only reinvigorated literary and cultural interpretation
through the use of Lacanian concepts such as the gaze and the Other, but also sparked renewed
interest in both psychoanalysis and Marxism, which many had left for dead, particularly after the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1991), 32; Žižek citing Marx.
218
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 33.

219
CHAPTER FIVE
Poststructuralism
5.0 INTRODUCTION
One view of literary and cultural theory is that there are only two schools and movements:
structuralism and poststructuralism. It is theory as high theory. At its foundation are the general
principles of the structural linguistics of Saussure. By the mid-1960s, structuralism was fully
established in a number of areas of thought including psychoanalysis (through Lacan), anthropology
(through Lévi-Strauss), Marxism (through Althusser), history (through Michel Foucault [9.1]),
linguistics (through Roman Jakobson), and in literature and culture (through Barthes). But, as one
famous version of the story goes, then came the conference to celebrate the arrival of structuralism
in the humanities—and with it, a presentation by the young French philosopher, Jacques Derrida.
The conference, held at Johns Hopkins University under the title “The Languages of Criticism
and the Sciences of Man,” was from October 18–21, 1966. It featured as speakers many of the most
prominent structuralist thinkers in the world, including Barthes, Lacan, René Girard, Lucien
Goldman, Jean Hyppolite, Georges Poulet, and Todorov. Jakobson was invited as one of fifteen
“colloquists”—people to carry on a discussion of the presentations—but was unable to attend
because of other commitments. Paul de Man, who went on to become one of the leading proponents
of deconstruction in America, was also a colloquist. And Lévi-Strauss gave “counsel and
encouragement” to the organizers, but also did not attend.1 All told, over 100 people attended this
event at the university’s newly instituted Humanities Center. One of the aims of the conference was
to celebrate the arrival of structuralism in the humanities and social sciences, which are described
in the conference title as “the Sciences of Man.” These areas include anthropology, classical studies,
comparative literature, history, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, semiology,
and sociology—and indeed all of these disciplines were represented at the conference.2
The title of Derrida’s presentation was “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences.” In it, he discusses the “structurality of structure,” which involves “a process of giving it
a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.”3 In other words, structuralism involves
the concept of a structure with a center upon which meaning can rest secure. Derrida’s presentation
aims to challenge the concepts of “center” and “fixed point of presence” necessary for structuralism.
In his presentation, Derrida says,
1
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of
Man (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), xvii. The papers and discussions from the conference are
collected in this volume.
2
Macksey and Donato, The Structuralist Controversy, xvi.
3
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, 247.
143
The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure—one
cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the
organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the free-play of the structure.
No doubt that orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure
permits the free-play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a
structure lacking a center presents the unthinkable itself.4
Derrida then goes on to show that the notion of the “center” of “structure” is an incoherent and
contradictory one:
The center is at the center of a totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality
(is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The
concept of centered structure—although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the
epistèmè as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent.5
Specifically, for Derrida, the concept of center is the product of a particular metaphysics. Namely,
this is the one passed down through the Western tradition by Plato and Aristotle, that has an
ontology (that is, theory of being) based in presence. Derrida will claim that this ontology is a
“mythology,” and dub it the “mythology of presence.” His philosophy disrupts—or, as it is often
stated, deconstructs—the stability of ontological presence by showing how it is always already in
freeplay with absence. This, in turn, reveals the knowledge conditions (or the epistèmè) of
philosophy and science as unstable or contradictorily coherent too. Comments Derrida,
Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and
substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay
is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must
be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as
presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around.6
To make his argument regarding freeplay, Derrida draws heavily on the work of Lévi-Strauss—
work which he says showcases the importance of the concept of freeplay. In the process, Derrida
reveals the contradictions regarding presence in the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. Thus, by pointing
out these contradictions in structuralist thinking, Derrida’s philosophy came to be characterized as
poststructuralism.
After his presentation, Derrida was asked a lot of questions. One of the best came from the
philosopher Jean Hyppolite, who asked, “Is the center the knowledge of general rules which, after
a fashion, allow us to understand the interplay of elements? Or is the center certain elements which
enjoy a particular privilege within the ensemble?”7 After all, comments Hyppolite, “one cannot
4
Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 247–8.
5
Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 248.
6
Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 263–4.
7
POSTSTRUCTURALISM 145
think of the structure without a center.”8 Derrida replied, “It is a rule of the game which does not
govern the game; it is a rule of the game which does not dominate the game.”9 “The concept of
structure itself,” continues Derrida, “is no longer satisfactory to describe that game.”10 But, how
then does Derrida define structure?
Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, as it was classically, like a
creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which
makes possible “free play” . . . a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds
finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.11
He concludes his reply to Hyppolite by bluntly stating, “I think that what I have said can be
understood as a criticism of structuralism.”12
If structuralism offered the promise of knowledge and understanding in the human sciences
through the identification of stable structures upon which meaning can rest secure, then
poststructuralism identifies meaning as only a momentary stop in the continuing flow of
interpretations. The instability of meaning in poststructuralism amplifies skepticism regarding any
form of certainty regarding knowledge and understanding. Moreover, as we shall see in the section
below on Derrida (5.1), the rejection of the metaphysics of presence (that is, idealist and
transcendental ontologies, which he calls onto-theology) offers an account of philosophy where
speech is no longer privileged over writing. Derrida calls this position grammatology.
While Derrida would become one of the most prominent poststructuralist thinkers—a
prominence launched in no small measure by his presentation at the Johns Hopkins conference—
Barthes’ “transition” from structuralist to poststructuralist thinking might be identified with the
increasing emphasis his later work placed on the “secondary signification (or connotation)”
identified by his semiology. Whereas the structuralist Barthes might be said to focus more on the
denotative as the neutral level of signification, the poststructuralist Barthes might be found in his
treatment of denotation as the last connotation. In fact, both his essay “The Death of the Author”
(1968) and his book S/Z (1970) are often regarded in the same early poststructuralist class as
Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966). In both of
these works by Barthes, the notion of a decentered reading process takes precedence over a centered
structure which is the stable site of denotative meaning. In short, poststructuralism contends that
signifiers produce signifiers—not signifieds. Moreover, for poststructuralists, selection and
combination along the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes implies meaning is always present and
absent, that is, unstable—a position contrary to the structural linguistics of Saussure, which is built
upon the stability of meaning.
Julia Kristeva shares with Barthes a foundation in structural linguistics and semiotics. Also, like
Barthes, she was first associated with structuralism and later made a transition to poststructuralism.
While Barthes was interested in psychoanalysis, Kristeva (5.2) was a practicing analyst, and her
8
9
10
11
12
theory is an effort to “graft” psychoanalytic theory onto semiotics, which she called semanalysis.
Her work was also, as we shall see, influenced by Bakhtin, particularly his notions of dialogism and
carnivalization. Finally, like Derrida, Kristeva contends that the signifying process undermines the
stability of meaning.
Like Barthes and Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard critique the essentialist
foundations of humanism and reject the notion of a unified subject with an essential core of being.
This subject, the Cartesian subject, the centered and fixed agent of history, is the same one that was
subjected to critique by Althusser. Also, the work of both was—for better or worse—prominently
featured in discussions of the nature of postmodernism in the 1980s: with Lyotard’s The Postmodern
Condition (1979) offering the notion of paralogy (5.3), a kind of language game, in place of the
master narratives of modernity; and Baudrillard’s Simulations (1975) presenting a theory of
simulation contending that the postmodern world is one in which the real world has been replaced
by simulations of reality (5.4). While both philosophers address many other issues in addition to
postmodernism, their poststructuralist thought is often simply equated with postmodernist thought.
Moreover, the equivalence created from the popular work of Lyotard and Baudrillard on
postmodernism goes even further: namely, many use the term poststructuralism interchangeably
with postmodernism. To complicate matters even more, if you consider that deconstruction is often
used interchangeably with poststructuralism, you have a perfect storm for conceptual confusion.
While poststructuralism accurately describes a variety of thinkers who approach it from differing
positions, for example, psychoanalysis (Kristeva), semiotics (Barthes), ontology (Derrida), history
(Foucault), and rhetoric (Paul de Man, who argues that literature is constituted by an undecidable
play between the grammatical and rhetorical in texts), it should not be conflated with either
postmodernism or deconstruction.
Still, an incredibly diverse number of thinkers are associated with the term poststructuralism,
including a number already discussed, namely Jameson, Lacan, Guattari and Deleuze, and Žižek—
and a number to be discussed, namely, Cixous (6.4), Irigaray (6.5), and Foucault. As for the latter,
Foucault’s work has been highly influential to both the New Historicism, which will be discussed in
this chapter (5.5), and cultural materialism, which will taken up in our discussion of cultural studies
(14.1). As the pre-eminent poststructuralist historian, Foucault’s thinking went through several
phases, like Barthes. More extended focus here will be placed on his later work, which was
concerned with power and the critique of totalities—work which has been seminal in an area of
theory that has come to be termed biopolitics. Therefore, it will be directly addressed under that
rubric (9.1)—even though it is also indirectly discussed in relation to New Historicism and cultural
studies.
Finally, the French poststructuralists are often associated with the experimental literary and
philosophical journal Tel Quel both because many of them published in it and because of the large
role it played in disseminating their thought. Launched by Philippe Sollers in 1960—and releasing
its final issue in 1982—Tel Quel published many of the most important poststructuralist (as well as
structuralist and semiotic) thinkers, including Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva. Still, its
twenty-two-year run was not without controversy, with many of these same thinkers “breaking”
with the journal for both philosophical and political reasons.
Again, of the eight ways of looking at theory presented in this book, structuralism and
poststructuralism have attracted both the most outspoken proponents and opponents. And, of the
two, poststructuralism has attracted the most passionate proponents and opponents. This is
particularly true of the work of Derrida and Baudrillard: the former’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences” arguably launched poststructuralism by deconstructing Lévi-
Strauss; and the latter’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), “The Spirit of Terrorism” (2002),
and “Requiem for the Twin Towers” (2002) allegedly ended poststructuralism by marking the nadir
of high theory—at least according to antitheorists (15.0).
5.1 JACQUES DERRIDA

In 1967, the year following his presentation at Johns Hopkins, Derrida firmly established himself
as one of the leading poststructuralist thinkers with the publication of three major books: Speech
and Phenomena, which was an introduction to signs in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology; Writing
and Difference, a collection of essays on writing in philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and
anthropology; and Of Grammatology, which both made the case for the repression of writing in
Western theories of language and outlined a new science of writing. Then, in 1972, five years later,
he would establish beyond any doubt his pre-eminence in poststructuralism, with the publication
of another three books in one year: Margins of Philosophy; Dissemination; and Positions, a collection
of interviews. Though many more books would appear both until his death in 2004 and then
posthumously, primarily through the publication of his seminars on various topics, his critique of
Western metaphysics was well established in these early publications.
One of the central themes explored in this work is the logocentrism of Western philosophy, that
is, the notion that meaning exists independently of the language in which it is communicated. Logos
is a Greek term that means reason, word, speech, and discourse, among other things. Hence,
logocentrism literally means putting reason, word, speech, and discourse at the center—and from his
presentation at Johns Hopkins, we already know that Derrida has deep reservations about centers.
Hence, it will not be much of a surprise to learn that Derrida rejects logocentrism. He offers in its
place a position on language that is a combination of Saussure’s position that a sign means by
differing from other signs, and his is own observation that a sign also defers meaning. By defers
meaning, Derrida offers that this meaning is never fully present, that is, it is both absent and
present. This notion of differing and deferring is captured by the notion of différance, which we will
look at more closely below. However, for Derrida, this endless play of signifiers differing and
deferring is halted in reading. For example, when we read in context “nothing was delivered,” the
signification process stops, albeit briefly. Still, for Derrida, not even context can control meaning,
for it carries traces of meanings from other contexts.
In “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1972), Derrida comments on Plato’s critique of writing in Phaedrus. It is
an excellent place to see Derrida’s poststructuralism at work undermining key aspects of Western
thinking. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates assaults writing, saying that it is “exceedingly simple-minded”
to believe that writing will result in something that is “reliable and permanent.”13 “Writing,” says
Socrates, cannot “do anything more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned
with.”14 Writing is also deficient because it cannot defend itself. “[O]nce a thing is put in writing,
13
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Reginald Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 275c.
14
Plato, Phaedrus, 275c–d.
the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of
those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how
to address the right people, and not address the wrong.”15 Only “living” discourse accompanied by
knowledge “written in the soul of the learner”—“living speech”—can defend itself in this way.16 It
“knows to whom it should speak and to whom it should say nothing.”17 Written discourse, not
knowing “when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused . . . always needs its parent to come to its help,
being unable to defend or help itself.”18
Finally, in addition to being unable to defend itself and being unresponsive, writing also destroys
memory and fills people with the conceit of wisdom. “They will cease to exercise memory,” writes
Plato, “because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from
within themselves, but by means of external marks.”19 Discourse for Plato should be human and
living, and becomes so when implanted in the soul of the learner. Whereas living discourse is a sign
of true wisdom, writing is dead discourse and not true wisdom. It is the “semblance” of wisdom
because it tells people “of many things without teaching them” and as such makes “them seem to
know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but
with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”20
While this critique of writing by Plato might simply be regarded as an afterthought, Derrida
argues otherwise. According to Derrida, Plato seriously believes that the spoken word is more
valuable than the written word. Nevertheless, Plato does not see how this position undermines his
entire philosophical project—and Derrida sees it as his task to convince us of this. In the process,
Derrida hopes to undercut what he views as one of the foundations of Western philosophy: the
opposition of speech to writing.
For Derrida, “the Phaedrus is less a condemnation of writing in the name of present speech than
a preference for one sort of writing over another, for the fertile trace over the sterile trace, for a
seed that engenders because it is planted inside over a seed scattered wastefully outside.”21 “Western
philosophy,” says Derrida, is dominated by a “pattern” wherein “good writing (natural, living,
knowledgeable, intelligible, internal, speaking) is opposed to bad writing (a moribund, ignorant,
external, mute artifice for the senses).”22
Nevertheless, for Derrida, not only is the history of philosophy only understandable as a species
of the history of writing, dialectic itself is possible only because of writing: in other words, writing
is the condition of possibility of philosophy. A spoken speech, says Derrida, “a speech proffered in
the present, in the presence of Socrates, would not have roused Socrates into a debate with Phaedrus.
“Only the logoi en biblios,” continues Derrida,
15
Plato, Phaedrus, 275e.
16
17
18
19
20
Plato, Phaedrus, 275a–b.
21
Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination (1972), trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), 149.
22
Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 149.
only words that are deferred, reserved, enveloped, rolled up, words that force one to wait for
them in the form and under cover of a solid object, letting themselves be desired for the space of
a walk, only hidden letters can thus get Socrates moving. If a speech could be purely present,
unveiled, naked, offered up in person in its truth, without the detours of a signifier foreign to it,
if at the limit an undeferred logos were possible, it would not seduce anyone.23
But, Derrida argues, it is never possible for speech to be purely present, unveiled, naked, offered up
in person in its truth.
Speech, says Derrida, is wrongly assumed to be closer to thought in the Western tradition, while
writing is taken to be purely graphic. The secondary status of writing to speech is founded in part
upon the belief that speech is closer to the emotions, ideas, and intentions of the speaker and
therefore primary, whereas writing is secondary—a “dangerous supplement” which is at best an aid
to memory. Derrida destabilizes the primacy of speech most memorably in his analysis of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s confessional and linguistic writings in Of Grammatology (1967).
Much like Plato, Rousseau views speech as the natural way to express thought, whereas writing
is, as he says in his Confessions (1782), a “dangerous supplement.”24 However, when presence is no
longer guaranteed by speech, writing becomes a necessary means to protect presence. Yet, for
Rousseau, writing can only be a “supplement to speech”:
[I]t is not natural. It diverts the immediate presence of thought . . . [It is] a sort of artificial and
artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent. It is a violence done to the natural
destiny of the language.25
For Derrida, “to supplement” means both to add and to substitute.

Writing is therefore both an addition to speech and a substitute for speech. Yet speech itself is a
supplement. It does not exist outside of culture. Speech cannot therefore play Edenic nature to
writing’s fallen culture, because it always already belongs to “the order of the supplement.”26 For,
“the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already
inscribed the space of repetition and the splitting of the self [from pure self presence].”27 Nature
may have preceded culture, but our sense of nature as pure presence is a product of culture.
Writing is not the fall of language; it is inscribed in its origins. Rousseau, in a sense, already
knows this, says Derrida: he “declares what he wishes to say,” but he also “describes that which he
does not wish to say.”28 It is in the unraveling of this contradiction that the opposition between
speech and writing is said to be deconstructed. The privileged term is shown to be dependent on the
other for its meaning.
In his analysis of Rousseau, as in many of his other analyses, it is the revealing of systems of
difference “without positive terms” where Derrida’s poststructuralist readings gain their momentum.
23
24
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 149.
25
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144; my emphasis.
26
27
28
Drawing on the untapped potential of Saussure’s analysis of language, Derrida comes to view
différance as a term that stands for meaning which always is deferred and different (in French, the
same verb, différer, means both “to differ” and “to defer”): the dimension of language which is both
unconceptualizable and always unperceived, yet always both absent and present. For Derrida,
différance becomes the prototype of what cannot be captured by Western metaphysics because it is
the very condition of its possibility. Différance is neither an identity nor the difference between two
identities. Rather, it is difference deferred. Moreover, it is différance that ultimately is the starting
point of Derrida’s reading of the Phaedrus.
Derrida’s interpretation of the Phaedrus turns on Socrates’ comparison of the writings that
Phaedrus has brought along to a drug (pharmakon). Socrates says to Phaedrus,
You must forgive me, dear friend; I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t
teach me anything, whereas men in town do. Yet you seem to have discovered a drug (pharmakon)
for getting me out.29
Pharmakon is then shown by Derrida to be a “malleable” concept “through skewing, indetermination,

or overdetermination, but without mistranslation.”30 The strategy of demonstrating the malleability
of terms is characteristic of Derrida’s poststructural readings.
In the case of pharmakon, he shows “in the most striking manner the regular, ordered polysemy
that has . . . permitted the rendering of the same word by ‘remedy,’ ‘recipe,’ ‘drug,’ philter,’ etc.”31
Additionally, in characteristic fashion, he reveals the “rules and the strange logic that links it
[pharmakon] with its signifier,” revealing how this polysemy “has been dispersed, masked,
obliterated, and rendered almost unreadable not only by the imprudence or empiricism of
translators, but first and foremost by the redoubtable, irreducible difficulty of translation.”32
Writing, then, which was invented as a remedy for forgetfulness, becomes though the poststructural
readings of Derrida a poison—something much worse than that which it was envisioned to prevent:
forgetfulness. “Writing,” says Derrida, “touted by Theuth [the Egyptian god of the underworld
who is credited with inventing numbers, writing, and games of chance] as a remedy, a beneficial
drug, is later overturned and denounced by the king and then, in the king’s place, by Socrates, as a
harmful substance, a philter of forgetfulness.”33
Derrida then reminds the reader that the hemlock which Socrates drinks in Plato’s Phaedo “is
never called anything but a pharmakon.”34 And it, too, is shown to reveal a polysemic logic: the
pharmakon “is presented to Socrates as a poison; yet it is transformed, through the effects of the
Socratic logos and of the philosophical demonstration of the Phaedo, into a means of deliverance,
a way toward salvation, a cathartic power.”35 Writing then is linked with the hemlock which Socrates
drank to end his life even if the path of the transformation of the meaning of pharmakon is reversed
29
30
31
32
Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 71–2.
33
34
35
in the Phaedo and “less immediately readable.”36 In Derrida’s estimation, it is the pharmakon which
gets Socrates to engage in dialectic.
The aim of the type of poststructural reading done by Derrida—one that is often termed
deconstruction—is to overthrow hierarchy everywhere. It is not just to neutralize oppositions or
relationships of superiority as found, for example, in speech versus writing or nature versus culture,
as we saw above. Rather, it is to demonstrate the violence that holds together this binary logic—“a
violence,” as he says above, “done to the natural destiny of the language.” In Of Grammatology,
Derrida tells us that a poststructural “reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived
by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the
language that he uses.”37 “This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and
light, of weakness or of force,” he continues, “but of a signifying structure that critical reading
should produce.”38
Finally, in Of Grammatology, Derrida argues that “There is nothing outside of the text [there is
no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte].”39 For him, text is the place of the effaced trace—the play
of presence and absence. The breadth of Derrida’s notion of textuality is evident when one considers
that not only is textuality the object of study, it is also the subject that studies. Accordingly, the
subject–object distinction does not hold for Derrida—his poststructural readings are said to have
deconstructed it. This, of course, is not to say there is nothing beyond language. “It is totally false,”
comments Derrida,
to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference. Deconstruction is always deeply

concerned with the “other” of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work
as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is,
in fact, saying the exact opposite.40
Whereas structuralists contend that the reconstruction of the object in a way that manifests the
rules of its functioning is the goal of critical activity, Derrida challenges this position because it is
predicated on the ability to objectively describe objects in the world. His poststructuralism asserts
that answers to questions like “What is X?” cannot be provided, regardless of whether X is literature
or just an ordinary object. While Derrida’s grammatological “structure” is discernible, it denies the
possibility of objective description. In this context, it is worth mentioning Derrida’s debt to—and
difference from—the phenomenological tradition.
The influence of the phenomenological tradition on the formation Derrida’s notion of textuality
is second only in impact to that of the Saussurean system of differences. Derrida draws on various
works on phenomenological description, such as Husserl’s efforts to describe the contents of
experience as well as phenomenology, which stresses the mediation between an interpreter and the
interpreted—a form of phenomenology often called phenomenological interpretation, or simply,
36
37
38
39
40
Jacques Derrida, “Interview with Richard Kearney,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard
Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 123.
hermeneutics. Nevertheless, his work differs significantly from work done in the phenomenological
tradition.
Poststructural reading as practiced by Derrida is not concerned with the mere description of
either the transcendental or the existential contents of experience. The existential, descriptive
phenomenologies of Sartre and the early Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example in Phenomenology
of Perception (1945), and the transcendental, descriptive phenomenologies of Husserl or even E. D.
Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation (1967) and Roman Ingarden in The Literary Work of Art (1931)
each offer too stable an account of textuality for him. For Derrida, descriptive phenomenologies
such as those of Husserl, Sartre, early Merleau-Ponty, Ingarden, and Hirsch reduce something that
is irreducible. Hence, even if Derrida’s account of a text draws on descriptive phenomenology, the
flow of his theory is in the opposite direction. Much the same condition holds for hermeneutics (or
phenomenological interpretation) as well. Poststructural reading is not concerned with interpretation
but rather with respectively providing a theoretical practice of reading texts (or, deconstruction, if
you will). If interpretation or understanding is the fundamental human activity or a basic fact of
human existence in the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, then reading is the fundamental
activity of Derrida’s poststructuralism.
5.2 JULIA KRISTEVA

Julia Kristeva’s poststructuralist theory is wide-ranging and stunningly interdisciplinary. It blends
not only psychoanalysis (especially, Freud, Lacan, and Melanie Klein) and semiotics (from the
Roman Stoics to Saussure, Peirce, and Hjelmslev), but also linguistics (including Noam Chomsky’s
theory of generative grammar and Jakobson), literary formalism (specifically, Bakhtin), logic,
mathematics, and philosophy (Hegel, Marx, and Husserl). If this were not enough, she is also a
pioneer of écriture feminine (along with Cixous [6.4]), which is sometimes translated as “feminine
writing” or “writing the body.” Given her wide-ranging influences and varied contributions to
literary and cultural theory, her work might also have been featured under several other headings,
including structuralism and semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory (6.0), and affect
studies (13.0).
In fact, by her own admission, she does not see her work as fitting into any one area or discipline.
“I do not put myself in a discipline or even, or only, in a tradition of thought,” says Kristeva. “I am
attracted by the questioning which comes to me, hic et nunc [here and now], and in light of that I
in fact prepared a kind of synthesis between different knowledges which had been bequeathed to
me and which I attempt to improve at a given moment.”41 She also says that her research “is very
much based on my personal development, on my biography, on the historical processes that I have
lived through, whether these be intellectual movements like the Tel Quel, avant-garde structuralism,
or the political movements in France, such as May ’68, the strike of ’75, the development of the
university or my own experience of maternity.”42
41
Julia Kristeva, “Interview [with John Lechte]: Sharing Singularity,” in Julia Kristeva: Live Theory, eds. John Lechte and
Maria Margaroni (London: Continuum, 2004), 144.
42
Kristeva, “Interview [with John Lechte]: Sharing Singularity,” 144.
Basic to Kristeva’s work is the idea that language is comprised of two levels or poles: the semiotic
and the symbolic. The semiotic involves psychic inscriptions controlled by the primary processes of
condensation and displacement. At this level, one finds the rhythms and tones that do not represent
anything, but that are still a meaningful part of language. Also, at the semiotic level are found the
drives that organize language. For Kristeva, drives “are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks,
[which] articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their
stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.”43 For Kristeva, these drives are
discharged through tones and rhythms, but are not representations of them. The semiotic level of
language is the translinguistic or non-linguistic level of language wherein its elements “turn toward
language even though they are irreducible to its grammatical and logical structures.”44
However, for Kristeva, the semiotic is different from semiotics. Semiotic (le sémiotique), as
explained above, is an element of language. Semiotics (la sémiotique), however, is the science of
signs, one that is concerned with making models, that is, “formal systems whose structure is
isomorphic or analogous to the structure of another system (the one under study).”45 Semiotics
borrows “its models from the formal sciences (such as mathematics or logic, which in this way are
reduced to being a branch of the vast ‘science’ of language-models),” says Kristeva—and “could
eventually become the axiomatization of signifying systems, without being hindered by its
epistemological dependence on linguistics.”46 However, for her, “rather than speak of a semiotics
[la sémiotique], we prefer to talk of a semiotic [le sémiotique] level, which is that of the axiomatization,
or formalization, of signifying systems.”47
The symbolic, on the other hand, is the grammar or structure of language. It governs the ways
in which symbols can refer or signify something. It is also at this level where the true self is articulated
in language. The symbolic is language at the level of propositions that are part of a system of signs.
However, Kristeva’s symbolic is not the same as Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic. For Lacan, the
Symbolic is the entire realm of signification, whereas for Kristeva the symbolic is only one element
of signification, the one associated with syntax.
According to Kristeva, language always consists of a dialectic between the semiotic and the
symbolic even if the Western tradition tries to contain, control, and even refuse the semiotic level
of language. This containment is dangerous according to Kristeva because it is only at the semiotic
level of language that the individual can express himself or herself through language; the symbolic
level of language allows for only a one-dimensional view of language and self. But, while the
semiotic level motivates signification, it also threatens the stasis of the symbolic level through
negativity. For Kristeva, negativity is not the operator of her dialectic as it is in Hegel’s thesis–
antithesis–synthesis. Rather, Kristeva replaces Hegel’s dialectical negativity with expenditure or
rejection, which becomes a further term in her dialectic. As she gets the term from psychoanalysis,
it allows her to better connect the dialectic to drive. “In our view, expenditure or rejection are better
43
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), 25.
44
Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul (1993), trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 35.
45
Julia Kristeva, “Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science” (1969), trans. Seán Hand, in The Kristeva
Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 76.
46
Kristeva, “Semiotics,” 76–7.
47
Kristeva, “Semiotics,” 77.
terms for the movement of material contradictions that generate the semiotic function,” writes
Kristeva.48 “Certainly the terms’ implications in drive theory and general analytic theory make
them preferable to that of negativity.”49 In short, whereas in Hegel’s dialectic, contradictions are
overcome through negativity, in Kristeva’s dialectic, the contradictions between the semiotic and
the symbolic are never overcome.
The semiotic and the symbolic correspond at the explicitly textual level to what Kristeva
respectively calls the genotext and the phenotext. The phenotext—which corresponds to the
symbolic level of language—is the textual surface structure that can be described empirically by the
methods of structural linguistics. The genotext—which corresponds to the semiotic level of
language—is the level of textual deep structure wherein the production of signification takes place.
Characteristics of the genotext include exteriority to the subject, timelessness, and a lack of
structure. Genotext contains the possibilities of all languages and signifying practices as its
predisposition before it is masked or censured by the phenotext. Textual analysis, for Kristeva,
shows that whenever a text signifies, it participates in the transformation of reality by capturing it
at the moment of its non-closure.
Kristeva treats the text, not as a communicative process of social exchange based on the sender–
receiver model of communication, but rather as a generative activity that she calls productivity. For
Kristeva,
the text is defined as a trans-linguistic apparatus that redistributes the order of language by
relating communicative speech, which aims to inform directly, to different kinds of anterior or
synchronic utterances. The text is therefore a productivity, and this means: first, that its
relationship to the language in which it is situated is redistributive (destructive–constructive),
and hence can be better approached through logical categories rather than linguistic ones; and
second, that it is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several
utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.50
As productivity, texts have a redistributive relationship to the language in which they are situated.
For Kristeva, texts are regarded as revolutionary transformations of the language because of the
dialectical relationship that she establishes between language and text. Of primary concern is the
dynamics of the production of texts, rather than the actual product. One of the factors determining
the polyphonous character of texts, intertextuality, is not simply a matter of literary influence.
The text is an intersection, absorption, and transformation of other texts and codes, and
comprises in some sense the entirety of contemporary and historical language. Thus, for Kristeva,
as text, the novel “is a semiotic practice in which the synthesized patterns of several utterances can
be read.”51 In this regard, the influence of Bakhtin, who, as you will recall, viewed the literary text
as a mosaic of quotations exhibited through a polyphonous and dialogical structure, is most
apparent. “Bakhtinian dialogism,” writes Kristeva, “identifies writing as both subjectivity and
48
Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 119.
49
Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 119.
50
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1969/1977), ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans.
Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36.
51
Kristeva, Desire in Language, 37.
communication, or better, as intertextuality.”52 Finally, for Kristeva, the analytical process,

comprised of the phenotext and genotext stages, is one of dissolution that inevitably leads to the
hidden meanings of the text.
For Kristeva, poetic language is unique because of the ability of its sounds and rhythms to
reactivate the semiotic drive force in language. Kristeva describes this as a reversed reactivation of
the contradiction between the semiotic and the symbolic. Poetic language reactivates the
contradictions between the semiotic and the symbolic. It does not, however, represent the chora or
drives of the semiotic. By reactivating these contradictions, poetic language displays the processes
that make signification and language possible. Poetic language plays between the genotext and the
phenotext, and in the process reactivates the contradiction between the semiotic and the symbolic.
Like Lacan, Kristeva contends that subjectivity is the product of the acquisition of language and
its use. However, she differs with Lacan concerning language acquisition. Whereas for Lacan, the
mirror stage and the substitution of the Law of the Father for the desire of the mother are central
to self-consciousness and signification, Kristeva offers another account. Instead of entering language
and the social realm through the separation from the maternal and the fear of castration, Kristeva
argues that separation occurs before Lacan’s mirror stage and Freud’s Oedipal Stage. For her, like
Lacan and Freud, the separation is a painful one. But unlike them, it is also a pleasurable one.
Rather than just paternal threats pushing the child into language acquisition and the social realm,
she contends that paternal love is also part of this process. She calls this loving father the imaginary
father, one whose loving support enables the child to abject (or separate) from its mother and enter
the social. For Kristeva, before the mother becomes an object for the infant, it is neither object nor
non-object. Rather, it is abject, a state between object and non-object. This abjection is one that the
child finds both horrifying and fascinating. For Kristeva, the uncertain boundary between the
mother and the child, the abject, becomes the primary experience of both horror and fascination.
Rather than being something that is grotesque or unclean, the abject is for Kristeva that which
threatens borders and calls identity into question.
Moreover, Kristeva also connects the meaning of both language and life with love:
Today Narcissus is an exile, deprived of his psychic space, an extraterrestrial [ET] with a
prehistory bearing, wanting love. An uneasy child, all scratched up, somewhat disgusting,
without a precise body or image, having lost his specificity, an alien in a world of desire and
power, he longs only to reinvent love. The ET’s are more and more numerous. We are all ET’s.53
For Kristeva, the living body is a body that not only speaks, but also loves. Moreover, “love is
something spoken, and it is only that.”54 Love is essential to the body because it helps to reconnect
words with affects, that is, the physical and psychical manifestation of drives. For Kristeva, the
connection between words and affects is established during the child’s acquisition of language.
However, when it is broken or missing, particular forms of mild psychosis can appear. Part of Kristeva’s
project is to reconnect language to bodily drives, and to show the role that love has in this process.
52
Kristeva, Desire in Language, 68.
53
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (1983), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 382–3.
54
Kristeva, Tales of Love, 277.
Kristeva’s notion that bodily drives manifest themselves in language is one of the ways in which
her semanalysis (sema, Greek for sign + analysis, short for psychoanalysis) brings the body back
into language. Key to her theory is that drives operate in a dialectical relationship between the
social and the biological levels—and one cannot be reduced to the other. For her, drives are energies
that move between the body and representation. This is important to recognize because
poststructuralism is often characterized as functioning only at the level of representation—and
foregoing any speculation on its relationship to the body and the material. As such, poststructuralism
is often characterized as a form of linguistic idealism wherein the external world is inaccessible to
us through language.
This is often the way in which, for example, Derrida’s poststructuralism is characterized—a
characterization that though an inaccurate one is difficult to ascertain from his work if one does not
regard the traces that language gives of something beyond language as a type of reference. With
Kristeva, however, there is no such difficulty: the material, the body, and affect are always reminding
us in her work of the dialectics between language and a material world. Whereas Derrida
continuously has to defend himself against the claim that his poststructuralist thought amounts to
the position that we live in the prison house of language and that there is nothing beyond language
or the text, Kristeva’s poststructuralism is never subject to such a charge.
Finally, by considering the role of the mother in object relations and moving away from the
Oedipal Complex, Kristeva’s work is both a rejection of patriarchy and phallogocentrism, that is,
psychoanalytic theory that centers on the phallus. “If it is not possible to say of a woman that she
is (without running the risk of abolishing her difference),” asks Kristeva, “would it perhaps be
different concerning the mother, since that is the only function of the ‘other sex’ to which we can
definitely attribute existence?” But, for Kristeva, this leaves us caught in a paradox:
First, we live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious and secular) representation of
femininity is absorbed by motherhood. If however, one looks at it more closely, this motherhood
is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what is more, it
involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the relationship that binds us to
her, one that cannot be localized—an idealization of primary narcissism. Now, when feminism
demands a new representation of femininity, it seems to identify motherhood with that idealized
misconception and, because it rejects the image and its misuse, feminism circumvents the real
experience that fantasy overshadows. The result?—a negation or rejection of motherhood by
some avant-garde feminist groups. Or else an acceptance—conscious or not—of its traditional
representations by the great mass of people, women and men.55
This passage is from an article called “Stabat Mater” (1977) which was written in two columns: one
column describes her motherhood and the birth of her son in 1976, and the other argues that we
need to reconceive maternity. Kristeva takes Freud’s account of motherhood, which says that it is
either penis envy (where the baby is equated with the penis) or a reactivated anal drive (where the
baby is equated with feces), as merely masculine fantasy. “Freud offers only a massive nothing”
regarding motherhood, says Kristeva, “punctuated with this or that remark on the part of Freud’s
55
Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater” (1977), trans. Leon S. Roudiez, in The Kristeva Reader, 161.
mother, proving to him in the kitchen that his own body is anything but immortal and will crumble
away like dough; or the sour photograph of Marthe Freud, the wife, a whole mute story.”56
Kristeva calls for us to reconceive the notion of maternity, and as part of the process, listen to
“what modern women have to say about this experience.”57 “Pregnancy,” she writes,
[s]eems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of
the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of
physiology and speech. The fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a fantasy
of totality—narcissistic completeness—a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis. The
arrival of the child, on the other hand, leads the mother into the labyrinths of experience that,
without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for an other. Not for herself, nor for an
identical being, and still less for another person with whom “I” fuse (love or sexual passion). But
the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself.
The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one’s affective,
intellectual and professional personality—such would seem to be the stakes to be won through
guiltless maternity. It then becomes a creation in the strong sense of the term. For this moment,
utopian?58
Pregnancy, for Kristeva, is an example of the subject-in-process, a situation where neither the fetus
nor the mother is a unified subject. Finally, argues Kristeva, we are all subjects-in-process, which is
one of the ways in which her maternal notion of the subject moves beyond patriarchal and
phallocentric models.
5.3 JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD

Though Jean-François Lyotard is most widely known for The Postmodern Condition (1979), a work
which closes with a call for us to “wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable;
let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name,” it is said to be one of his “least
representative books” from a publishing career that spanned over forty years—and nearly the same
number of books.59 Nevertheless, his definition of “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives,”
and argument that the totalizing structures of modernity are no longer a legitimate basis for social
and political action have been highly influential in literary and cultural theory.
Though The Postmodern Condition was his twelfth book, his thought had already gone in several
different directions by the time he published it. His first book, Phenomenology (1954), was a
textbook that went through ten editions. The final edition was published in 1986—seven years
after the publication of The Postmodern Condition. In this textbook, Lyotard sought to situate
phenomenology within the context of then contemporary Marxist thought. He valued the ability
of phenomenology to relate experiences that could not be captured in language and argued that
56
Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 179.
57
Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time” (1979), trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, in The Kristeva Reader, 206.
58
Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 206.
59
Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1.
phenomenology could be a foundation for the human sciences, particularly history and sociology.
But still, for him, phenomenology alone cannot produce an account of the dialectical materialism
of Marxism.
For Lyotard, phenomenology tells us that history has “some meaning,” but not “a meaning—
unique, necessary, and thus inevitable, of which humans are the toys and dupes, as they ultimately
are in Hegelian philosophy of history.”60 The meaning of history by way of phenomenology, writes
Lyotard, is a “collective meaning,” which
is the result of the meanings projected by historical subjectivities at the heart of their coexistence,
and which these subjectivities must recover in an act of appropriation that puts an end to the
alienation or objectification of this meaning and history, constituting in itself a modification of
this meaning and proclaiming a transformation of history. There is not objectivity on one side
and subjectivity on the other, which are heterogeneous and at best brought into alignment; and
thus there is never a total understanding of history, since even when this understanding is as
“adequate” as possible, it engages history in a new way and opens up a new future. For this
reason we can grasp history neither through objectivism nor subjectivism, and even less through
a problematic union of the two, but only through a deepening of both which leads us to the very
existence of historical subjects in their “world,” on the basis of which objectivism and subjectivism
appear as two equally inadequate options through which these subjects can understand themselves
in history.61
What is also clear here is that for Lyotard any adequate account of history must provide a role for
the subject. Therefore, the structuralist account of history, a position that denies a role for the
subject, is not an acceptable one for him. “In order to understand history (and there is no greater
task for philosophy),” writes Lyotard, “we must therefore escape this impasse of equally total
freedom and [total] necessity.”62
Ultimately, though, the account of human existence offered by phenomenology will prove
inadequate in determining a third way to account for history between “total freedom” and “total
necessity.” His next book, Discourse, Figure (1971), which appeared seventeen years after the
publication of Phenomenology, offered a different account of human existence from the ones
provided by phenomenology—one that emphasized the figural and aesthetic dimensions of
experience.
By the figural, Lyotard means the visual, which he discusses through the phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty. He sets the figural against discourse, that is, the written text of structuralism and
semiotics. One of the problems he has with structuralism and semiotics is the intellectual emphasis
on discourse over the figural, that is, the emphasis on texts over sensuous experiences and gestures.
Here, Lyotard’s discourse and figure resonates with Kristeva’s distinction between the symbolic and
the semiotic, which for her are the two levels or poles that come together in language. Lyotard,
however, avoids the reduction of discourse and figure to language, but rather speaks of the way they
60
Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology (1954), 10th edition, 1986; trans. Brian Beakley (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1991), 131.
61
Lyotard, Phenomenology, 131.
62
Lyotard, Phenomenology, 131.
co-implicate each other: discourse includes figures, and figures are ordered discursively. Moreover,
contra Lacan, Lyotard’s figural is not structured like a language. Rather, like Kristeva’s semiotic, the
figural might also be described as translinguistic or non-linguistic. But, it is important to add that
the figural is also a disruptive force.
During the span between the publication of Phenomenology and Discourse, Figure, which was
the European equivalent of his doctoral dissertation, Lyotard became deeply involved with the
intellectuals and activists of Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), an editorial collective
concerned with the history and theory of Marxism. One of the concerns of the journal was how to
separate Marxism from Stalinism while at the same time not retreating from politics. As a member
of Socialisme ou Barbarie, he wrote articles for the journal, some of which were later collected in
the edited volume Political Writings (1993).63 But he also wrote and distributed leaflets to union
workers and protesters during this period. After ten years with Socialisme ou Barbarie, he left in
1964 to join Pouvoir Ouvrier (Worker’s Party), which he then left two years later, at which time he
started to attend the seminars of Lacan. For some, his interest in the work of Lacan coupled with
leaving Pouvoir Ouvrier and publication of Discourse, Figure (a work with scant overt discussion of
Marx or Marxism) marked his turning away from Marxism. For others, it marked a new approach
to Marxism. For his friend Derrida, though, who continued to be haunted by the spirit of Marxism
all of his career, Lyotard ultimately sacrificed Marxism to postmodernism.64
If Discourse, Figure resonates with the work of Kristeva, then Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy
(1974) might be linked to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly Anti-Oedipus (1972).
Libidinal Economy utilizes Freud’s theory of libido to offer a critique of philosophy and Marxism.
The result is a theory of libidinal economy as political economy. For Lyotard, the formations of
society are libidinal fields that are stabilized by Freud’s pleasure principle (Eros) and destabilized by
the death drive (Thanatos). The energies of the libido are not representable. Also, like Deleuze and
Guattari’s body without organs, the energies of the libido cannot be contained by a system. But
unlike them, Lyotard makes no distinction between fascist and liberatory forms of desire. Capitalism,
for example, is regarded by him as a liberatory libidinal economy because it overthrows all
institutions that get in the way of its pursuit of capital. For Lyotard, all institutions aim to totalize
these flows of energy and exploit the libidinal economy to their advantage.
Up to the publication of The Postmodern Condition, the representative works of Lyotard were deeply
involved in debates concerning phenomenology, Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. But,
arguably, because Lyotard was largely working as a radical political activist in the 1960s, and because the
poststructuralism of Foucault (9.1) and Derrida was much more influential in the 1970s than his own
work from this period, his twenty-five-year body of work took on a secondary status in literary and
cultural theory of the time. All of this changed, however, in the 1980s with the publication of The
Postmodern Condition, which launched Lyotard into the mainstream of literary and cultural theory.
In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard again argues against totalizing structures of knowledge.
However, this time he is not discussing them in the context of a phenomenology of history grounded
in Husserl and Sartre; or the figural dimensions of experience by way of Merleau-Ponty; or even a
63
Jean-François Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geimen (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993).
64
John Mowitt, “The Gold-Bug,” in Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (1971), trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xi.
libidinal economy à la Marx and Freud. Rather, in The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard approaches
totalizing structures of knowledge from the context of a pragmatics and game theory. His work
here is influenced by the language games and “rule-following” of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy, particularly his Philosophical Investigations (1953), and the work of the logician Saul
Kripke—two analytic philosophers whose work is central to gaming studies (14.4), but very distant
from the concerns of phenomenology, Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. In The
Postmodern Condition, Lyotard asks,
Where, after the metanarratives [of modernity], can legitimacy reside? Is legitimacy to be found
in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jürgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does
violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension.
Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences
and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s
homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.65
Lyotard analyzes how metanarratives (or, master narratives) reproduce and legitimize the dominant
norms, institutions, and ideologies of modernity. For him, the postmodern is that which cannot be
presented in the modern. It is knowledge founded on alternative models of narrative based in
paralogy, a mode of legitimation determined by making moves within a pragmatics of knowledge,
not by promoting law as a norm.
Lyotard argues against the notion that the goal of dialogue is consensus—a notion that he
attributes to Habermas. For Lyotard, “consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its
end.”66 Consensus requires “that it is possible for all speakers to come to agreement on which rules
or metaprescriptions are universally valid for language games”—something which Lyotard contends
he has shown is not possible through his analysis of the pragmatics of science.67 For him, “it is clear
that language games are heteromorphous, subject to heterogeneous sets of pragmatic rules.”68
Nonetheless, in spite of his difficulties with consensus as the aim of dialogue, Lyotard is no
enemy of dialogue as such. For him, rather than viewing the aim of dialogue as consensus and
stability, he would rather that we view its aim as dissent and instability, that is to say, paralogy.
Writes Lyotard, “This double observation (the heterogeneity of the rules and the search for dissent)
destroys a belief that . . . humanity as a collective (universal) subject seeks its common emancipation
through the regularization of the ‘moves’ permitted in all language games and that the legitimacy
of any statement resides in its contributing to that emancipation.”69
For Lyotard, two of the benefits of paralogical inquiry are that it eliminates “terror” and it allows
terms to be defined locally. “By terror,” writes Lyotard, “I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating,
or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him.”70 “He is silenced
65
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxv; my emphasis.
66
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 65.
67
68
69
70
or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been
threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing).”71 However, when one
eliminates the regularization of moves, one allows for the possibility of everyone participating in
the game. Lyotard’s “permissiveness toward the various games” shields the players of games from
acts of terror. “The decision maker’s arrogance,” writes Lyotard, “consists in the exercise of
terror.”72 He continues, “It says: ‘Adapt your aspirations to our ends—or else.’ ”73 Thus, for Lyotard,
terroristic behavior in the game results not from playing by one’s own rules, but rather by adapting
one’s aspirations to the rules of the game.
The second benefit of paralogy is the “principle that any consensus on the rules defining the
game and the ‘moves’ playable with it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present
players and subject to eventual cancellation.”74 “The orientation then favors a multiplicity of finite
meta-arguments,” writes Lyotard, “by which I mean argumentation that concerns metaprescriptives
and is limited in space and time.”75 This implies that “temporary” features may be favored over
“permanent” ones—and that the notion of universal consensus is “neither possible, nor even
prudent”—to borrow Lyotard’s comment about Habermas’s search for universal consensus.76
Lyotard says that the paralogical “orientation corresponds to the course that the evolution of
social interaction is currently taking; the temporary contract is in practice supplanting permanent
institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as
well as in political affairs.”77 “This evolution,” adds Lyotard, “is of course ambiguous: the temporary
contract is favored by the system due to its greater flexibility, lower cost, and the creative turmoil
of its accompanying motivations—all of these factors contribute to increased operativity.”78 As to
the question of whether to try to repair the “old” system or to simply replace it with a “new”
system, Lyotard’s response is quite clear: “there is no question here of proposing a ‘pure’ alternative
to the system” as any “attempt at an alternative . . . would end up resembling the system it was
meant to replace.”79
Lyotard’s paralogism is not one of calm, dispassionate dialogue. Rather, it is an agonistic one.
Writes Lyotard, “the first principle underlying our method as a whole: to speak is to fight, in the
sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of general agonistics.”80 Jameson,
commenting on Lyotard’s paralogism, writes that its “rhetoric” is “one of struggle, conflict, the
agonic in a quasi-heroic sense,” and reminds us not to “forget Lyotard’s related vision of
nonhegemonic Greek philosophy (the Stoics, the Cynics, the Sophists), as the guerrilla war of the
marginals, the foreigners, the non-Greeks, against the massive and repressive Order of Aristotle and
his successors.”81 In this light, one might regard Lyotard’s paralogism as a kind of “negative
71
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 63–4.
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xix.
dialogics,” that is, dialogue aimed at disrupting the system rather than bringing it into equilibrium.
Paralogism encourages renouncement of the notion that dialogue needs to be conducted in a calm,
dispassionate, and respectful way. For Lyotard, this type of dialogue needs to be rejected because it
allows the system to become more powerful as a hegemonic force and homogeneous game.
Lyotard also presents here a theory of the postmodern sublime grounded in the Kantian sublime.
For Lyotard, the sublime allows us “to present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make
visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made
visible.”82 The difference, however, between Kant’s modern sublime and Lyotard’s postmodern
sublime is as follows:
[M]odern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the
unpresentable to be put forward only as missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable
consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these
sentiments do not constitute real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure
and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or
sensibility should not be equal to the concept.
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in
presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste
which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which
searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a strong sense
of the unpresentable.83
Lyotard will develop this notion of the postmodern sublime and its political potential in other
works including The Differend (1983).
In this later work, Lyotard provides an account of the differends in various language games. The
differend is the irreconcilable and irreducible difference between two or more language games or
regimes of language. If the language of a community is regarded as a language game, in order for it
to function there must be some shared rules within the community. For Lyotard, these rules are
embedded in the phrases of the language and provide the community members with shared rules
for meaning. The differend is the incommensurable difference between the shared understanding of
one regime of language and others.
Political conflict enters considerations of the differend because it provides an account of points
of dispute or conflict over things like the good, the true, and the just among regimes of language
games. Basic to the notion of the differend is that knowledge is constructed through various language
games, that is, genres of discourse. These genres of discourse allow for some phrasing that excludes
others. These exclusions are the differend, points where the incommensurability of the discourse
does not provide those of a different regime of language access to the values and experiences of
other regimes of language. The differend also shows us where new genres of discourse need to be
developed that break down incommensurability, that is, provide more access among peoples of
differing language games.
82
83
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81; my emphasis.
Finally, with regard to rule-following, Lyotard places the postmodern writer and artist in the
position of a philosopher:
[T]he text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules,
and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories
to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking
for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of
what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have characters of an event; hence
also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being
put into work, their realization (mise en oeuvre) always being too soon. Post modern would have
to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).84
For Lyotard, a form of text that exemplifies “working without rules in order to formulate the rules
of what will have been done” is the essay. In contrast, he finds the fragment to be modern.
“It seems to me the essay (Montaigne) is postmodern,” writes Lyotard, “while the fragment (The
Athenaeum) is modern.”85 The journal, Athenaeum, was a set of fragments published by the Schlegel
brothers—Friedrich and August Wilhelm—between 1798 and 1800. The fragment is a literary form
that the Romantic Movement believed opened up the relationship between the infinite and the
finite—the epitome of the modern sublime. The essays of Montaigne, however, first published in
1580, exhibit well the epistemological skepticism of postmodern knowledge. Moreover, it is fitting
that Michel de Montaigne is often regarded by philosophers as offering a counter-narrative of the
epistemological foundations of modern philosophy. It is one whose skepticism stands in stark
contrast to Descartes (12.4), the philosopher whose certainty of the cogito (or thinking thing)
supposedly overcame skepticism to become the indubitable foundation of modern philosophy.
5.4 JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Baudrillard’s world is one filled with objects. “Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-
accelerating procession of generations of products, appliances and gadgets,” he comments, “by
comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species.”86 His first book, The
System of Objects (1968), argues that social life is structured by our consumption of these objects.
“Could we classify,” asks Baudrillard, “the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna,
complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by
extinction?”87 Baudrillard explores the classification system of consumer objects that code social
behavior and consumer groups. In this work, he reconsiders consumer society through a Marxism
tempered by Saussure and Freud, that is, by use of linguistic categories rather than economic ones.
For Baudrillard, we live in a consumer society wherein traditional Marxist analysis fails to capture
the status of objects. Commodities post-1945 have a communicational structure that can only be
84
85
86
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1968), trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 3.
87
Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 3.
captured by a semiotics that relies not on a referential model akin to Peirce, but rather a differential
one like Saussure. Baudrillard’s semiotics combines aspects of Freud and Saussure to show how in
the commodity word and image is related to desire, rather than use value or utility. Symbols provide
the codes that differentiate one consumer product from another. Upon consumption, symbols then
transfer meaning from the product to its consumer. Moreover, as a poststructuralist, the free play of
this semiotics is potentially endless, and provides the consumer with a strong sense of freedom and
self-determination within the hyperreality of the new semiotic condition of consumer society. It is
hyperreality because in Baudrillard’s system one cannot get outside of the fantasies and desires
generated by consumer consumption within the system of objects.
In Baudrillard’s economy of signs, individuals are not making consumption choices based on
tastes in a marketplace of products. Rather, consumer objects are codes that function within a
system of signs. Following Saussure’s principles, signs become meaningful only when differentiated
from other signs—not by reference to an external reality. Within this system of signs, consumer
objects are able to generate desire without corresponding to need or use value. For Baudrillard, the
mode of production of a society requires an expansion of consumer consumption in order for it to
be reproduced. The dependency of the reproduction of the mode of production on the reproduction
of the act of consumption thus becomes a new development in capitalism.
In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard works out a
poststructuralist theory of language that can supplement Marxism. In Saussure, the signifier and the
signified are distinct and are only arbitrarily related. Signs then take on value through their
relationship with other signs in the system. Baudrillard, however, argues that we should reverse
Saussure’s process, that is, we should begin our theory of language from the combination of the
signifier and the signified replete with systemic value. To do otherwise is to use the signified as an
excuse to render signifier and signified as distinct.
For Baudrillard, political economy mirrors Saussure’s separation of signifier and signified before
their combination in the sign by its separation of use value from exchange value before their
combination in the commodity. “By giving the Sr [Signifier] and the Sd [Signified] ‘in equivalence’
as constitutive agencies (instances) of the sign,” comments Baudrillard, Saussure’s theory of the sign
“veils the strategic apparatus of the sign, which rests precisely on the disparity of the two terms and
on the fundamental circularity of the dominant term.”88 He then explains:
The Signifier–Referent is taken for an original reality, a substance of value and recurring finality
through the supporting play of signifiers . . . Similarly, use value is given as origin and purpose
(finalité), and needs as the basic motor of the economic cycle—the cycle of exchange value
appearing here as a necessary detour, but incompatible with true finalities . . . In reality, this
moral and metaphysical privilege of contents (Use Value and Signifier–Referent) only masks the
decisive privilege of form (Exchange Value and Signifier).89
Baudrillard argues that the political economy of the sign needs to keep use value and exchange value
together in the commodity, rather than make use value into a “mask” or excuse for exchange value.
88
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, MO: Telos
Press Ltd., 1981), 156.
89
Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 156.
This reversal of the theory of the sign not only undermines structuralism but also undermines
Marxism by radically altering its theory of the commodity. Ultimately, Baudrillard not only rejects
structuralism but also Marxism. He offers in its place a theory of the sign as the mode of signification
within capitalism. From The Mirror of Production (1973) onward, Baudrillard regards his critique
of the political economy of the sign not as supplementing Marxism, but rather replacing it.
Moreover, Baudrillard regards Marxism not as a critique of capitalism, but rather as its highest
form of ideology. In addition, he believes that his own critique of the political economy of the sign
is sufficiently distanced from Marxism in order to provide capitalism with a proper critique.
One of the differences between Baudrillard’s semiology and those of Saussure and Barthes is that
he provides a diachronic account of the formation of language usage, whereas their accounts are
primarily synchronic. His diachronic account begins with pre-industrial society, where he says there
were signs attached to referents and that the referents of these signs were subject to reversal. This
began to change, however, in the Renaissance, which for him is the historical period when “the
sign” emerged. For Baudrillard, the rise of capitalism was a reflection of these changes in modes of
signification. By the late twentieth century, the sign became completely separated from the referent.
Signs are now more like traffic signals; that is, they emit a meaning but it is not a meaning to which
one responds linguistically: the code tells us that a red light means stop and that nothing more
needs to be said in response to this signal. This code extracts signifieds from the social and
recirculates them in media such as television as floating signifiers. The code itself might be regarded
as the entire system of political economy including the rules through which the sign values of
commodities are produced and regulated.
In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), this diachronic account of the sign morphs into a
diachronic account of the three orders of simulacrum (or, appearance) that parallel the mutations
of the law: Counterfeit, the first order of the simulacrum, which was the dominant scheme from the
Renaissance to the industrial era, is based on the natural law of value; Production, the second order
of the simulacrum, which was the dominant scheme of the industrial era, is based on the commercial
law of value; and Simulation, the third order of the simulacrum, which is the “reigning scheme of
the current phase that is controlled by the code,” is based on the structural law of value.90 Here, as
indicated in the third order of simulation, the code still takes precedence over consumer objects.
But within a few years, that is, by the time of the publication of Simulacra and Simulations (1981),
its order and control will fade away as a final relic of structuralism in the precession of simulacra.
In Seduction (1979), Baudrillard puts all modern theory into question under the sign of seduction.
For him, seduction speaks to the sudden reversibility in the order of things where discourse is
“absorbed into its own signs without a trace of meaning.”91 This sudden reversibility is a threat to
every discourse. “This is why all disciplines, which have as an axiom the coherence and finality of
their discourse,” continues Baudrillard, “must try to exorcise [seduction].”92 Baudrillard, however,
does the opposite: he celebrates seduction because it plays on the surface and challenges theories
like structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis which are interpretive strategies that favor the
hermeneutics of suspicion, that is, hidden structures and meanings.
90
Jean Baudrillard, “The Order of Simulacra,” from Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), collected in Jean Baudrillard,
Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 83.
91
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (1979), trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 2.
92
Baudrillard, Seduction, 2.
Seduction takes from discourse its sense and turns it from its truth. It is, therefore, contrary to the
psychoanalytic distinction between manifest and latent discourses. For the latent discourse turns the
manifest discourse not from its truth, but towards its truth. It makes manifest discourse say what it
does not want to say; it causes determinations and profound indeterminations to show through in
the manifest discourse. Depth always peeks through from behind the break, and meaning peaks
from behind the line. The manifest discourse has the status of appearance, a laboured appearance,
traversed by the emergence of meaning. Interpretation is what breaks the appearance and play of
the manifest discourse and, by taking up the latent discourse, delivers the real meaning.
In seduction, by contrast, it is the manifest discourse—discourse at its most superficial—that
turns back on the deeper order (whether conscious or unconscious) in order to invalidate it,
substituting the charm and illusion of appearances. These appearances are not in the least
frivolous, but occasions for a game and its stakes, and a passion for deviation—the seduction of
signs themselves being more important than the emergence of any truth—which interpretation
neglects and destroys in its search for hidden meanings. This is why interpretation is what, par
excellence, is opposed to seduction, and why it is the least seductive of the discourses.93
Looking ahead, Baudrillard’s poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion in favor of

surface play might be viewed as a kind of prequel to surface reading and postcritique (15.4). Though
their strategies are different, their common enemy is the hermeneutics of suspicion.
In Simulacra and Simulations, the distinction between a sign and its object are said to not have
any purchase in the current phase of history, that is, the third order of simulation.
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation
is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models
of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor
does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—
that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose
shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges
persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert
of the real itself.94
For Baudrillard, this is the condition of our society in the late twentieth century. One where we
have become so reliant upon maps that all contact with a reality that precedes these maps has been
forever lost. Or, more precisely, “it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something
has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm
of abstraction.”95
Baudrillard will return to this question of disappearance again twenty-five years later in one of
the final texts that he wrote before his death, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2007).
93
Baudrillard, Seduction, 53–4.
94
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
1994), 2.
95
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2.
“Is everything doomed to disappear,” asks Baudrillard.96 “[O]r, more precisely,” he continues,
“hasn’t everything already disappeared? (which connects up with the very distant paradox from a
philosophy that never was: WHY IS THERE NOTHING RATHER THAN SOMETHING?).”97 It
is this latter question that speaks to the metaphysical shift Baudrillard makes in his post-Marxist
writing on hyperreality.
The question, “Why is there nothing rather than something?” is a reversal of a question famously
raised by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a philosopher who proposed that not only did God create the
world, He created the best of all possible worlds. Though the world created by God is not a perfect
one, it is far from imperfect. It is not a world without evil, but on the whole the good in the world
exceeds the evil. More importantly, Leibniz’s world is founded in a metaphysics of things. Baudrillard,
however, turns metaphysics inside out: the main philosophical question for the late twentieth century
is why is there now the “nothing” of hyperreality, rather than the “something” of reality?
For Baudrillard, the metaphysical question regarding nothingness corresponds to a particular
form of nihilism that he comments on at the close of Simulacra and Simulations. For him, the death
of God takes on a different character in the late twentieth century than it did at the end of previous
century:
Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the
century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical
radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this
death. Today’s nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial
than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly
that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it. When God died,
there was still Nietzsche to say so—the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the
Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the
materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become
hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.98
Rather than distance himself from nihilism or try to overcome it, Baudrillard fully embraces it as
his metaphysical position:
I am a nihilist.
I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of
the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.)
that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth
century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world
and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history.
96
Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2007), trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books,
2016), 63; my emphasis.
97
Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? 63.
98
I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century,
that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the
earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning.
The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of
meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of
indifferentiation.99
With this statement of nihilism, Baudrillard reaffirms his rejection of the hermeneutics of suspicion
and along with it a large chunk of contemporary theory for a view of the universe as simulation.
“The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation,” writes Baudrillard, “into the malefic,
not even malefic, indifferent, sphere of deterrence: in a bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely
realized no longer through destruction, but through simulation and deterrence.”100
As one of the major commentators on postmodernity, Baudrillard essentially leaves us in the
“desert of the real” with no “dialectic stage” on the horizon to transition us to another critical
stage. The reasons for our current predicament range from the expansion of consumer society and
new media to the loss of a sense of use-value and history. While Baudrillard is mostly responsible
for the entry of the terms simulation and simulacra into the contemporary critical lexicon, the
concept of a world of appearances can be traced back through the history of philosophy to Plato’s
cave, where images were projected on a wall. But the more recent precursor to Baudrillard’s
simulation and simulacra is perhaps Benjamin, whose work of art has lost its aura through
mechanical reproduction. Baudrillard might then be viewed as expanding Benjamin’s thesis to all
objects in the postmodern world.
Baudrillard’s work throughout his career has been a lightening rod for commentators, but
perhaps none more famous and discussed than Bruno Latour’s comments in a 2003 lecture at
Stanford University. “What has critique become,” asked Latour, “when a French general, no, a
marshal of critique, namely, Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book that the Twin Towers
destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism
inherent in capitalism itself—as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful
attraction of this black hole of nothingness?”101 Latour is here referring two of Baudrillard’s late
essays, “The Spirit of Terrorism” (2002) and “Requiem for the Twin Towers” (2002).102 On the
basis of these and other examples, Latour wonders if critique has “run out of steam.” What is ironic
about Latour’s question is that Baudrillard renounced critique—and along with it the hermeneutics
of suspicion—over two decades earlier in both Seduction and Simulacra and Simulations. The
better question to ask of Baudrillard is what becomes of philosophy when nothingness rather than
somethingness becomes its major concern. For Baudrillard, the answer provides us with an
understanding and explanation of contemporary culture and society. Nevertheless, we will turn our
attention to these and other questions asked of theory and critique by Latour and others in due
course (15.0).
99
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 160–1.
100
101
Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30
(2004): 228.
102
Both of these essays are collected in Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002), trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso,
2012).
5.5 NEW HISTORICISM

New Historicism was a term coined in the 1980s for a poststructuralist approach to history that was
emerging in literary studies. The field of literature in which it gained most currency was Renaissance
studies, and the critic most often associated with its rise is Stephen Greenblatt. Though he first used
it in a brief introduction to a journal issue103 in 1982, in major works before and after, such as
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), he preferred the term
cultural poetics. In the latter work, he describes cultural poetics as “study of the collective making
of distinct cultural practices and inquiry into the relations among these practices.”104 The major
concerns of cultural poetics are “how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from
one medium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption [and]
how the boundaries were marked between cultural practices understood to be art forms and other,
contiguous, forms of expression.”105 But his own positive relationship with the term New
Historicism—let alone the designation of it as a literary theory or doctrine is—at best—strained.
In “Towards a Poetics of Culture” (1989), Greenblatt says that he coined the term in 1982 “out
of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done.”106 “I’ve never been very good at making up
advertising phrases of this kind,” continues Greenblatt, “for reasons that I would be quite interested
in exploring at some point, the name stuck more than other names I’d very carefully tried to invent
over the years.”107 But perhaps more interesting than the question of whether New Historicism or
cultural poetics is the right term for his poststructuralist approach to history in the reading of
Renaissance texts is Greenblatt’s description of his approach to theory. “My own work has always
been done with a sense of just having to go about and do it,” says Greenblatt, “without establishing
first exactly what my theoretical position is.”108 At best, therefore, he sees his approach to literature,
history, and culture not as a theoretical doctrine, but rather as a practice. In fact, regarding New
Historicism, Greenblatt says “it’s no doctrine at all.”109
Furthermore, Greenblatt describes the relationship of New Historicism to literary theory as both
“unresolved and in some ways disingenuous.”110 Writes Greenblatt,
On the one hand it seems to me that an openness to the theoretical ferment of the last few years
is precisely what distinguished the New Historicism from the positivist historical scholarship of
the early twentieth century . . . On the other hand the [new] historical critics have on the whole
been unwilling to enroll themselves in one or the other dominant theoretical camps.111
103
Stephen Greenblatt, “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance,” Genre 15.1/2 (1982): 1–4.
104
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 5.
105
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 5.
106
Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge,
1989), 1.
107
Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” 1.
108
109
110
111
Circa 1989, when Greenblatt is writing this, New Historicism is forming in the theoretical wake of
structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, formalism, Marxism,
psychoanalysis, and feminism. It is also a time when cultural studies in the US is coming to offer an
alternative to theoretical accounts of literature (14.1). However, what was largely missing from this
“theoretical ferment,” particularly with regard to literature, was history. While the dialectical
materialism of Marxism offered a path to New Historicism, it was a path not taken.
Rather, it was one that was taken by the British equivalent of New Historicism—something
called cultural materialism (or, alternately, historical materialism). Its major proponent, Raymond
Williams, was discussed earlier in reference to the work of Jameson. For cultural materialists, study
of the history of the material base of society helps us to understand literature and culture. New
historicists, however, reverse this formula, arguing that the study of literature and culture helps us
to understand history. Here the major influences are the biopolitics of Foucault, that is, his later
work on power, discourse, and subjectivity (9.1), and the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz,
particularly his notion of thick description, which he describes as “a semiotic one.”112 “[M]an is an
animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” says Geertz, and “I take culture to
be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law
but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”113 This, however, cannot be accomplished by
structural linguistics, which strives “to understand men without knowing them.”114 “Nothing will
discredit a semiotic approach to culture more quickly than allowing it to drift into a combination
of intuitionism and alchemy,” that is, by allowing it to drift into structural linguistics.115 For Geertz,
one must attempt to see cultural artifacts from the position of those who belong to the culture. The
latter is accomplished through a mastery of the webs of the culture in order to gain as complete an
account as possible of the background and context of the cultural artifact.
Thus, New Historicism might be regarded as the American version of cultural materialism. It
should be no surprise then that its aversion to Marxism will lead Jameson to oppose New
Historicism: for him, cultural texts are symptoms of history, whereas for the New Historicists,
cultural texts are agents of history. What might be surprising, though, is that Greenblatt was a
student of Williams at Cambridge University—and learned cultural materialism directly from its
most celebrated practitioner.
Nevertheless, if a tension with Marxism always seems to be percolating just below the surface of
New Historicism, then so too does one with deconstruction. Catherine Gallagher, who like
Greenblatt is also closely linked to New Historicism, explains this tension as follows:
Many of us, however, found that we could neither renew our faith in Marxism or convert to
deconstruction, for neither seemed sufficient to explain the permutations of our own historical
subjectivities and our relationships to a system of power, which we still imagined as decentered,
but which we no longer viewed as easily vulnerable to its own contradictions.116
112
Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures:
Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
113
Geertz, “Thick Description,” 5.
114
115
116
Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in The New Historicism, 42.
So, with deconstruction off the table as a potential theoretical approach to Renaissance studies, and
Marxism appearing to have run out of steam circa 1989, Gallagher and her New Historicist
colleagues fashioned a set of practices (but no defined theory) that loosely drew from theorists such
as Althusser, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Gramsci and theoretical movements such as formalism,
hermeneutics, structuralism, phenomenology—and, yes, even Marxism. In a way, New Historicism
was the result of the rise and success of theory in the 1980s—a success that made literary critics
highly attuned to the benefits and costs of their theoretical approach. Even Lyotard’s critique of
meta-narratives entered their deliberations, with Gallagher and others aiming to avoid totalizing
narratives and to drift toward micro-narratives. Gallagher successfully encapsulates all of these
theoretical anxieties of the time:
Instead of resubscribing, as some Marxist critics have, to a historical meta-narrative of class

conflict, we have tended to insist that power cannot be equated with economic or state power,
that its sites of activity, and hence of resistance, are also in the micro-politics of daily life. The
traditionally important economic and political agents and events have been displaced or
supplemented by people and phenomena that once seemed wholly insignificant, indeed outside
of history: women, criminals, the insane, sexual practices and discourses, fairs, festivals, plays of
all kinds. Just as in the sixties, the effort of the eighties has been to question and destabilize the
distinctions between sign systems and things, the representation and the represented, history and
text.117
Looking forward, she adds, “some new historicists will continue to resist the goal of synthesizing
their historical, literary critical, and political consciousness in one coherent entity” such as
Marxism.118 “The new historicist,” continues Gallagher, “unlike the Marxist, is under no nominal
compulsion to achieve consistency.”119
Whereas the disagreements between Marxism and New Historicism have been well established,
its distance from deconstruction is far less established. In fact, Louis Montrose, another thinker
closely associated with New Historicism, describes it as concerned with “the Historicity of Texts
and the Textuality of History”—a phrasing that links it strongly to the textualist approach of
poststructuralism. Writes Montrose,
The post-structuralist orientation to history now emerging in literary studies may be characterized
chiastically, as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. By
the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all
mode of all modes of writing—not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we
study them. By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest, firstly, that we can have no access to
a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces
of the society in question—traces whose survival we cannot assume to be merely contingent but
must rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes
117
Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” 43.
118
119
of preservation and effacement; and secondly, that those textual traces are themselves subject to
subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the “documents” upon which
historians ground their own texts, called “histories.”120
For Montrose, “the various modes of what could be called post-structuralist historical criticism
(including modes of revisionist or ‘post’ Marxism, as well as ‘New Historicism’ or ‘Cultural Poetics’)
can be characterized as a shift from History to histories.”121 History with a big H is the history of
the old historicism, wherein literary history is considered a part of cultural history. One version of
this comes from Hegel’s idealism, wherein the literary history of nations is viewed as an expression
of the evolution of “Spirit.” The study of literature under this version of the old historicism is to
regard it in the context of social, political, and cultural History (with a big H)—a History that
consists of a seamless unified system of meanings that cannot be disturbed or altered by dissenting
voices or accounts.
By contrast, the New Historicism, as Montrose says, is history with a small h—one wherein
there is no untextualized or unnarrated access to the past. On the one hand, the notion that we have
no unnarrated access to the past calls upon theoretical work done on history under the rubric of
structural narratology, in particular, the contributions of Hayden White; on the other hand, the
notion that we have no untextualized access to the past calls directly upon the theoretical work of
Derrida, whose theory of textuality is the most robust version in poststructuralism. The combination
of these two approaches to the past leads to historians who no longer claim that their study of the
past is detached and objective, that is, it is the study of history that does not and cannot transcend
one’s historical situation. For those who study history with a small h, we construct the past from
texts of all kinds, which we construe in line with our historical concerns.
Moreover, on this approach to history with a small h, all texts are equal, which is to say, the
literary text is regarded as neither sublime nor transcendent. Literary and non-literary texts are of
the same order for those who attest to the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. Literature
is neither read against the background of History nor is there a fixed History to set in the background.
Small h history is merely one story about the past among many competing versions. While one may
combine all of these small h histories together into a set and call them “histories,” they are very
different from the History (with a big H) of both Hegel and Marx. There is no totalizing History or
meta-narrative in the histories of New Historicism. There is also, as Greenblatt observed in
Renaissance Self-Fashioning, no room for human freedom or agency in these histories with a small h:
In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered
subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological
product of the relations of power in a particular society. Whenever I focused sharply upon a
moment of apparently autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely
chosen but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was among
possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force.122
120
Louis Montrose, “The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, 20.
121
Montrose, “The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” 20.
122
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980), 256.
As a practice that offers no human agency and no human freedom, the New Historicism also denies
the humanist ideal of the autonomous self. As such, the idea of the individual literary genius like
the ones discussed by Bloom are not possible in the New Historicism. Whereas humanists such as
Bloom view literary history as a series of isolated moments of genius, the very idea of individual
genius is not possible within the New Historicism.
But then again, not only is the autonomous self not possible, the same goes for the autonomous
text cherished by the New Criticism. As H. Aram Veeser puts it, the “autonomous self and text are
mere holograms” for the New Historicists—“effects that intersecting institutions produce.”123
While it might sound extreme to compare these holograms to Baudrillard’s simulations, the
autonomous self and text are not possible within the context of either approach. Similarly, although
it might be a stretch to call the New Historicism a nihilism, as Baudrillard terms his world of
simulation, the New Historicist notion of “selves and texts [only] defined by their relation to hostile
others (despised and feared Indians, Jews, Blacks) and disciplinary power (the King, Religion,
Masculinity)”124 is no less bleak a vision of humanity, particularly when one also considers that it
offers to us a world wherein there is also no room for critique and no access to any universal truths.
In sum, the New Historicism, in spite of its heterogeneity and desire to not be attached to doctrines,
might be characterized by five assumptions:
(1) Every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices.
(2) Every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling
prey to the practice it exposes.
(3) Literary and non-literary “texts” circulate inseparably.
(4) No discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses
inalterable human nature.
(5) A critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participates
in the economy it describes.125
Finally, for all of its efforts to distance itself from Marxism, the New Historicism, like Derrida, is
haunted by it. Or perhaps it would be better to say, in strict parallel with Derrida’s comment that
Lyotard ultimately sacrificed Marxism to postmodernism, that New Historicism sacrificed Marxism
to histories.
123
H. Aram Veeser, “Introduction,” in The New Historicism, xiii; my emphasis.
124
Veeser, “Introduction,” xiii.
125
Veeser, “Introduction,” xi (slightly adapted).
174
CHAPTER SIX
Feminist Theory
6.0 INTRODUCTION
By the time of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, feminist theory had already more than 200 years
of history behind it. This period, often said to begin with the letters Abigail Adams wrote to John
Adams during the Continental Congress of 1776, is alternately termed old or first-wave feminism
(6.1). It was fundamentally concerned with the liberty of women.
Abigail wrote to her husband John, who would later become the second president of the US, that
the new government that was being codified by Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and
others must provide greater freedoms to women. In one of her letters, she writes:
[I]n the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you
would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.
Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be
tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to ladies, we are determined to
foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or
representation.1
While Abigail ultimately did not convince the future president regarding the rights of women, her
correspondence is valuable because she pointed out to him that “while emancipating the world, he
still believes in giving men the absolute control over women.”2
If old feminism (or first-wave feminism) had its origins in the democratic revolutions in America
and France, it was also pointed out by some writers during this period that its history goes back
even further to early feminist writers such as Christine de Pisan, a fifteenth-century poet whom
Simone de Beauvoir says was the first woman “to take up her pen in defense of her sex.”3 “Later,”
continues Beauvoir, “she maintained that if little girls were well taught, they would ‘understand the
subtleties of all the arts and sciences’ as well as boys.”4 From the late eighteenth century through
World War I (1914–18), the rights of women was the major topic of feminism. But, after the war,
there was a decline in feminism that has been attributed to a number of factors including the victory
in securing suffrage in the US (the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified on August 18,
1
Abigail Adams, “Letter to John Adams, 31 March 1776,” in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam
Schneir (New York: Vintage, 1972), 3.
2
Miriam Schneir, “Abigail Adams,” in Feminism, 3.
3
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), 118.
4
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 118.
175
1920, granted women the right to vote) and the UK (women were granted the right to vote in the
UK through laws passed in 1918 and 1928); the rise of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which was
regarded as anti-feminist; the economic depression which followed World War I; and the
development of authoritarian governments in Germany and the Soviet Union that promoted
the value of male supremacy. In Sexual Politics (1969), Kate Millett says that the first phase of the
sexual revolution spans 1830 to 1930, and that the second phase, which she calls the “counter-
revolution,” spans 1930 to 1960. For Millett, while the first phase of the sexual revolution effectively
attacked the “political, economic, and legal superstructure, accomplishing very notable reform in
the area of legislative and other civil rights, suffrage, education, and employment,” it did not
dismantle the ideology of patriarchy—that is, a social system in which men dominate and exercise
control over women in all important areas of life.5
The old feminism (or first-wave feminism) ranges from Abigail Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and
Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963). The focus here is on women as people with rights in
society. In the 1960s, however, there is a shift in focus in feminism to the body. This new feminism
or second-wave feminism (6.2) will focus on matters such as ownership of the body, the nature of
the body, abortion, and women’s liberation. Also, as evidenced above by Millett, there will be
attention to the omnipresence of patriarchy and the inadequacy of political institutions with respect
to women. Carol Gilligan will even argue that men and women have different moral attitudes—and
that one is as correct as the other.
But as the second-wave feminism begins to unfold in the 1960s, so too does a suspicion among
feminists regarding theory. As Mary Eagleton puts it,
A suspicion of theory is widespread throughout feminism. Faced as we are with a long history of
patriarchal theory which claims to have proved decisively the inferiority of women, this caution
is hardly surprising. Many feminists see theory as, if not innately male—women are capable of
doing it—then certainly male-dominated in its practice and masculinist in its methods.6
According to Eagleton, feminism argues that “the impersonality and disinterestedness of theory is
fallacious, masking the needs and partiality of the theoretician and that it partakes in [a] kind of
hierarchical binary opposition.”7 Continues Eagleton,
[T]heory is impersonal, public, objective, male; experience is personal, private, subjective,

female. The anti-theorists undermine the primacy of theory by valorizing the subordinated term,
variously styled as the experiential, the body, jouissance, the Mother.8
Eagleton also cites Marguerite Duras, who echoes the feminist position that theory is oppressive to
women and only further consolidates male power:
5
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 64.
6
Mary Eagleton, “Introduction,” in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Mary Eagleton (New York: Routledge, 1991), 5.
7
Mary Eagleton, “Introduction,” 5.
8
Mary Eagleton, “Introduction,” 6.
FEMINIST THEORY 177
Men must learn to be silent. This is probably very painful to them. To quell their theoretical
voice, the exercise of theoretical interpretation. They must watch themselves carefully. One has
scarcely the time to experience an event as important as May ’68 before men begin to speak out,
to formulate theoretical epilogues, and to break the silence. . . . They are the ones who started
to speak, to speak alone and for everyone else, on behalf of everyone else, as they put it. They
immediately forced women and extremists to keep silent. They activated the old language,
enlisted the aid of the old way of theorizing, in order to recount, to explain this new situation:
May ’68.9
The question of whether feminism should be associated with theory or not will be an important
one, especially after the events of May 1968. Again, this was a period where various discourses such
as Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis were interacting both to understand why the
revolutionary moment of 1968 had failed as well as to rethink institutions such as the family, the
state, and education. Feminism would play a decisive role regarding how these institutions should
be rethought—a move that echoes backwards through history to Abigail Adams’s failed plea to
John Adams to rethink America’s nascent institutions with respect to the rights of women. Flash
forward two centuries later and feminists are still working to reform patriarchal institutions, but
now the question is whether the totalizing discourse of theory is the best approach to the feminist
reform of society—or whether theory is itself part of the patriarchal problem.
While Anglo-American feminism of the second wave tended not to theorize itself for the reasons
described above—and opted instead for the terms politics and criticism to describe their practices—
French feminism from the same period tended to be self-consciously theoretical. But this is not to
say that French feminist theory simply uncritically adopted structuralist, poststructuralist,
psychoanalytic, and Marxist theory. Rather, the major French theorists, such as Julia Kristeva (5.2),
Hélène Cixous (6.4), and Luce Irigaray (6.5), explored and challenged the patriarchal and
phallocentric traditions that underwrote theory to offer a new direction for theory and feminism.
One of the major themes of French feminist theory is its defense of the psychoanalysis of Freud and
Lacan against other feminists who regarded it as the epitome of patriarchy and anti-feminism.
Another theme was its development of the concept of écriture féminine (female writing), one that
theorized a role for women’s bodies in writing.
In the early 1990s, however, feminism started to move in another direction. It was one that was
initiated by a generation of feminists born in the 1960s and 1970s, and came about because of the
advances of second-wave feminism. It extended feminism in a number of new directions, including
sex positivity, intersectionality (8.4), postmodern feminism, transfeminism, and ecofeminism.
Termed third-wave feminism (6.3), it is often said to have been launched in the early 1990s with
Anita Hill’s testimony, regarding sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas,
to an all-white Senate Judiciary committee. For third-wave feminists, second-wave feminism was
just too white and too serious.
But the “wave” story of feminism continues to develop. It now includes a fourth wave, said to
have begun around 2012, when social media platforms gave women the opportunity to mobilize
9
Marguerite Duras, “An Interview,” in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), 111.
and collaborate against abuse of power and to seek justice against assault and harassment. Moreover,
there is even talk of a fifth wave that is now forming. While these successive “waves” are often
viewed by feminists as a positive sign of the continuing journey or development of feminism, others
argue against the “wave” story of feminism. “Those who constellate the ‘First and Second Waves’
of feminism as defined by a neglect of race experience and contributors of color,” writes Robin
Goodman, “are undervaluing the critique of world-historical racism that influences the construction
of feminism’s subject in many cases.”10 “Feminism relies on ‘women’ being more than what ‘women’
are,” continues Goodman, “for those who see in ‘women’ the potential of a better world.”11
While the “wave story” provides a popular and unified account of feminism, as Goodman notes,
one should not use it as a means to limit what women are and can be. Another approach to
feminism—both as theory and/or criticism—is to regard it as a set of feminisms without a grand
narrative or story (récit). In this view, there are many feminisms, including African, anarchist, Asian
American, Black American, Black British, cultural, Chicana, difference, ecofeminism, existentialist,
French, gynesis, gynocritical, Irish, lesbian, liberal, libertarian, Marxist, multiracial, myth, Native
American, postcolonial, poststructural, postmodern, psychoanalytic, radical, separatist, socialist,
standpoint, third-world, transfeminism, womanist, among others.
Still another approach is to avoid the entire project of locating feminism in feminisms and waves
and instead to view it from the point of view of how feminists approach the terms that constitute
its field of discourse. “Alternatives exist,” offers Goodman, “that neither get bogged down and
trapped in the past nor repress it wholeheartedly, and perhaps will surprise us with new beginnings.”12
“Instead of enslaving our speech to already existing narratives that have been washed out and
wrapped up in over-small packages, and instead of expanding the present as the transcendent
moment of truth,” she suggests that it is best to approach feminism through the terms that are
“constantly being revised by feminist encounters, speaking through our mothers’ mouths.”13
In a move indicating a fatigue with the wave on wave of feminism that echoes “the rhythms of
fashion, where ephemeral image constellations and shiny surfaces pop up as ‘new and improved’
attractions and then pop out with the regulated and unmemorable cycles of the clock,” Goodman
contends that approaching feminism through keywords engages “the deep structures of feminist
thought and politics”—deep structures that call upon feminism’s past while looking to its future
through engagements with the present.14 If this is the favored approach to feminist theory today,
then every theoretical keyword with a deep contemporary valence should be regarded as a potential
point of contact with feminist theory. In other words, keywords like affect (13.0), intersectionality
(8.4), translation (10.4), and Anthropocene (11.3), which in this volume also define more general
areas of theoretical concern, are also important points of contact for contemporary feminist theory.
In short, this approach contends that feminism cannot and should not be localized in one wave or
another, but rather should be viewed from the post-wave positionality of the keywords or concepts
that define and organize contemporary theory. To think about, for example, affect, translation, and
10
Robin Truth Goodman, “Feminism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 134.
11
Goodman, “Feminism,” 134.
12
Robin Truth Goodman, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory, ed. Robin Truth
Goodman (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 13.
13
Goodman, “Introduction,” 13.
14
Goodman, “Introduction,” 13.
FEMINIST THEORY 179
the Anthropocene, for post-wave feminists of this kind, becomes an opportunity to think about
feminism’s past, present, and future.
6.1 FIRST WAVE

The origins of the first wave of feminism—or, alternately, the old- or classical feminism—can be
stretched all the way back to the ancient Greek poet Sappho, who flourished in the second half of
the seventh century BCE , which is about a century after the time of Homer and two centuries before
Plato. In her poetry, Sappho celebrates the existence of women and advocates for their worth. She
is also often the leading figure in an educational circle of choruses of unmarried girls (parthenoi).
Sappho’s celebration of women stands in sharp contrast not only to the ancient Greek
philosophers, but to much of the Western philosophical tradition until John Stuart Mill in the
nineteenth century—and then again Simone de Beauvoir in the twentieth. While Hildegard of
Bingen, from the late Middle Ages of the twelfth century, and Christine de Pisan, from the fifteenth
century, are considered major contributors to the origins of classical feminism, the story of the first
wave of feminism is most often considered to begin in the late eighteenth century with figures such
as Abigail Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft—and to have had a major turning point (or counter-
revolution) around 1930.
The contrast between the position on women of the first wave of feminism and the Western
philosophical tradition is a stark one. In short, it is difficult to locate much in this tradition ostensibly
in support of the position of women in society. Aristotle, for example, in the Generation of Animals,
contended that the male supplied the soul during the act of conception and said that “the female is
as it were a mutilated male.”15 In late antiquity, Augustine, who is said to be the most influential
philosopher in the Western tradition, said that men and women are both created in the image of
God only when the woman is married to a man and fulfills her role as a helper to man. Ultimately,
however, for Augustine only man is in the image of God. And, in the late Middle Ages, Thomas
Aquinas, who is often called the “Angelic Doctor” (Doctor Angelicus), considered the female to be
an imperfect man. In short, until the modern period, the general position of Western philosophers
is that females are inferior to males. But even in the modern period, this position is still advanced.
For example, at the same time that Adams and Wollstonecraft are advocating for the rights of
women, Kant was presenting quite the opposite position. In his first treatise on aesthetics,
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Kant discusses the education and
proper place of women:
Deep meditations and long sustained reflection are noble but difficult, and do not well befit a
person in which unconstrained charms should show nothing else than a beautiful nature.
Laborious learning or painful pondering, even if a woman should greatly succeed in it, destroy
the merits that are proper to her sex, and because of their rarity they can make her an object of
cold admiration: but at the same time they will weaken the charms with which she exercises her
power over the other sex. A woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mme [Anne] Dacier [who
Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
15
University Press, 1984), I:1144; 737a 26–30.

translated the Iliad, Odyssey, and other Greek and Latin classics into French], or carries on
fundamental controversies about mechanics, like the Marquise [Émilie] du Chatelet [whose
essay on the nature of fire won the French Academy of Science prize in 1738], might as well even
have a beard; for perhaps that would express more obviously the mien of profundity for which
she strives. The beautiful understanding selects for its objects everything closely related to the
finer feeling, and relinquishes to the diligent, fundamental, and deep understanding abstract
speculations of branches of knowledge useful but dry. A woman therefore will learn no geometry;
of the principle of sufficient reason or the monads she will know only so much as is needed to
perceive the salt in a satire which the insipid grubs of our sex have censured. The fair can leave
Descartes his vortices to whirl forever without troubling themselves about them.16
It is said—as if to excuse these inexcusable remarks—that in this early work on aesthetics, one
published twenty-five years before the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant was under the influence
of Rousseau.
In Emile (1762), published two years before Kant’s Observations, Rousseau comments on the
prospect of equal education for women:
[W]omen are always exclaiming that we educate them for nothing but vanity and coquetry, that
we keep them amused with trifles that we may be their masters; we are responsible, so they say,
for the faults we attribute to them. How silly! What have men to do with the education of girls?
What is there to hinder their mothers educating them as they please? There are no colleges for
girls; so much the better for them! Would God there were none for boys, their education would
be more sensible and more wholesome. Who is it that compels girls to waste her time on foolish
trifles? Are they forced against their will, to spend half their time over their toilet, following the
example set them by you? Who prevents you teaching them, or having them taught, whatever
seems good in your eyes? It is our fault that we are charmed by their beauty and delighted by
their airs and graces, if we are attracted and flattered by the arts they learn from you, if we love
to see them prettily dressed, if we let them display at leisure the weapons by which we are
subjugated? Well then, educate them like men. The more women are like men, the less influence
they will have over men, and then men will be masters indeed.17
Rousseau also comments in Emile on the prospect of equal rights for women:
All the faculties common to both sexes are not equally shared between them, but taken as a
whole they are fairly divided. Woman is worth more as a woman and less as a man; when she
makes a good use of her own rights, she has the best of it; when she tries to usurp our rights, she
is our inferior. It is impossible to controvert this, except by quoting exceptions after the usual
fashion of the partisans of the fair sex.
16
Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1960), 78–9.
17
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762), trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1911), 327.
FEMINIST THEORY 181
To cultivate the masculine virtues in women and to neglect their own is evidently to do them
an injury. Women are too clear-sighted to be thus deceived; when they try to usurp our privileges
they do not abandon their own; with this result: they are unable to make use of two incompatible
things, so they fall below their own level as women, instead of rising to the level of men. If you
are a sensible mother you will take my advice. Do not try to make your daughter a good man in
defiance of nature. Make her a good woman, and be sure it will be better both for her and us.18
In short, while men and women have rights, they are different rights. Women who seek the rights
of men become inferior by the same misogynistic logic that leads Rousseau to conclude that women
who seek the same education as men only advance the domination of men over women.
In contrast to Rousseau, Wollstonecraft argues that it is unfair not to provide women with the
same educational opportunities afforded to men. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792),
she writes:
Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if
she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man she will stop the progress of
knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all or it will be inefficacious with respect to
its influence on general practice. And how can woman be expected to co-operate unless she
know why she ought to be virtuous? unless freedom strengthen her reason till she comprehends
her duty, and sees in what manner it is connected with her real good? If children are to be
educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot; and the
love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only be produced by
considering the moral and civil interest of mankind; but the education and situation of woman,
at present, shuts her out from such investigations.19
Moreover, Wollstonecraft argues, to apply two different systems of value to men and women makes
a mockery of the concept of virtue:
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering
their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood,
unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness
consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body,
and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and
refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings
who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon
become objects of contempt.
. . . I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition
is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary
views should be brought to this simple touchstone.20
18
Rousseau, Emile, 327.
19
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), viii–ix.
20
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 34.
While Wollstonecraft disagreed with Rousseau that educational reform should be limited to boys,
she was very sympathetic to his image of man as an element in nature. She argued that the education
of boys and girls should be similar, and based on a simple, naturalistic approach. She defended
physical exercise, a healthy approach to human sexuality, simple clothing, and the nursing of
children. However, it was not the positions of Rousseau that motivated her to write Vindication,
but rather Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Wollstonecraft objected
to Burke’s acceptance of social injustices, and strenuously rejected them in Vindication.
A century after Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill wrote in defense of sexual equality and argued
against all forms of legal discrimination against women in The Subjection of Women (1869). “All
women are brought up from the earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very
opposite of that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding
to the control of others,” writes Mill.21 “All the moralities tell them,” he continues, “that it is the
duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others.”22
While Mill is sympathetic to many traditional claims about the social roles of men and women, he
nevertheless makes many controversial proposals, including the analogy between the subjection of
women and the possession of slaves. Mill believes that the Enlightenment ideals of individual
freedom and autonomy had almost eradicated slavery despite its long tradition. These same ideals
should, if followed, eradicate the subordination of women to men. Mill strongly advocates in The
Subjection of Women for the freedom of choice and the equality of persons. He also believes that
moral progress is possible, and that it occurs over the course of history. Most of the civilized world
has abandoned slavery, yet the oppression of women remains unrecognized by most men, and
widely accepted. For Mill, men must recognize the slavery of women if reform is to happen. He
also responds to a number of objections that have been raised by his philosophical predecessors to
the equality of women, including the charge that women’s subordination across history indicates
their willingness to consent to it. The compassion that Mill shows in his writing on sexual equality—
contra just about all of his Western philosophical predecessors—is widely attributed to the strong
influence of Harriet Taylor Mill, who was one of his strongest intellectual influences.
By the second quarter of the twentieth century, particularly after the attainment of suffrage in
the US and UK, a common belief regarding the social construction of gender identity takes root
through the work of Virginia Woolf and Beauvoir. Both share a belief in androgyny—a word that
combines the Greek terms for male (andros) and female (gyne)—as an ideal. At the root of the
concept of androgyny is the combination of both masculine and feminine character traits in one
individual—either of the male or female sex. As an ideal, androgyny is a perfect blend of female and
male cultures into the ideal person. Still, as Gloria Steinem would later point out, androgyny is a
concept that “raise[s] anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite
of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism [of the second-wave] has in mind.”23
In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write fiction.”24 For Woolf, women have always faced social and economic
21
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), 3rd edition (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870), 27.
22
Mill, The Subjection of Women, 27.
23
Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), 158.
24
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Anna Snaith (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 3.
FEMINIST THEORY 183
obstacles to their literary ambitions. Except under extraordinary circumstances, “a room of their
own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room”25 for women was out of the question. Woolf
argues that the literary genius of women has been thwarted by their social and economic conditions,
and makes her by case by showing why “it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for
any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”26 Writes Woolf,
I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s
day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among
labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the
Britons. It is not born today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born
among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were
out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law
and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among
the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its
presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being
ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very
remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, of some
mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or
mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.27
The question remains, though, of what to make of Woolf ’s defense of androgyny as a form of
feminism.
In A Literature of Their Own (1977), Elaine Showalter argues that androgyny for Woolf
“represents an escape from the confrontation with femaleness or maleness.”28 She also argues that
Woolf ’s definition of life as a “luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the
beginning of consciousness to the end,” is “another metaphor of uterine withdrawal and
containment.”29 For Showalter, the consequences of Woolf ’s “flight into androgyny” are “at heart
evasions of reality” and “the female experience.”30
Others, however, like Toril Moi in Sexual/Textual Politics (2002), do not regard Woolf ’s
androgyny as a passive withdrawl from the world, but rather view it as a complete displacement of
masculine/feminine gender identities. Here Moi finds in Woolf ’s androgyny an anticipation of
Kristeva’s third “position” toward feminism (where position one is liberal feminism, and position
two is radical feminism), which involves resisting the oppositional struggle “between rival groups
and thus between the sexes” and challenging “the very notion of identity.”31 Comments Moi, “I
25
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 40.
26
27
28
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, expanded edition (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 289.
29
Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 296.
30
31
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2002), 14; Kristeva,
“Women’s Time,” 209.
would stress with Kristeva that a theory that demands the deconstruction of sexual identity is
indeed authentically feminist.”32
Finally, there is perhaps no better figure and set of concepts to mark the final chapter of first-
wave feminism than Beauvoir, who argues in The Second Sex (1949) that “woman is the Other.”
She approaches the issue of “woman” from the point of view of the individual woman’s consciousness
of herself as such. “Otherness,” for Beauvoir, is a secondary status that the “Self ” posits by negation
and out of a sense of inadequacy. Consequently, women share the status of “Other” with any group
that has been so negated. For Beauvoir, there does not seem to be any natural sex difference. All
differences that have been recognized throughout history are merely the creations of defensive self-
consciousness. This includes the traditional view of women in the Western philosophical tradition
(e.g., Aristotle and Aquinas, as noted above) as atypical and deviant. Without the creation of
feminine consciousness by men, argues Beauvoir, there would be no such thing as woman at all.
For Beauvoir, woman is seen by man, and by herself, as “the other,” an atypical person. Woman
helps man define himself through her alienness but can never become man. For Beauvoir, these are
cultural facts, not natural ones:
One is not born, but rather becomes a woman – it is civilization as a whole who creates this
creature. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human
female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate
between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone
else can establish an individual as an Other. In so far as he exists in and for himself, the child
would hardly be able to think of himself as sexually differentiated.33
The only way women can become authentic persons is to leave behind their role as “the second
sex” by developing a consciousness that overcomes these distinctions: a consciousness that is neither
Other nor Self and that is unbound by the dichotomous dictates of the master–slave relation.
Education, for Beauvoir, is one of the most important means to the establishment of this “new
woman.” It is a new woman that is free from biological difference, and that aspires toward androgyny
as an ideal. This ideal will later become a political ideal: one version is monoandrogynism, wherein
everyone in society ought to share all the best characteristics of both genders; and polyandrogynism,
wherein everyone in society is free to choose his or her gender role. Compared with these two
political ideals for androgyny, Beauvoir’s position is a moderate androgynism, which advocates for
a common upbringing for both men and women. The ultimate version of androgynism is changing
or altering the human body through surgery so as to eliminate sexual difference.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes, “The truth is that when a woman is engaged in an enterprise
worthy of a human being, she is quite able to show herself as active, effective, taciturn—and as
ascetic—as a man.”34 After the publication of The Second Sex, Beauvoir became a figure of inspiration
for women’s movements around the world. She is widely regarded as one of the founding figures
of contemporary feminism and is one of the most respected modern philosophers. Her work
32
Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 14.
33
34
FEMINIST THEORY 185
belongs to the existentialist–phenomenological tradition, and is inspired by, among others, the
works of Søren Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, her lifelong companion, whom she
first met in 1929.
As an existentialist, Beauvoir believes that existence precedes essence, and that humans are not
determined and must accept responsibility for who they are. For Beauvoir, women are subject to
social influences that rob them of both who they are and of an awareness of their freedom. For her,
these social influences can be overcome by courageous self-assertion. In a male-dominated society,
women are defined in terms of men’s nature, and when they accept this role they forego their
freedom. Women must reject male myths of who they are and create woman as a free, independent
being. They must also overcome the social and economic conditions which keep them from
exercising their freedom. For de Beauvoir, social and economic liberation is the key to women’s
freedom.
6.2 SECOND WAVE

In 1968, the New York Times announced in its Sunday Magazine a second wave of feminism.
According to Martha Lear, “feminism, which one might have supposed as dead . . . is again an
issue.”35 “Proponents call it the Second Feminist Wave,” continues Lear, “the first having ebbed
after the glorious victory of suffrage and disappeared, finally, into the great sandbar of Togetherness.”36
This was the first mention of a second wave of feminism, one that was necessary because “American
women have traded their rights for their comfort.”37 The second wave is said to have been launched
by NOW (The National Organization for Women), “which wants ‘full equality for all women in
America, in truly equal partnership with men,’ now.”38 Whereas the anti-feminist status quo in
1968 argued that women now have economic power, second-wave feminists regarded this economic
power to be a fraud “when it devolves ultimately upon the power to decide which breakfast food
to buy,” which is “not what men mean when they speak of power.”39 For the president of NOW,
Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), which “provided a powerful undercurrent
to this second wave,”40 corporate power is a myth. “What it means generally,” says Friedan, “is that
wives and widows own the stocks and men vote for them.”41
As Friedan explains in The Second Stage (1981), the aim of the second wave of feminism, which
she calls “the women’s movement,” had an agenda which seemed “simple and straightforward”42 in
the early 1970s. Writes Friedan, “thousands of women marching down Fifth Avenue on August 26,
1970, in that first nationwide women’s strike for equality, carrying banners for ‘Equal Rights to
Jobs and Education,’ ‘The Right to Abortion,’ ‘24–Hour Child Care,’ ‘Political Power to Women.’ ”43
35
Martha Weinman Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” New York Times (March 10, 1968), Sunday Magazine [SM] 24.
36
Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” SM24.
37
38
39
40
41
42
Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (New York: Summit Books, 1981), 10.
43
Friedan, The Second Stage, 10.
Their “aim was full participation, power, and voice in the mainstream, inside the party, the political
process, the professions, the business world.”44 But, asks Friedan in 1981, what happens once
women begin to share power with men? “Do women change, inevitably discard the radiant,
enviable, idealized feminist dream, once they get inside and begin to share that power, or do they
then operate on the same terms as men?”45 Continues Friedan,
What are the limits and the true potential of women’s power? I believe that the women’s
movement, in the political sense, is both less and more powerful than we realize. I believe that
the personal is both more and less political than our own rhetoric ever implied. I believe that we
have to break through our own feminist mystique now to come to terms with the new reality of
our personal and political experience, and to move into the second stage.46
That is, move into the second stage of the second wave of feminism. If the first stage of the second
wave of feminism was a women’s movement about political power, abortion rights, and equal rights
to jobs and education, then, for Friedan, the second stage of the second wave of feminism “may not
even be a women’s movement.”47 Writes Friedan,
The second stage cannot be seen in terms of women alone, our separate personhood or equality
with men.
The second stage involves coming to new terms with the family—new terms with love and
with work.
The second stage may not even be a women’s movement. Men may be at the cutting edge of
the second stage.
The second stage has to transcend the battle for equal power in institutions. The second stage
will restructure institutions and transform the nature of power itself.
The second stage may even now be evolving, out of or even aside from what we have thought
of as our battle.48
For Friedan, the women’s movement—that is, the first stage of the second wave—started
with facing the concrete, mundane personal truth of my own life and hearing the personal truth
of other women—the “problem that has no name” because it didn’t quite fit the image of the
happy suburban housewife we were all living in those days—that image of woman completely
fulfilled in her role as husband’s wife, children’s mother, server of physical needs of husband,
children, home. That image, which I called the “feminine mystique,” bombarded us from all
sides in the fifteen or twenty years after World War II, denying the very existence in women
of the need to be and move in society and be recognized as a person, an individual in her own
right.
44
45
46
47
48
FEMINIST THEORY 187
We broke through that image. So for nearly twenty years now, [that is, from the publication
of The Feminine Mystique in 1963 to the publication of The Second Stage in 1981], the words
written about and by and for women have been about women’s need to be, first of all, themselves
. . . to find themselves, fulfill themselves, their own personhood . . . to free themselves from
submission as servants of the family and take control of their own bodies, their own lives . . . to
find their own identity as separate from men, marriage and child-rearing—and to demand equal
opportunity with men, power of their own in corporate office, Senate chamber, spaceship,
ballfield, battlefield, at whatever price. Organizing the women’s movement, we broke through
the barriers that kept women from moving, working, earning and speaking in their own voice in
the mainstream of society. For nearly twenty years we have been pressing our grievances against
men in office and home, school and field, in marriage, housework, even sex.49
Friedan’s feminism, often termed liberal feminism, is perhaps the most mainstream point of entry
into second-wave feminism. The work of Gloria Steinem is also associated with this type of feminism
and the second wave. Increased focus on the body and women’s experience differentiate second-
wave from first-wave liberal feminists such as Wollstonecraft and Mill.
One of the more radical versions of second-wave feminism deals with equal rights and
pornography. Catharine MacKinnon, with her colleague Andrea Dworkin, argue that pornography
is a practice of sex discrimination that should be actionable in civil court by people who can prove
that pornography harmed them. They propose civil rights laws regarding pornography that allow
for claims of coercion into pornography, forcing pornography on a person, assault due to specific
pornography, and trafficking in pornography. The goal is to stop the violence against women and
children that MacKinnon and Dworkin document as endemic to pornography’s making and use.
Key to MacKinnon’s second-wave feminism is her analysis of the concrete role of pornography
in constructing and institutionalizing a sexuality of male dominance over women and children. She
also analyzes evidence that pornography is predicated upon, and promotes, the social and economic
inequality of the sexes. “There is a belief,” writes McKinnon in Feminism Unmodified (1987), “that
this is a society in which women and men are basically equals.”50 “Feminism,” continues McKinnon,
is the discovery that women do not live in this [equal] world, that the person occupying this
realm [of equality] is a man, so much more a man if he is white and wealthy. This world of
potential credibility, authority, security, and just rewards, recognition of one’s identity and
capacity, is a world that some people do inhabit as a condition of birth, with variations among
them. It is not a basic condition accorded humanity in this society, but a prerogative of status, a
privilege, among other things, of gender.51
MacKinnon considers feminism a “discovery” because it has never been assumed:
49
50
Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987), 168.
51
MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 169.
Feminism is the first theory, the first practice, the first movement, to take seriously the situation
of all women from the point of view of all women, both on our situation and on social life as a
whole. The discovery has therefore been made that the implicit social content of humanism, as
well as the standpoint from which legal method has been designed and injuries have been defined,
has not been women’s standpoint. Defining feminism in a way that connects epistemology with
power as the politics of women’s point of view, this discovery can be summed up by saying that
women live in another world: specifically, a world of not equality, a world of inequality.52
MacKinnon’s view that the social content of humanism is not the standpoint of women reveals its
strained relationship with second-wave feminism. This holds not only for the humanist basis of the
law, but also morality—an area where humanism does not make a distinction between the moral
attitudes of men versus women.
In her book In a Different Voice (1982), Carol Gilligan argues that women’s moral development
and their mature approach to moral questions can be at times quite different from those of men.
Gilligan criticizes Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. According to Kohlberg, a
person’s moral abilities develop in stages. In the first stage, the preconventional stage, we follow
authority to avoid punishment. In the second stage of our moral development, the conventional
stage, we desire acceptance by a group and follow conventional moral standards. In the third and
final stage of our moral development, the postconventional, we question conventional standards
and base our ideas of morality on the universal moral principles of human welfare, justice, and
rights. When Kohlberg’s theory is applied to women it turns out that women are on the average less
morally developed than men. While many men continue to move up to the post-conventional level
of impartial principles, women are more likely to stay at the lower conventional level of personal
attachments and loyalties.
Gilligan proposes an alternative model of moral development that reflects women’s distinctive
moral perspective. Women also develop in three stages for Gilligan. The first stage is caring for the
self only, the second is caring for others only, and the third is a balance between caring for the self
and others—a recognition that caring for others depends on caring for the self. According to
Gilligan, women develop by discovering better ways of caring for themselves and others. Women
faced with moral decisions focus on relationships and view morality as taking care of these
relationships. Men faced with moral decisions focus on following moral rules and principles.
According to Gilligan, women’s morality is not inferior to that of men. The virtues of caring and
responsibility are needed to ensure that society does not become a collection of isolated individuals
who guard their individual rights and justice but who are lonely, unattached, and uncaring.
The notion that women have a moral voice or perspective that is distinct from the moral voice
of men speaks to the tendency in second-wave feminism to focus on the differences in women’s
experience as compared to men. But unlike MacKinnon, who speaks of the role of pornography in
constructing and institutionalizing a sexuality of male dominance over women and children,
Gilligan contends that a woman’s moral perspective is by nature more personal and contextual than
the natural moral perspective of a man. Whereas men are naturally motivated more by impartial
and abstract principles about duty, women are naturally motivated more by feeling, care, and
52
MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 169.
FEMINIST THEORY 189
responsibility. The differences between MacKinnon’s approach to women’s experience and

Gilligan’s, though, involves more that just a disagreement regarding the nature versus nurture
argument—they are also very different second-wave approaches to feminism. In fact, from Gilligan’s
perspective, MacKinnon’s focus on rights and the law is more reflective of the moral orientation of
men as compared to the ideals of caring and responsibility that play a more central role in the moral
orientations of women. Still, both MacKinnon and Gilligan concur on the existence of male bias
and a general failure to take specific account of the standpoint of women.
Both MacKinnon and Gilligan approach second-wave feminism from a theoretical perspective,
albeit different ones: the social construction of sexuality in relationship to rights and the law versus
the psychology of moral development. While a direct response to the psychology of Kohlberg,
Gilligan’s In a Different Voice also deals with masculine bias in psychoanalytic theory including the
way it led Freud to regard “women’s pre-Oedipal attachments to their mothers” as a “developmental
failure” in women.53 The relationship between psychoanalysis and second-wave feminism is also
developed in French feminism, particularly in the work of Kristeva (5.2), Cixous (6.4), and Irigaray
(6.5). But, again, whereas second-wave French feminism tends to be self-consciously theoretical,
Anglo-American feminism, particularly major feminist critics such as Showalter, Sandra Gilbert,
and Susan Gubar, tends to be much less theoretical. This is nowhere more in evidence than with
respect to the question “What is women’s writing?”
In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar maintain that many women writers
achieved a distinctive voice by producing works that conceal deeper levels of meaning:
In short, like the twentieth-century American poet H. D., who declared her aesthetic strategy by
entitling one of her novels Palimpsest, women from Jane Austin and Mary Shelley to Emily
Brontë and Emily Dickinson produced literary works that are in some sense palimpsestic, works
whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable)
levels of meaning. Thus these authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary
authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards.54
However, as Gilbert and Gubar explain, male literary history differs from female literary history,
particularly within the context of Bloom’s theory of literary anxiety. According to Gilbert and
Gubar, the male writer “conceals his revolutionary energies only so that he may more powerfully
reveal them, and swerves or rebels so that he may triumph by founding a new order, since his
struggle against his precursor is a ‘battle of strong equals.’ ”55 However, for Gilbert and Gubar, a
different situation holds for the female writer:
[C]oncealment is not a military gesture but a strategy born of fear and dis-ease. Similarly, a
literary “swerve” is not a motion by which the [female] writer prepares for a victorious accession
to power [as in Bloom’s account] but a necessary evasion. Locked into structures created by and
53
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982/1993) (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003), 7.
54
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 73.
55
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 74.
for men, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers did not so much rebel against the
prevailing aesthetic as feel guilty about their inability to conform to it. With little sense of viable
female culture, such women were plainly much troubled by the fact that they needed to
communicate truths which other (i.e. male) writers apparently never felt or expressed.
Conditioned to doubt their own authority anyway, women writers who wanted to describe what,
in Dickinson’s phrase, is “not brayed of tongue” would find it easier to doubt themselves than
the censorious voices of society. The evasions and concealments of their art are therefore far
more elaborate than those of most male writers. For, given the patriarchal biases of nineteenth-
century literary culture, the literary woman did have something crucial to hide.56
Thus, for Gilbert and Gubar, the anxiety of influence à la Bloom functions differently in women’s
writing from that it does in male writing. So much so, that women’s writing deals with the prevailing
aesthetic differently than male writing does. In terms of prevailing stereotypes about women as
either angels or monsters (or madwomen), Gilbert and Gubar argue that the women writers they
focus on accept these stereotypes on the surface while at the same time deconstructing them on a
deeper level.
For some feminists, however, like Mary Jacobus, Gilbert and Gubar’s strategy of focusing on the
ways in which women writers aim to deceive the reader makes them “evasive at the cost of a
freedom which twentieth-century women poets have eagerly sought: the freedom of being read as
more than exceptionally articulate victims of a patriarchally engendered plot.”57 To this point, asks
Toril Moi, “how did women manage to write at all, given the relentless patriarchal indoctrination
that surrounded them from the moment they were born?”58 Moi says that Gilbert and Gubar never
answer this particular question. Instead, however, they say “Despite the obstacles presented by
those twin images of angel and monster, despite the fears of sterility and the anxieties of authorship
from which women have suffered, generations of texts have been possible for female writers.”59
Moreover, Moi says that Gilbert and Gubar’s
refusal to admit a separation between nature and nurture at the lexical level renders their whole
argument obscure. For what is this “female creativity” that they are studying? Is it a natural,
essential, inborn quality in all women? Is it “feminine” creativity in the sense of a creativity
conforming to certain social standards of female behavior, or is it a creativity typical of a feminine
subject position in the psychoanalytical sense?60
For Moi, the main problem with Gilbert and Gubar’s account, if not all Anglo-American feminist
criticism, is “the radical contradiction it presents between feminist politics and patriarchal aesthetics.”61
In other words, by providing an account of women’s writing by way of patriarchal aesthetics, Gilbert
and Gubar lock feminist criticism into a relationship with the very patriarchal (and authoritarian)
56
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 74–5.
57
Mary Jacobus, “Review of The Madwoman in the Attic”; cited by Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 63.
58
59
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 44.
60
61
FEMINIST THEORY 191
criticism feminist politics wants to overcome. For Moi, this can be avoided by turning to French
feminist approaches such as those of Cixous and Irigaray. In short, for Moi, the problems of Anglo-
American feminist criticism stem from its under-theorization.
A similar situation might be said to obtain in the work the Anglo-American feminist criticism of
Showalter, who outlines a literary history of women writers in A Literature of Their Own. According
to Showalter, the female tradition in English literature can be divided into three major phases: the
Feminine Phase (1840–80)—a phase wherein female writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and George
Eliot imitated or internalized the dominate male aesthetic; the Feminist Phase (1880–1920)—a
phase wherein radical feminist writers such as Elizabeth Robins and Olive Schreiner protested
against male values and advocated for separatist suffragette sisterhoods and Amazonian utopias;
and the Female Phase (1920–), which combines the characteristics of both the Feminine and
Feminist phases in a phase of self-discovery.
Early novelists in the Female Phase include Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy
Richardson, and Woolf. Richardson’s work, for example, is regarded as comparable to that of
Proust and Joyce though unlike their work it explores female consciousness. “Like Joyce,” writes
Showalter,
Richardson had philosophical objections to the inadequacy of language; unlike Joyce, she
regarded language as a male construct. Richardson maintained that men and women used two
different languages, or rather, the same language with two different meanings.62
According to Showalter, Richardson “implies that women communicate on a higher level.”63 Her
“stream-of-consciousness technique,” comments Showalter, was an attempt to present “the
multiplicity and variety of associations held simultaneously in the female mode of perception.”64
According to Showalter, Richardson’s shapeless outpourings in her fiction were a natural expression
of female empathy. However, later Female Phase writers, that is, those after Woolf, did not feel the
need to express female discontents like earlier Female Phase writers. These later writers included
Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, A. S. Byatt, and Margaret Drabble.
Finally, for Showalter, feminist criticism can be divided into two types: feminist critique and
gynocritics. The former, feminist critique,
is concerned with woman as reader—with woman as the consumer of male-produced literature,

and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a
given text, awakening us to the significance of sexual codes. I shall call this kind of analysis the
feminist critique, and like other kinds of critique it is historically grounded inquiry which probes
the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes
of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the
fissures in male-constructed literary history. It is also concerned with the exploitation and
manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film; and with the analysis
of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems.
62
63
64
[And the latter, gynocritics,]

. . . is concerned with woman as writer—with woman as the producer of textual meaning,
with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include
psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of female language; the
trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course,
studies of particular writers and works. No term exists in English for such as specialized discourse,
so I have adapted the French term la gynocritique: “gynocritics.”65
Showalter’s gynocritics (or gynocriticism) sharply contrasts, as we will see, with the French feminists
regarding the innateness of female sexuality and imagination. For Showalter, there is no fixed or
innate female sexuality or imagination as there is, for example, in Cixous’s gynesis. Nevertheless,
for Showalter, there is a difference between men’s writing and women’s writing, and gyncritics is
her term for second-wave feminist criticism in the Anglo-American tradition that demonstrates this
difference.
6.3 THIRD WAVE AND BEYOND

By the 1990s, there was a highly publicized backlash against feminism by writers such as Camille
Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Christina Hoff Sommers. Coined as postfeminism, these writers attacked
second-wave feminism from a variety of directions. Roiphe, for example, argues that there are
many cases where women are responsible for their supposed campus date rape. In “Date Rape’s
Other Victim” (1993), Roiphe says,
One in four college women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. One in four. I
remember standing outside the dining hall in college, looking at a purple poster with this statistic
written in bold letters. It didn’t seem right. If sexual assault was really so pervasive, it seemed
strange that the intricate gossip networks hadn’t picked up more than one or two shadowy
instances of rape. If I was really standing in the middle of an “epidemic,” a “crisis”—if 25
percent of my women friends were really being raped—wouldn’t I know it?
These posters were not presenting facts. They were advertising a mood. Preoccupied with
issues like date rape and sexual harassment, campus feminists produce endless images of women
as victims—women offended by a professor’s dirty joke, women pressured into sex by peers,
women trying to say no but not managing to get it across.66
Roiphe cites Neil Gilbert, who, while not disproving the one-in-four statistic, does say that this
statistic is more about sexual politics than sexual behavior. For Gilbert and Roiphe, the date rape
crisis is “more a way of interpreting, a way of seeing, than a physical phenomenon,” that is, it “is a
matter of opinion, not a matter of mathematical fact.”67
65
Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London:
Routledge, 1979), 25.
66
Katie Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim,” New York Times Magazine (June 13, 1993), https://www.nytimes.
com/1993/06/13/magazine/date-rape-s-other-victim.html.
67
Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim.”
FEMINIST THEORY 193
Roiphe’s target here are second-wave feminists such as MacKinnon. “Compare victims’ reports
of rape with women’s reports of sex,” writes MacKinnon.68 “They look a lot alike . . . In this light,
the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens
so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.”69 Roiphe says that MacKinnon
here is conflating sex and rape. Also, Roiphe claims that MacKinnon reinforces “traditional views
about the fragility of the female body and will.”70 “Politically,” says MacKinnon, “I call it rape
whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”71 For Roiphe, this position utilizes a “language of
virtue and violation” that “reinforces retrograde stereotypes,” which “backs women into old
corners.”72 “Younger feminists,” comments Roiphe, “share MacKinnon’s vocabulary and the
accompanying assumptions about women’s bodies.”73
In Roiphe’s postfeminism, rape is “a natural trump card for feminism,” and “a catchall expression,
a word used to define everything that is unpleasant and disturbing about relations between the
sexes.”74 Her objection to the treatment of rape by second-wave feminists is that it threatens to
place women in a “passive sexual role” and is “the denial of female sexual agency,” two characteristics
that threaten “to propel us backward.”75 Again, the “us” here are women who reject second-wave
feminism but advocate for strong female agency and an active sexual role for women.
Roiphe’s book on this topic, The Morning After (1994), was praised by like-minded postfeminists
such as Paglia, who called it “an eloquent, thoughtful, finely argued book that was savaged from
coast to coast by shallow, dishonest feminist book reviewers.”76 Paglia also praises fellow-postfeminist
Sommers’s Who Stole Feminism? (1994) for its use of “ingenious detective work to unmask the
shocking fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the servility of American media and
academe to Machiavellian feminist manipulation.”77 “Sommers is a courageous academic
philosopher,” writes Paglia, “who was one of the very first to systematically critique current feminist
ideology and who took tremendous abuse for it.”78 “Sommers has done a great service for women
and for feminism,” continues Paglia, “whose fundamental principles she has clarified and
strengthened.”79
Paglia regards herself as a “militant reformer of feminism and academe,” who follows the “Sixties
design of protest and opposition.”80 Writes Paglia,
My highest ideals are free thought and free speech. I condemn all speech codes and espouse
offensiveness for its own sake, as a tool of attack against received opinion and unexamined
68
Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim”; MacKinnon cited by Roiphe.
69
70
71
Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim”; MacKinnon cited by Roiphe.
72
73
74
75
76
Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (New York, Penguin, 1995), xvi.
77
Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, xvi.
78
79
80
assumptions. My heroes are the libertines of the Enlightenment and the aesthetes of the
nineteenth-century Decadence. Science and art—intellect and imagination—must be reintegrated
for a complete vision of the universe.81
Paglia regards herself as a defender against the
corrupt palace elites, arrogant with power, [who] must be exposed and brought to justice
everywhere, whether they are in the literature departments at Harvard and Princeton or in the
headquarters of the National Organization for Women, which at the moment is merely an
outpost of the Gloria Steinem coterie. Those who have poisoned the cultural atmosphere in
America or gained high position by unethical means must be held accountable. It’s Nuremberg
time.82
In short, Paglia, Roiphe, Sommers, and others were strongly pushing back in the early 1990s on
second-wave feminism. Though each regards themself a defender of feminism, Paglia, Roiphe,
and Sommers are not what has generally come to be thought of as third-wave feminism. Rather, it
was opposition to their postfeminism that is widely regarded as a major source of third-wave
feminism.
The term third-wave feminism is often traced back to Rebecca Walker’s “Becoming the 3rd
Wave” (1992). The context is Anita Hill’s testimony in 1991 to the US Senate Judiciary Committee
regarding Supreme Court nominee’s Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of her. For
Walker, these senate hearings were particularly painful:
A black man grilled by a panel of white men about his sexual deviance. A black woman claiming
harassment and being discredited by other women . . . I could not bring myself to watch that
sensationalized assault of the human spirit.83
Walker comments that the hearings “were not about determining whether or not Clarence Thomas
did in fact harass Anita Hill,” but rather “were about checking and redefining the extent of women’s
credibility and power.”84 Writes Walker,
While some may laud the whole spectacle for the consciousness it raised around sexual
harassment, its very real outcome is more informative. He was promoted. She was repudiated.
Men were assured of the inviolability of their penis/power. Women were admonished to keep
their experiences to themselves.
The backlash against US women is real. Thomas’s confirmation, the ultimate rally of support
for the male paradigm of harassment, sends a clear message to women: “Shut up! Even if you
speak, we will not listen.”85
81
82
Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, xvi–xvii.
83
Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the 3rd Wave,” Ms. (Jan./Feb. 1992), reprinted in Ms. (Spring 2002): 86.
84
Walker, “Becoming the 3rd Wave,” 86.
85
FEMINIST THEORY 195
Walker, however, refuses to accept this imperative to be silent. “I will not be silenced,” she says. “I
intend to fight back.”86 And she does by making
a plea to all women, especially to the women of my generation. Let Thomas’ confirmation serve
to remind you, as it did me, that the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s
experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them
unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not
nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives.
I am not a postfeminist feminist. I am the Third Wave.87
Walker’s generation is Generation X, people who were born in the 1960s and 1970s who came of
age during the second wave of feminism and the struggle for civil rights. Her mother, the writer
Alice Walker, was also a Ms. editor in the 1970s. So Rebecca Walker, who “often played in the [Ms.]
offices ‘tot lot,’ ”88 grew up in the company of second-wave feminists.
Unlike the relationship of third-wave feminism with postfeminism, which is one of rejection,
third-wave feminists do not necessarily have a different set of issues or solutions from second-wave
feminists. Rather, third-wavers like Rebecca Walker aim to open up what had come to be perceived
in the 1980s as the ideological rigidity of second-wave feminism. As Walker, one of the founders of
the Third Wave Foundation, put it in her introduction to To Be Real (1995),
For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood
feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn’t allow for individuality,
complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and
regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and
unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good
against bad.
This way of ordering the world is especially difficult for a generation that has grown up
transgender, bisexual, interracial, and knowing and loving people who are racist, sexist, and
otherwise afflicted. We have trouble formulating and perpetuating theories that compartmentalize
and divide according to race and gender and all of the other signifiers. For us the lines between
Us and Them are often blurred, and as a result we find ourselves seeking to create identities that
accommodate ambiguity and our multiple personalities: including more than excluding,
exploring more than defining, searching more than arriving.89
One of the characteristics of this new generation of feminism is that it is less rigid about its identity
than second-wave feminism. “People keep insisting on defining and defining and defining and
making a smaller and smaller definition” of feminism, writes third-wave feminist Jennifer
Baumgardner. “[I]t’s just lazy thinking on their part,” she continues. “Feminism is something
86
87
88
89
Rebecca Walker, “Being Real,” in To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, ed. Rebecca Walker
(New York: Anchor, 1995), xxxiii.
individual to each feminist,” concludes Baumgardner.90 As a consequence, third-wave feminism is

broadly focused on issues of gender and social justice albeit in the context of no particular politics.
Third-wave feminism often fashions itself as sex-positive and fun in contrast to second-wave
feminism which it regards as frigid and frumpy. Moreover, third-wave feminism is broadly inclusive,
respecting “not only differences between women based on race, ethnicity, religion, and economic
standing but also,” says Leslie Heywood, “makes allowance for different identities within a single
person.”91
Aside from its frequent association with new currents and theories in feminism such as sex
positivity, intersectionality (8.4), postmodern feminism, transfeminism, and ecofeminism, another
way to view third-wave feminism is as a tactical response to some of the theoretical challenges
associated with second-wave feminism, which for the third-wavers is their old or establishment
feminism. R. Claire Snyder describes these theoretical challenges and the tactical response by third-
wavers as follows:
(1) Feminism without women—this is third-wave feminism’s tactical response to the theoretical
“ ‘category of women’ debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s that began with a critique
of the second-wave contention that women share something in common as women: common
gender identity and set of experiences”;92
(2) Feminism without foundations—this is third-wave feminism’s tactical response to the “larger
trend in intellectual life away from grand narratives of modernity and into the foundationless
world of postmodernity,”93 which we saw earlier in the poststructuralisms of Lyotard and
Baudrillard; and,
(3) Feminism without exclusion—this is third-wave feminism’s tactical response to “rejecting a
unified category of women and embracing the anarchic imperative of direct action,” a
tactical response that might also be called “a philosophy of nonjudgment.”94
For Snyder, these third-wave “tactics” allow for it to continue the work of second-wave feminism
“to create conditions of freedom, equality, justice, and self-actualization for all people by focusing
on gender-related issues in particular,” while at the same time responding to some of the theoretical
challenges that faced second-wave feminism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, nearing
the end of the 2000s, she was not yet ready to call third-wave feminism a social movement—and
says it may never become one. Why? “Because it strives to be inclusive of all,” writes Snyder,
“collective action constitutes one of its biggest challenges, and one that it shares with other
antifoundationalist discourses, such as radical democracy.”95
90
Tamara Straus, “Lipstick Feministas: Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Create a Manifesto for Third Wave
Feminism,” Metro Santa Cruz (November 29-December 6, 2000), http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/11.29.00/
feminism-0048.html.
91
Leslie L. Heywood, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, A–Z, 2 vols. (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 2006), 1: xx.
92
R. Claire Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism?: A New Directions Essay,” Signs 34.1 (2008): 183.
93
Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism?” 186.
94
95
FEMINIST THEORY 197
By the early 2010s, however, third-wave feminism was ceding the way to a fourth wave of
feminism, one characterized by its use of technology which allows women from around the world
“to build,” as Kira Cochrane reports, “a strong, popular, reactive movement online.”96 In other
words, to achieve through technology the collective action that Snyder claims is a challenge for
third-wave feminism. According to Cochrane, the majority of fourth-wave feminists “define
themselves as intersectional feminists,” a theory that concerns the way multiple oppressions
intersect. Fourth-wave feminists tend to regard intersectionality (8.4) “as an attempt to elevate and
make space for the voices and issues of those who are marginalized, and a framework for recognizing
how class, race, age, ability, sexuality, gender and other issues combine to affect women’s experience
of discrimination.”97 While fourth-wave feminists are women and men of all ages, “many at the
forefront are in their teens and 20s, and had their outlook formed during the decades in which
attitudes to women were particularly confusing.”98 These decades were the 1990s and 2000s, when
postfeminism was openly challenging second-wave feminism—and third-wave feminism was
working to distinguish itself from second-wave feminism by developing a feminism without women,
foundations, or exclusion. Fourth-wave feminists, writes Cochrane,
grew up being told the world was post-feminist, that sexism and misogyny were over, and
feminists should pack up their placards. At the same time, women in the public eye were often
either sidelined or sexualized, represented in exactly the same way as they had been in the 70s,
albeit beneath a thin veil of irony.99
One of the aims of fourth-wave feminism was to combat what Laura Bates termed everyday sexism.
Bates created the Everyday Sexism Project in April of 2012, a place where women could share their
everyday experience of misogyny—things like, sexual harassment, street harassment, body-shaming,
and workplace discrimination. It was so successful that after its first year of operation it was rolled
out to seventeen countries.
Since 2012, many events from around the world have galvanized fourth-wave feminists to utilize
media technology as a form of activism. They include: gang rapes in Delhi (India) and Pamplona,
Navarre (Spain); the Isla Vista killings (US); the sexual abuse of women and children by Jimmy Savile
(UK); the Bill Cosby (US), Jian Ghomeshi (Canada), and Harvey Weinstein (US) sexual assault cases;
and, of course, many others. Hashtags generally associated with fourth-wave feminism span the globe:
#AmINext (South Africa), #BabaeAko (Philippines; Filipino for “I am a Woman”), #BalanceTonPor
(France; French for “DenounceYourPig” or “ExposeYourPig”), #BoycottAliZafar (Pakistan),
#EtMaintenant (Canada; French for “AndNow”), #MeToo (US), #MoiAussi (Canada; French for
“MeToo”), #NotinMyName (India), #QuellaVoltaChe (Italy; Italian for “TheTimeThat”), #WoYeShi
(China; Mandarin for “MeToo”), #YoTambien (Spain; Spanish for “MeToo”), and many others.
There are also much more specific hashtags such as #YesAllWomen, created in May of 2014 in
96
Kira Cochrane, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Meet the Rebel Women,” Guardian (March 14, 2016), https://www.
theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women.
97
Cochrane, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism.”
98
99
response to the killings in Isla Vista, California, and #BeenRapedNeverReported, created in October
of 2014 in response to sexual assault by Ghomeshi.
In sum, the focus of fourth-wave feminism around the globe is on equitable policies and practices
for people of all perspectives. However, empowerment of women across the globe to speak out
against sexual harassment and assault through technology is perhaps the feature of fourth-wave
feminism that most distinguishes it from the other waves. Considering though that millions of
people contribute to many different fourth-wave feminist movements, particularly through popular
hashtags such as those related to #MeToo, which was only launched in 2017, there is every reason
to believe that as long as social-media technology continues to be a preferred vehicle for social and
political activism, the fourth wave will continue to be a progressive force in feminist theory.
Nevertheless, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, localizing feminism to one wave or
another can limit one’s ability to position feminism within the context of the keywords or concepts
that define and organize contemporary theory. Again, for post-wave feminists, thinking about
keywords and concepts such as affect, translation, and the Anthropocene becomes an opportunity
to think about feminism’s past, present, and future. One finds this post-wave approach to feminist
theory at work in just about every area of theory that has developed significantly over the past
twenty years, including LGBTQ+ (7.0), race and justice (8.0), biopolitics (9.0), globalization
(10.0), ecocriticism (11.0), posthumanism (12.0), and affect studies (13.0).
6.4 HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

Hélène Cixous is a second-wave feminist, though her approach to it is very different from Friedan,
MacKinnon, Showalter, and most of the other Anglo-American feminists discussed earlier. For one
thing, like her second-wave French feminist peer, Kristeva, Cixous’s feminist theory fully engages
psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, and radical politics in its critique of patriarchy
and the gendered subject. So even though Anglo-American and French feminists are both concerned
with the problem of sexual difference, their approach to its theory and politics is very different.
Moreover, while Anglo-American and French feminists concur that “the very reason why women
as a social group are oppressed is that they differ from men,” they disagree on “what that difference
consists in, how far it extends, and how it is constructed in relation to power.”100
As Moi observes, for Anglo-American feminists used to reading say Millet or Friedan, the texts
of French feminists such as Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray “must have seemed almost incomprehensible
at first, steeped as these French intellectuals are in a European philosophical tradition and a
psychoanalytical theory formation largely unknown to most Anglo-American feminists in the mid-
1970s.”101 But the differences between Anglo-American and French feminism extend far beyond
mere comprehensibility. Writes Moi,
Where we [Anglo-American feminists] were empirical, they [French feminists] were theoretical;
where we believed in the authority of experience, they questioned not only the category of
experience, but even that of the “experiencer”—the female subject herself. If we were looking
Toril Moi, “Introduction,” to French Feminist Thought: A Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 4.
100
101
Moi, “Introduction,” 4–5.
FEMINIST THEORY 199
for a homogeneous female tradition in art or history, they insisted that female writing could only
ever be visible in the gaps, contradictions or margins of patriarchal discourse. And when we were
looking for women writers, they sought feminine writing, which, they confusingly claimed,
could equally well be produced by men.102
It is for these reasons and others that the second wave of feminism is often divided between Anglo-
American and French feminist approaches. For the most part, up to this point, we have been focusing
on developments in second-wave Anglo-American feminism and reactions to it in third-wave feminism.
And though fourth-wave feminism is a global affair, major approaches to it, like Bates’s Everyday
Sexism Project, champion the authority of experience—and are much more empirical than theoretical.
In “Sorties” (1975), Cixous discusses the binary oppositions that comprise masculine discourse—
and wonders where is woman in this phallocentric system? “Where is she?” asks Cixous,
Activity/passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother
Head/Heart
Intelligible/Palpable
Logos/Pathos
Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress.
Matter, concave, ground—where steps are taken, holding- and dumping-ground.
Man
Woman103
According to Cixous, thought has always worked through these and other “dual, hierarchical
oppositions” including speaking/writing, high/low, superior/inferior, nature/history, and nature/
art.104 These hierarchical oppositions are found “[e]verywhere [where] ordering intervenes, where
a law organizes what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical).”105
Cixous then asks whether the fact that “all these pairs of oppositions are couples” mean something?
“Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought—all concepts, codes, and values—to a binary
system,” wonders Cixous, “related to ‘the’ couple, man/woman?”106 Her answer here is affirmative—
and is the key to opening the door to her treatment of sexual difference.
For Cixous, hierarchical oppositions are based on the heterosexual couple. As such, they
construct language as “a universal battlefield” structured in terms of a “victory” where one of the
terms of these binary oppositions prevails over the other:
102
Moi, “Introduction,” 5.
103
Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays” (1975), in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The
Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 63.
104
Cixous, “Sorties,” 64.
105
106
We see that “victory” always comes down to the same thing: things get hierarchical. Organization
by hierarchy makes all conceptual organization subject to man. Male privilege, shown in the
opposition between activity and passivity, which he uses to sustain himself. Traditionally, the
question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition: activity/passivity.107
Given that “woman is always associated with passivity in philosophy,” language based on the
heterosexual couple is structured in terms of masculine “victory” and feminine “defeat.”108 But not
only is patriarchy coded into the structure of language via the heterosexual couple; it is also found
at the level of ontology (or being). Comments Cixous,
Ultimately the world of “being” can function while precluding the mother. No need for a mother,
as long as there is some motherliness: and it is the father, then, who acts the part, who is the
mother. Either woman is passive or she does not exist. What is left of her is unthinkable,
unthought. Which certainly means that she is not thought, that she does not enter into the
opposition, that she does not make a couple with the father (who makes a couple with the
son).109
In short, “there is no place whatsoever for woman in this calculation”—a calculation that is
structured by a phallocentric binary system.
Cixous was strongly influenced by Derrida’s poststructuralism, and they would write a series of
crossed works including Cixous’s Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2001) and
Derrida’s H.C. for Life, That Is to Say (2000). By drawing upon Derrida’s theory of différance,
Cixous also believes that meaning is always deferred and different in language—that there is a
dimension of language that is both unconceptualizable and always unperceived, yet always both
absent and present.
Thus, for both Cixous and Derrida, the only source of meaning is linguistic difference. Also, for
both, there is always a trace of the excluded term from the binary opposition. Thus, when Cixous
speaks of oppositions and the ontology of woman, she is calling upon Derridean différance as the
prototype of what cannot be captured by Western metaphysics because it is the very condition of
its possibility. So, even though Cixous approaches sexual oppression in terms of binary oppositions
and contends that these binary oppositions create difference between people, one should regard this
more in theoretical (Derridean) terms than experiential (Anglo-American) ones. Again, when
Anglo-American feminists speak of different they mean the difference between two identities (men/
women; masculine/feminine), whereas when French feminists use the same term they are drawing
upon Derridean différance, which is neither an identity nor the difference between two identities.
Moreover, what is unique about Cixous’s feminism as compared to Anglo-American feminists of
the second wave is that she believes that language is the domain in which difference is structured.
In this regard, she was strongly influenced by Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Following Lacan, Cixous
treats sexual difference as linguistically and socially arbitrary, and regards the phallus as a symbolic
107
108
109
FEMINIST THEORY 201
concept. Again, following Lacan, the phallus signifies all that the subject loses with the acquisition
of language. It is neither an organ of the body, an object, or a fantasy. It signifies the power,
authority, and rationality associated with the Name-of-the Father, the fundamental and transcendental
signifier that permits signification to proceed normally. Phallocentrism is inseparable from the
structure of the sign. As a signifier, the phallus holds the promise of full presence or power, which,
because it is unobtainable, threatens both sexes with castration. Again, both males and females lack
the wholeness of sexuality symbolized by the phallus. The child gets its sense of identity by entering
the Symbolic Order of language, which is comprised of relations of similarity and difference.
It should also be noted that Cixous and other French feminists are not only influenced by Lacan,
but also defend Freud against criticisms of him by other feminists. Again, for Freud, the female
child seeing the male organ recognizes herself as female because she lacks the penis. Moreover, the
female child defines herself negatively, and suffers from penis envy, which Freud says is universal in
women. This leads to a castration complex and the position that women are not a positive sex.
French feminists defend Freud not as a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but rather as an
analysis of one. For them, Freud is not describing reality itself, but is rather presenting an analysis
of the mental representation of social reality. Lacan then through a combination of Saussurean
linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis shows us how the unconscious is structured like a language.
For Cixous, however, in order to eliminate the oppression and domination of women, we must
resist the phallocentrism described by Lacan—and eliminate difference at the level of language. In
other words, feminist resistance to phallocentrism must come from within the signifying process.
For her, this is achieved by providing an alternative to the masculine symbolic—something she calls
écriture feminine (feminine writing). This form of writing is Cixous’s challenge to the phallocentric
theories of sexuality and subjectivities posited by Freud and Lacan.
To accomplish this, Cixous argues that we reconsider the pre-Oedipal phase and the repressed
other of the imaginary mother–child relationship. Rather than repressing the other of this imaginary
mother–child relationship upon entry into the symbolic, Cixous contends that writing is the place
of this other. What she means by this is that feminine writing or the feminine text is where both the
unconscious drives of the child that occur in several different forms and the child’s closeness with
the body of the m/other are written. For Cixous, écriture feminine is an effort “to hear what-comes-
before-language reverberating,”110 that is to say, it draws upon the pre-verbal spaces of instinctual
drives and the unconscious. As a kind of writing through the body, écriture feminine gives birth to
the polysemic nature of signification, a space far removed from the phallocentrism of the Symbolic.
Again, as noted above by Moi, both women and men can engage in écriture feminine. Moreover,
Cixous also encourages rethinking the role of parents in ensuring that children have the freedom to
be themselves to the other. “It will be the task of woman and man,” writes Cixous, “to make the
old relationship and all of its consequences out-of-date; to think the launching of a new subject,
into life, with defamiliarization.”111 It should also be mentioned that Cixous associates écriture
feminine with what she calls “the other bisexuality.”112 In contrast to the “bisexuality that melts
together and effaces, wishing to avert castration,” Cixous opposes
110
111
112
the other bisexuality, the one with which every subject, who is not shut up inside the spurious
Phallocentric Performing Theater, sets up his or her erotic universe. Bisexuality—that is to say
the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes, evident and insistent in different ways
according to the individual, the nonexclusion of difference or of a sex, and starting with this
“permission” one gives oneself, the multiplication of the effects of desire’s inscription on every
part of the body and the other body.113
This is Cixous’s way of moving beyond the binary logic of sexual difference. It is found in the gaps
or between spaces of écriture feminine. “To say that woman is somehow bisexual is an apparently
paradoxical way of displacing and reviving the question of difference,” writes Cixous. “And
therefore of writing as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine.’ ”114 Rather, what Cixous says, is that
today, writing is woman’s. That is not a provocation, it means that woman admits there is an
other. In her becoming-woman, she has not erased bisexuality latent in the girl as in the boy.
Femininity and bisexuality go together, in a combination that varies according to the individual,
spreading the intensity of its force differently and (depending on the moments of their history)
privileging one component or another. It is much harder for man to let the other come through
him. Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me—the
other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me
live—that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?—a feminine one, a masculine one,
some?—several different, some unknown, which indeed [is] what gives me the desire to know
and from which all life soars.115
The other bisexuality of Cixous differs, however, from the neutral bisexuality (androgyny) of Woolf.
Whereas Woolf ’s neutral bisexuality abandon’s the struggle to speak the female body, Cixous
embraces the other bisexuality for its ability to stir up difference. For Cixous, female sexuality is an
unknown and subterranean entity which can be accessed through écriture feminine, a form of
writing that allows the vast female unconscious to be heard. Writing for Cixous is the place where
subversive thought can germinate and where new identities and social formations for women will
be created.
Cixous’s feminism is visionary in that it imagines a possible language for woman. It does not,
however, describe an actual language in the way that Showalter, for example, treats women’s
writing. In this way, Cixous’s gynesis differs radically from Showalter’s gynocriticism. One way to
think of the difference between their respective positions is to view gynocriticism as concerned with
the sexuality of the text, and gynesis as concerned with the textuality of sex. Cixous’s call to put into
discourse the other is concerned with non-knowledge, a space which master-narratives always
control but cannot contain. For Cixous, “woman” is writing effect, not a person—and definitely
not gendered, that is, masculine/feminine. Woman is disruptive of fixed meaning and a freeplay of
signification that is beyond authorial control.
113
Cixous, “Sorties,” 84–5.
114
115
Cixous, “Sorties,” 85–6.
FEMINIST THEORY 203
In sum, Cixous’s feminism is not only anti-realist, anti-humanist, and anti-essentialist, but also
critical of patriarchal politics and defined practices of feminine writing. In “The Laugh of the
Medusa (1976),” she writes:
It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will
remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it
doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system: it
does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical
domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by
peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.116
Cixous’s claim here that écriture feminine “can never be theorized” is a continuation of her charge
in “Sorties” that “[p]hallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone.”117 But in view of second-wave
Anglo-American feminism, Cixous is a prime example of feminist theory—and one need go no
further than her appropriation of Freudian, Derridean, and Lacanian theory to build her case for
écriture feminine.
6.5 LUCE IRIGARAY

Luce Irigaray is a trained psychoanalyst. She was also a member of the École Freudienne de Paris
founded by Lacan. However, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), a book which was the European
equivalent of her doctoral dissertation, was a thesis in philosophy, not psychiatry. Upon its
publication, Irigaray was dismissed from both the École Freudienne de Paris and the University of
Paris, where she was employed. Her dismissals were to a great extent because Lacan disapproved
of her work.
Speculum is a reading of the philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel that begins with a long
exegesis on Freud. Irigaray’s thesis is that women in both the Western philosophical tradition and
psychoanalysis are merely reflecting surfaces upon which masculine identity constitutes itself in a
dialectical relation of dominance. According to the Western philosophical tradition and
psychoanalysis, women are the non-essential essence that grounds male subjectivity. This notion of
woman as a non-essential essence is captured by the term speculum, which also means mirror. In
other words, women are a mirror for the production of male subjectivity.
As such, while women are associated with the material ground of existence, they are characterized
by an ontological status that is both “incomplete” and “uncompletable.” Irigaray describes their
ontological status in the Western philosophical tradition and psychoanalysis in Speculum as follows:
Woman, for her part, remains in unrealized potentiality—unrealized, at least, for/by herself. Is
she, by nature, a being that exists for/by another? And in her share of substance, not only is she
secondary to man but she may just as well not be as be. Ontological status makes her incomplete
and uncompletable. She can never achieve the wholeness of her form. Or perhaps her form has
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4 (1976): 83.
116
117
to be seen—paradoxically—as a mere privation? But this question can never be decided since
woman is never resolved by/in being, but remains the simultaneous co-existence of opposites.
She is both one and the other. She is at once decay and growth, for example, and this bodes ill
for any semblance she might have with the eternal. And the Eternal (as we may call it) has no
truck with potentiality. She is equally neither one nor the other. Or is she rather between one and
the other—that elusive gap between two discrete bodies? Between two realizations of one body?
Which implies that change can always come about, that somewhere anything could be refined
otherwise. Is she the reverse of the coin of man’s ability to act and move around in the physical
world we are calling “place”? Is she unnecessary in and of herself, but essential as the non-
subjective sub-jectum? As that which can never achieve the status of subject, at least for/by
herself. Is she the indispensible condition whereby the living entity retains and maintains and
perfects himself in his self-likeness?118
Irigaray’s description of the ontological status of woman in the Western philosophical tradition is
interesting because one direction (woman as both one and the other) can be connected with mystical
ascent and the higher union found in God, whereas the other direction (woman as neither one nor
the other) points to non-being or no existence.
While the latter position is the one that Irigaray wants to emphasize, namely, that woman does
not exist in the Western philosophical tradition (and psychoanalysis), the former position is one
held by medieval mystical philosophers such as Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, who
generally believed that the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) is related to our
understanding of God. For example, for Nicholas, the admission of contraries is the starting point
of mystical ascent. Both reality and God consist in a coincidentia oppositorum, that is, in both “to
exist” and “not to exist” coincide. As such, from this philosophical perspective, to characterize
women as a coincidentia oppositorum is to see both reality and God in them.119 But, for the
Aristotelians—and most of Western philosophy until Hegel—a coincidence of opposites is a heresy:
that is to say, things either exist or do not exist—and to not exist is of lesser ontological status than
to exist. Irigaray, however, by pointing out that women in the Western philosophical tradition are
both “one and the other” and “neither one nor the other,” aims to establish the position that
woman in Western metaphysics is “unnecessary in and of herself.” But rather than deconstruct this
philosophical system à la Derrida, Irigaray reconstructs or recreates a metaphysics of woman from
within this system.
For Irigaray, to question the function of women in “the all-powerful ‘machine’ we know as
metaphysics” is to question the “choice” given to women in this metaphysics: “a choice that has
always already been made by ‘nature,’ between a male pleasure and her role as a vehicle for
procreation.”120 According to Irigaray, this metaphysical “choice”—one that can be found in the
works of Aristotle, Freud, Lacan, and many others—abandons woman as “deformed and formless.”121
Writes Irigaray,
118
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165.
119
See Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “The Divine Structure of Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan: God, Transcendence, and Coincidentia
Oppositorum,” Tristania XVI (1995), 47–50.
120
Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 166.
121
FEMINIST THEORY 205
But doesn’t her whole existence amount to an “accident”? An accident of reproduction? A

genetic monstrosity? For a human life takes its form from its father, or more specifically from the
male sperm, since the product of intercourse is not made up of the combination of sperm and
ovum. If this is so, how can a girl be conceived? Except by chromosomal anomaly? In any case,
she couldn’t lay claim to any substance. Merely added to—or taken away from—essence,
fortuitous, troublesome, “accidental,” she can be modified or eliminated without changing
anything in “nature.”122
This metaphysical account of woman leads Irigaray to conclude that “theoretically” there is “no
such thing as woman.”123 “The best that can be said is that she does not exist yet.”124 Therefore, one
might regard Irigaray’s contribution to Western philosophy as both demonstrating this—and
creating or recreating a place for her.
For Irigaray, the questions of sexual difference that she examines in Speculum and elsewhere are
among “the important questions of our age, if not in fact the burning issue.”125 Citing Heidegger,
who contends that “each age is preoccupied with one thing, and one alone,” Irigaray contends in
that “[s]exual difference is probably that issue in our own age which could be our salvation on an
intellectual level.”126 Her claim here comes in the mid-1980s, when questions of sexual difference
have not yet experienced the backlash of postfeminism and third-wave feminism. Nevertheless,
Irigaray bemoans that
wherever I turn, whether to philosophy, science or religion, I find that this underlying and
increasingly insistent question remains silenced. It is as if opening up this question would allow
us to put a check on the many forms of destruction in the universe, like some kind of nihilism
which affirms nothing more than the reversal or proliferation of existing values—whether we
call these the consumer society, the circular nature of discourse, the more or less cancerous
disease of our age, the unreliable nature of words, the end of philosophy, religious despair or the
regressive return to religion, scientistic imperialism or a technique that does not take the human
subject into account, and so on.127
Irigaray finds resistance everywhere to taking up sexual difference philosophically, that is, examining
and providing responses to the ontological problem of the non-existence of woman described
above. For her, “the arrival or discovery of such an event is resisted”128—even by theorists. “In
theory,” continues Irigaray, “philosophy wishes to become literature or rhetoric, by breaking with
ontology or returning to ontological origins.”129
122
123
124
125
Luce Irigaray, “Sexual Difference” (1984), trans. Seán Hand, in French Feminist Thought, 118.
126
Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 118.
127
128
129
But by the early 1990s, another line of criticism of Irigaray’s ontological approach to sexual
difference will develop. In Essentially Speaking (1989), Diana Fuss described the theoretical models
for understanding identity in the 1980s as essence versus difference. For her, “essentialism is typically
defined in opposition to difference,” that is, the latter term represents “a complex system of cultural,
social, psychical, and historical differences, and not a set of pre-existent human essences, [which]
position and constitute the subject.”130 With respect to Irigaray, the “complex system of cultural,
social, psychical, and historical differences” identified by Fuss is the philosophical program of
Hegel, Freud, and Lacan that she is attempting to overcome or recreate in her call for a new
ontological program for woman.
But for Fuss, identity theorists are either essentialists or constructionists. Essentialists, claims
Fuss, maintain “that the natural is repressed by the social,” whereas constructionists claim “that the
natural is produced by the social.”131 By claiming that the real distinction for understanding identity
is between essentialism and constructionism—and not, as Irigaray claims, between essence versus
(sexual) difference—Fuss effectively associates Irigaray’s feminism (as well as Cixous’s) with
essentialism. From the perspective of Irigaray and French theory, essentialism is the very Western
philosophical tradition regarding woman that she is attempting to rewrite; from the perspective of
Fuss, who here is a representative of Anglo-American theory, any philosophy that can be linked to
sexual difference is essentialist. The association of Irigaray (and Cixous) with essentialism leads
some Anglo-American critics to dismiss her feminism. But for her, such dismissal is precisely the
type of “silence” on the ontology of sexual difference she notes—and if the dismissal of her work is
based on misappropriating it as “essentialist,” then it betrays a basic misunderstanding of her
approach to the history of the ontological status of woman in Western philosophy.
Irigaray calls for “a change in the economy of desire,” which will necessitate “a different
relationship between man and god(s), man and man, man and world, man and woman.”132 “This is
a world that must be constructed or reconstructed,”133 comments Irigaray. It is a world that will
forge
an alliance between the divine and the mortal, in which a sexual encounter would be a celebration,
and not a disguised or polemic form of the master–slave relationship. In this way it would no
longer be a meeting within the shadow or orbit of a God of the Father who alone lays down the
law, or the immutable mouthpiece of single sex.134
Moreover, for Irigaray, it is a world where there will be a “genesis of love between the sexes”—“a
world to be created or recreated so that man and woman may once more or finally live together,
meet and sometimes inhabit the same place.”135 It will be a place “that could be inhabited by each
sex, body and flesh.”136 Irigaray wonders whether we could be witnessing the dawning of this new
world.
130
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), xii.
131
Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 3.
132
133
Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 127; my emphasis.
134
135
Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 127; my emphasis.
136
FEMINIST THEORY 207
Immanence and transcendence are being recast, notably by that threshold which has never been
examined in itself: the female sex. It is a threshold unto mucosity. Beyond the classic opposites
of love and hate, liquid and ice lies this perpetually half-open threshold, consisting of lips that
are strangers to dichotomy. Pressed against one another, but without any possibility of suture, at
least of a real kind, they do not absorb the world either into themselves or through themselves,
provided they are not abused and reduced to a mere consummating or consuming structure.
Instead their shape welcomes without assimilating or reducing or devouring. A sort of door unto
voluptuousness, then? Not that, either: their useful function is to designate a place: the very
place of uselessness, at least on a habitual plane. Strictly speaking, they serve neither conception
nor jouissance. Is this, then the mystery of female identity, of its self-contemplation, of that
strange word of silence: both the threshold and reception of exchange, the sealed-up wisdom,
belief and faith in every truth?137
For Irigaray, two lips pressed against each other is her trope for the female economy. It is meant to
sharply contrast with the one of the masculine economy of phallocentrism, wherein the male body
is the imaginary ideal upon which the bodily ego is constructed. Contra to Lacan, whose
phallocentrism only casts woman as a lack, Irigaray’s speculum accounts for both the female sex
and female sexuality. By enabling female sexuality and accounting for female sexual difference,
Irigaray aims to create or recreate a world wherein both sexes “may once more or finally live
together”—a sharp contrast to the phallocentric world where there can only be one sex, which is
the masculine sex.
However, because woman already exists within the one-sex phallocentric system, Irigaray aims
to reconstruct or recreate woman within this system rather than deconstruct the entire system. Her
approach is to create or recreate woman from within the structures of the phallocentric system. She
does this through mimicry (or mimesis), wherein the feminine position takes seriously what the
masculine position does not. Thus, as mimics operating within a system that has no positive position
for them, the feminine position can operate at a distance from the system and carry out its mimicry
in a defiant manner. In short, the feminine position can and does mock masculine mimesis through
its mimicry.
But, by carrying out this strategy of occupying the phallocentric system through mimicry, Irigaray,
again, opens herself to the criticism that her two (lips) are a form of essentialism. She claims that
part of the reason for this misunderstanding is that her work is “extremely difficult to translate
given that the writing plays on the synonymy of homonymy of French words and their syntactic
and semantic ambiguities.”138 But another reason for this misunderstanding is that “Speculum
cannot suggest getting ‘the female body’ to enter into the male corpus, as the female body has
always figured in the male corpus” though “not always in philosophy.”139 Comments Irigaray,
Speculum criticizes the exclusive right of the use(s), exchange(s), representation(s) of one sex by
the other. This critique is accompanied by the beginnings of a woman’s phenomenological
137
138
Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (1990), trans. Alison Martin (London: Routledge, 2007), 53.
139
Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous, 53.
elaboration of the auto-affection and auto-representation of her body: Luce Irigaray, signatory to
the book. What this implies is that the female body is not to remain the object of men’s discourse
or their various arts but that it become the object of a female subjectivity experiencing and
identifying itself. Such research attempts to suggest to women a morpho-logic that is appropriate
to their bodies. It’s aimed at the male subject, too, inviting him to redefine himself as a body with
a view to exchanges between sexed subjects.140
In sum, Irigaray’s response to these critics is that her form of écriture feminine (feminine writing)
not only defies dualisms and biological essentialism, but opens up a new place for the repressed
feminine to be recreated, redefined, rearticulated, and reconceptualized by mimicking (and mocking)
masculine discourse. It also, as noted above, invites the male subject “to redefine himself as a body
with a view to exchanges between sexed subjects.” For Irigaray, all of this redefinition defies
accusations of dualism and biological essentialism.
Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous, 53; my emphasis.

140
CHAPTER SEVEN
LGBTQ+ Theory
7.0 INTRODUCTION
Until the mid-twentieth century, there were prohibitions against the public portrayal of sexuality in the
US. These prohibitions were enforced by obscenity law, which started to be loosened in the 1930s—
and which by the mid-1960s were effectively removed. The virtual disappearance of these obscenity
laws in the mid-1960s, write John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman in Intimate Matters (1988), “removed
the barriers against the forthright presentation of sexual matters in literature and other media.”1
For literary context, consider that in 1957, a San Francisco police officer seized copies of Allen
Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956) from the City Lights Bookstore “on the grounds that it was ‘not fit
for children to read.’ ”2 Also, a warrant was issued for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City
Lights, and the store’s clerk was arrested. D’Emilio and Freedman write, “Ginsberg’s poem was
targeted by censors in large part because of its open acknowledgement of homosexual desire.”3 In
Howl, Ginsberg writes of people
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,

and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors,
caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evening in rosegardens and the
grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen
freely to whomever come who may4
The judge who heard the case rejected censoring the poem, arguing that it had “social importance,”
and that “life is not encased in one formula where everybody acts the same or conforms to a
particular pattern.”5 Ginsberg said of the poem that it represented a “crucial moment of breakthrough
. . . an acknowledgement of the basic reality of homosexual joy . . . a breakthrough in the sense of
a public statement of feeling and emotions and attitudes.”6
1
John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row,
1988), 277.
2
D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 275.
3
4
Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions (1956), ed. Barry Miles (New York: Harper
& Row, 1986), 4 (lines 36–9).
5
6
209
But, even if obscenity laws were loosening, sexual boundaries were growing tighter. “Hand in
hand with the more permissive attitudes of sexual liberalism toward most forms of heterosexual
expression,” write D’Emilio and B. Freedman,
went an effort to label homosexual behavior as deviant. In the middle decades of the twentieth
century, a gay subculture took root in American cities. As men and women constructed new
opportunities for meeting one another, sustaining relationships, and deepening their sense of
sexual difference, American society responded fiercely by raising the penalties that lesbians and
gay men faced. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, federal, state, and local governments mobilized
their resources against this underground sexual world.7
Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s, the sexual revolution was in full swing—and for some, like
the “hippies,” it had already been accomplished. “For the hippies,” wrote Newsweek in 1967, “sex
is not a matter of great debate, because as far as they are concerned the sexual revolution is
accomplished.”8 “There are no hippies who believe in chastity, or look askance at marital infidelity,
or see even marriage itself as a virtue.”9 It was also a period where not only, as we saw in the
previous chapter, second-wave feminists were rethinking institutions such as the family, the state,
and education, but also where gay and lesbian activists were waging social and political challenges
to the liberal consensus on sex and sexuality.
Various theoretical discourses such as Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis were
interacting with the sexual revolution, and, just as with feminist theory, adding to our understanding
as to how institutions should rethink sex and sexuality. In this regard, the work of Michel Foucault
came to be of particular importance. In the History of Sexuality, the first volume of which appeared
in 1976 and the fourth and final volume appearing posthumously in 2018, Foucault asks how did
we come to speak about sex and sexuality? This is a particularly interesting question because in
Greek and Latin there is no word for what has come to be known now as sex and sexuality. What
Foucault finds in his studies is that sexuality is neither natural nor a thing. Rather, our discourse of
sexuality developed over time through a series of shifts, adaptations, and displacements in “learned
discourses, forms of reflection, and structures of truth in relation to the deployment of various
modalities of power and governmentality,”10 which Foucault terms biopolitics (9.1).
Thus, for Foucault, the study of sex and sexuality, that is, that which founds our identity as
straight, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, polysexual, transsexual, queer,
questioning, and other is the study of truth and power. In The Use of Pleasure (1984), Foucault
describes the study of sex and sexuality as the study of “the games of truth in relationship of self
with self and the forming of oneself as a subject, taking as my domain of reference and field of
investigation what might be called ‘the history of desiring man.’ ”11 His genealogy of the
“hermeneutics of the self ” in antiquity establishes sex and sexuality not as essential categories that
7
8
Newsweek (February 6, 1967), 92; cited in D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 307.
9
Newsweek (February 6, 1967), 92; cited in D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 307.
10
Paul Allen Miller, “Confessions of the Flesh: Between Pleasure and Sexuality,” symploke– 29.1/2 (2021): 653–4.
11
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 (1984), trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Pantheon, 1985), 6.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 211
transcend history, but rather as ones that are constructed in relation to various modalities of power
and governmentality. “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries
to hold in check,” writes Foucault, “or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries to uncover.”12
Rather, he continues, sexuality is “the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive
reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the
intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the
strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major
strategies of knowledge and power.”13
This general theoretical approach to the study of sex and sexuality, that is, one that regards our
identity as straight, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, polysexual, transsexual, queer,
questioning, or other as in some way constructed will dominate literary and cultural theoretical
work regarding sex and sexuality beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Early theoretical
contributions during this period such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), in addition to the work of Foucault, will set the basic
theoretical terms for much of the LGTBQ+ theory that follows.
But the question still lingers as what to call work that theoretically engages the literary and
cultural dimensions of sex and sexuality. Once we get beyond the censorship of such discourse on the
grounds of obscenity, and reach the 1970s, where significant work is beginning to appear in literary
and cultural theory, gender theory becomes the operative term for the study of the identity politics
of sexuality. Gender (and also sex role) refers in gender theory to the differences between men and
women that are cultural or societal in origin. Masculine and feminine, as we saw, for example, in
second-wave feminism, are generally used in gender theory to refer to distinctions on the basis of
gender. Also, sex, in this context, refers to the differences between men and women that are biological
in origin, and male and female are generally used to refer to distinctions made on the basis of sex.
In the 1980s, gender theory began to argue for equal rights for gay and lesbian individuals. Some key
texts from this period include John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980),
which challenged preconceptions about the Church’s past relationship to its gay members, including
priests, bishops and saints. Boswell, whose book is regarded as one of the most extensive treatments of
any single aspect of Western social history, demonstrated some of the important contributions gay men
have made to society and the extent to which they have been socially tolerated to varying degrees.
Another important work is Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple (1985), who writes that,
Lesbian culture may be seen as “marginal” by heterosexual culture and heterosexual definition.
“Marginal” is a word that implies, like the story of Columbus, that there is one world and it is
flat. Fortunately at the heart of these [marginal] groups, one finds an entirely different schema,
a map virtually unrelated to the “flat world” folks. Surely, Lesbian culture is central to Lesbians.
Moreover, the work that comes from Lesbian culture, the special perspective, can be central to
society as a whole.14
12
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction (1976), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage,
1980), 105.
13
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 105–6.
14
Judy Grahn, The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (San Francisco: Spinter’s Ink, 1985), xvi.
Still another relevant study is Karla Jay and Allen Young’s pioneering edited collection Lavender
Culture (1978), which was “one of the first books to explore in-depth lesbian and gay creativity.”15
It includes articles about “sex, bars, baths, clothing, the politics of sado-masochism, the gay male
and lesbian movements, aging and race.”16
In her “Foreword” to a new edition of Lavender Culture published upon the occasion of the 25th
anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots (which occurred after police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar
located in New York City’s Greenwich Village that served as a haven for the city’s gay, lesbian, and
transgender community, and are often said to have launched the Gay Pride Movement in NYC), Cindy
Patton reflects on homosexuality in late twentieth-century America. “From our late twentieth-century
vantage point,” writes Patton, “we can now see that there are and have been many homosexualities, a
reeling matrix of class, gender (including butch, fem, sissy, clone), race, ethnicity, geographic locale
which created possibilities and imposed prohibitions.”17 This “reeling matrix” of race, class, gender,
ethnicity, and place speak to the increasing emphasis in the 1990s to situate intersectionally (8.4) each
individual as far as possible into a set of coordinates that will assist in determining the conditions and
contingencies that make possible the construction and constitution of sex and sexuality.
Patton also points out that it is wrongheaded to treat these statements from gay and lesbian
individuals from the late 1970s as “ ‘authentic voices’ of ‘essential’ identity,” and to see “them only
as evidence for the historical specificity of queerness.”18 That is to say, these statements from gay
and lesbian individuals are evidence for the historical specificity of queerness (à la Foucault) and
reveal the constructedness of identity rather than any essentialism. But Patton also adds another
potential layer to our understanding of them—namely, that we understand these statements as
representing two cultures: “a High Culture we have queered and an alternative culture we have
created.”19 For her, this “double culture”—one that is high culture and another that is alt culture—
is “a way to think and be queer now.”20 Her comments on the two queer cultures reflect the shift in
the 1990s to cultural studies (14.1) over theory. They also indicate the increasing preference of the
term queer to gender to signify the various categories of gender identity and sexual orientation.
While queer can be used by individuals of a specific gender identity, it more generally came to
refer to anyone who is neither cisgender (individuals whose gender identity corresponds to the
gender associated with the sex they were assigned at birth) nor heterosexual. In Fear of a Queer
Planet (1993), Michael Warner argues that
“queer” represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a

minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more
thorough resistance to regimes of the normal . . . For both academics and activists, “queer” gets
a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual.21
15
Cindy Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” (1994), in Lavender Culture (1978), ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New
York: New York University Press, 1994), xxiii.
16
Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xxiii.
17
Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xvii.
18
Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xiii; my emphasis.
19
Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xiii.
20
Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xiii.
21
Michael Warner, “Introduction,” in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 213
In short, by the 1990s, queer theory comes to replace gender theory as the preferred general term
for critical inquiry into sex and sexuality. The term queer theory was first used by Teresa de Lauretis
at a conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz, about lesbian and gay sexualities in
1990. Her aim was to create some critical distance between the gay and lesbian studies, which
emerged in the 1970s, and to emphasize the study of gay and lesbian sexualities in their own right
instead of as deviations of heterosexuality.22 For both de Lauretis and Warner, queer theory is about
resistance to regimes of the normal and counteracting discourse that normalize the heterosexual.
Today, however, while queer theory is still widely used, LGBTQ+ theory is perhaps an even more
inclusive designation for the work that is currently being done in literary and cultural analysis
regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. LGBTQ+ theory encompasses a broad range of
perspectives on sex and sexuality including gay and lesbian theory (7.1), lesbian feminism (7.2),
Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity (7.3), the trans* theory of Jack Halberstam (7.5),
and the queer affect theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (7.4). In addition to these topics, which are
all covered in this chapter, LGBTQ+ theory also intersects in various ways with broader issues in
race and justice (8.0), biopolitics (9.0), globalization (10.0), posthumanism (12.0), affect studies
(13.0), and pop culture (14.0).
But, while the terms lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning are all key points
of contact for contemporary theories of sex and sexuality, the “+” in LGBTQ+ theory importantly
indicates that there are also gender identities and sexual orientations not covered by the letters L,
G, B, T, and Q. One example is Two-Spirit, a pan-Indigenous American identity. Other terms that
mediate further layers to LGBTQ+ theory are intersex (individuals who are born with variations of
sex characteristics that conform to neither definitions of male or female bodies), nonbinary (a
person whose gender identity is neither exclusively woman or man), gender nonconforming (an
individual whose gender identity or expression is outside of man/woman and masculine/feminine),
and asexual (or ace, someone with little or no sexual attraction). In sum, LGBTQ+ theory makes
sexual orientation and gender identity a fundamental category of literary and cultural analysis and
understanding.
7.1 LESBIAN AND GAY THEORY

After the Stonewall Riots in 1969, interest in the study of lesbian and gay literature and culture went
on the rise, and has risen in scope and range in each successive decade. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s,
the study of sex and sexuality underwent a renaissance of sorts, with the historical and theoretical work
of Boswell and Foucault leading the way into a new understanding of sex and sexuality. Moreover,
during this period, much of the work prior to the 1970s was re-evaluated and much of it was
delegitimated because of its questionable methodological and theoretical foundations.
For the most part, what is found questionable about this pre-1970 work on sex and sexuality is
its implied or explicit biological essentialism, that is, rather than regarding sex and sexuality as a
socio-cultural construct that influences identity formation (social constructionism), it assumed that
individuals possessed an innate and fixed sexual identity that is both universal and transhistorical
22
Regarding the conference and its objectives, see Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities—An
Introduction,” differences 3.2 (1991): iii–xviii.
(biological essentialism). This emphasis on sexual-identity constructionism against any form of

biological essentialism will result in (as we will see below) a split in the 1990s between lesbian and
gay studies and queer theory.
However, if one does look backward in history at lesbian and gay theory, one will find figures
who attempted to advocate for the rights of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men—even if their theories
regarding sex and sexuality exhibited biological essentialism. Some, like Freud, following Plato,
believed that all humans were bisexual. For him, everyone incorporates aspects of both sexes, and
everyone is sexually attracted to both sexes.23 In The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (1992),
Margaret Cruikshank says that Freud
speculated that homosexuality involved a narcissistic search for a love that symbolizes the self, a
castration fear for men and penis envy for women. He did not regard it as a sickness, however,
or as a condition that could be changed, and thus he opposed criminal punishments for
homosexuality. Freud believed that the natural sexual feelings of children are both homosexual
and heterosexual and that social conditioning usefully represses both bisexuality and
homosexuality. Thus a homosexual person is arrested in his or her development. Followers of
Freud, especially in the United States, interpreted this to mean that homosexuals are perpetually
adolescents, immature, blocked in some way, incapable of leading normal lives. Abandoning
Freud’s tolerant views, his disciples advocated treatment for homosexuality.24
But even if Freud’s biological essentialism regarding bisexuality pushes him to social toleration of
homosexuality, his position on the usefulness of social conditioning points in the other direction.
In short, contemporary lesbian and gay studies and queer theory widely rejects Freud and
psychoanalysis as representative of both biological essentialism and normative-heterosexual (or,
alternately, hetero-normative) systems of value.
Another psychoanalyst who contributed to early lesbian and gay theory was Joan Rivière, who
was a colleague of Melanie Klein and also one of Freud’s translators. In 1929, she published
“Womanliness as a Masquerade,” an article wherein she theorizes on homosexual and bisexual
development in women. Athol Hughes, a psychoanalyst who has edited Rivière’s papers, says that
in this article,
She demonstrates with convincing clinical material a fraudulent femininity in a certain type of
woman, not overtly homosexual, but not fully heterosexual. This bisexual woman hides a wish
for masculinity behind a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution she fears from
both men and women.25
According to Hughes, “the roots of the homosexual development in women” for Rivière can be
traced to a “frustration during sucking or weaning which gives rise to intense sadism towards both
23
Michael Ruse, Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 22.
24
Margaret Cruikshank, The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.
25
Joan Rivière, The Inner World and Joan Rivière: Collected Papers, 1920–1958, ed. Athol Hughes (New York: Routledge,
2018), 89.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 215
parents, particularly the mother.”26 The result of this, following the work of Klein in the “Early
Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” (1928), is “an overpowering fear of her mother and consequent
need to placate her.”27 Nevertheless, Rivière’s focus on both homosexual and bisexual women does
not alter its grounding—like the work of Freud—in a biological essentialism that conflicts with
constructivist notions of sex and sexuality.
But aside from psychoanalytic theory—where the work of many other figures can be added to
that of Freud and Rivière—there are others who wrote on lesbian and gay sexology even before
Freud. Included in this group is Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a nineteenth-century German legal scholar
(jurist) and lawyer who was the first person to demand not just the decriminalization of homosexual
practices, but also the complete legal equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals. Despite his
acknowledgment of a wide variety of sexual orientations and types, Ulrichs basically maintained a
“third sex” theory of homosexuality. For him, lesbians are born with a male anima (psyche, spirit,
or soul), and gay men are born with a female one.
Ulrichs also coined a word for same-sex love, which is based on Pausanias’s speech in Plato’s
Symposium. As Pausanias explains in the dialogue,
Now you will all agree, gentlemen, that without Love there could be no such goddess as
Aphrodite. If, then, there were only one goddess of that name, we might suppose that there was
only one kind of Love, but since in fact there are two such goddesses there must also be two
kinds of Love. No one, I think, will deny that there are two goddesses of that name—one, the
elder, sprung from no mother’s womb but from the heavens themselves, we call the Uranian,
the heavenly Aphrodite, while the younger, daughter of Zeus and Dione, we call Pandemus, the
earthly Aphrodite. It follows, then, that Love should be known as earthly or heavenly according
to the goddess in whose company his work is done.28
Pausanias attributes same-sex love to the heavenly Aphrodite, that is, the motherless daughter of
Uranus; and opposite-sex love to the earthly Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Ulrichs
coins the term Dioning (from Dione) for heterosexuals, and Urning (from Uranus) for homosexuals.
Both Urning (or, Uranian) and homosexual were coined in the 1860s, and both terms were widely
used before the latter term came to be preferred.
There are also other figures who contributed to the study of lesbians and gays prior to 1970s,
including Edward Carpenter, who was a prominent advocate of both women’s rights and overt
homosexuality, whose work on relationships between the sexes in Love’s Coming-of-Age (1896)
and The Intermediate Sex (1908) was influenced by the work of Havelock Ellis on human sexuality;
Alfred Kinsey, who studied human sexual behavior, and who wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), which were based on 18,500
personal interviews and indicated a wide variation in behavior; Jeannette Foster, the author of the
first critical study of lesbian literature, Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956), who was also the
first librarian of Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research; and, Frantz Fanon, an influential postcolonial
26
Rivière, The Inner World and Joan Rivière, 89.
27
Rivière, The Inner World and Joan Rivière, 89.
28
Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 180d–e.
theorist (10.1) who, on the one hand, regarded homosexuality as a sign of psychological distress,
exclusive to Western-raced people and directly related to their “Negrophobia” (“the Negrophobic
man is a repressed homosexual”),29 and, on the other hand, regarded all “Negroes” as free from the
disorder of homosexuality (“I had no opportunity to establish the overt presence of homosexuality
in Martinique. This must be viewed as the result of the absence of the Oedipus complex in the
Antilles”).30 Fanon, however, when confronted with the evidence of homosexuality in non-Western
cultures, for example, transvestites in Martinique, claimed that they “lead normal sex lives”—and
“can take a punch like any ‘he-man’ and are not impervious to the allures of women—fish and
vegetable merchants.”31
Finally, there is Mary McIntosh, a British sociologist and lesbian and gay rights activist. Just
before the Stonewall Riots, McIntosh published “The Homosexual Role,” where she argued that
the
current conceptualization of homosexuality as a condition is a false one, resulting from

ethnocentric bias. Homosexuality should be seen rather as a social role. Anthropological evidence
shows that the role does not exist in all societies, and where it does it is not always the same as
in modern western societies. Historical evidence shows that the role did not emerge in England
until towards the end of the seventeenth century. Evidence from the “Kinsey Reports” shows
that, in spite of the existence of the role in our society, much homosexual behavior occurs
outside the recognized role and the polarization between the heterosexual man and the
homosexual man is far from complete.32
McIntosh’s work signals the more general view in the 1970s and 1980s that homosexuality
has been wrongly or falsely conceptualized. To get it right, a social constructivist approach to sex
and sexuality will come to be favored. Gone is biological essentialism with its innate and fixed
sexual identity sourced to figures such as Plato or Freud that is both universal and transhistorical.
It is replaced by an approach drawn from many different disciplines including sociology,
anthropology, and history rather than just leaning heavily on the theoretical methodology of
philosophy and/or psychoanalysis (as in, for example, the examples above, ranging from Ulrichs to
Fanon).
This change in approach is coupled with increasing emphasis on the study of the cultural
production, dissemination, and the vicissitudes of sexual meaning, rather than the universal and
transhistorical features of sex and sexuality. As a consequence, much of the lesbian and gay theory
from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the 1960s is largely ignored because it does
not conform to the theoretical and methodological contours of the field circa the final quarter of
the twentieth century. Moreover, there is a shift in the 1970s and 1980s to lesbian and gay studies
as opposed to lesbian and gay theory. Whereas a theoretical approach would be grounded in a fixed
methodology replete with a rigid vocabulary concerning sex and sexuality (e.g., psychoanalysis), a
29
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 156.
30
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 180, n. 44.
31
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 180, n. 44.
32
Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role,” Social Problems 16.2 (1968): 182.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 217
studies approach eschews both a fixed methodology and a rigid vocabulary (e.g., cultural studies
[14.1]). Moreover, this studies approach to the study of lesbians and gays is regarded as a kind of
Copernican revolution in the study of sex and sexuality.
In 1993, Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin published The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader. Regarded at the time as the most comprehensive work of its kind, it
presented lesbian and gay studies (two decades after the Stonewall riots) as a flourishing
multidisciplinary endeavor concerning sexuality, sexual politics, and gender studies. Disciplines
represented in the volume included African-American studies, anthropology, classics, critical theory,
cultural studies, ethnic studies, history, literature, sociology, philosophy, and psychology, among
others. Among the topics addressed were AIDS, Black nationalism, butch-fem roles, children’s
books, the closet, colonialism, the cultural construction of gender, Freud, the hijras of India,
homophobia, lesbian separatism, Robert Mapplethorpe, the media, the politics of representation,
popular films, safe-sex education, S/M, Sappho, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, and Oscar Wilde,
among many others. The volume had forty-two contributors whose work represented the diversity,
range, and scope of lesbian and gay studies circa 1970–90. Among its forty-two contributors were
Judith Butler, John D’Emilio, Cindy Patton, Teresa de Lauretis, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, all of
whom we have already had some exposure to in the introduction to this chapter. And, as the editors
noted, these contributors “produce and engage many different kinds of knowledge and meaning;
they suggest many different topics and subjects for further inquiry; they demonstrate the cogency
of many different methods, theories, styles, and approaches; and taken together, they transform
our view of our cultures and world.”33
In short, as this volume illustrated, by the 1990s, lesbian and gay studies had become a massive
field whose history “has yet to be written.”34 In fact, the editors warn that,
[W]hen such a history comes to be written, it is likely to be contested: like any institutional
history, the history of lesbian/gay studies will doubtless constitute acts of definition, an exercise
in legitimation and delegitimation, and an attempt at political intervention. This is not the time
or the place to begin to specify the intellectual roots of the field, to describe the conditions that
made its emergence possible, or to fix its theoretical, methodological, thematic, or disciplinary
contours.35
Thirty-years later, their warnings about fixing its theoretical, methodological, thematic, or
disciplinary contours still hold and perhaps with even more currency, particularly in what has come
to be known as queer studies (see below). Moreover, they add that
lesbian/gay studies is not limited to the study of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Nor does it
refer simply to studies undertaken by, or in the name of, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Not
all research into the lives of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men necessarily qualifies as lesbian/gay
33
Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, “Introduction,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds.
Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), xv.
34
Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xv.
35
studies. Lesbian/gay studies, in short, cannot be defined exclusively by its subject, its practitioners,
its methods, or its themes.36
So, how then is one to understand lesbian and gay studies if it “cannot be defined exclusively by its
subject, its practitioners, its methods, or its themes”?
The editors suggest that an analogy with women’s studies will aid us in understanding the field
of lesbian and gay studies. Just as “women’s history is not intended to be merely additive; its effect
is not to introduce another sub-department of history into the traditional panoply of historical
fields—such as political history, economic history, social history, military history, diplomatic history,
and intellectual history,”37 so too is lesbian and gay history not merely additive. Rather, like women’s
studies which “seeks to establish the centrality of gender as a fundamental category of historical
analysis and understanding,” lesbian and gay studies seeks to establish the centrality of sex and
sexuality as a fundamental category of historical analysis and understanding. “Lesbian and gay
studies does for sex and sexuality,” write the editors, “what women’s studies does for gender.”38 In
sum, lesbian and gay studies
intends to establish the analytical centrality of sex and sexuality within many different fields of
inquiry, to express and advance the interests of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men, and to contribute
culturally and intellectually to the contemporary lesbian/gay movement. In particular, lesbian/
gay studies focuses intense scrutiny on cultural production, dissemination, and vicissitudes of
sexual meaning.39
However, in spite of the efforts of lesbian and gay studies to place emphasis on the “cultural
production, dissemination, and vicissitudes of sexual meaning” coupled with a reluctance to
establish its theoretical and methodological contours, some have argued that it took an essentialist
view of sex and sexuality—and have proposed queer theory as an alternative.
In “Queer Theory (1991),” de Lauretis articulates the problems with lesbian and gay studies as
a general field of study. By the 1990s, writes de Lauretis,
homosexuality is no longer to be seen simply as marginal with regard to a dominant, stable form
of sexuality (heterosexuality) against which it would be defined either by opposition or by
homology. In other works, it is no longer to be seen either as merely transgressive or deviant
vis-à-vis a proper, natural sexuality (i.e., institutionalized reproductive sexuality), according to
the older, pathological model, or as just another, optional “life-style,” according to the model of
contemporary North American pluralism. Instead, male and female homosexualities—in their
current sexual-political articulations of gay and lesbian sexualities, in North America—may be
reconceptualized as social and cultural forms in their own right, albeit emergent ones and thus
still fuzzily defined, undercoded, or discursively dependent on more established forms. Thus,
36
Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xv; my emphasis.
37
38
39
Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xvi.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 219
rather than marking the limits of the social space by designating a place at the edge of culture,
gay sexuality in its specific female and male cultural (or subcultural) forms acts as an agency of
social process whose mode of functioning is both interactive and yet resistant, both participatory
and yet distinct, claiming at once equality and difference, demanding political representation
while insisting on its material and historical specificity.40
For de Lauretis, some of the “discursive constructions and constructed silences in the emergent field
of ‘gay and lesbian studies’ ” need to be problematized. As an alternative to lesbian and gay studies,
she coins queer theory, which she says is
willing to examine, make explicit, compare, or confront the respective histories, assumptions,
and conceptual frameworks that have characterized the self-representations of North American
lesbians and gay men, of color and white, up to now; from there, we could then go on to recast
or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, another way of
thinking the sexual.41
As for the term “lesbian and gay,” she contends that it needs to be put at a critical distance because
by 1990, it had established itself as an “often convenient formula.”42 Writes de Lauretis, “the phrase
‘lesbian and gay’ or ‘gay and lesbian’ has become the standard way of referring to what only a few
years ago used to be simply ‘gay’ (e.g. the gay community, the gay liberation movement) or just a
few years earlier still, ‘homosexual.’ ”43 However, it should be noted that queer theory is establishing
itself around the same time that lesbian and gay studies is decidedly distancing itself from theory.
The studies–theory divide in this area (as well as others) reveals an important contemporary fault
line that is often distinguishable only on the basis of the claims of the general area of concern (viz.,
queer theory is theory whereas lesbian and gay studies are studies). This becomes an almost
tautological exercise as figures such as Butler, Sedgwick, and de Lauretis can be found under both
rubrics.
More recently, queer studies, comment Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, is “the
institutionalization of a new—or at least newly visible—paradigm for thinking about sexuality that
emerged simultaneously across academic and activist contexts in the early 1990s, constituting a
broad and unmethodological critique of normative models of sex, gender, and sexuality.”44 “Queer
studies’ commitment to non-normativity and anti-identitarianism, coupled with its refusal to define
its proper field of operation to any fixed content,” they continue,
means that, while prominently organized around sexuality, it is potentially attentive to any
socially consequential difference that contributes to regimes of sexual normalization. Rather
than separating sexuality from other axes of social difference—race, ethnicity, class, gender,
40
Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” differences 3.2 (1991): iii.
41
De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” iv.
42
43
44
Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, “Introduction,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, eds. Donald E. Hall and
Annamarie Jagose with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter (London: Routledge, 2013), xvi.
nationality and so on—queer studies has increasingly attended to the ways in which various
categories of difference inflect and transform each other. This kind of intersectional analysis is
neither new nor an innovation of queer studies.45
These comments by Hall and Jagose come two decades after those of de Lauretis, Abelove, Barale,
and Halperin, and indicate the ongoing reshaping of the range and scope of sex and sexuality. The
emphasis on non-normativity and anti-identitarianism reveal the continuing commitment of work
in this area against essentialism of any form, whether it is in the form of essential racial, ethnic,
class, gender, and national characteristics or in the form of norms that categorize sex, gender, and
sexuality. Again, the designation of this chapter as one on LGBTQ+ theory is an effort to recognize
work in both queer studies and queer theory as indicative of a wider and dynamic set of approaches
to sex and sexuality today.
7.2 LESBIAN FEMINISM

In 1955, the Daughters of Bilitis was formed in San Francisco. As the first national organization for
lesbians, it sought to educate lesbians about their legal rights and to work to increase their acceptance
in society. While there were lesbian communities prior to the 1960s, they tended to center on
homes or bars. One of the social and political goals of the Daughters of Bilitis was to bring about
an end to the social and political isolation of lesbians.
However, when the second wave of feminism began to take shape in the 1960s, the concerns of
lesbians converged with the broader issues of the women’s movement and the sexual revolution.
Unfortunately, however, the founder of the National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan,
coined the term “lavender menace” to describe the lesbian members of the feminist movement. To
conservative women’s organizations, the issues of lesbian members were regarded as hindering the
women’s movement “in the same way that drag queens,” writes Nikki Sullivan, “had been regarded
by homophiles as an obstacle to acceptance by the heterosexual majority.”46
One of the consequences of women’s liberation organizations regarding lesbians as undermining
the credibility of second-wave feminism was the formation of lesbian–feminist groups. One of
them, Radicalesbians, was formed in New York in 1970. Some of its original members, such as Rita
Mae Brown, Barbara Love, and Ellen Shumsky, were previously members of the Gay Liberation
Front, which they left because they believed it placed a lower priority on advancing the rights of
lesbians as opposed to the rights of gay men.
Radicalesbians wrote a famous manifesto, The Woman[-]Identified Woman, in 1970, which
maintained that lesbianism is necessary to women’s liberation. The Radicalesbians, who were
aiming to reclaim the “Lavender Menace,” argued that
Only women can give to each other a new sense of self. That identity we have to develop with
reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. This consciousness is the revolutionary force
from which all else will follow, for ours is an organic revolution. For this we must be available
45
Hall and Jagose, “Introduction,” xvi.
46
Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 32.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 221
and supportive to one another, give our commitment and our love, give the emotional support
necessary to sustain this movement. Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward
toward our oppressors. As long as woman’s liberation tries to free women without facing the
basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one relationship with our oppressors,
tremendous energies will continue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship
with a man, into finding how to get better sex, how to turn his head around—into trying to make
the “new man” out of him, in the delusion that this will allow us to be the “new woman.” This
obviously splits our energies and commitments, leaving us unable to be committed to the
construction of the new patterns which will liberate us.
It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and
with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural
revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves.47
On May 1, 1970, members of Radicalesbians rushed the stage of the “Second Congress to Unite
Women” to express their issues and distribute copies of Woman[-]Identified Woman. Their efforts
contributed to the passage of some pro-lesbian resolutions at the feminist conference—and the
following year Radicalesbians was dissolved.
One of the things that threatened the women’s movement at the time was the belief of
heterosexual women that lesbians were introducing sex to the movement. For heterosexual women,
the women’s movement was supposed to be a respite from sexuality. Lesbian feminists responded
to heterosexual feminists by emphasizing the sensual aspects of lesbianism over its sexual ones. One
of the consequences of emphasizing gender over sexuality was to push lesbian feminists closer to
heterosexual feminists and further from gay men. But by basing their political coalition with
heterosexual feminists on gender, “it often seemed,” writes Sullivan, “that to be a heterosexual
woman-identified woman was a contradiction in terms.”48 Or, as the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists
put it in 1979,
We do not think that all feminists can and should be political lesbians. Our definition of political
lesbian is a women-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory
sexual activity with women.49
The position of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists was that “any woman could (potentially) be a
political lesbian since lesbianism is less a sexual identity than a political position,”50 or, as it was put
at the time, “lesbians are feminists not homosexuals.”51
47
Radicalesbians, The Woman[-]Identified Woman (Pittsburgh: Know, Inc. 1970), 3–4. Pamphlet from the David M.
Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, NC.
48
Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 33.
49
OnlyWomen Collective, “Political Lesbianism: The Case Against Heterosexuality,” in Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between
Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism, eds. OnlyWomen Collective (London: OnlyWomen Press, 1981), 5.
50
51
Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 33; Johnston cited by Sullivan.
In Unpacking Queer Politics (2003), Sheila Jeffreys maintains that
Lesbian feminism starts from the understanding that the interests of lesbians and gay men are in
many respects very different, because lesbians are members of the political class of women.
Lesbian liberation thus requires the destruction of men’s power over women.52
For Jeffreys, the principles that “inspired lesbian feminism from the beginning, and which distinguish
it from subsequent forms of politics that lesbians have adopted, particularly queer politics,” are as
follows:
(1) Lesbian feminists are woman-loving;
(2) Lesbian feminism is a separatist organization;
(3) Lesbian feminism is a community and ideas;
(4) Lesbian feminism believes that the personal is political;
(5) Lesbian feminism rejects hierarchy in the form of role-playing and sadomasochism; and,
(6) Lesbian feminism is a critique of the sexuality of male supremacy which eroticizes inequality.53
But many political feminists also critiqued “heterosexual penetration as a key factor in the
oppression of women” and condemned “penetrative sex between lesbians on the grounds that
penetration is, by definition, phallocentric.”54
Hence, one of the consequences of political lesbianism was to alienate “many working-class
lesbians, lesbians of color, butches and femmes, ‘sex positive’ lesbians, and/or those whose lesbianism
had been shaped in and through bar culture.”55 That is to say, some regarded political lesbianism as
both desexualizing lesbianism and sex-policing lesbians. Other strands of lesbian feminism, however,
were sex positive. They led to the publication of pro-sex magazines and to the production of
“lesbian porn, sex toys for women, and lesbian S/M”56 among other items in support of lesbian sex
and sexuality. These factions within lesbian feminism, which were the result of deep ideological
differences, played themselves out in what has been termed the sex wars.
The divisions within feminism regarding lesbians might be broadly divided into two periods,
both of which are marked by stark oppositions. De Lauretis describes them as follows:
Since the late 60s, practically since Stonewall, North American lesbians have been more or less
painfully divided between an allegiance to the women’s movement, with its more or less overt
homophobia, and its appropriation of lesbianism, and an allegiance to the gay liberation
movement, with its more or less overt sexism. Of late [that is, in the late 1980s and early 1990s],
this division has been recast as an embattled, starkly polarized opposition between sex-radical or
s/m lesbians and mainstream or cultural feminist lesbians; an opposition where gay men are, on
52
Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 19.
53
Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics, 19.
54
55
56
LGBTQ+ THEORY 223
this side, subsumed under the undifferentiated category “men” and/or not considered pertinent
to lesbian life and thought, whereas on the other side, they would represent the cultural model
and very possibility of lesbian radical sex.57
De Lauretis’s observation here is that this polarization is controlled by a “mechanical, toggle-switch

binarism.”58 For de Lauretis, one sees this binarism “popularized”59 through two women’s magazine
titles: one is Off Our Backs, an American radical feminist publication that ran from 1970 to 2008
aimed at “all women who are fighting for the liberation of their lives” that its publishers wrote in
the first issue “will grow and expand to meet the needs of women from all backgrounds and
classes”;60 the other, which ran from 1984 to 2006, is On Our Backs, the first women-run erotica
magazine and the first magazine to feature lesbian erotica targeted at a lesbian audience.
Moreover, in order to break associations with “maleness,” comments Alice Echols in Daring to
Be Bad (1989), lesbian-feminists often resorted to and
reinforced dominant cultural assumptions about women’s sexuality. They spoke platitudinously
about the differences between women’s (and, by extension, lesbian’s) diffuse, romantic, and
nurturing sexuality and men’s aggressive, genitally oriented sexuality.61
Examples include statements such as “the male seeks to conquer through sex while the female seeks
to communicate”62 by Rita Mae Brown (who Echols says “did more than any other individual to
raise feminists’ consciousness about lesbianism”),63 and “Men who are obsessed with sex are
convinced that lesbians are obsessed with sex. Actually, like other women, lesbians are obsessed
with love and fidelity” by a member of Gay Women’s Liberation in Berkeley.64 Moreover, the
binarism even extended to heterosexual sex versus lesbian sex, which was described by a writer
from the Los Angeles feminist newspaper Everywoman as “pure as snow”: “Fortunately, Lesbianism
never really had anything to do with men, despite all attempts at interference, and as a consequence
remains the only viable pursuit left on earth as pure as snow, ego-free, and non-profit.”65
With the formation of queer theory in the 1990s, the binarism, essentialism, and platitudes often
found in lesbian feminism will give way to an anti-binarism and anti-essentialism that resists
reduction to platitudes. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in 1993, queer involves “the open mesh
of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning [that
occur] when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or
can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”66
57
De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” vii–viii.
58
De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” viii.
59
De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” viii.
60
Statement from Off Our Backs 1.1 (1970), https://web.archive.org/web/20051224044533/http://www.offourbacks.org/
Mission.htm.
61
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (1989) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2019), 218.
62
Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213; Brown cited by Echols.
63
Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213.
64
Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213; Gay Women’s Liberation cited by Echols.
65
Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 218.
66
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.
Finally, it has been noted that lesbian feminists were for the most part white middle-class women.
These white middle-class women claimed that their lesbian feminist discourse spoke for all women. In
Margaret Mead Made Me Gay (2000), Esther Newton argues that white middle-class women claiming
to represent all women may have “sharpened” “class and race antagonisms” since the 1970s.67 For
Newton, there is an ideological hegemony in lesbian-feminist discourse that omits the differences and
fragmentation among lesbian communities and cultures. There is perhaps no better place to view this
at work than in the formation of the Combahee River Collective.
In 1975, a group of Black lesbian feminists formed this collective as a response to racism in the
women’s movement, to the lack of attention to sexuality and economic oppression in the National
Black Feminist Organization, and to sexism in the Black freedom movements. By focusing on the
intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, the Combahee River Collective brought to lesbian-
feminist discourse an ideological response to the hegemony of white middle-class women. In The
Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), the Combahee River Collective write:
[W]e are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class
oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice
based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these
oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the
logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women
of color face . . . This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity
politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly
out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case
of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore
revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have
preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals,
queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is
enough.68
The intersectional identity politics of the Combahee River Collective challenge essentialist and
universalist notions of gender and sexual identity. In fact, their statement is where the phrase
identity politics was coined. Still, during the 1980s there was debate concerning political activism
of any form under the term identity—even if the terms were Black, lesbian, gay, and women. The
issue here was the degree to which identity politics required that the belief that Black, lesbian, gay,
women, and other identity terms represent essential, irreducible, and unchanging characteristics
that are constitutive of a person or thing—versus socially constructed ones.
However, in spite of its essentialist tendencies, the identity politics of the Combahee River
Collective provide a glimpse of the possibilities available by resisting ideological hegemony in
lesbian-feminist discourse. For the Combahee River Collective, the sources of Black lesbian-feminist
67
Esther Newton, “Will the Real Lesbian Community Please Stand Up?” (1982, 1998), in Margaret Mead Made Me Gay:
Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 161.
68
Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), in Home Girls: A Black Feminist
Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 264, 274.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 225
oppression can be most effectively dismantled through political struggle with several particular
systems of oppression (and not just one, the heterosexual structure) that have used power to gain
privilege over them. They view the political struggle ahead as a “revolutionary task” that will entail
“a lifetime of work and struggle.” The intersectional identity politics of the Combahee River
Collective foreground the ideals and hopes of a group of individuals to bring about the end of their
own oppression. The later (and continuing) emphasis on intersectionality (8.4) as central to issues
concerning race and justice (8.0) always already links back to the identity politics of this pioneering
Black lesbian feminist collective.
7.3 JUDITH BUTLER

Judith Butler argues that gender is for the most part not a set of natural or essential traits. Rather,
gendered behavior, such as that which we commonly associate with masculinity and femininity, is a
performance that is learned. “Gender reality is performative,” writes Butler, “which means, quite
simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.”69 She then continues,
It seems fair to say that certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core
or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that
expectation in some way. That expectation, in turn, is based upon the perception of sex, where
sex is understood to be the discrete and factic datum of primary sexual characteristics. This
implicit and popular theory of acts and gestures as expressive of gender suggest that gender itself
is dramatized and known; indeed, gender appears to the popular imagination as a substantial core
which might well be understood as the spiritual or psychological correlate of biological sex.70
Therefore, in order to avoid the misconception that gender is expressive of sex, Butler argues that
the link between gender and sex needs to be broken:
When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself
becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as
easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a
female one.71
Thus, with sex as radically independent of gender, Butler shows that the gendered self is not prior
to its acts as it is in the phenomenological models of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, George Herbert
Mead, and others.
For the phenomenologists, “social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and
all manner of symbolic social sign.”72 However, as Butler points out, this does not imply that social
agents necessarily exist prior to their constitution in language. “Though phenomenology sometimes
69
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre
Journal 40.4 (1988): 527.
70
Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 527–8.
71
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 6.
72
Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 519.
appears to assume the existence of a choosing and constituting agent prior to language (who poses
as the sole source of its constituting acts),” says Butler, “there is also a more radical use of the
doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive
acts.”73 This “subject” that Butler is referring to is not a “gendered self ” that exists “prior to its act,”
as one strand of the phenomenological tradition would have us believe. Rather, the constituting
acts of this subject result in both “the identity of the actor” and the constitution of “that identity as
a compelling illusion, an object of belief.”74
Consequently, for Butler, “there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor
an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender
creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.”75 What Butler
provides here is a way of theorizing both the notion that gender is constructed, and that gender as
a construction . . . regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform,
produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility
of its own production. The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby
the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness.76
Butler’s position that gender is constructed through performativity provides a challenge to all forms
of identity politics that utilize women as a common identity. Why? Because Butler is opposed to the
notion that “the term women denote[s] a common identity.”77
Hence, for Butler, any feminist theory that that relies upon the category of woman as a universal
presupposition is problematic. This includes not just second-wave Anglo-American feminist
theorists from Friedan to Gubar but also French theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray. In their
“effort to combat the invisibility of women as a category,” comments Butler,
feminists run the risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be representative of
the concrete lives of women. As feminists, we have been less eager, I think, to consider the status
of the category itself, and, indeed, to discern the conditions of oppression which issue from an
unexamined reproduction of gender identities which sustain discrete and binary categories of
man and woman.78
To be sure, Butler’s concept of gender “troubles” much of what had come to be regarded as feminist
theory up to 1990, when her first major book on this topic, Gender Trouble, was published. For her,
like Foucault (9.1), there is no such thing as either normative sexuality or normative heterosexuality.
However, through social compulsion or coercion, we are taught to believe otherwise. “Gender
identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo,” writes Butler.79
73
74
75
76
Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 522; my emphasis.
77
Butler, Gender Trouble, 3.
78
79
Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 520; my emphasis.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 227
She then explains how social sanctions, punitive regulations, and taboos work together to compel
normative heterosexuality by reminding us of how “cultures are governed by conventions that not
only regulate and guarantee the production, exchange, and consumption of material goods, but
also reproduce the bonds of kinship itself, which require taboos and punitive regulation of
reproduction to effect that end.”80 In this regard, Levì-Strauss’s efforts to show “how the incest
taboo works to guarantee the channeling of sexuality into various modes of heterosexual marriage”
is one example of how “compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed . . . through the
cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’ heterosexual
dispositions.”81
For Butler, the body is both matter and “a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities.”82
By “materializing” the possibilities of one’s body, “one does one’s body, and indeed, one does one’s
body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors
as well.”83 This “doing” of one’s body is a process whereby “the body becomes its gender through
a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time.”84 In short, for Butler
the gendered body as matter is not a given. Rather, the gendered body is something that is produced
through a “legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence
or fact, whether natural, cultural, or linguistic.”85 The implications for feminist theory of Butler’s
position on the gendered body are significant: namely, it does not allow feminism to regard women’s
bodies to exist outside of the legacy of their performative acts. Or, more simply, there is no such
thing for Butler as gendered bodies outside of or external to their performativity.
One of the implications of Butler’s notion that gendered bodies do not exist outside of or
external to their performativity is that the “transvestite’s gender is as fully real as anyone whose
performance complies with social expectations.”86 Her argument here is that because “the ‘reality’
of gender is constituted by the performance itself, then there is no recourse to an essential and
unrealized ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ which gender performances ostensibly express.”87 Thus, the gender of
the transvestite is as real as every other gender performance. Moreover, the gender of the transvestite
has an added significance: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of
gender itself—as well as its contingency.”88 To which Butler adds,
[P]art of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical
contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of
causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary. In the place of the law of
heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of performance which
avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.89
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
Butler, Gender Trouble, 137; original emphasis.
89
For Butler, the performance of drag shows us that sex and gender are not situated in nature because
there is no original nature in a drag performance.
Butler’s approach here, which she calls “antifoundationalist,”90 has a commonality with the
antifoundational work of poststructuralists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard in that all of
these thinkers reject the view that all knowledge has an indubitable foundation (in the way, for
example, that Descartes’s cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—provides an indubitable
foundation for knowledge). The difference, however, is that gender for her is not determined by
language, difference, or the symbolic. Moreover, by directing our attention to the performativity of
sex and gender, Butler effectively changes the terms and conditions of feminism. “Genders can be
neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived,”91 argues Butler.
One of the consequences of Butler’s performative view of gender is that it “cannot be understood
as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior ‘self,’ whether that ‘self ’ is conceived as
sexed or not.”92 Unlike, say, McIntosh, who views homosexuality as a social role, or Erving Goffman,
who “posits a self which assumes and exchanges various ‘roles’ within the complex social
expectations of the ‘game’ of modern life,” Butler contends that the self is “outside.”93 That is, for
Butler, the self is constituted in social discourse. However, any effort to ascribe to this “outside” self
interiority is merely “a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication.”94
In sum, “gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular
actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and
reproduced as reality once again.”95 Nevertheless, it is “not passively scripted on the body, and
neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of
patriarchy.”96 This position puts her at odds with most of the work done on gender in the twentieth
century. “Gender,” writes Butler, “is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and
incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic
given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of
various kinds.”97
With regard to lesbian and gay theory, Butler is quite clear that she is not comfortable with it
because of its association with the identity categories (viz., gay, lesbian). Writes Butler, “identity
categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of
oppressive structures or as the rallying points for liberatory contestation of that very oppression.”98
Moreover, Butler is not comfortable with lesbian and gay theory because she does “not understand
the notion of ‘theory,’ and [is] hardly interested in being cast as its defender, much less in being
signified as part of an elite gay/lesbian theory crowd that seeks to establish the legitimacy and
domestication of gay/lesbian studies within the academy.”99 Rather than theory, Butler regards her
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1991), in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 308.
99
Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 308.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 229
work on performativity as politics. “If the political task is to show that theory is never merely
theoria, in the sense of disengaged contemplation, and to insist that it is fully political (phronesis or
even praxis), then why not simply call this operation politics, or some necessary permutation of
it?”100
Butler’s politics of performativity is critical of any approach that “invokes the lesbian-signifier,
since its signification is always to some degree out of one’s control, but also because its specificity
can only be demarcated by exclusions that return to disrupt its claim to coherence.”101 “What, if
anything,” asks Butler, “can lesbians be said to share? And who will decide this question, and in the
name of whom? If I claim to be a lesbian, I ‘come out’ only to produce a new and different
‘closet.’ ”102 However, in spite of her disclaimers regarding lesbian and gay theory, Butler’s work on
performativity is widely regarded as a seminal contribution to this field—as well as to queer theory.
It changed not only the way we think about identity, but also how we approach its politics and
theory. In sum, just as Marx changed the way we think about class, Butler changed the way we
think about gender and sex.
7.4 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines the structuring logics of same-sex desire (or queerness) and is
interested in theories of the affective orientation (or affect) of human bodies and identities (or
multiplicities).
The former interest led her to develop the concept of homosociality, where she argues in Between
Men (1985) that there is a triangular structure in homosocial desire between men where a woman
is the supposed object of at least one of the men. In the structuring logic of this same-sex desire,
“the ultimate function of woman is to be conduits of homosocial desire.”103 To develop the concept
of homosociality, Sedgwick draws upon some earlier theoretical work. One theoretical source is
Gayle Rubin’s “sex/gender system,” a term she coined in 1975 for “the set of arrangements by
which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these
transformed sexual needs are satisfied”104—a system Rubin develops through a feminist critique of
Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of kinship systems in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969), wherein
women function as gifts in economic exchanges between men. The other source is René Girard’s
theory of triangular desire, a concept he first explored in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961),
wherein the object of desire, whether male or female, stands at the peak of the triangle and demands
the competing desire of two rivals.
The latter interest, which might be termed affective multiplicities, combines Sedgwick’s
examinations of same-sex affect and desire into a highly influential and very expansive definition of
queer in Tendencies (1993):
100
101
102
103
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985), 99.
104
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women,
ed. Ranya R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 159.
What’s striking is the number and difference of the dimensions that “sexual identity” is supposed
to organize into a seamless and univocal whole. And if it doesn’t? That’s one of the things that
“queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances,
lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s
sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental, linguistic,
epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may
at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical
faeries, fanatacists, drags, clones, leather folk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist
men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! Queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals,
aunties, wannabes, lesbian identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or . . . people able to
relish, learn from, or identify with such.105
This expansive definition illustrates one of the first “axioms” of Sedgwick’s approach to sexuality
and gender in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), namely, “People are different from each other.”106
It also reveals the relative paucity of conceptual tools there are for dealing with this multiplicity. “A
tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization,” comments Sedgwick, “have been
painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality,
sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions.”107
She then goes on to further problematize the study of sexuality and gender with some additional
axioms: the study of sexuality is not the same thing as the study of gender, and antihomophobic
inquiry is not the same thing as feminist inquiry;108 there is no way to know in advance whether
lesbian and gay identities should be conceptualized together or separately;109 the debate regarding
nature versus nurture takes place in the context of unstable assumptions and fantasies about both
nature and nurture;110 the search for a Great Paradigm Shift regarding sexuality and gender may
obscure the present conditions of sexual identity;111 the relation of gay studies to debates on the
literary canon is and should be a tortuous one;112 and, the paths of allo- (or difference, divergence)
and auto- (or self, same) identification are likely to be strange and recalcitrant.
While these axioms inform Sedgwick’s approach to gender and sexuality, her work in this area does
not conform to any one theoretical method. Rather, she draws upon many different theoretical methods
including psychoanalysis, feminism, deconstruction, and queer theory (which would include Foucault’s
work on the history of sexuality). “As a general principle,” comments Sedgwick, “I don’t like the idea
of ‘applying’ theoretical models to particular situations or texts—it’s always more interesting when the
pressure of application goes in both directions.”113 What Sedgwick does, however, is utilize extant
theories, if appropriate, to produce critical interpretations of the culture or experience at hand.
105
Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8.
106
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Updated with a New Preface (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990, 2008), 22.
107
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 22.
108
109
110
111
112
113
LGBTQ+ THEORY 231
For example, when faced with the experience of breast cancer, she said “it’s hard not to think of
this continuing experience as, among other things, an adventure in applied deconstruction.”114 For
her, “there was no more “efficient demonstration of the instability of the supposed oppositions that
structure an experience of ‘self ’ ”115 than deconstruction. These oppositions include:
the part and the whole (when cancer so dramatically corrodes that distinction); safety and danger
(when fewer than half of the women diagnosed with breast cancer display any of the statistically
defined “risk factors” for the disease); fear and hope (when I feel—I’ve got a quarterly physical
coming up—so much less prepared to deal with the news that a lump or rash isn’t a metastasis
than that it is); past and future (when a person anticipating the possibility of death, and the
people who care for her, occupy temporalities that more and more radically diverge); thought
and act (the words in my head are aswirl with fatalism, but at the gym I’m striding treadmills and
lifting weights); or the natural and the technological (what with exoskeleton of the bone-scan
machine, the uncanny appendage of the IV drip, the bionic implant of the Port-a-cath, all in the
service of imaging and recovering my “natural” healthy body in the face of its spontaneous and
endogenous threat against itself).116
Moreover, her self-reflection on this use of deconstruction speaks well to the overall temper of her
approach to theory:
That deconstruction can offer crucial resources of thought for survival under duress will sound
astonishing, I know, to anyone who knows it mostly from the journalism on the subject—
journalism that always depicts “deconstruction,” not as a group of usable intellectual tools, but
as a set of beliefs involving a patently absurd dogma (“nothing really exists”), loopy as Christian
Science but as exotically aggressive as (American journalism would also have us find) Islam. I
came to my encounter with breast cancer not as a member of a credal sect of “deconstructionists”
but as someone who needed all the cognitive skills she could get. I found, as often before, that I
had some good and relevant ones from my deconstructive training.117
This notion of theory as “usable intellectual tools” to respond to the text or experience at hand
attests to Sedgwick’s overall approach to gender and sexuality. For her, there is a great deal of
theoretical work that can be drawn from to understand gender and sexuality, and one always gets
the sense that the prospect of producing more theoretical work is always a good thing. But, what is
in lesser abundance for Sedgwick, comments Ramzi Fawaz, are “the ethical, affective, and political
orientations required to make those theories have a palpable, materially nourishing, or transformative
affect on our daily lives.”118
While Sedgwick provides critical interpretations of literature and culture that resist generalizing
and transhistorical explanation, she is not averse to making broad claims relating to her approach
114
115
116
117
Sedgwick, Tendencies, 12, n. 11.
118
Ramzi Fawaz, “ ‘An Open Mesh of Possibilities’: The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times,” in Reading Sedgwick, ed.
Lauren Berlant (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 10.
to gender and sexuality. For example, she says that what follows from the axioms above is that “an
understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete,
but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of
modern homo/heterosexual definition.”119 She makes her case for this broad claim by exploring
two major contradictions in modern homo/heterosexual definition: “the first is the contradiction
between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance
primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing
view), and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the
lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view)”;120 and,
the “second is the contradiction between seeing same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter
of liminality or transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting an impulse
of separatism—though by no means necessarily political separatism—with each gender.”121 For
Sedgwick, these “conceptually intractable” and “nominally marginal” definitional issues are central
to “knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western culture as a whole.”122
The book in which these ideas are principally developed, Epistemology of the Closet (1990),
establishes Sedgwick as a major theorist of knowledge (or, epistemologist). Her queer epistemology
will bring her in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably
Think This Essay is About You” (1997) to try to understand better the paranoia of critical
interpretation, that is, what has come to be termed the hermeneutics of suspicion—rather than
trying to reject paranoid reading as postcritique aims to do in the 2010s (15.4). For Sedgwick, “the
possibility of unpacking, of disentangling from their impacted and overdetermined historical
relation to each other some of the separate elements of the intellectual baggage that many of us
carry around under a label such as ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ ” is an “enabling” one.123 One of
the things she discovers is that “the methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice
has involved a concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia.”124 Sedgwick’s work here has
produced a remarkable account of how paranoia works in relation to affect studies (13.0).
As an epistemologist, Sedgwick is concerned with how knowledge is performative. For her, the basic
question of epistemology is not, “What is knowledge?” Rather, it is, “What does knowledge do—the
pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already
knows?”125 So, with respect to paranoia, her question is not “What is paranoia (in critical practice)?” but
rather “What does paranoia do (in critical practice)?” By asking the latter question, Sedgwick finds that
because Freud’s concept of paranoia is often at the center of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” it also
performs as knowledge his famous generalization regarding paranoia: “the delusions of paranoiacs have
an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers.”126 As such, for
Sedgwick, it “become[s] less a diagnosis than a prescription,”127 that is,
119
120
121
122
123
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay
is About You” (1997), in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 124.
124
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 125.
125
126
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 125; Freud cited by Sedgwick.
127
LGBTQ+ THEORY 233
[T]o theorize anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious or complaisant.
I myself have no wish to return to the use of “paranoid” as pathologizing diagnosis, but it seems
to me a great loss when paranoid inquiry comes to seem entirely coextensive with critical
theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice
among other, alternative kinds.128
The challenge then for Sedgwick is “to understand paranoia in such a way as to situate it as
one kind of epistemological practice among other, alternative ones.”129 Again, the question here is
not one of the “truth value” of paranoia, but rather one of its “performative affect.”130 Thus,
for her,
some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that
they offer unique access to true knowledge. They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking,
finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.131
In this regard, Sedgwick makes five general claims about paranoia as “a tool for better seeing
differentials of practice.”132
First, Sedgwick notes that paranoia is “anticipatory,” which she then associates with the “first
imperative” of paranoia: “There must be no bad surprises.”133 For Sedgwick, recognition of this
imperative is fundamental to her epistemology because it establishes a necessary connection between
knowledge and paranoia. Whereas for ontologically static conceptions of knowledge (e.g.,
foundationalism), paranoia only functions as the lack of foundation to belief (viz., Paranoia is a
type of unfounded belief), in Sedgwick’s performative conception of knowledge, paranoia is a
necessary aspect of all knowledge (viz., All knowledge is paranoid). She illustrates this point by
quoting D. A. Miller: “Surprise . . . is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate, but it is also
what, in the event, he survives by reading as a frightening incentive: he can never be paranoid
enough.”134 Therefore, by anticipating events, paranoia works to establish conditions for knowledge
that are antifoundational (and performative), rather than foundational (and static).
Second, for Sedgwick, paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. By this, she means that paranoia tends
toward “symmetrical epistemologies,” that is, epistemologies that refuse “to be only either a way of
knowing or a thing known.”135 The epistemological symmetry of paranoia means that it both needs
to be imitated to be understood, and it is only understood through imitation. Moreover, this
epistemological symmetry is also “contagious” or a contagion: “Anything you can do (to me) I can
do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can do first—to myself.”136
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 130; Miller cited by Sedgwick.
135
136
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 131; original emphasis.
Third, paranoia is a strong theory. Sedgwick reaches this conclusion by following the work of
Silvan Tomkins, who characterizes a theory as “strong” that “is capable of accounting for a wide
spectrum of phenomena which appear to be very remote, one from the other, and from a common
source.”137 “Weak” theory, on the other hand, is, for Tomkins, theory that “can account only for
‘near’ phenomena,” which makes it “little better than a description of the phenomena which it
purports to explain.”138 Therefore, strong theory is not determined for Sedgwick (and Tomkins) on
the basis of “how it avoids negative affect or finds positive affect, but [on] the size and topology of
the domain it organizes.”139 However, even though paranoia is a strong theory that organizes
domains, for Sedgwick it is just “one kind of affect theory among other possible kinds” that might
organize domains.140 In short, just because paranoia is a strong affect theory that organizes one
domain, there may be others. Moreover, because paranoia is a strong theory that is also “a locus of
reflexive mimeticism,” Sedgwick concludes that “[it] is nothing if not teachable.”141
Fourth, for Sedgwick, following Tomkins, affects can be qualitatively separated into two groups:
negative affects and positive ones. Moreover, for Tomkins, in reference to these two groups of
affects, there are two goals: the first is the general goal of seeking to minimize negative affect; and
the second is the general goal of seeking to maximize positive affect. As a strong theory, paranoia
concerns primarily negative affects, not positive ones. “The only sense in which [the paranoid] may
strive for positive affect at all,” comments Tomkins, “is for the shield which it promises against
humiliation.”142 For Sedgwick, because the goals of minimizing negative affect and maximizing
positive affect are independent of each other, each can be associated with two different
epistemologies—a point which she claims is supported by Proust and denied by Freud.
Whereas Freud joins together the avoidance of pain and the seeking of pleasure under one
rubric, the “pleasure principle,” Proust finds “jostling each other within me a whole host of truths
concerning human passions and character and conduct”—and, insofar as “the perception of [them]
caused me joy,” recognizes them as truths.143 Sedgwick’s account of the differential epistemology of
paranoia as negative affect allows us to view the imperative to paranoia as an effort to minimize
negative affect, rather than as an example of self-delusion (following, for example, Freud) or
epistemological weakness (that is, regarding as unfounded belief).
The fifth and final general claim about paranoia is that it places a great amount of trust or faith
in exposure. This claim is directly linked by Sedgwick to the hermeneutics of suspicion of Nietzsche,
Marx, and Freud, who each shared a form of trust or faith in (following Ricoeur’s phrasing)
“procedures of demystification.”144 Sedgwick also finds a similar paranoid faith in exposure in
universalist liberal humanism, the New Historicism, and Butler’s Gender Trouble.145 In fact, for her,
137
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 131; Tomkins cited by Sedgwick.
138
139
140
141
142
143
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 137; Proust cited by Sedgwick.
144
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 139; Ricoeur cited by Sedgwick 139.
145
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 139–40.
LGBTQ+ THEORY 235
“paranoid thinking,” with its concomitant faith in exposure, “has become [normative] at every
point in the political spectrum,” and is even the “structure” of popular cynicism.146
Sedgwick contends that understanding paranoia as affect-oriented (rather than drive-oriented,
like Freud) makes “the inscription of queer thought with the topic of paranoia [possibly] less
necessary, less definitional, less completely constitutive than earlier writing on it, very much
including my own, has assumed” it to be.147 It will also, comments Sedgwick, “leave us in a vastly
better position to do justice to a wealth of characteristic, culturally central practices, many of which
can well be called reparative, that emerge from queer experience but become invisible or illegible
under a paranoid optic.”148 In sum, reparative reading is paranoid reading that utilizes her affect-
oriented notion of paranoia. Sedgwick contends that her reparative reading will be less thesis-
driven and less angst-ridden than the critique normally associated with the hermeneutics of
suspicion. Reparative reading would seek to repair the damage of homophobia and other forms of
prejudice and violence, rather than simply revealing allegedly new and ever more insidious forms
of abuse in rather unlikely places.
7.5 TRANS* THEORY

In “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity” (1994), Judith Halberstam declared “There are no
transsexuals. We are all transsexuals.”149 For her, the transsexual body “threatens the binarism of
homo/hetero sexuality by performing and fictionalizing gender.”150 However, “fictionalizing
gender” means that we must “learn how to read it.”151 “In order to find our way into a posttransexual
era,” continues Halberstam, “we must educate ourselves as readers of gender fiction, we must learn
to take pleasure in gender and how to become an audience for the multiple performances of gender
we witness every day.”152 Contrary to the transsexual era, wherein transsexuals are constituted as a
genre, the posttransexual era for her is one that demands that “we examine the strangeness of all
gendered bodies, not only transsexualized ones and that we rewrite the cultural fiction that divides
a sex from a transsex, a gender from a transgender.”153 “All gender should be transgender,” writes
Halberstam, “all desire is transgendered, movement is all.”154
In Female Masculinity (1998), Halberstam later commented that the refrain “There are no
transsexuals. We are all transsexuals” was used “to point to the inadequacy” of the category transsexual
“in an age of profound gender trouble.”155 The “age of profound gender trouble” is one that was
theoretically shaped by Butler’s position that gender reality is performative, and for the most part not
a set of natural or essential traits. Halberstam then qualifies the meaning of this refrain:
146
147
148
149
Judith Halberstam, “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity,” in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 226.
150
Halberstam, “F2M,” 225–6.
151
Halberstam, “F2M,” 226.
152
153
154
155
Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, [1998]
2018), 153.
I recognize, of course, the real and particular history of the transsexual and of transsexual surgery,
hormone treatment, and transsexual rights discourse. I also recognize that there are huge and
important differences between genetic females who specifically identify and genetic females who
feel comfortable with female masculinity. There are real and physical difference between female-
born men who take hormones, have surgery, and live as men and female-born butches who live
some version of gender ambiguity. But there are also many situations in which those differences
are less clear than one might expect, and there are many butches who pass as men and many
transsexuals who present as gender ambiguous and many bodies that cannot be classified by the
options transsexual and butch. We are not all transsexual, I admit, but many bodies are gender
strange to some degree or another, and it is time to complicate on the one hand transsexual
models that assign gender deviance only to transsexual bodies and gender normativity to all other
bodies, and on the other hand the hetero-normative models that see transsexuality as the solution
to gender deviance and homosexuality as a pathological perversion.156
Thus, for Halberstam, the topic of female masculinity provides an opportunity “to explore a queer
subject position that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity.”157 “Female
masculinity is a particularly fruitful sight of investigation,” continues Halberstam, “because it has
been vilified by heterosexist and feminist/womanist programs alike.”158 In Female Masculinity,
Halberstam aims to “produce a model of female masculinity that remarks on its multiple forms but
also calls for new and self-conscious affirmations of different gender taxonomies.”159
The methodology Halberstam utilizes to approach female masculinity is described as a “queer
methodology” because it “attempts to remain supple enough to respond to various locations of
information on female masculinity and betrays a certain disloyalty to conventional disciplinary
models.”160 As such, Halberstam’s queer methodology is an interdisciplinary “combination of textual
criticism, ethnography, historical survey, archival research, and the production of taxonomies.”161
It is utilized in Female Masculinity, writes Halberstam, in
an attempt to make my own female masculinity plausible, credible, and real. For a large part
of my life, I have been stigmatized by a masculinity that marked me as ambiguous and illegible.
Like many other tomboys, I was mistaken for a boy throughout my childhood, and like many
other tomboy adolescents, I was forced into some semblance of femininity for my teenage
years.162
For Halberstam, then, queer theory, particularly as it is informed by the work of Butler on
performativity, is put into open dialogue with transgender/transsexual theory. It is a dialogue that
will produce “new and self-conscious affirmations of different gender taxonomies,” including ones
that will make Halberstam’s own “female masculinity plausible, credible, and real.”
156
Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 153–4.
157
Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 9.
158
159
160
161
162
LGBTQ+ THEORY 237
But, as Viviane Namaste points out in Invisible Lives (2000), associating transgender/transsexual
theory with queer theory is wrongheaded. According to Namaste, the “absolute neglect of everyday
life for transgender people” means “queer theory as it is currently practiced needs to be rejected for
both theoretical and political reasons.”163 And, by queer theory, Namaste includes the work of
Butler, who she also criticizes for ignoring the ways in which the queer community has often itself
oppressed gender nonconformists: “Critics in queer theory write page after page on the inherent
liberation of transgressing normative sex/gender codes, but they have nothing to say about the
precarious position of the transsexual woman who is battered and who is unable to access a woman’s
shelter because she was not born a biological woman.”164 Namaste argues that “there is not one
large ‘transgendered community,’ but rather several small networks of transsexual and transgendered
people, as well as many TS/TG people unaffiliated with other individuals like them.”165 She also
reminds us that when considering transsexual and transgendered people, we also need to consider
“the lives of prostitutes, immigrants, and the working poor.”166 Finally, regarding Halberstam’s
framework for transgender/transsexual theory, Namaste argues that it “does not respect the diverse
ways transsexual and transgendered people make sense of themselves.”167 For example, it “does not
respect the identities and lives of heterosexual FTMs [female to male], assuming that one cannot be
politically progressive and heterosexual, and that transsexuals need lesbian and gay communities to
advance their collective situation.”168
In Trans* (2018), Jack Halberstam argues that the objections to Butler’s work by Namaste and
other transsexual theorists such as Jay Prosser, Henry Rubin, and Stephen Wittle “have arisen from
a recommitment to essentialism with transsexual theory.”169 For Halberstam, these and other
essentialists “have read the emphasis in post-structuralist gender theories on performativity as a
way of denying the need for some trans* people to undergo sex reassignment surgeries.”170
Halberstam claims that for Prosser in Second Skins (1998) the transsexual body “vanishes within
ever more abstract theories of gender, sexuality, and desire.”171 “Queer’s alignment of itself with
transgender performativity represents queer’s sense of its own ‘higher purpose,’ ” writes Prosser,
“in fact there are transgendered trajectories, in particular transsexual trajectories, that aspire to that
which this scheme [viz., Butler’s] devalues.”172 “Namely,” he continues, “there are transsexuals who
seek very pointedly to be nonperformative, to be constative, quite simply, to be.”173
But, despite being the object of critique by transsexual and transgender theorists, Butler’s theory
of gender performativity has, according to Halberstam, “actually furnished trans* theorists with the
163
Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), 9.
164
Namaste, Invisible Lives, 9–10.
165
Namaste, Invisible Lives, 266–7.
166
Namaste, Invisible Lives, 270.
167
168
169
Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2018), 120.
170
Halberstam, Trans*, 120.
171
172
Jay Prosser, Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 32.
173
Prosser, Second Skins, 32.
theoretical framings necessary to push back on essentialist accounts of normative identities, on the
one hand, and the fetishizing gaze at transgender bodies, on the other.”174 Nevertheless, Halberstam
calls for contemporary trans* theory to “reset the terms of these debates: rather than remaining
invested in an identitarian set of conflicts that turn on small differences and individual hurts, let us
rather wage battle against the violent imposition of economic disparity and forcefully oppose a
renewed and open investment in white supremacy and American imperial ambition transacted
through the channels of globalization.”175
Ultimately, for Halberstam, the term trans* “puts pressure on all modes of gendered embodiment
and refuses to choose between the identitarian and the contingent forms of trans identity.”176 “It is
not a matter of whose gender is variable and whose is fixed,” writes Halberstam.177 “With the ghosts
of [David] Bowie and Prince as our guides, we will go where trans* takes us, looking not for trans
people (or people who have legally changed their sex) but for a politics of transitivity.”178 For
Halberstam,
the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a
destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity.
The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance
what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it
makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations.179
For Halberstam, trans* bodies are “fragmented, unfinished, broken-beyond-repair forms” that
“remind all of us that the body is always under construction.”180 These bodies “represent the art of
becoming, the necessity of imagining, and the fleshy insistence of transitivity.”181 In sum, trans*
theory for Halberstam is at odds with “the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed
into concise definitions, sure medical pronouncements, and fierce exclusions.”182 One might
surmise, then, that the opposite of trans* theory is trans theory, the one without the asterisk, a form
of theory that chooses between identitarianism and the contingent forms of trans identity.
174
175
176
Halberstam, Trans*, xiii.
177
178
179
180
181
182
CHAPTER EIGHT
Race and Justice
8.0 INTRODUCTION
Race and racism entered the field of literary and cultural theory half a century ago. Prior to the
1970s, race was regarded as a natural category that was rarely spoken of in literary studies. To
establish this point, consider that it was only in 1985 that Henry Louis Gates Jr. asked the question,
“What importance does ‘race’ have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the
shaping of critical theory?”1 He continues,
If we attempt to answer this question by examining the history of Western literature and its
criticism, our initial response would probably be “nothing” or, at the very least, “nothing
explicitly.” Indeed, until the past decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics
would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in the history of criticism, race
has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way.2
As Gates notes, “the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition have more been defined as a
more or less closed set of works that somehow speak to, or respond to, ‘the human condition’ and
to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision.”3 One of the masters of tracking these
formal patterns of repetition and revision in the Western canon was Harold Bloom, who steadfastly
refused to bring in considerations of race (as well as class, gender, and sexuality). Bloom’s work
here in defense of the literary tradition often put him at odds with other critics like Gates who
sought to diversify the canon along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
But the canon wars did more than just uncritically bring race, class, gender, and sexuality into
the study of literature and culture. They also provided new anti-essentialist conceptions of these
identity categories. Gates, for example, argues that race is not a natural and fixed category. Rather,
race is an arbitrary linguistic category, and racism is the effort to make this arbitrary category a
natural or essential one. “Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between
cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which—more often than not—
also have fundamentally opposed economic interests,”4 argues Gates. “Race is the ultimate trope of
difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application.”5
1
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes” (1985), in The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, ed.
Abby Wolf (New York: Basic Civitas, 2012), 213.
2
Gates, “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes,” 213.
3
4
5
239
But there is of course another sense of racism that is different from the one Gates proposes. It
posits racism as the inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of
particular races or geographical origins. This sense of racism has been closely connected with
contemporary work in literary and cultural studies on human rights (8.3), or, what is sometimes
also called natural rights. These rights are entitlements that belong to each person by nature or by
virtue of being human regardless of race or geographical origin. Critical work in this area often
provides a critique of Western conceptions of human rights, which it often views as flawed in
various ways including on racial grounds.
Work on human rights also shows how literary and cultural works can offer an important
window to the perspectives of people whose lives are radically different from our own. In Poetic
Justice (1995), for example, Martha Nussbaum argues that “literary works typically invite readers
to put themselves in the place of people of many different kinds and to take on their experiences.”6
“Literary understanding,” writes Nussbaum, “promotes habits of mind that lead toward social
equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of stereotypes that support group hatred.”7 For
Nussbaum, unless we are capable of “entering imaginatively into the lives of distant others and to
have emotions related to that participation,”8 we will fail to attain any real sense of impartial
respect for human rights and dignity—and thereby end racism and other forms of discrimination
and oppression.
While theoretical justifications of racism can be traced back to at least the fifteenth century, it
was the race pseudo-science of the mid-nineteenth century that brought the term into prominence.
In the 1850s, people in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, were proposing pseudo-
scientific theories that “race” is a determinate biological category that can be used to establish a
hierarchy among different ethnic groups. Most of these defenses of dividing people into groups
based on shared, fundamental, biologically inheritable characteristics were developed to justify pre-
existing prejudicial practices, actions, and beliefs. Culture that asserts irrelevant differences between
races or exploits irrelevant differences between races is termed racist culture.
In the US, at least until 1954, racial discrimination was neither illegal nor widely regarded as
immoral. Job discrimination, housing discrimination, judicial discrimination, and educational
discrimination were a normal part of the Native American, Asian American, Latino/a American,
Chicano/a American, and African American experience at this time. Add to this list slavery, lynching,
unjust imprisonment as well as assorted forms of public humiliation, and you get a fair sense of the
range of racially discriminatory practices in the US. Moreover, it must be remembered that the
enslavement of African Americans is just one part of a larger set of racially discriminatory practices
that included the exploitation of Asian American labor by the US railroad and agricultural industries
as well as the killing of Native Americans and their forced expulsion from their homelands. While
it is true that our ancestors were not all of one mind on race, and that the face of racism in the US
has changed, Brown v. Board of Education and the emergence of the American civil rights movement
radically reshaped the character of racism in the US.
6
Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination in Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 5.
7
Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 92.
8
Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, xvi.
RACE AND JUSTICE 241
In 1954, the US Supreme Court reversed in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the
long-standing “separate but equal” doctrine, and began the desegregation of schools. By the next
year, the civil rights movement in the US was beginning to take shape. Events like Rosa Parks’
refusal to adhere to the policy of forcing Blacks to sit at the back of public buses on December 5,
1955 spurred on the formation of various civil rights groups. These groups, like the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference of Martin Luther King, Jr., began a non-violent campaign against
racial discrimination. One of the positive results of the efforts of the various civil rights groups was
the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established a commission to investigate
infringements of Black voting rights. Also, in the same year, federal troops were sent by US President
Dwight D. Eisenhower to enforce a federal court order to desegregate Little Rock Central High
School in Arkansas. In 1962, US President John F. Kennedy would send federal troops to enforce
integration at the University of Mississippi.
By the 1960s, many organizations had focused attention on how society unfairly treated Blacks
in the US. One of the most visible displays of solidarity regarding civil rights was the march on
Washington, DC in 1963 in support of Black civil rights. In protest after protest, many legal
institutions and societal beliefs were shown to be racist, and to prevent Blacks from achieving the
full benefits of US citizenship. For example, until the 1960s, many states had laws and social beliefs
that required Black Americans to sit in the back of public buses, to use separate drinking fountains
in public parks, and even made it illegal for them to go to the same public schools as white
Americans. As a result of the efforts of thousands of Americans, both Black and white, many of
these laws were changed. And in 1964, the US passed the Civil Rights Act to end all discrimination,
including religious, racial, and sex discrimination.
The civil rights movement had a profound impact on US society. One result of this movement
was that women, who believed that they were also treated unfairly by society, began to organize
themselves into groups. Through protests and organized campaigning, these women—many of
whom were also supporters of the Black civil rights movement—brought about changes in US law
and social life in the 1960s through the 1970s. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which
made it illegal to sexually harass women in the workplace, is at least in part due to the efforts of
women who wished to be treated better by US law and society. The social and political goals of
feminism are also due largely to the efforts of women in the 1960s through the 1970s to change
what they thought were sexist laws and practices in the US. Consequently, many have argued that
racial discrimination and sexual discrimination, or simply, racism and sexism, have some deep
similarities. Intersectionality (8.4), a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, provides a
framework for understanding how race combines not only with sex and gender, but also with age,
ability, sexuality, and other issues to produce various forms of discrimination and oppression.
Moreover, the law and literature movement (8.2) in literary and cultural theory is founded upon
doubts regarding whether the law (in this case, civil rights law) has meaning and value outside of its
various cultural, literary, and philosophical contexts—or whether it is only through these contexts
that it takes on meaning and value. In addition, this movement is concerned with the law in the
context of the mutability of all textual meaning after the linguistic turn.
Ordinarily, distinctions between different types of racism have been drawn. Some of the more
common distinctions are overt racism, covert racism, unintentional racism, institutional racism,
and environmental racism. Overt and covert racism both occur when race is used as a sufficient
ground for treating people differently. The most common instances of overt and covert racism are
when people of other races are treated differently through unprovoked violence, racial slurs, and
unequal treatment. When other people of other races are openly met with this behavior, the racism
is termed overt racism. Examples of overt racism would be the speech and action of members of
groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and the neo-Nazis. These groups openly state their hatred
for particular races of people, and center their actions on their overtly stated racist beliefs.
Nevertheless, overt racism is probably not the most common form of racism in the US. Covert
racism is much more common.
Covert racists seldom if ever openly state their hatred for people of other races. The reason why
many people become covert racists is that overt racism is not socially accepted. Some people argue
that overt racism is much less dangerous than covert racism. We know what the overt racist believes
because he tells us as much, and therefore, we are free to openly question and challenge his beliefs.
Covert racism, on the other hand, is much less easy to identify because it is not openly stated.
Others argue that overt racism is much more dangerous than covert racism. Overt racism challenges
the moral opinion of the public majority that racism and racist comments and actions are wrong,
whereas covert racism tacitly acknowledges and respects the belief that racist comments and actions
are wrong by not openly showing their ill will toward other races.
Unintentional racism occurs when an action, practice, or belief has the effect of either exploiting
irrelevant differences between the races or of asserting irrelevant differences between the races.
Whereas overt and covert racism are characterized by the motives and intentions of the racist,
unintentional racism is defined by the harmful consequences of the speech and actions of these
parties. Many times, unintentional racists do not intend to cause harm on racial grounds. Nevertheless,
the consequence of their speech and/or action is regarded by others as a form of racism. An example
of unintentional racism is a police officer pulling over a Black motorist driving in a predominantly
white neighborhood even if the driver has not committed any moving violations. This action is
viewed by many as racist because it would not have occurred had the person in question been white.
Many times, the cause of racism can be linked to generalizations and stereotypes about people
of varying racial backgrounds. Most of the time these generalizations and stereotypes are
unsubstantiated and need to be changed. The problem is that many times these unsubstantiated
assumptions and stereotypes are a basic part of our social, political, and economic institutions.
Thus, changing these beliefs entails altering institutions that form the basis of our society, which can
be very difficult. Racism of this kind is called institutional racism (or structural racism). It can be
further classified as either overt, covert, or unintentional. For example, segregated public schools
are an example of overt institutional racism; neighborhoods with highways built to divide white
from non-white populations is an example of covert institutional racism; and educational testing
with questions which white students have a better chance of answering correctly than non-white
students is an example of unintentional institutional racism.
Finally, environmental racism refers to the connections between race, poverty, and the
environment. We know, for example, that people of color have been the worst victim of
environmental pollution for a long time. A number of studies have concluded that communities of
color are where most of the places of poison are located in the US. One study, for example,
concluded that communities with the greatest number of commercial hazardous waste facilities had
the highest composition of ethnic residents.
In “Racisms” (1990), Kwame Anthony Appiah aims to clarify these ordinary ways of thinking
about race and racism noted above and to point out some of their presuppositions. Appiah claims
that there are “at least three distinct doctrines that might be held to express the theoretical content
of what we call ‘racism.’ ”9 The first, racialism, is the proposition that “there are heritable
characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set
of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with
each other that they do not share with members of any other race.”10 The second, extrinsic racism,
is the proposition that races are morally significant because they are “contingently correlated with
morally relevant properties.”11 The third, intrinsic racism, is the proposition that races are morally
significant because “they are intrinsically morally significant.”12 For Appiah, racial prejudice is a
tendency to assent to false propositions about races and “to do so even in the face of evidence and
argument that should appropriately lead to giving those propositions up.”13
Appiah believes that racialism is false. However, racialism, as he argues in In My Father’s House
(1992), has worked to shape the modern idea of literature. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, this false theory of race shaped “our modern understanding of literature—indeed of most
symbolic culture—in fundamental ways, and this despite the fact that many of these assumptions
have been officially discarded.”14 For Appiah, race, nationality, and literature are interconnected
with each other in European and American thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such
that “on the one hand, [there is] race and nationality, and on the other, nationality and literature.”15
“In short,” comments Appiah, “the nation is the key middle term in understanding the relations
between the concept of race and the idea of literature.”16
Subaltern studies (8.5) is a general area of literary and cultural theory that is concerned with the
members of subordinated national populations. Subaltern literally means “of lower rank” and
includes Blacks, the working class, the colonized, women, and others. Though often associated
with British colonialism and the economics and politics of postcolonialism (10.1), in general
subaltern studies is concerned with changing the narratives that determine the identity, subjectivity,
and speech of the subaltern. It combines work from Marxism, deconstruction, semiotics, and
feminism to understand and alter the consciousness and culture of the subaltern. Work in this area
has been heavily shaped by both the contributions of Gramsci and Gayatri Spivak (10.1).
Finally, critical race theory (8.1) takes up the relationship among race, racism, and power. As
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic point out, critical race theory “considers many of the same
issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a
broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions
and the unconscious.”17 One of the things that critical race theory shows us is how race works as a
9
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racisms,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of
10
Appiah, “Racisms,” 4–5.
11
Appiah, “Racisms,” 15.
12
13
14
Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 47.
15
Appiah, In My Father’s House, 48.
16
Appiah, In My Father’s House, 48.
17
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 3rd edition (New York: New York University
Press, 2017), 3.
category of both inclusion and exclusion within modern institutions. It also warns of the dangers of
organizing political agency through race: namely, that in an effort to overcome the norms of racial
regulation, political agency through race runs the risk of succumbing to the very norms it seeks to
overcome.
Whereas issues of race and justice were largely absent from literary and cultural theory fifty years
ago, today many different theoretical roads take up these issues. As with the concepts of sex and
gender, race is widely viewed as a socially-constructed category—or, at the very least, an anti-
essentialist one. Critical race theory (8.1), the law and literature movement (8.2), intersectionality
(8.3), human rights (8.4), and subaltern studies (8.5) each bring further understanding to the
functions, meaning, and status of race and racism in contemporary literary and cultural theory. But,
of course, they are not the only word or even the last ones in this book. Looking ahead, postcolonial
theory (10.1), affect studies (13.0) and Holocaust studies (13.5) will offer key theoretical
interventions on this general topic, but a case might be made for other areas as well.
8.1 CRITICAL RACE THEORY

After the advances of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there was a feeling among some
activists, lawyers, and legal scholars that the movement had stalled in the 1970s. Some were even
arguing that civil rights were regressing from the advancements that had been made. In an effort to
address the civil rights stasis, if not regression, critical race theory took root to work out new
theories and strategies to confront continuing forms of racism. Early theorists included Derrick
Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, who in 1989 convened with other activists, lawyers, and
legal scholars the first workshop on critical race theory. Though developed in the US, critical race
theory has spread to many other countries, including Australia, Brazil, India, New Zealand, South
Africa, and the UK.
Critical race theory addresses the relationship between race, racism, and power by drawing upon
a number of different strands in critical theory including Marxism, poststructuralism, biopolitics
(9.0), and second-wave feminism. Key thinkers here include Derrida, Gramsci, and Michel Foucault
(9.1). It also draws upon work by the Black Power and Chicano movements, where figures such as
W. E. B. Du Bois, César Chávez, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sojourner Truth
were all instrumental to the direction of these movements. Finally, critical race theory builds upon
some of the work in critical legal studies, particularly their notion of legal indeterminacy, the idea
that some legal cases can have more than one correct outcome. According to critical legal studies,
by emphasizing one line of authority rather than another or by interpreting the facts in a different
way than one’s legal opponent, most cases can be decided in differing ways.18
Overall, there are six general propositions that most critical race theorists agree on:
(1) Racism is Ordinary, not an Irregularity—the fact that racism is regarded as ordinary behavior
makes racism difficult to address and end. It also means that conceptions of equality that are
color-blind only address the most egregious forms of racial discrimination such as mortgage
redlining, that is, the policy where mortgage companies do not do business in areas with
heavy minority populations.
18
Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 5.
(2) Racism concerns Material Determinism—because racism advances the material interests of
white elites and the psychic interests of working-class whites, and because these groups
constitute a large segment of the population, there is little incentive for white elites and the
white working class to end racism. Critical race theorists call this phenomenon interest
convergence or material determinism. As an illustration of this, Derrick Bell argues that
Brown v. Board of Education may have resulted less from a desire to help Blacks than to
advance the interest of the white elite.19
(3) Race is Socially Constructed—because critical race theory contends that race is a socio-
cultural construct that influences identity formation, it denies that individuals possess an
objective, inherent, and fixed racial identity that is both universal and transhistorical. Race
is neither a biological reality nor a genetic reality, but rather a category that is invented,
manipulated, and retired by culture and society based on convenience. As such, one of the
aims of critical race theory is to debunk as pseudo-science biological-essentialist research that
establishes permanent racial characteristics and profiles.
(4) Critical Race Theory is concerned with Differential Racialization—that is, the ways in which
the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times in responses to
various social, political, and economic needs. As an illustration of this, consider that in one
age, Middle Eastern people are exotic—and fetishized figures, whereas in another, they are
regarded as fanatical, religiously-crazed terrorists.20 The consequences of differential
racialization from one age to another are of particular interest to critical race theorists.
(5) Critical Race Theory is Anti-essentialist and Intersectional—no person has a single, fixed,
unitary, and essential identity. Rather, each person has many different and potentially
conflicting identities, loyalties, and allegiances relating to their gender, race, class, nationality,
sexual orientation, and other factors.
(6) Voices-of-Color have Knowledge that Whites are Unlikely to Know—because of their different
experiences with racism, writers of color may be able to communicate to their white
counterparts things about discrimination and oppression that they may not know. As such,
the legal storytelling movement within critical race theory encourages Black, Native
American, Asian, and Latino writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal
system.21
Nonetheless, this voices-of-color proposition has an uneasy relationship with the anti-essentialism
of critical race theory in the same way that queer theory has an uneasy relationship with the
essentialism and platitudes often found in lesbian feminism. The notion of authentic voices-of-color
appears to assume an essential identity underlying these voices—a notion that conflicts with the
anti-identitarianism of critical race theory, that is, the notion that regards race as a socio-cultural
construction with no fixed or essential identity.
19
See Derrick Bell, Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93.3
(1980): 518–33.
20
21
Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 8–11.
But the notion that some critical race theorists are less committed to anti-essentialism than others
speaks to some of the other divisions within the field. One of the larger ones is between the idealist
and the materialist strands of critical race theory. Critical race theory idealists hold that discrimination
and racism are constituted through attitudes, thoughts, and discourse. Also called discourse analysts,
they focus on the social construction of race and racism by means of various categories and ideas.22
Critical race theory materialists (or economic determinists), however, contend that status and
privilege are often allocated in society through racism.23 They focus on the “real” world as opposed
to the world of discourse, and are concerned with issues such as immigration, divisions of wealth,
globalization, the justice system, and nativism.24
Whereas critical race theory idealists work to eradicate racism by altering the discourse
surrounding it, critical race theory materialists strive to end racism by altering the racial hierarchies
that determine who tangibly benefits from racism through access to the best education, employment,
and social networks.25 Moreover, while earlier critical race theorists tended to be materialists, later
ones have preferred to combine idealist and materialist approaches to critical race theory.
This combination of idealist and materialist versions of critical race theory is regarded as
structural determinism. To explain how structural determinism operates in critical race theory,
Delgado and Stefancic ask us to recall one of the most distinctive theses of the linguistic turn via
Saussure: that different languages produce different mappings of the real. “Everyone has heard the
story about Eskimo languages,” write Delgado and Stefancic, “some of which supposedly contain
many words for different kinds of snow.”26 Now imagine, they continue,
the opposite predicament—a society that has only one word (say, “racism”) for a phenomenon
that is much more complex than that, for example, [there is] biological racism; intentional
racism; unconscious racism; microagressions; nativism; institutional racism; racism tinged with
homophobia or sexism; racism that takes the form of indifference, coldness, or implicit
associations; and white privilege, reserving favors, smiles, kindness, the best stories, one’s most
charming side, and invitations to real intimacy for one’s own kind or class.27
For Delgado and Stefancic, structural determinism is a theory that demonstrates the ways in which
our system is not equipped to redress certain types of wrongs because its discourse does not account
for them.
Structural determinism exhibits itself in a number of ways in critical race theory, including the
dilemma of law reform—it is difficult to think about something if one does not have a name for it
in legal research, and it is difficult to name it until one’s community has identified it and begun to
talk about it; the empathic fallacy—the mistaken belief that sweeping social reform can be
accomplished through speech and incremental victories within the system; serving two masters—
situations where the client and their community do not want the same remedy that their lawyer
22
23
24
25
26
27
wants; and race remedies law as homeostatic device—the notion that racial progress occurs at just
the right slow pace so as to risk neither impatience and destabilization among minority groups nor
jeopardizing the interests of elite groups.
Finally, there are a number of strategies utilized by critical race theorists to redress the wrongs
of society. First, they produce revisionist interpretations of history, that is, re-examine the historical
record and replace interpretations of events that are comforting to the majority with ones that
better exemplify the experiences of minorities;28 second, they offer a critique of liberalism, namely,
a critique of the belief that color-blindness, neutral constitutional principles, and equality (equal
treatment for all persons) are the best way to redress the wrongs of society; and third, they engage
in storytelling and narrative analysis, that is, they build on accounts of everyday experiences of how
people see race in an effort to come to a deeper understanding of it. Here, critical race theorists
draw upon narratology as well as Lyotard’s concept of the differend in an effort to understand how
and why narratives are valued by marginalized persons.29 In this regard, the differend is useful to
critical race theory in situations where concepts, such as privilege and justice, come to have
conflicting meanings among different groups.30
By questioning everything from legal reasoning and equality theory to Enlightenment rationality
and the neutral principles of constitutional law, critical race theory offers a rigorous critique of the
foundations of liberal society.31 It concerns the treatment and experience of all minority groups,
including Asians, Native Americans, Blacks, Chicanos, and Latinos. Nevertheless, the question has
been raised as to what extent critical race theory is founded upon a Black–white binary framework
that establishes the treatment of African Americans as the standard for comparison regarding
redress for the grievances of the extended BIPOC (which stands for Black, Indigenous, and People
of Color) community.32 In addition, there is also a subarea of critical race theory known as critical
white studies specifically devoted to the “study of the white race”33 and the socio-cultural
construction of whiteness. One of its topics is how particular groups come not to be and then be
affiliated with whiteness. As an example, in the United States, Irish-, Jewish-, and Italian Americans
were once considered nonwhite, but over time came to be considered white through various means
including the accumulation of wealth, and affiliation with labor unions and the Democratic Party.34
8.2 LAW AND LITERATURE

“I am told at times by friends that a judicial opinion has no business in literature,” writes Benjamin
Cardozo. He continues in, “Law and Literature” (1925),
The idol must be ugly, or he may be taken for a common man. The deliverance that is to be
accepted without demur or hesitation must have a certain high austerity which frowns at winning
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 88–9.
graces. I fancy that not a little of this criticism is founded in misconception of the true significance
of literature, or, more accurately perhaps, of literary style.35
For Cardoza, who served on the US Supreme Court from 1932 until his death in 1938, literary style
is important for lawyers and judges. “Form is not something added to substance as a mere
protuberant adornment,”36 said Cardozo. Rather, form and content are “fused into a unity.” To
make this point, which was also one advocated by the New Critics, Cardozo quotes Henry James:
“Form alone takes, and holds and preserves substance, saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage
that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding.”37
Nevertheless, it would be nearly a half a century after Cardozo’s reflections on the significance
of literary style on legal writing that the law and literature movement would begin to take shape—
that is, roughly at the same time that critical race theory was in its early stages of development.
While there were plenty of observations about the interrelations between literature and the law
prior to the 1970s, it would be during this time period that a larger movement regarding law and
literature developed. And by many accounts, James Boyd White is credited as the founder of it.
In The Legal Imagination (1973), White argues that the study of literature can be of benefit to
those who study and practice law. For White, literature offers insight to those in the legal profession
because literature offers an understanding of the language (or languages) that constitute individuals,
communities, and cultures. Literature also provides insight into different forms of expression,
which can then be drawn from to bolster legal arguments. These differing forms of expression offer
a range of rhetorical and narrative strategies that can then be put into the service of legal
argumentation. White believes that literature provides its readers with a deeper sense of the nature
of humanity. It teaches us to value each person as bearers of individual worth. This is an ethical and
cultural lesson regarding humanity that often gets lost through stereotyping and treating people
only as means to an end—rather than as a means in themselves. Ultimately, drawing literature to
bear on law allows us to view the law as “an institution that is founded on the principle of recognizing
others, in large part by giving them a chance to tell their stories and have them heard.”38 This
storytelling dimension of law and literature offered by White is related to the one advanced in
critical race theory, albeit with at least one crucial difference: whereas White views literature as
providing insight into our humanity with respect to the law, the critical in critical race theory
stresses our inhumanity with regard to race and other intersectional topics with respect to the law.
White believes that literature can provide a strong dose of humanity to judges and lawyers
willing to take the time to study it. Richard Posner, however, disagrees with this idea. In Law and
Literature (1988), Posner argues that scholars of law and literature “need to give up on efforts to
humanize the practice of law by immersing judges, lawyers, and law students in literary works,
unrelated to law, selected for ideological reasons and viewed through the prism of moralistic literary
criticism.”39 One of the major differences between White’s and Posner’s approaches to law and
literature is that one of them believes in the general value of studying literature for legal practitioners
35
Benjamin Cardozo, “Law and Literature,” Yale Review (July 1925): 490.
36
Cardozo, “Law and Literature,” 490.
37
Cardozo, “Law and Literature,” 491; James cited by Cardozo.
38
James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination (1973) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), xiv.
39
Richard Posner, Law and Literature, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 550.
(White), and the other believes that the study of literature by lawyers, judges, and law students
should focus on literature about lawyers, judges, and law students (Posner). “What literary texts that
have law for a theme can do for legal teaching and scholarship,” writes Posner, “is to illuminate
issues of jurisprudence or legal process.”40 This is especially true for jurisprudence, that is, the theory
or philosophy of law, where Posner claims that a course on this topic “in college or law school could
profitably substitute works of great literature for the dusty tomes of legal philosophy.”41 As an
example, Posner comments that the film My Cousin Vinny (1992; dir. Jonathan Lynn) “can be mined
for helpful hints on how to try a case”42 and “is particularly rich in practice tips” such as “how a
criminal defendant’s lawyer must stand his ground against a hostile judge.”43 Regardless of whether
this film qualifies as a work of “great literature,” Posner’s point is that the literature (and film) must
be about the law in particular—and not just about humanity in general as White contends.
The differences between White’s approach and Posner’s reveals two broad directions in the law
and literature movement: law as literature, wherein the law is studied in the same way that we
would study a work of literature; and law in literature, wherein literature is studied for its insights
into the law. The first area, law as literature, can potentially bring just about any approach in the
literary and cultural theory inventory to the study of law. The example above from Cardozo,
brought a New Critical approach to the relationship between form and content, whereas White
focuses on the rhetoric and poetics of the law. But much more progressive approaches are possible
to the interdisciplinary study of law as literature, including the perspective offered by critical race
theory, one which it tempered by work in Marxism, poststructuralism, biopolitics, second-wave
feminism, and the Black Power and Chicano movements. The second direction, law in literature, is
one where it has long been common to see canonical authors such as Dickens, Dostoevsky, Albert
Camus, Franz Kafka, and Herman Melville discussed. However, the range of works now considered
spans the history of literature across the globe. It also includes, as Posner’s comment indicates, film
as well. In short, law in literature is a very large field of study, for as J. Hillis Miller writes, “scarcely
a single novel exists that does not in some way dramatize details about law in a specific country at
a specific time.”44
Still, while earlier work in law and literature tended to focus on law in literature, since the early
1970s, law as literature has grown considerably in conjunction with the development of new
approaches to literary and cultural theory. Also, in addition to the law as literature and law in
literature approaches, there is simply the law of literature approach. This approach examines law
that directly impacts literature such as censorship and copyright.
Moreover, Posner’s position that scholars of law and literature need to both “give up on efforts
to humanize the practice of law” and to view it “through the prism of moralistic literary criticism”
raises another potential point of division: the role of morality in bringing law and literature to bear
on each other. Martha Nussbaum, for example, argues in Poetic Justice (1995) that the literary
imagination provides “a more complex vision of human life.”45 Literature makes it possible to enter
40
Posner, Law and Literature, 546.
41
42
43
44
J. Hillis Miller, “Law,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 549.
45
Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, xv.
imaginatively into the lives of others, and that an emotional understanding of others’ lives is an
important part of moral reasoning. Nussbaum puts storytelling and literature at the heart of moral
philosophy. For her, reading literature ultimately strengthens our capacity to make good ethical
judgments and to gain a “humanistic and multivalued conception of public rationality.”46 Through
engagement with the literary understanding, contends Nussbaum, we come to better understand
compassion, sympathy, and mercy. From her perspective, moralistic literary criticism leads not only
to better lawyers, judges, and law students, but also to better people and a better world. Law and
literature share a common impulse: “to produce order out of chaos, humanity out of brutality.”47
Hence, both law and literature “can function as peace-loving and peace-keeping.”48
Another ethical approach to law and literature is that of Richard Weisberg, who argues in
Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (1992) and elsewhere that literature has the
capacity to reveal the ways in which the law exhibits ressentiment, a key concept in Nietzsche’s
ethics, that claims that the weak act out their resentment toward the strong. “Ressentiment arises,”
comments Weisberg, “from a coexisting hatred and dependence on some individual or group. Its
morality is essentially reactive, a bitterly creative response to the positive forms of life around it.”49
Like Cardozo, Weisberg believes that just as form cannot be separated from content in literature,
the same holds with the law: that is, the way legal judgments are expressed cannot be separated
from their content. Moreover, both literature and the law are ethical projects. However, because
the law has lost its ethical direction, Weisberg argues for the combination of law and literature. He
terms this combination poethics, which “endeavors nothing less than to fill the ethical void in which
legal thought and practice now exist.”50 “Lawyer and writer stand together,” says Weisberg, “the
former differing only in his coercive power, not in his technique or value system.”51 Broadly
speaking, ethical strands in the law and literature movement such as those of Nussbaum and
Weisberg are humanist ones. For comparison, they might be opposed to hermeneutic strands, that
is, ones more concerned with issues of literary and legal interpretation.
8.3 HUMAN RIGHTS

Every day, millions of people are denied what many consider to be their human rights. Some are
imprisoned without being charged with a crime. Others are charged but are not given fair trials. Many
are tortured or detained because of their political beliefs. Leaders of religious groups are murdered,
and their followers persecuted. Women are raped in acts of war. Children are forced to work in
dangerous conditions for long hours at low wages. Entire races of people are driven from their homes
and countries, some are executed. And while the news media may report on selected human rights
violations, they are but a small percentage of the human rights atrocities committed worldwide.
46
Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, xv.
47
Alison LaCroix, Jonathan Masur, Martha Nussbaum, and Laura Weinrib, “Introduction,” in Canons and Codes: Law,
Literature, and America’s Wars, eds. Alison LaCroix, Jonathan Masur, Martha Nussbaum, and Laura Weinrib (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2021), 2.
48
LaCroix, Masur, Nussbaum, and Weinrib, “Introduction,” 2.
49
Richard H. Weisberg, Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1984), 20.
50
Richard Weisberg, Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 4.
51
Weisberg, Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature, x.
Some argue that all human beings, regardless of their racial, sexual, economic, and cultural
backgrounds are guaranteed certain freedoms or rights. These human rights are natural rights, that
is to say, rights with which all of us are born. Thomas Hobbes, for example, said that every person
has a right to life, and that no society can arbitrarily abridge that right; John Locke said that all
humans have the right to life, property, and liberty; Thomas Jefferson said in the US Declaration of
Independence that all humans have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On the
other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that we give up our natural rights to act on impulse and
instinct when we enter the state, and receive mere civil rights in return. The United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10,
1948, it is the central document in modern day human rights policy.
Human rights, for many, belong to us by virtue of the fact that we are human beings. As Jack
Donnelly states it, “Human rights are literally the rights that one has simply because one is a human
being.”52 Some human rights theorists argue that no one has the right to interfere with the exercise
of our natural rights. This includes our government as well as our society and culture at large. People
have the right to protect their human rights, and governments have the right to protect individuals’
human rights as well. Conversely, no individual and no government has the right to interfere with
the human rights of others. In the US, for example, the Bill of Rights guarantees our human rights,
and the court system enforces and sets the limits on human rights in order to resolve conflicts.
Others argue that human rights depend on the time and place in which you live, and that universal
human rights are not possible. Furthermore, many contend that the dominant discourses on universal
rights are founded upon Western notions of rights to the exclusion of non-Western notions of rights.
Others charge that the dominant discourse on universal rights excludes sexual rights, economic
rights, and women’s rights, among others. There have been many calls for a transformation of the
concept of universal human rights. There has also been much questioning as to the authority of
Westerners to impose their own concept of universal human rights on the rest of humanity.
The nature of human rights itself is a complex topic for both moral absolutists and cultural
relativists. On the one hand, if one assumes a form of cultural relativism, it is entirely possible that
the very idea of universal human rights is problematized. Cultural relativists argue from the claim
that different societies or cultures have different moral principles to the conclusion that there are
no universal or absolute moral principles. Consequently, for the cultural relativist, it is very difficult
to clearly delineate human rights that cross all cultural boundaries and that do not interfere with
indigenous cultural practices. For example, while some argue that a woman’s right to control her
body in reproduction is a universal human right, others contend that it is not because it conflicts
with particular religious or cultural practices.
On the other hand, if one assumes a form of moral absolutism (or universalism), and develops a
notion of human rights on the basis of moral absolutism, then one runs the risk of postulating
universal human rights that are at odds with alternative perspectives on the nature of morality. For
example, there is no reason to believe that a notion of human rights based on a Buddhist conception
of morality would be the same as one based on a Western conception of morality. Moral absolutists
argue that there are general moral principles that cross racial, sexual, economic, and cultural lines.
These moral principles are absolute, and hold for all peoples at all times and in all situations.
Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2nd edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 10.
52
Slavery, for the moral absolutist, is as morally wrong today as it was in ancient Greece—and the
argument that slavery was part of the social, economic, and political condition of nineteenth-
century America does not matter to them.
Literary and cultural theory has expanded its interest in human rights over the past twenty years.
One of the things that it has focused on are the inadequacies in the language and justifications for
human rights. For example, what does it mean to say, as Donnelly does, that human rights are
simply ones we have as a human being? For Donnelly, human rights do not have a foundation in
anything other than our status as human beings.53 But if there is no authority such as the law of God
or natural law upon which to found human rights, how do we know what these rights are? How do
we define “human being”? How do we enforce these rights? How do we reach a consensus on
them? Contemporary literary and cultural theory has much to offer in this area though it has
altered and reconceptualized our approach to human rights.
In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler, for example, argues that vulnerability is common to all
forms of life including the human subject. Vulnerability is a factor in our embodiment as human
beings—one that opens us to loss, injury, and the world. Vulnerability through injury makes us
aware that
there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know.
This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No
security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world
of this fact.54
For Butler, our shared vulnerability and mutual interdependence on each other leads her to posit
an alternative notion of human rights and political community, namely, one founded upon a
recognition of our shared experience of bodily vulnerability:
Not only is there always the possibility that a vulnerability will not be recognized and that it will
be constituted as “unrecognizable,” but when a vulnerability is recognized, that recognition has
the power to change the meaning and structure of the vulnerability itself. In this sense, if
vulnerability is one precondition for humanization, and humanization takes place differently
through variable forms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerability is fundamentally
dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject.55
Butler notes that national acts of mourning initiate fear, hatred, and oppression. They also trigger
increased militarism and censorship. This situation allows some lives to be treated as “unrecognizable”
and not-grievable because they are regarded as less-than-human. Butler’s politics of vulnerability
recognition offers a way out of these forms of fear, hatred, and oppression. It also offers an
alternative to the moral absolutism and cultural relativism impasse regarding human rights.
53
Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 18.
54
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), xii.
55
Butler, Precarious Life, 43.
Butler’s approach to human rights favors the human subject as the locus of rights rather than the
human being. This is also a shift from the essentialist approach to human rights favored by humanism
(e.g., Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, and Rousseau), to the anti-essentialist one favored by antihumanism.
By approaching human rights through the subject, literary and cultural theorists are able to
historicize and denaturalize our approach to human rights. But taking a closer look at human rights
as approached from within the essentialist and humanist traditions, particularly how they are
instantiated in literature, one finds, as Joseph Slaughter argues in Human Rights, Inc. (2007),
the site where culture-bound knowledge confronts its own limits and turns back on itself to
produce the most concise and chiastic formulation of communally constitutive common sense:
Human rights are the rights of humans, inalienability is inalienable, impresciptibility cannot be
prescribed, a person is a person.56
For Slaughter, the tautology, human rights are the rights of humans, creates the very subject that it
is intended to serve. Human rights law is a combination of positive law (or written law, wherein
rights are granted by an authority such as the state), and natural law (wherein rights exist in nature,
that is, outside of and before the formation of society and positive law). Moreover, for Slaughter,
the subject of international human rights discourse is the same as the subject of the bildungsroman
(novel of formation) genre of literature. He then shows how international human rights legal
discourse and the bildungsroman are “mutually enabling fictions”57 about human existence. “Human
rights law and the Bildungsroman,” argues Slaughter, are “consubstantial and mutually reinforcing,
but their sociocultural and historical alliance is neither unproblematic nor uncomplicated.”58 “Both
human rights and the novel,” he continues, “have been part of the engine and freight of Western
colonialism and (neo)imperialism over the past two centuries.”59
Not only does Slaughter show how a genre of literature can become an agent of colonialism and
imperialism, but because “person” means something other than “human” in the law (the term
“person” came to replace “human” in legal discourse), and because the Bildungsroman is of the
same substance (consubstantial) with human rights law, the subject of the bildungsroman is also
something other than the human. “From the point of view of the law,” writes Slaughter, “ ‘person’
is a technical term designating a ‘right-and-duty bearing unit’; it has no necessary relation to the
human being since it merely names something that has been endowed with the capacity to ‘enjoy
. . . the protections of the law and of the forces of the law.’ ”60 Consequently, while the person is the
way the law incorporates the human being into its discourse, person and human being are not
necessarily consubstantial.
As the work of Butler and Slaughter reveals, the topic of human rights as approached by literary
and cultural theory raises a host of questions about the subject of human rights, trauma, the nation-
state, colonialism, and imperialism. It is also a highly interdisciplinary topic drawing upon work
56
Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham
57
Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 4.
58
59
60
from legal studies, history, rhetoric, literature, philosophy, and other areas. Miller’s comment that
“scarcely a single novel exists that does not in some way dramatize details about law in a specific
country at a specific time” also applies to human rights, particularly as it concerns our vulnerabilities
as human beings. This includes perspectives on those who have been silenced and marginalized.
Literature, as many have shown, has the potential to deepen our understanding of human rights.
But as Gayatri Spivak warns, one must not be lulled into fixing people into groups as “righters”
and “receivers” of wrongs when addressing issues of human rights. For Spivak,
the redressing work of Human Rights must be supplemented by an education that can continue
to make unstable the presupposition that the reasonable righting of wrongs is inevitably the
manifest destiny of groups—unevenly class-divided, embracing North and South—that remain
posed to right them; and that, among the receiving groups, wrongs will inevitably proliferate
with unsurprising regularity. Consequently, the groups that are the dispensers of human rights
must realize that, just as the natural Rights of Man were contingent upon the historical French
Revolution, and the Universal Declaration upon the historical events that led to the Second
World War, so also is the current emergence of the human rights model as the global dominant,
contingent upon the turbulence in the wake of the dissolution of imperial formations and global
economic restructuring. The task of making visible the begged question grounding the political
manipulation of a civil society forged on globally defined natural rights is just as urgent; and not
simply by way of cultural relativism.61
In short, Spivak reminds us to take into account our own structural position as subjects when
addressing human rights issues—as opposed to simply adopting a righter/receiver model.
Finally, while human rights as indicated above are fraught with many social, political, and
economic tensions and limitations including questions regarding their universality versus cultural
relativity, for some we have no choice but to stand on their side. Perhaps Derrida expressed this
point best in the wake of the 9/11 attacks:
We must more than ever stand on the side of human rights. We need human rights. We are in
need of them and they are in need, for there is always a lack, a shortfall, a falling short, an
insufficiency; human rights are never sufficient.62
Two general explanations as to why there has been so much interest in the past twenty years in
international human rights is the rise in personal storytelling and the failure of the postcolonial
state. James Dawes, for example, claims in That the World May Know (2007) that “human rights
work is, at its heart, a matter of storytelling”63—something that increased greatly with regard to
human rights since the 1990s. But there is also the argument made by Samuel Moyn in The Last
Utopia (2010), that international human rights arose out of the ashes of the failed political processes
61
Gayatri Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004): 530.
62
Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida,
ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 132–3.
63
James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), 394.
of the postcolonial state (10.1). But there are others as well that might simply be reduced to
Derrida’s axiom: We need human rights. And recent work on the interconnections between human
rights and other areas of literary and cultural theory such as biopolitics (9.0), globalization (10.0),
ecocriticism (11.0), and affect studies (13.0) only further confirms the deepening of our need for
and interest in human rights as a key topic of contemporary critical concern.
8.4 INTERSECTIONALITY
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced intersectionality in her article, “Demarginalizing the
Intersection of Race and Sex.” Inspired by Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851) and the
Black lesbian feminism of the Combahee River Collective, Crenshaw showed how the intersection
of racial and gender oppression renders invisible the experiences of Black women in US
antidiscrimination law. Crenshaw along with Delgado, Regina Austin, Charles R. Lawrence, Patricia
J. Williams, and others had helped launch critical race theory, and would now address intersectional
issues in their work. Moreover, intersectional issues would also come to bear on human rights law.
In addition, much public policy in the US, including differential funding for disaster relief, mass
incarceration, migrant and refugee discrimination, reproductive rights for poor women, and voter
suppression, would be shaped by a sense of intersectionality.
Indeed, a mere decade after Crenshaw coined the term, it was being vigorously expanded, developed,
and explored in fields and disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences including American
studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, history, political science, sociology, and women’s studies. And
two decades later, the term became a rallying cry for a wide range of activism including antiviolence
initiatives, workers’ rights campaigns, and many other grassroots organizations from all over the globe.
Among the many social movements who utilized the term was the Black Lives Matter movement.
Yet in spite of the ubiquity and utilization of the term intersectionality in both theory and practice
(praxis), there is little consensus among scholars as to how to describe and utilize it. Patricia Hill
Collins and Sirma Bilge offer the following general description of intersectionality:
Intersectionality investigates how intersecting power relations influence social relations across
diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life. As an analytic tool,
intersectionality views categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and
age—among others—as interrelated and mutually shaping one another. Intersectionality is a way
of understanding and explaining complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences.64
Note though that they do not put a range or limit on the intersectional categories to be utilized in
intersectional understanding and explanation. Whereas Crenshaw coined the term in reference to
the intersection of two categories (race and sex), Collins and Bilge’s depiction is consistent with the
general practice of bringing to bear whatever intersecting categories are necessary to solve the
problem at hand. “People generally,” write Collins and Bilge, “use intersectionality as an analytic
tool to solve problems that they or others around them face.”65 In such general practice, there is no
predetermined set of intersectional categories. Rather, they are set by the task at hand.
64
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 2nd ed. (Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), 2.
65
Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 2.
Moreover, the flexibility of intersectionality is further evidenced by the fact that different
scholars regard it in different ways: for some, intersectionality is a concept; for others, it is a
perspective; for still others, it is a type of analysis. It is also variably regarded by scholars as a
methodological approach, a research paradigm, and a measurable variable and type of data.66 In all
of these scholarly uses, intersectionality complicates single-identity category understandings and
explanations of matters at hand. Thus, when measured by the standards of intersectionality, race-
only, class-only, gender-only, sexuality-only, nation-only, ability-only, ethnicity-only, and age-only
understandings and explanations of literature and culture are always inadequate, incomplete, and
insufficient.
According to Collins and Bilge, there are six core ideas within intersectionality:
(1) Social Inequality—intersectionality contends that social inequality is rarely caused by a
single factor such as race, class, or gender. One of its aims is to add layers of complexity to
understandings of social inequality by examining it through the interactions among various
categories of power.
(2) Intersecting Power Relations—intersectionality maintains that intersecting power relations
often operate in and are organized through social institutions. However, these intersecting
power relations are often hidden or masked by ideology. Intersectionality calls for an
examination of how these power relations specifically intersect, for example, in racism and
sexism. It also calls for an understanding of how power relations are manifested across
structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal domains of power.
(3) Social Context—intersectionality emphasizes the importance of examining intersecting
power relations from within their particular social context. These social contexts can be
local, national, and global.
(4) Relationality—intersectionality embraces a both/and approach to categories as opposed to an
oppositional approach. In this way, its framework for understanding social inequality and
power relations is built upon interconnections and relationships between categories as opposed
to differences and oppositions. The relationality of intersectionality is in evidence in its preference
for terms such as dialog, solidarity, coalition, conversation, transaction, and interaction.
(5) Social Justice—intersectionality is committed to social justice. This commitment makes it a
critical discourse as opposed to a merely descriptive or analytical one. As such, for those
who believe that fairness, meritocracy, and democracy have been achieved on a local,
national, and global scale, there is no social inequality for intersectionality to solve. However,
because intersectional scholars, activists, and practitioners all identify various forms of social
inequality, social justice is always a central aim.
(6) Complexity—intersectional analysis is a complex mode of critical inquiry. The complexity
of intersectional analysis derives from its multifaceted approach to problems and the
increasing complex world to which it responds with a parallel degree of complexity. The
complexity of critical intersectional analysis can be a source of frustration to scholars and
activists.67
66
Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 244, n. 6.
67
Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 32–5.
Intersectionality regards the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity,
age, and other categories in a person not as constituting their fixed or essential identity (essentialism),
but rather as components of a site where intersecting power relations are performed by individuals
in differing social contexts (anti-essentialism). Identity for the intersectionalist is something one
does through a performance, not something one has by nature. As such, it is more proper to speak
of shifting identifications, rather than the identity of a person.
In Familiar Stranger (2017), Stuart Hall describes the difference between identity and
identifications:
Identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly
shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the
part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-
completed process of becoming—a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular,
complete, finished state of being.68
Thus, intersectionality does not require individuals to prioritize categories of their identity, but
rather asks them to regard them all as constituting their shifting identifications. In short, a Black
lesbian feminist need not concern themselves with the question of whether they are first Black,
lesbian, or a woman. Rather, for the intersectionalist, all three of these identity categories commingle
as different individual identifications or subjectivities.
Again, it should be noted that while intersectionality utilizes identity categories such as race,
class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age, it is in no way committed to fixed identities
(essentialism). Rather, the notion that intersectional identity is a shifting set of subjectivities
positioned differently in different social contexts captures well its general anti-essentialistic
temperament. Moreover, intersectionality offers less a grand theory of individual identity than an
approach to explaining and understanding the particularities of intersectional identifications. In
doing so, it effectively continuously breaks down larger groups identifiable by race, class, gender,
sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age into ever smaller ones.
Nevertheless, as Crenshaw explains, “the intersectional experiences of women of color
disenfranchised in prevailing conceptions of identity politics does not require that we give up
attempts to organize as communities of color.”69 “Rather, intersectionality provides a basis for
reconceptualizing race as a coalition between men and women of color,” continues Crenshaw, “or
a coalition of straight and gay people of color.”70 Moreover, by Crenshaw’s logic, this process of
intersectionally reconceptualizing race theoretically holds for the other categories of identity as
well, such as sexuality, class, gender, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age. “Recognizing that identity
politics takes place at the site where categories intersect,” writes Crenshaw, “thus seems more
fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about categories at all.”71 “Through an awareness
68
Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 16.
69
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”
(1991), in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary
Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 377.
70
Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 377.
71
of intersectionality,” she concludes, “we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among
us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group
politics.”72
8.5 SUBALTERN STUDIES

In his Prison Notebooks, composed from 1929 to 1935 (and first published between 1948 and
1951), Antonio Gramsci writes about subaltern social groups and subaltern classes. The subaltern
for him are the underclass of society that are subject to the hegemony of the ruling class. “The
subaltern classes, by definition,” writes Gramsci, “are not unified and cannot unite until they are
able to become a ‘State’: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby
with the history of States and groups of States.”73 Gramsci uses the term subaltern to refer to the
rural peasant classes or social groups, which in his case, were located in Italy. He is interested in the
history of the subaltern and their identity, which he utilizes in his theories about class struggle.
Gramsci was interested not only in the subordination and oppression of the working class, but also
all of the other factions of society who were subjected to subordination and oppression. In this way,
his work expanded the scope of Marxist politics.
This type of history, inspired by Gramsci’s studies, came to be known as history from below. It is
an approach to historical research wherein the state is replaced by social history as the focus of
concern. This bottom-up approach to history focuses on people who have generally been ignored
in historical studies. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is regarded
as one of the influential early works of history from below, which by the 1970s was beginning to
flourish. One begins to see at this time, for example, women’s histories as well as the return of the
peasant to colonial history. In 1972, for example, The Peasant Studies Newsletter was launched, and
a year later, The Journal of Peasant Studies was formed. Also in the 1970s, Eric Stokes published
The Peasant and the Raj (1978) and A. R. Desai published Peasant Struggles in India (1979).74
In South Asia, there were many people working on the history of subaltern groups in the 1970s
even though the term subaltern was not yet used to describe them. In the late 1970s, however, by
the time the founders of what came to be known as subaltern studies started to meet in England,
there had already been two decades of studies on insurgencies in, and histories from below of,
colonial India. One of their common points of agreement was dissatisfaction with the state-centered
Cambridge School of South Asian history.75 Together, these South Asian intellectuals launched
Subaltern Studies, which published twelve edited volumes from 1982 to 2005. Among the editorial
group were Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee,
Ranajit Guha, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pandey, and Sumit Sarkar—each of whom was variously
influenced by structuralism, semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, poststructuralism, and postcolonial
theory (10.1).
72
73
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 52.
74
David Ludden, “A Brief History of Subalternity,” in Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning, and
the Globalization of South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 5.
75
Ludden, “A Brief History of Subalternity,” 6.
Within a few years of the establishment of Subaltern Studies, the phrase also came to be associated
with a distinctive approach to historical research. Its adherents came to be known as subalterns or
subalternists. One of their aims was to change the way the identity, speech, and subjectivity of the
subaltern was cast in historical discourse. Their publication was a sign of the growth of historical
interest in South Asian studies in the 1980s. However, by the 1990s, subaltern studies had become
a major a field of inquiry not just in history but also anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism,
sociology, and political science.
In general, the subalterns contended that there were two separate political domains in colonial
India: one associated with the elite, and another associated with the subaltern. The elite domain
engaged the structures of power in the colonial states, whereas the subaltern domain consisted of
actions such as violent protests by peasants that did not seem to follow the standard rules of
politics. Therefore, the historians regard the domain of the elite as a political one, and the domain
of the peasants as a pre-political one. The subalterns, however, disagreed with the assessment of the
subaltern domain as pre-political. They argued that peasant unrest was not the consequence of
hunger or primordial urges, but rather was often linked to a religious belief shared by a tribe or
caste. Subalterns then demonstrated the political logic of these peasants by exploring their folklore
and popular beliefs.
Moreover, the subalterns argued that subaltern groups also shaped the anti-colonial nationalist
movement in India. Whereas previous explanations focused on political leaders such as Mahatma
Gandhi who moved the masses or Indian elites who sought greater political power, the subalterns
reversed the agency here. Rather than the elites shaping anti-colonialism in India, the subalterns
argued that it was the resistance to state and local authority of subaltern groups that shifted the
leadership in more radical directions. Subalterns maintained that the nationalist movement must be
viewed as an anti-colonial effort by the people of India and a political effort by elites to keep
subaltern resistance under control.
Later, the subalterns would shift their focus from reconstructing subaltern experience to
deconstructing colonial power. Also, there was an increased effort to focus on the local experiences
of subaltern groups as opposed to grand narratives about the history of India, and to critique the
Eurocentrism of history writing. Robert Young describes this Eurocentrism in White Mythologies
(1990):
Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of world history is

simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism: it was Hegel, after all, who
declared that “Africa has no history,” and it was Marx who, though critical of British imperialism,
concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best because it brought
India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating the conditions for future
class struggle there.76
Subaltern studies showed how historical writing was Eurocentric by the way it measured all other
historical experiences against those of the West. It also offered in its own historical studies non-
Eurocentric alternatives to the histories produced by the West.
76
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 2.
Given the general characteristics of subaltern studies described above, it should not be surprising
to learn that while it provided a major boost to the general study of subaltern histories, it also had
its critics, including those in India who saw it as not giving enough credit to the heroism of figures
in the nationalist movement such as Gandhi. Some Marxists also criticized it for its lack of focus on
the economy and class struggle. Then, of course, there were the Cambridge historians, whose
narratives of the political history of India were rendered obsolete by subaltern studies. But more
interesting were the criticisms of subaltern studies from those associated with postcolonial theory
(10.1) such as Spivak.
In her article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), while Spivak generally approves of the work
of the subalterns, she still offers some criticisms of it. First, she is not as optimistic as they are that
the resistance of subaltern groups always involved the potential for emancipation, that is, the
potential for the oppressed group to seize power from their oppressors. Second, because all of the
leading members of the subaltern studies group are male, their work involves a male bias and often
ignores the experiences of subaltern women. And third, she argues that the subaltern’s efforts to
represent subaltern resistance was itself an act of discursive power, that is, who speaks in subaltern
studies is not those who have been oppressed, but rather the subaltern historian. Overall, Spivak
argues that the subaltern studies group needs to pay more attention to both the discourse of
domination and the textual construction of power, that is to say, to be more poststructuralist
(specifically, Derridean, and not Deleuzian or Foucauldian)77 in its approach to the subaltern.
In sum, subaltern studies—or simply, subalternity—is an effort to reconstruct history from the
bottom. Of central importance to this task are the experiences of the oppressed and the poor—
experiences ignored by history from above, that is, history that assumes as its central point of focus
the elites and the state. Subalternity, like intersectionality, presents a very complex account of
oppression. Its critique of the Eurocentrism of history writing has been influential across the world
and is all the more significant because it originated in the Third World, rather than Europe or North
America. Though subalternity is regarded as a branch of postcolonial theory in the same way that
intersectionality is regarded as a branch of critical race theory, just as intersectionality is perhaps the
most well-known branch of critical race theory, subalternity is perhaps the most well-known branch
of postcolonial theory. Subaltern studies gave an entirely new meaning and critical power to a term
that in common parlance (that is, Gramsci’s usage aside) simply meant “of lower rank,” and is still
used in the British military to describe all those whose rank is below captain. Finally, although
subaltern as used within subaltern studies primarily refers to specific groups within colonial India,
the term is now also widely used to refer to any subordinated or oppressed population including
the poor, the working class, women, Blacks, and the colonized. As such, subaltern studies more
generally refers to both the study of subordination and oppression in general, and in literature and
culture in particular.
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence
77
Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 308.

CHAPTER NINE
Biopolitics
9.0 INTRODUCTION
The Greek word bios means life. Connected with the Greek word logia meaning knowledge of, it
constitutes the name of a mainstream field of natural science dating back to the Lyceum of Aristotle.
However, in the modern world, the study of biology came to be regarded as entirely separate from
philosophy. Biotheory today is reconnecting bios with theory and philosophy in new and interesting ways.
The philosophy of biology traditionally was organized into three basic interpretations of biological
phenomena: Reductionism, which maintains that all biological phenomena can be accounted for by
chemistry and physics; Vitalism, which maintains that there is some controlling vital force within
organic forms that cannot be reduced to either the terms of chemistry or physics; and Organismicism
(or Organismic Biology), which rejects both reductionism and vitalism, and maintains that whole
organisms cannot be understood merely as the sum total of the actions of their parts.
However, Michel Foucault can be credited for reviving the Greek investigation of bios in ways
different from the mainstream philosophy of biology by introducing a form of power based on the
right to take life or let live. Biopolitics is a concept introduced by Foucault in the 1970s concerning
the connections between life and politics. The bio in biopolitics draws on a fuller sense of the Greek
word bios, which means not only life but also living and ways of life. Therefore, whereas biology
literally means knowledge of (logia) life (bios), biopolitics literally means the politics of life, living,
and ways of living.
But, as Foucault points out, the type of knowledge (or episteme, which is also the Greek word
for knowledge) regarding life constitutive of the modern age (that is, the nineteenth century) did
not exist in the classical age (that is, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). This is important to
note because for Foucault, the episteme is the condition of possibility for knowledge, and at any one
historical moment there can only be one episteme. In fact, for Foucault, biology as a science that
studies life did not exist in the classical age because life as we have come to know it in the modern
age did not exist at this time.
In The Order of Things (1966), writes Foucault,
Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize
that biology did not exist then, that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a
hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown,
there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living
beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history.1
1
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (New York: Vintage, 1973), 127–8.
261
Whereas the living beings of natural history were grouped by class in a visible grid, the modern
episteme says that “life, on the confines of being, is what is exterior to it and also, at the same time,
what manifests itself within it.”2 Foucault sums up the difference between life in the classical and
modern ages as follows: in “the Classical age, life was the province of an ontology which dealt in
the same way with all material beings, all of which were subject to extension, weight, and
movement”; in the modern age, “living beings escape . . . the general laws of extensive being,” and
“biological being becomes regional and autonomous.”3
Contemporary interest in the concept of biopolitics often originates with Foucault’s analyses of
questions of life, living, and ways of life as they relate to techniques of power, which he alternately
termed biopolitics and biopower. Foucault’s groundbreaking work on sexuality, hygiene, and mental
health in the eighteenth century and beyond provides powerful and provocative understandings of
governance, and what he termed governmentality. His work on biopolitics and biopower from the
1970s until his death in 1984 have played a major role in establishing biopolitics as one of the most
influential critical approaches in both the humanities and the social sciences today.
In general terms, biopolitics in view of Foucault’s work comes to refer to the management of
populations and the resources necessary for their survival through various types of accounting and
record-keeping by the state. Its development coincides, argues Foucault, with the emergence of a
new type of economic man (homo oeconomicus). Whereas the classical conception of economic
man was “the man of exchange, the partner, one of two partners in the process of exchange,”4 the
neoliberal conception of economic man “is not at all a partner of exchange,” but is rather “an
entrepreneur,” that is, “an entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for
himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”5 Thus, neoliberal society
(10.3), the hyper-driven market society wherein economic man operates as an entrepreneur, comes
to bear in significant ways in any and all considerations of biopolitics.
Today, biopower and biopolitics constitute the conceptual center of an expansive and expanding
realm within contemporary literary and cultural theory. Both have deep connections with adjacent
areas of concern such as technology, security, and death (and dying). When these adjacent concerns
intersect with biopolitics and biopower the result are more specialized subareas such as biotechnology,
biosecurity, and thanatopolitics. With regard to the latter term, thanatos is the Greek word for
death, so thanatopolitics is the inversion of biopolitics. And it too can be regarded as a productive
power. As Stuart Murray points out, “if biopolitics is a productive power that necessitates or silently
calls for death as the consequence of ‘making live,’ then thanatopolitics is not merely the lethal
underside of biopolitics but is itself a productive power in the voices of those who biopolitical
power ‘lets die.’ ”6 For Murray, thanatopolitics asks how deaths productively disconfirm the
condemnation of death by biopolitics.
More generally, any area of literary and cultural theory where questions of life, living, and ways
of living are connected to governmental control and political concerns can be considered a subarea
2
Foucault, The Order of Things, 273.
3
Foucault, The Order of Things, 273.
4
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham
Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 225.
5
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226.
6
Stuart Murray, “Thanatopolitics,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 718.
BIOPOLITICS 263
of biopolitics. These areas include, but are not limited to, gender studies, body studies, age studies,
leisure studies, disability studies, cyborg studies, and surveillance and security studies. This chapter
will look into two of these areas—surveillance studies (9.4) and disability studies (9.5). And, gender
studies, which has already been addressed within the context of feminist theory and LGBTQ+
theory, and cyborg studies (12.1), which will be taken up later, offer additional opportunities for
biopolitical engagement. The question of how life, living, and ways of living are managed by political
and economic forms of power in each of these subareas are all topics within the general area of
biopolitics. In addition to the areas already noted, one might also add immigration, abortion, capital
punishment, and infectious disease prevention (e.g., Covid-19, HIV/AIDS, influenza). Consequently,
biopolitics (like many of the key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural theory) is
interdisciplinary in its orientation. Some of the fields within its interdisciplinary purview include
anthropology, biomedicine, cultural studies, economics, gender studies, history (of science),
international relations, law, literature, philosophy, political science, and science and technology.
Moreover, it should be noted that while the work of Foucault is largely responsible for much of our
current interest in biopolitics and biopower, he is neither the first thinker to address this topic nor does
everyone agree with his theory of biopolitics. Thinkers such as Hobbes, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and
Arendt, as well as many others, have discussed structures of economic, social, and political power and
the constellations of ideas intended to secure them. While these thinkers may not have used the terms
biopolitics and biopower in their work, each was interested to varying degrees in the ways in which
societies control life, living, and ways of life—or what is now termed social control or control society.
In capitalist social and economic relations, the determination of life (and death) assumes crucial
modes of biopolitical control regarding questions of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class, and
attempts to manage extremes of uneven and combined development across the globe. Biopolitics,
derived from Foucault’s understanding of political and economic forms of power, is not an
unproblematic analytic in differentiating life study. This is not just because of the limits it seems to
place on transforming biopolitical control, but also because the structural logics of capitalism and
globalism are themselves in great flux.
Since Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics in his lectures at the Collège de France in the
spring of 1976, philosophers and social critics have challenged some of his central assumptions and
considered variegations of biotheory across competing paradigms. In this chapter, we will look at
both Foucault’s biopolitics (9.1) and a couple of major challenges and alternatives to it offered by
Giorgio Agamben (9.2), and by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (9.3). But there are other
challenges, including Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2006); Jacques Derrida’s Life/Death seminars
of 1975–6 (2019) and The Beast and the Sovereign seminars from 2001 to 2003 (two vols., 2008–
10); Roberto Esposito’s Immunitas (2002) and Bios (2004); Donna Haraway’s “The Biopolitics of
Postmodern Bodies” (1989); and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2011). These and other
biopolitical theorists offer different positions on the biopolitical subject as well as explore how
changing conceptions of the human and nature affect life conditions today. Thus, while all biopolitics
goes through Foucault—for many, its conceptualization does not end with him.
9.1 MICHEL FOUCAULT

Foucault first introduced the problematic of biopower in his lectures at the Collège de France in the
spring of 1976, and then devoted his next two years of lectures at the Collège (the 1977–8 and
1978–9 academic years)7 to developing his thoughts on biopolitics. In his final lecture in 1976
under the course title “Society Must Be Defended,” he notes that in the second half of the eighteenth
century “a new technology of power” emerges. He terms it here “biopower” and “biopolitics.”8
Foucault explains that while biopower “does not exclude disciplinary technology . . . it does
dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it,
embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques.”9 Disciplinary technology refers to new forms
of human punishment that Foucault located in the history of Europe that moved away from
grotesque and spectacular punishment to more subtle modes of coercing individual bodies. “Unlike
discipline, which is addressed to bodies,” biopower “is applied not to man-as-body but to the living
man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species.”10 Biopower addresses “man-
as-species” as “a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death,
production, illness, and so on.”11 It is a “seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like,
massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species.”12
The first object of biopolitics are processes “such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of
reproduction, the fertility of the population, and so on.”13 In the second half of the eighteenth
century, biopolitics seeks to control these processes. It is here that “the first demographers begin to
measure these phenomena in statistical terms.”14 During this period, death is “no longer something
that suddenly swooped down on life—as in an epidemic.”15 Death becomes “permanent, something
that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it.”16
While Foucault enumerates many different elements that enter into the domain of biopolitics
both in its early stages and its later stages, he says “biopolitics will derive its knowledge from, and
define its power’s field of intervention in terms of, the birth rate, the morality rate, various biological
disabilities, and the effects of the environment.”17 Also, in addition, it “deals with the population as
a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and
as power’s problem.”18 Biopolitics is as well credited by Foucault with introducing “forecasts,
statistical estimates, and overall measures.”19
The topic of “bio-politics” is also discussed by Foucault around the same time in The History of
Sexuality (1976). In Part Five of this book, entitled “Right of Death and Power over Life,” Foucault
discusses “the ancient right to take life or let live” that comes to be replaced at the beginning of the
7
Foucault did not lecture at the Collège de France during the 1976–7 academic year. The 1977–8 lectures can be found in
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and 1978–9 lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics.
8
Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and
Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 243.
9
Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 242.
10
11
Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 242–3.
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
BIOPOLITICS 265
eighteenth century by “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”20 The context
here are the changes in the right of the sovereign to take life through the death penalty. Focus in the
application of capital punishment shifts from emphasizing the “enormity of the crime” to “the
safeguard of society” and “the monstrosity of the criminal.”21 “Now it is over life, throughout its
unfolding,” comments Foucault, “that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the
moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private.’”22
Under the aegis of an emerging biopolitics, “life more than the law . . . became the issue of
political struggles”23 to the point where even Aristotle’s observations on the nature of man as a
political animal were no longer valid. Whereas “[f]or millennia, man remained what he was for
Aristotle: a living animal with the capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose
politics places his existence as a living being in question.”24
As a form of power, biopower regulates and orders biological life. This regulation is achieved
through governmentality by means of various statistics and other population technologies. As a
form of power, biopower differs from and replaces the power of the sovereign. In the History of
Sexuality, Foucault describes the difference between sovereign power and biopower as one between
a “society of blood” (sovereign power) and a “society of ‘sex,’ or rather a society ‘with a sexuality’ ”
(biopower).25 In sovereign power, “power spoke through blood: the honor of war, the fear of famine,
the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword, executioners, and tortures; blood was a reality
with a symbolic function.”26 However, in biopower,
the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to
what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used.
Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social
body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an
object and a target.27
Foucault notes that these “new procedures of power that were devised during the classical age and
employed in the nineteenth century were what caused our societies to go from a symbolics of blood
to an analytics of sexuality.”28 For him, “nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression,
the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge,
life, meaning, the disciplines, and regulations.”29
It should be noted that Foucault’s work on biopolitics and biopower was a position he arrived at
later in his career, and is one that differs in key ways from his earlier work. In the 1960s, Foucault’s
work focused on language and the constitution of the subject in discourse, or more specifically,
what he calls discursive formations. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault describes
20
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138; original emphasis.
21
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138.
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
discursive formations as “large groups of statements with which we are so familiar—and which we
call medicine, economics, or grammar.”30 However, rather than viewing these groups of statements
as “chains of inference (as one often does in the history of the sciences or of philosophy)” or
“drawing up tables of differences (as the linguists do),” he describes them as “systems of dispersion.”31
“Hence,” writes Foucault,
the idea of describing these dispersions themselves; of discovering whether, between these
elements, which are certainly not organized as a progressively deductive structure, nor as an
enormous book that is being gradually and continuously written, nor as the oeuvre of a collective
subject, one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in
their simultaneity, assignable positions in their common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked
and hierarchized transformations.32
On this view, which might be called linguistic determinism, the subject was an empty entity, an
intersection of discursive formations, wherein discourses are practices that systemically form the
objects of which they speak. In Foucault’s later work, which includes his thoughts on biopolitics
and biopower described above, he shifted to the view that individuals are constituted by power
relations, wherein power is the ultimate principle of social reality. Power according to this view is
not a commodity that can be acquired or taken away. Rather, it is more like a network whose
threads go everywhere. Foucault is more interested in how subjects are constituted by power, rather
than who has power. Moreover, he rejects the view that we can locate power in a structure or in a
particular institution. Foucault’s work on power and the nature of social institutions such as the
prison, the madhouse, and the clinic would come to have an enormous impact on the intersections
between politics and literary and cultural theory.
Jeremy Bentham’s work on prison reform in the nineteenth century provides Foucault with a
metaphor for the anonymous central power he describes. Bentham’s panopticon is a prison that
would be structured in such a way that all of the cells would be visible from a central tower. This
prison would be one where the cells do not interact with one another, and none of the prisoners in
those cells know if and when they are being watched. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault
describes the power of Bentham’s panopticon as both visible and unverifiable: “Visible: the inmate
will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied
upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment;
but he must be sure that he always be so.”33 The effect of the panopticon is “to induce in the inmate
a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”34
Herein, power is organized such that “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is
discontinuous in its action.”35 Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower via surveillance technologies
such as Bentham’s will become foundational to the field of surveillance studies (9.4).
30
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 37;
original emphasis.
31
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 37; original emphasis.
32
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 37.
33
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 201.
34
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.
35
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.
BIOPOLITICS 267
For Foucault, power is everywhere: it is in all social relations. Moreover, power on this model is
not just negative and repressive. Rather, it is also productive. The productive power of the
panopticon creates subjects who are “responsible” for their own subjection. There is no individual
sovereign now to point to as the cause of their subjection, but rather only an anonymous
governmentality. This view of power leaves little to no room for autonomous individuals, that is,
for human agents whose actions now lack complete freedom and autonomy. As such, Foucault’s
biopolitics and biopower are a type of antihumanism.
In short, biopower is omnipotent with respect to the psychic formation of the subject. Individuals
for Foucault exist merely as an embodied nexus to be transformed by the deployment of external
causal powers. History, in this view, is thus an endless play of domination. Like Nietzsche, Foucault
takes a genealogical view of history rather than one that traces lines of inevitability or development.
It is an approach to history that avoids all forms of global theorizing, totalizing forms of analysis,
and systematic philosophizing.
In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), Foucault explains that genealogy breaks off the past
from the present and emphasizes “the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality.”36
Genealogy is also opposed “to the search for ‘origins.’ ”37 “History is the concrete body of a
development,” comments Foucault, “with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods
of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant
ideality of the origin.”38 Genealogy focuses on local, discontinuous, and illegitimate knowledges
against the claims of efforts to present knowledges as global, continuous, and legitimate. The task
of genealogy is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction
of the body.”39 The aim of genealogy is critique. Given then that Foucault defines critique elsewhere
as “the art of voluntary insubordination,”40 the aim of genealogy as critique is to uproot traditional
foundations and to disrupt pretended continuity. In short, the purpose of a genealogical approach
to history “is not to discover the roots of our identity, but rather to commit itself to its dissipation.”41
In sum, Foucault offers an alternative to both the Hegelian and Marxist views of history. History
is discontinuous for Foucault, and neither teleological, as Hegel would have us believe, nor
dialectical, as Marx contends. Moreover, Foucault’s position on power conflicts with the Marxist
notion of a conflict between the ruling class and a subordinate class. Techniques of power are for
Foucault neither invented by the bourgeoisie, nor the creation of a class seeking to exercise effective
forms of domination. Rather, techniques of power were deployed from the moment that they
reveal their economic and political utility for the bourgeoisie. Foucault’s notions of genealogy,
power, and history were highly influential on the New Historicism.
36
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon,
1984), 76.
37
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 77.
38
39
40
Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, eds. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1997), 32.
41
9.2 GIORGIO AGAMBEN

When Giorgio Agamben published Homo Sacer (1995), it would be the first of what would come
to be nine volumes of interconnected investigations into the foundations of Western institutions
and political philosophy. The other volumes are Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and
the Archive (1999), State of Exception (2003), Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (2003), The
Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2007), The
Sacrament of Language: The Archaeology of the Oath (2008), Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty
(2012), The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (2011), and The Use of Bodies
(2014). As the titles of these books indicate, Agamben is very interested in Foucault’s notions of the
archive (that is, the limit of what can be known about a particular historical moment), archaeology
(that is, a research method that avoids traditional approaches to history that focus on what has been
said and done by focusing instead on the discursive formations—or sets of conditions—that enable
things to be said and done), and genealogy (that is, a research method that also avoids traditional
approaches to history by focusing instead on the unwritten rules or system of a particular social
formation).
In terms of biopolitics, however, Homo Sacer holds a place of special interest because it is here
that Agamben—at least in his own mind—completes the work that Foucault began on this topic.
“Foucault’s death kept him,” comments Agamben, “from showing how he would have developed
the concept and study of biopolitics.”42 But for Agamben, completing Foucault’s biopolitics does
not simply mean following the tracks laid down by the deceased theorist. Rather, it involves
reinterpreting biopolitics by going back to its point of origin to recover an aspect of power that was
concealed in Foucault’s work. According to Agamben, this concealed point of origin is to be found
in the notion of sovereign power.
Agamben points out that the “Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word
‘life.’ ”43 Rather, they used two terms: “zoe–, which expressed the simple fact of living common to
all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper
to an individual or group.”44 This distinction, argues Agamben, is fundamental to the origins of
Western political philosophy for it amounts to a distinction between the bare existence common to
all living things (zoe–) and a qualified life, that is, a particular way of life. When the Greeks discuss
particular ways of life—such as when Plato describes three kinds of life in the Philebus, and when
Aristotle distinguished the contemplative life of the philosopher as compared to the political life
and the life of pleasure—they always use the term bios and never the term zoe–.
However, according to Agamben, when sovereign power ceases in the modern era to be founded
upon theology or nature, zoe– or bare life starts to become its foundation. In the process, sovereignty
rearticulates and redefines the relationship between zoe– and bios with relation to power. In sovereign
power, bios comes to refer to the lives that are included within the political community, and zoe–
refers to those lives which are excluded from the political community—and are able to be killed
with impunity. Agamben reaches this conclusion by drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s definition of
42
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), in The Omnibus Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 7.
43
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5.
44
BIOPOLITICS 269
sovereignty, where he says the “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.”45 Schmitt’s
definition of sovereignty reveals a paradox in the modern conception of sovereignty, namely, that
the sovereign can be both inside and outside of the political order at the same time. Thus, for
Agamben, as bare life (zoe–) is fundamental to sovereign power, the birth of biopolitics must be
backdated to at least the sovereign exception.
Agamben says that Foucault’s work on biopolitics is a “decisive abandonment of the traditional
approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutional models (the definition
of sovereignty, the theory of the State), in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in
which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life.”46 “Clearly,” comments Agamben,
these two lines (which carry on two tendencies present in Foucault’s work from the very
beginning) intersect in many points and refer back to a common center . . . Yet the point at which
these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear in Foucault’s work, so much so that
it has even been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary
theory of power. If Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which
is exclusively based on juridical models (“What legitimates power?”) or on institutional models
(“What is the State?”), and if he calls for a “liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty”
in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code, then
where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection)
at which techniques of individuation and totalizing procedures converge?47
What it interesting here is that whereas Foucault’s research methodology led him to the conclusion
that the passage from the classical age to the modern age involved the transition from one model
of power (sovereign power) to another model of power (biopower), Agamben insists that aspects of
the nucleus of sovereign power remain or are retained in biopower—and claims that Foucault’s
work does not allow for this. But is this really the case?
In a lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, Foucault provides evidence that he does not
completely abandon the traditional approach to power as Agamben claims:
[T]he idea of a government as government of population makes the problem of the foundation
of sovereignty even more acute (and we have Rousseau) and it makes the need to develop the
disciplines even more acute (and we have the history of the disciplines that I have tried to
analyze elsewhere [e.g., as in Discipline and Punish]). So we should not see things as the
replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then a society of discipline
by a society, say, of government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and
governmental management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security
as its essential mechanism.48
45
46
47
48
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 107–8.
Thus, given Foucault’s comments here, biopolitics does not completely turn away from considerations
of sovereign power, but rather triangulates them with disciplinary power and biopower. Still, these
lecture comments aside, if a philosopher of Agamben’s stature was led to believe that Foucault
abandons the traditional approach to the problem of power in favor of one in which power
penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life reveals that there is at least a lack of clarity in
Foucault’s work on this point.
Moreover, for Agamben, the question of the degree to which Foucault’s biopolitics accounts for
bare life (zoe–) and the state of exception as a paradigm of government do not simply go away with
the triangulation of sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management. For, as Agamben says
in State of Exception (2003), “there is still no theory of the state of exception in public law, and
jurists and theorists of public law seem to regard the problem more as a quaestio facti [question of
fact] than as a genuine juridical problem.”49 A state of exception is for Agamben the “no-man’s land
between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life.”50 It is here that the
sovereign state both institutes the law and is the only element of the political order capable of
suspending the law in exceptional situations. What is unique about this situation is that when the
sovereign state suspends the law, the legal and political order is not itself suspended in this state of
exception. In such times, the sovereign state, again, is both inside and outside the legal and political
order.
As Agamben points out, this state of exception is one where the “question of borders becomes
all the more urgent: if exceptional measures are the result of periods of political crisis and, as such,
must be understood on political and not juridico-constitutional grounds, then they find themselves
in the paradoxical situation of being juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms,
and the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form.”51 On the one
hand, think of exceptional situations, say, involving civil war, insurrection, and resistance wherein
legal terms simply cannot account for these events. On the other hand, there are also those situations
where the “law employs the exception—that is the suspension of law itself—as its original means
of referring to and encompassing life.”52 It is in these situations, that “a theory of the state of
exception is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same
time, abandons the living being to law.”53
For Agamben, the normalization of the state of exception was achieved in the concentration
camps of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Here, beginning in 1933, prisoners were stripped of both
their political and civil rights, and subject as bare life to the sovereign powers of the German state.
As bare life (zo e–), the prisoners were excluded from the political community and are able to be
killed with impunity in a state of exception. For Agamben, the relationship between bare life and
sovereign power continues to define contemporary politics in various refugee crises around the
world. William Spanos argues that rather than restricting the genealogy of bare life and the state of
exception to Europe as Agamben does, the US as well needs to be considered in any genealogy of
49
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2003), in The Omnibus Homo Sacer, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford
50
Agamben, State of Exception, 167.
51
52
53
BIOPOLITICS 271
the exceptionalist state.54 Finally, Agamben’s argument that sovereignty reveals the permanence of
biopolitics within Western political thought foretells a condition of permanent crisis—one wherein
the norming of the state of exception draws a line from the Nazi concentration camps to the
present production and reproduction of systemic racism.
9.3 MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI

If Foucault might be characterized as leaving behind sovereign power in his pursuit of biopower,
and Agamben might be said to put sovereign power into biopolitics, then Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri might be said to locate a type of sovereignty recognized by neither Foucault nor
Agamben: empire.
For Hardt and Negri, empire is a mode of sovereignty that is globally connected and sweeps
aside centrist or static versions of power. It is something that is literally “materializing before our
very eyes.”55 “Over the past several decades,” they write in Empire (2000),
as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the
capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible
globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global
circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a
new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global
exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.56
One of the characteristics of this new world order is that “there is no place of power—it is both
everywhere and nowhere.”57
“In the passage from modern to postmodern and from imperialism to Empire,” write Hardt and
Negri, “there is progressively less distinction between inside and outside.”58 Whereas the modern
nation-state is built upon the inside/outside distinction, the development of trans- and supra-
national organizations such as the United Nations indicate that there is increasingly no longer an
outside. The United Nations, comment Hardt and Negri, “both reveals the limitations of the notion
of international order and points beyond it toward a new notion of global order.”59 Empire is a
global order that is an “ou-topia, or really a non-place.”60 It has “no territorial center of power and
does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers.”61 Hardt and Negri describe empire as “a decentered
and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within
its open, expanding frontiers.”62
54
William Spanos, The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
55
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xi.
56
Hardt and Negri, Empire, xi; my emphasis.
57
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 190.
58
59
60
61
Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii.
62
Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii.
Hardt and Negri maintain that in this new geopolitical order, industrial capitalism has been
replaced by cognitive capitalism, a form of capitalism wherein automated, networked, and global
production processes result in a new form of labor: immaterial labor. Hardt and Negri define three
types of immaterial labor that “drive the postmodernization of the global economy”:
The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalized and has
incorporated communication technologies in a way that transforms the production process itself
. . . Second is the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into
creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other.
Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affect and
requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labor in a bodily mode.63
The immaterial labor of cognitive capitalism brings affect, intellect, and bodies into capitalist
production in ways not accounted for in industrial capitalism. For example, in the case of affective
labor, that is, the labor of human contact and interaction (or “labor in the bodily mode”), what is
produced are “social networks, forms of community, biopower.”64 Hardt and Negri state that “the
role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative,
cooperative, and affective labor.”65 Moreover, the shift from industrial capitalism to cognitive
capitalism results in not only a blurring of the distinction between physical and intellectual labor,
but also between individual and collective work.
The creation of wealth in this postmodern global economy tends toward what they call
biopolitical production, that is, “the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the
political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest in one another.”66 It is important to note
here that for Hardt and Negri economic value is linked to biopolitical production, that is, the
production of forms of life and social relations, and not only material production, that is, the
production of material objects. Hardt and Negri claim that Foucault prepared the way for their
biopolitical production thesis by recognizing “the epochal passage in social forms from disciplinary
society to the society of control,” and by pointing out a new form of power, biopower.67
“Disciplinary society,” write Hardt and Negri, “is that society in which social command is
constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate
customs, habits, and produce practices.”68 By contrast, the society of control is one “in which
mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent to the social field,
distributed throughout the brains and bodies of citizens.”69 In societies of control, power is “exercised
through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks,
etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, information networks, etc.) toward a state of autonomous
alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity.”70 Whereas disciplinary societies were
63
64
65
Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiii.
66
Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiii.
67
68
69
70
BIOPOLITICS 273
explicitly articulated by Foucault, societies of control were not. Rather, according to Deleuze, the
passage from disciplinary societies to societies of control was implicit in Foucault’s work—and he
took the opportunity to follow through on this implication in his own work.
Why societies of control are important to Hardt and Negri is because they follow Deleuze in
regarding biopolitical control as extending “throughout the depths of consciousness and bodies of
the population—and at the same time across the entirety of social relations.”71 “Society,” write
Hardt and Negri, “subsumed within a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the social structure
and its processes of development, reacts like a single body.”72 Thus, while Hardt and Negri take
their inspiration from the biopolitics of Foucault, their thesis that empire is a regime wherein
“biopower, economic production and political constitution tend to increasingly coincide” might be
regarded as both a challenge to his work and creative rereading of it.
Moreover—and perhaps more importantly—Hardt and Negri’s postmodern biopolitics is a
direct challenge to and creative reworking of Marxism. “Postmodernism and the passage to
Empire,” comment Hardt and Negri, “involve a real convergence of the realms that used to be
designated as base and superstructure.”73 For them,
Production becomes indistinguishable from reproduction; productive forces merge with relations
of production; constant capital tends to be constituted and represented within variable capital,
in the brains, bodies, and cooperation of productive subjects. Social subjects are at the same time
producers and products of this unitary machine. In this new historical formation it is thus no
longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value, or a practice that is “outside.”74
By rejecting traditional models of production as a misrepresentation of the geopolitics of cognitive

capitalism, Hardt and Negri offer a postmodern Marxist view of biopolitical production as
reproduction. Within the machine of cognitive-capitalist geopolitics, the classical Marxist distinction
between base and superstructure converges.
One of the major consequences of biopolitical production is that nature is no longer “outside”
of production. Rather, “through the processes of modern technological transformation, all of
nature has become capital, or at least subject to capital.”75 Whereas the “industrial revolution
introduced machine-made consumer goods and then machine-made machines,” biopolitical
production has introduced “machine-made rare materials and foodstuffs—in short, machine-made
nature and machine-made culture.”76 Thus, under postmodern biopolitics, the distinction between
nature and culture no longer holds. Now that all of nature has become capital, and nature is
indistinguishable from culture, there is truly nothing outside of capital. “There is nothing, no
‘naked life,’ no external standpoint,” write Hardt and Negri, “that can be posed outside this field
permeated by money.”77 “Production and reproduction,” they continue, “are dressed in monetary
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
clothing.”78 The sphere of biopolitics is one wherein “life is made to work for production and
production is made to work for life.”79
But whereas the view of sovereignty of Agamben leaves us with the normalization of the state of
exception and no opportunity for resistance, the new type of sovereignty described by Hardt and
Negri is tempered by a vision of resistance and revolutionary hope. “Empire creates a greater
potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power because it presents us, alongside the
machine of command, with an alternative,”80 write Hardt and Negri. The alternative to imperial
sovereignty is “the set of all the exploited and the subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed
to Empire, with no mediation between them.”81
Their concept of a multitude that opposes imperial sovereignty has its roots in the political
philosophy of Baruch Spinoza—and explicating the revolutionary hope of this concept becomes the
focus of Multitude (2004). Here multitude is defined as “a set of singularities,” wherein a singularity
is a “social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains
different.”82 For Hardt and Negri, in a multitude
the component parts of the people are indifferent in their unity; they become an identity by
negating or setting aside their differences. The plural singularities of the multitude thus stand in
contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the people.83
As an identity, the opposition of the multitude toward imperial sovereignty provides the world with
revolutionary hope. The revolutionary potential of the multitude might be thought of as a
postmodern Marxist updating of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. If, as Marx and
Engels state in Manifesto of the Communist Party, the aim of the communists is the “formation of
the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by
the proletariat,”84 then the aim of the multitude in the hands of Hardt and Negri is the overthrow
of imperial sovereignty—and to create an alternative global society. So, Hardt and Negri’s work in
Empire and elsewhere, following Žižek’s comment, might be regarded as the “Communist Manifesto
of the 21st Century.”85
In sum, Hardt and Negri note that if biopower “stands above society, transcendent, as a sovereign
authority and imposes its order,” then “biopolitical production, in contrast, is immanent to society
and creates social relationships and forms through collaborative forms of labor.”86 The hope for an
alternative global society rests not in biopower, but rather a biopolitics founded upon what they call
in Commonwealth (2009) a “democracy of the multitude”87 directed toward the development of
78
79
80
81
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 393; my emphasis.
82
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 99.
83
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 99.
84
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 31–2.
85
Slavoj Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?”
Rethinking Marxism 13.3/4 (2001): 190–8.
86
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 94–5.
87
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 21.
BIOPOLITICS 275
the common/s. The common, write Hardt and Negri, is both “the common wealth of the material
world—the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty” and “those results of social
production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges,
languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth.”88
9.4 SURVEILLANCE STUDIES

Surveillance comes from the French word surveiller, which means to watch over or to watch over
from above. David Lyon, who is often credited as helping to found surveillance studies as a field in
the late 1990s, argues in The Electronic Eye (1994) that “surveillance can be detected in population
documents from ancient Egypt and also in records of English landholding with the Domesday Book
from 1086.”89 Moreover, as Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood point out, the “word
‘eavesdrop,’ which had its first printed use in 1606, originally referred to someone who literally
stood within the space next to a house where rainwater dripped from the eaves, where one could
secretly listen to what was said inside.”90
Lyon defines surveillance as “the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for
purposes of influence, management, protection or direction.”91 The systematic aspect of surveillance
implies, of course, that it is not random, but something that is done with a purpose. If this systematic
aspect of surveillance is viewed through the context of the biopolitics of Foucault, then surveillance
studies concerns the management and regulation of populations through identification, monitoring,
categorization, and statistics.
As a multidisciplinary field that includes anthropology, American studies, communication,
cultural studies, criminology, geography, history, legal studies, literary studies, philosophy, political
science, sociology, and others, surveillance studies is concerned with power and its distribution.
Major sites of surveillance include policing and crime control, the workplace, government, the
military, and consumer marketing. Nevertheless, sites of surveillance are continually expanding as
information systems that utilize it come to regulate more and more aspects of everyday life.
Moreover, to say that surveillance today is ubiquitous means that it has many different functions,
forms, and meanings depending on the social, political, and economic setting. And, part of the task
of surveillance studies is to identify and examine them. The question remains though as to what
extent the many different functions, forms, and meanings of surveillance are subject to critique.
In the early 1970s, before the formation of surveillance studies as a field in the late 1990s, surveillance
was primarily the subject of critique. Focus was placed on the ways in which state and police surveillance,
and centralized computer databases, threatened society. Terms like dataveillance, coined by Roger
Clarke in 1988, echoed fears about the discriminatory use of large-scale sets of surveillance data to
identify individuals as criminals in advance of any wrongdoing.92 But Clarke was just part of a conceptual
88
Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, viii.
89
Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood, “Introduction: Surveillance Studies as a Transdisciplinary Endeavor,” in
Surveillance Studies: A Reader, eds. Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood (New York: Oxford University Press,
2018), xxii.
90
Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxii.
91
David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 14.
92
Roger Clarke, “Information Technology and Dataveillance,” Communications of the ACM 31.5 (1988): 498–512.
genealogy about surveillance that involves, among other sources, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four (1949) and Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s panopticon. The notion of an all-powerful,
centralized surveillance, whether in the form of Orwell’s Big Brother, Foucault’s biopower, or Bentham’s
panopticon, immediately raises issues concerning privacy, domination, and power. In the case of
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother conceptually connects surveillance with violence, fascism,
and totalitarianism. A human face crushed under the boot of Big Brother is a visual image of surveillance
that is difficult to erase from the conceptual field of surveillance studies.
However, as the field of surveillance studies was formed during a period of wide-scale
technological innovation, surveillance came to be regarded within this nascent field of study as “one
of the dominant modes of ordering in the postmodern era”—rather than as only a symptom of
totalitarianism and subject of critique.93 Here Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control”
(1992), which is a critique of Foucault, is often cited as one of the turning points regarding the
concept of surveillance.
As noted earlier, Foucault contended that there was a shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries from societies of sovereignty to disciplinary societies.94 However, for Deleuze, the
disciplinary societies identified by Foucault “reach[ed] their height at the outset of the twentieth-
century,” and were replaced in the twentieth century by societies of control. Deleuze argues that the
disciplinary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Foucault “brilliantly analyzed”
were “vast spaces of enclosure.”95 “The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment
to another,” comments Deleuze of these enclosures, “each has its own laws: first, the family; then
the school (‘you are no longer in your family’); then the barracks (‘you are no longer at school’);
then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the
enclosed environment.”96 Foucault, comments Deleuze, saw the enclosures of disciplinary society
as a way “to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force
within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component
forces.”97 They marked a transition from the goal and functions of societies of sovereignty that
were “to tax rather than organize production to rule on death rather than administer life.”98
But for Deleuze, the “interiors” of disciplinary society underwent a crisis that accelerated at a
rapid pace after World War II. The prison, hospital, factory, school, and the family endured a crisis
of interiority. In spite of many efforts to reform these interiors, “everyone knows that these
institutions are finished, whatever the life of their expiration periods.”99 “These are the societies of
control,” writes Deleuze, “which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies.”100 As Hardt
sees it (a few years before the publication with Negri of Empire), Deleuze’s notion of control
society is “a first attempt to understand the decline of the rule of civil society and the rise of a new
form of control.”101 Instead of disciplinary enclosures, comments Hardt, where the “coordinated
93
Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxiv; my emphasis.
94
See, for example, Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
95
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter, 1992): 3.
96
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3.
97
98
99
100
101
BIOPOLITICS 277
striations formed by the institutions of civil society branch out through social space in structured
networks” for Deleuze “like the tunnels of a mole,”102 we need to move to a new animal to
characterize societies of control: the snake, whose “infinite undulations” characterize for Deleuze
“the smooth space of the societies of control.”103 “Instead of disciplining the citizen as a fixed social
identity,” writes Hardt, “the new social regime seeks to control the citizen as a whatever identity,
or rather an infinitely flexible placeholder of identity.”104 Hardt’s observations here encourage us to
regard the post-disciplinary situation of empire as a society of control that is in part ordered by a
post-disciplinary concept of surveillance.
In short, via Deleuze’s societies of control, surveillance studies has shifted focus from a critique
of surveillance to the position that “surveillance is central to the functioning of contemporary
societies, from the level of state practices all the way down to interpersonal exchanges among
family members and friends.”105 “While some may not agree,” write Monahan and Wood,
that surveillance is the most important social process or cultural logic, it is difficult to contest its
pervasiveness and influence. It is how organizations and people make sense of and manage the
world. It is also how power relations are established and reproduced. For scholars, surveillance
offers a rich approach to investigating social and cultural phenomena and detecting the power
relations inherent in them.106
Thus, the concerns of contemporary surveillance studies include “the ways in which surveillance
was a critical part of the rise of the modern nation-state, especially pertaining to the identification
and governance of people at borders and within state territories”;107 the ways in which the
identification and sorting of populations is increasingly conducted through computer algorithms;
and the ways in which national security and the police utilize surveillance systems. Moreover, there
are also issues concerning privacy and surveillance, workplace surveillance, the relationship between
political economy and surveillance, and others, all pursued within surveillance studies as aspects of
the contemporary cultural logic of a control society.
Thus, a division might be posited between modern and postmodern surveillance theory: whereas
modern surveillance theory regards “surveillance as an outgrowth of capitalist enterprises,
bureaucratic organization, the nation-state, a machine-like technologic and the development of
new kinds of solidarity, involving less ‘trust’ or at least different kinds of trust,” postmodern
surveillance theory deals with “new forms of ‘vigilance and visibility’—technology-based, body-
objectifying, everyday, universal kinds of surveillance.”108
In terms of modern surveillance theory, Hannah Arendt and Anthony Giddens, for example, both
see “totalitarian tendencies—among which state surveillance would figure prominently—as immanent
102
103
Michael Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and
Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 31.
104
Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” 36.
105
Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxxi.
106
Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxxi.
107
Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxvii.
108
Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 51.
within any bureaucratically organized nation-state.”109 In fact, Giddens argues in The Nation-State
and Violence (1985) that surveillance is one of the main social processes that constitutes modernity.
Moreover, Lyon claims that one of the continuing themes in surveillance studies is that “within liberal
democratic nation-states where record-keeping, monitoring and observation become routine and
technologically augmented that restrictions on liberty—and, especially post-9/11, mobility—may be
anticipated.”110 The rise of reality television is a good illustration of the extent to which liberal
democracies tolerate high levels of the invasion of privacy. “The culture industry,” writes Catherine
Liu, “has been able to make surveillance natural and entertaining at the same time.”111
But whereas modern surveillance theory tends to situate surveillance practices within the context
of the nation-state, postmodern surveillance theory takes its approach from outside the context of
the nation-state in several ways. First, technology-based surveillance makes “surveillance amenable
to automation and places increasing reliance upon the data-double or the virtual self.”112 Thus, if
modern surveillance theory centers upon the concept of the panopticon, then, following Mark
Poster, postmodern surveillance theory centers upon the superpanopticon, in which “database
discourse produces objectified individuals with dispersed data ‘identities’ of which some may not
even be aware.”113 Second, body-objectifying surveillance reflects increasing attention paid to the
body itself as a source of surveillance data through various forms of biometrics such as those
available through a Fitbit watch. Third, everyday surveillance includes not only workplace and
criminal deviance, but also psychological classifications, educational differences, and health
distinctions. Or, as Liu makes this point, “surveillance is built into everything we touch.”114 Yet, in
spite of “the warnings about privacy and profits,” she continues, “there has been no stampede away
from Google or Facebook.”115 And, fourth, universal surveillance, in the sense that surveillance
permeates all life and no one is immune from the gaze.116 Here Hardt and Negri’s empire is one
example of a surveillance formation outside of the political logic of the nation-state.
9.5 DISABILITY STUDIES

According to Lennard Davis, “disability studies attempts to unpack the complex biocultural and
biopolitical forces that are involved in ableism.”117 Though the terms disablism and ableism are
often used interchangeably, some theorists have argued that they should be distinguished.
Disablism is a term that specifically refers to discrimination and prejudice founded upon a
disability. Ableism is a term that refers to the ideology of ability, which is a “ubiquitous belief system
that privileges a certain type of person above another.”118 D. Christopher Gabbard describes the
109
110
111
Catherine Liu, “Surveillance,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 708.
112
113
Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 55. See Mark Poster, “Databases as Discourse or Electronic Interpellations,” in Computers,
Surveillance and Privacy, eds. David Lyon and Elia Zureik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
114
Liu, “Surveillance,” 708.
115
Liu, “Surveillance,” 708.
116
Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 55–6.
117
Lennard Davis, “Disability,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 454.
118
D. Christopher Gabbard, “Ableism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 357.
BIOPOLITICS 279
model type of person in the ideology of ability as “a young, white, fully physically functional,
healthy, reasonably intelligent, heterosexual male.”119 This, continues Gabbard, makes ableism
“one of the most socially entrenched and accepted of -isms”120—and one that Gregor Wolbring
argues is “an umbrella ism for other isms such as racism, sexism, casteism, ageism, speciesism, anti-
environmentalism, gross domestic product (GDP)-ism and consumerism.”121 Thus, given that
ableism is an umbrella “-ism” for many other -isms including racism and sexism, the biopolitics of
ableism concerns a very wide range of discrimination and prejudice in culture and society.
If emphasis is placed on the different centers of focus in disablism as opposed to ableism, then
one might further distinguish between disability studies and ability studies: disability studies
examines disablism, that is, discrimination against the “less able”; and ability studies examines
ableism, that is, the belief system founded upon ability. Moreover, the term dis/ability studies is
often used to signify a more balanced approach to disablism and ableism. The bifurcation of dis/
ability studies echoes the situation in other forms of oppositional identity study such as women’s
studies, which is sometimes set in opposition to men’s studies (the interdisciplinary study of the
history, culture, and politics of men and masculinity). And there is also the field of critical white
studies, which while regarded as a subarea in critical race theory, might also be regarded in a
complementary relationship with critical race theory in the same way that ability studies (or critical
ability studies) is related to disability studies (or critical disability studies).
But the concept of disability does not merely hinge on the interplay between the disabled/abled.
Rather, it is connected with many other words and concepts such as infirmity, affliction, monstrosity,
deformity, and cripple.122 Davis, for example, argues in Enforcing Normalcy (1995) that disability
came to be associated with words such as deviance, abnormality, and disorder in the nineteenth
century. These associations, established through legal, medical, and statistical discourses, led to the
modern conception of disability as one related to the concept of normalcy, wherein disability is
regarded as a by-product of normalcy. Today, however, the conceptual field has been greatly
widened to connect disability to many other major areas of concern in contemporary literary and
cultural theory including affect (13.0), biopolitics, gender, narrative, performance, queer, race,
rights, sex, sexuality, space (11.4), and trauma (13.4).
It is also important to note in this context that critical disability studies might be described as
intersectional in its approach to issues of disablism and ableism. That is, disability tends to be
regarded as the intersection of ability, race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ethnicity, age, and other
categories in a person not as constituting their fixed or essential identity (essentialism), but rather
as presenting a site where intersecting power relations are performed by individuals in differing
social contexts (anti-essentialism). Again, identity on this intersectionalist approach to disability
studies is something one does through a performance, not something one has by nature. As such, in
critical disability studies, that is, disability studies that approach their topic intersectionally, it is
more proper to speak of shifting identifications rather than the identity of a disabled person.
119
Gabbard, “Ableism,” 357.
120
Gabbard, “Ableism,” 357.
121
Gregor Wolbring, “The Politics of Ableism,” Development 51.2 (2008): 252–8, https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.17.
122
Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, “Disability,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, eds. Rachel Adams,
Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 6.
But the distinction between the anti-essentialism of critical disability studies and the essentialism
of disability studies is but one way to illustrate their critical differences. Another is to systematically
follow through on how considerations of biopolitics fundamentally alter the work of disability
studies. Thus, when a critical effort is made “to unpack the complex biocultural and biopolitical
forces that are involved in ableism,” the field of disability studies takes on some different contours.
As David T. Mitchell explains in The Biopolitics of Disability (2015), the removal of discriminatory
social barriers and “bodily limitations on public participation have been the two poles between
which disability studies research has primarily shuttled since its founding moments in the 1970s.”123
According to Mitchell, barrier removal and impairment effects are the “twin pillars” of the research
and politics of disability studies, with the “majority of disability studies research remain[ing] focused
on pragmatic social changes brought about by” these pillars. Rather than continue in this direction,
Mitchell points out that while “these two domains are critical to the developing contributions of
disability studies and international disability rights movements, they are largely bounded by the
terms of social recognition,” and “have almost nothing to say, for instance, about the active
transformation of life that the alternative corporealities of disability creatively entail.”124 Thus,
Mitchell aims to “explore how disability subjectivities are not just characterized by socially imposed
restrictions, but, in fact, productively create new forms of embodied knowledge and collective
knowledge.”125 In short, his work provides disability studies with some “alternative maps for living
together in the deterritorialized, yet highly regulated spaces of biopolitics.”126
Moreover, the intersectionality of his work is foregrounded in the way “crip” and queer identities
are combined (crip/queer) to forward this thesis. Queer for Mitchell designates, following the work
of Randall Halle, “not the acts in which they engage but rather the coercive norms that place their
desires into a position of conflict with the current order;”127 and crip, used in tandem with queer,
designates “the ways in which such bodies represent alternative forms of being-in-the-world when
navigating environments that privilege able-bodied participants as fully capacitated agential
participants within democratic institutions.”128 For Mitchell, crip/queer is coined to recognize that
“all bodies identified as excessively deviant are ‘queer’ in the sense that they represent discordant
functionalities and outlaw sexualities.”129 “Thus,” concludes Mitchell, “crip/queer forms of
embodiment contest their consignment to illegitimacy because sexual prohibition has proven one of
the most historically salient forms of exclusion within biopolitics since the late nineteenth century.”130
Looking ahead, Mitchell says that disability studies “must be able to address what crip/queer
bodies bring to the table of imagining the value of alternative lives, particularly lives that exist at
the fraught intersections of marginalized identities such as disability, race, gender, sexuality, and
class.”131 But if pushing the intersectionality and biopolitics of disability studies marks new frontiers
123
David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral
Embodiment (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 1.
124
Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 2.
125
126
127
Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 3; Halle cited by Mitchell.
128
129
130
131
BIOPOLITICS 281
for the field, how might the current field be described, particularly from the position of literature
and culture?
Davis says that disability studies aims to correct the “often limited, stereotypical, and viewed[-]
from[-]an[-]ableist perspective”132 of disability in literature and culture. For Davis, disability studies
helps us to view “bodily or mental impairment as part of human diversity” and “seeks to place
disability within current discussions of identity in literature and media.”133 As we have seen earlier,
particularly in the context of LGBTQ+ theory, discussions of identity are increasingly both non-
normative and anti-identitarian. In critical disability studies, non-normative and anti-identitarian
approaches push the field increasingly to take up intersectional and biopolitical issues.
Finally, considering that nearly one-fifth of any given population has a disability, why is it that
literature and culture so rarely concerns itself with disabled characters and themes? One of the tasks
of disability studies is to change this situation by not only encouraging and promoting literary and
artistic work on disability, but also by actively supporting the work of writers and artists with
disabilities.
132
Davis, “Disability,” 454.
133
Davis, “Disability,” 454.
282
CHAPTER TEN
Globalization
10.0 INTRODUCTION
In An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), Gayatri Spivak describes the
“beginnings of what we now call globalization” as commencing with
the period of “modernization,” opened up by the end of World War II. It began with the establishment
of the Bretton Woods Organizations, of the United Nations, of the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade—between 1945 and 1948. It was the beginning of the end of European colonialism. The
middle of our century is the initiation of neo-colonialism. Colonialism has a civilizing mission of
settlement. Neocolonialism had a modernizing mission of development. In the 1970s, the circuits of
dominant capital became electronified. We entered the phase of “postmodernization.” Robert B.
Reich, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor, has called this “electronic capitalism.”1
While some, like Immanuel Wallerstein, disagree with this characterization of the beginnings of
globalization, and argue instead that its origins can be traced back to the international trade that
has been going on since antiquity, Spivak’s account is noteworthy because of the way in which it
connects globalization to colonialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism, which is the first topic
taken up in this chapter.
Postcolonial theory (10.1) is one of several major gateways to understanding the development
and processes of globalization. As a field, it studies the connections between postcolonial emancipation
and globalization, and provides theoretical insight into colonization and decolonization. This insight,
in the case of leading postcolonial theorists such as Spivak, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, often
involves the utilization not only of psychoanalytic theory, poststructuralism, and feminist theory, but
also work from Marxism, human rights, and subaltern studies.
Postcolonial theory presents both a critique of Western intellectual traditions and offers an
alternative theoretical account based on the social, political, and cultural circumstances of former
colonies. It also explores the cultural and literary politics of postcolonial nations in an era of
increasing globalization. These politics often bear on the ways in which subalternity, racial
difference, and legal inequality—all topics introduced in our earlier discussion of race and justice—
are masked or concealed in colonial society.
Even if Wallerstein is correct in his belief that globalization is just another word for international
trade that has been going on since antiquity, the term neoliberalism rose to prominence in the
1980s and continues to the present to refer to an ideology that champions consumerism, global
1
Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 98.
283
trading, and international free markets all aimed at producing a better world. Neoliberalism, the
doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, is an economic and political project distinctly
different from any other form of international trade that has occurred throughout history. Its
increasing privatization, strengthening of private property rights, market deregulation, corporate
mergers and takeovers, and decreasing state intervention and support for social provisions and
public goods stages another major gateway to understanding the development and processes of
globalization. Neoliberalism is a major economic dynamic in the process of globalization that some
have even argued is leading to the McDonaldization—a term George Ritzer uses in The
McDonaldization of Society (1993) to refer to the global business practices of the fast-food chain
McDonalds—of some areas of literature and culture, specifically regarding literature and culture
that is distributed globally.
After discussing neoliberalism (10.3) more generally, we will look into the impact of globalization
(and neoliberalism) on both translation (10.4) and world literature (10.5). Translation becomes an
important aspect of the globalization of literature and culture when language becomes a barrier to
its global diffusion. For example, literature written in Japanese is only accessible in translation to
readers who cannot read it in the original. The politics of what gets translated, why it gets translated,
and the quality of the translation impact not only our view of world literature in the era of
globalization, but also perhaps serves as a bridge from globalization theory to world theory, a new
paradigm that is reframing intellectual problematics across cognitive and geopolitical areas. While
this world theory, or simply, worlding, is introduced in this chapter in connection with world
literature, it is one that concerns a very wide range of disciplines.
But if institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and
the International Monetary Fund, and multinational corporations like Walmart Inc., Apple Inc.,
Amazon.com Inc., and Toyota Motor Corporation (which are also among the ten biggest companies
in the world) exemplify the institutional and corporate realities of globalization in the new world
order, then the borders between the US and Mexico, Israel and Palestine, and Afghanistan and
Pakistan speak to the geopolitical context wherein the era of globalization is still one where borders
matter.
Border studies (10.2), which is also taken up in this chapter, examines the establishment and
disestablishment of borders including the walls that literarily separate the US and Mexico. As
another major gateway to understanding the development and processes of globalization, border
studies concerns not only colonial borders but also regional, national, and continental borders.
Work in this area takes up and intersects with work in other areas of literary and cultural theory
including race and justice, especially human rights; and biopolitics, particularly surveillance studies.
Regardless of whether one chooses to describe “the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the birth of the Internet and related communication technologies, as well as the
consolidation of world markets, transnational corporations, nongovernmental organizations,
supranational media sociality, and international networks of finance, digital knowledge exchange,
crime and terror sometimes at the expense of statal actors, national sovereignties, and political
borders,”2 the beginnings of globalization or merely a sign of its intensification or changing character,
the early years of the post-Cold War era are an important to its consideration.
2
Christian Moraru, “Globalization,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 504.
GLOBALIZATION 285
Post-1989 globalization has been described variously as late globalization, accelerated

globalization, and contemporary globalization. Irrespective of how one terms it, it is also strong
globalization, as Christian Moraru points out, because “it is demonstrably much better marked than
ever before in people’s lives as well as in public consciousness.”3 While there are those, like James
Clifford, who point out that there are millions of people from across the globe who live in poverty
and are not aware of globalization, others would say that public consciousness of globalization is
not a requirement to being impacted by it. “Globalization,” writes Moraru, is “the multifaceted,
pluricentric, nonlinear, oftentimes contradictory process through which the world’s places, cultures,
and communities become more and more interconnected” by means of “a host of techno-economic,
political, and cultural forces.”4 It is also a process wherein global capital, politics, and technology
increasingly tend to work in consort to flatten differences and to move toward standardization and
universalization grounded in the logic of the market.
In this regard, the major sections in this chapter—postcolonial theory (10.1), border studies
(10.2), neoliberalism (10.3), translation (10.4), and world literature and theory (10.5)—provide
several different points of entry into this expansive area of contemporary literary and cultural
theory. The question today for many is not whether we live in an era of globalization, but rather
will we be able to survive it—a biopolitical question that will serve as a bridge to the concerns of
ecocriticism (11.0), the topic of our next chapter.
10.1 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

Postcolonial theory deals with the consequences of colonialism. It is concerned with the political,
economic, and cultural impact of colonialism both during its heyday and after former-colonial
nations have achieved independence. Sometimes the term postcolonial is hyphenated (post-colonial)
and is used to refer only to the historical period of independence, but not always. Also, while
strictly speaking the independence of the US from Britain via the American Revolutionary War
marks the beginning of the postcolonial period, because of the subsequent global political and
economic status of the US, it is generally not afforded postcolonial status in postcolonial theory.
Rather, given that the decolonization of the US resulted in the formation of political, economic, and
cultural power over other nations, specifically developing and newly independent ones, it is
described as neocolonial, not postcolonial. Whereas neocolonial nations such as the US are
characterized by a new form of imperialism (neoimperialism), postcolonial nations are often the
targets of the imperial ambitions of neocolonial nations.
Rather, postcolonial theory marks its origins from the dismantling of the British Empire,
beginning in 1947 and extending through 1965. During this period, India and Pakistan achieved
independence in 1947, Sri Lanka in 1948, and Ghana in 1957. Then, between 1960 and 1965,
many other states became independent, including British Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia and
Singapore, Nigeria, Tanganyika, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uganda. The formation of the British
Commonwealth (which became the Commonwealth of Nations) established a new political
formation in which many of these former colonies of Britain came to participate. Thus, the British
3
Moraru, “Globalization,” 504.
4
Moraru, “Globalization,” 503–4.
Commonwealth, which was formed in 1948, provided the impetus in the mid-1960s for the
beginnings of commonwealth studies (or commonwealth literary studies), a field where writers
from the former British colonies, particularly those who deal with the colonial encounter and its
aftermath, are the focus of scholarly study.
Related to commonwealth studies are fields of study concerned with all forms of double
consciousness, a term coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to characterize
African-American consciousness, one that is both American and Black. “It is a peculiar sensation,”
writes Du Bois, “this double-consciousness, this sensation of always looking at one’s self through
the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt
and pity.”5 W. Lawrence Hogue says that for Du Bois double consciousness is a “gift” of “second-
sense” wherein the binary logic of subordination is rejected in favor of a subjectivity that is neither
American nor Black but rather both. It is a double consciousness that Hogue describes as “accepting
as permanent the tension and the contradiction between the two equal terms.”6 In terms of
postcolonial theory, double consciousness refers to one’s capacity to live in two cultures at once:
one linked to life under colonialism and the other linked to life under postcolonialism. One of the
major theorists to address this topic was Frantz Fanon (whose work was referred to earlier, albeit
in the context of gay and lesbian theory).
Fanon, who studied under Lacan, wrote on the psychology of racism and colonialism. Born in
the former slave colony of Martinique, Fanon was also a student of Aimé Césaire, who was one of
the prime movers behind the négritude movement, one that firmly rejected Western stereotypes
regarding Black people and embraced a collective sense of Black-African identity. Fanon, however,
rejected négritude as an ideology that is unable to dislodge itself from colonial and racial ways of
thinking. Whereas négritude built its movement upon embracing négre, a derisive term for Black
people, Fanon finds it forever trapped in a dialectic (specifically, a Manichean logic, as described
below) wherein Black people are inferior to white people. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he
writes:
There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men.

There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at allcosts, the richness of their
thought, the equal value of their intellect.
How do we extricate ourselves?7
Recalling the work of Lacan on “the gaze,” Fanon writes on the effects of the colonial “gaze” on
Black people, a gaze emblazoned with white, European, colonial superiority. The problem,
according to Fanon, is that négritude cannot free itself from not only the European dialectic
regarding Black/white superiority noted above, but also the Hegelian and Marxist positions on
Africa noted earlier in the context of subaltern studies: in short, for Hegel, “Africa has no history,”
and for Marx, the British colonization of India was for the best.
5
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), 5th edition (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.,
1904), 3.
6
W. Lawrence Hogue, “Double Consciousness,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 460.
7
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 10.
GLOBALIZATION 287
Not only does Fanon take issue with this view of colonization and African history, but he wants
to provide an approach to the psychology of racism and colonization that frees itself from Hegelian
and Marxist dialectics—one which he further associates with Manichaeism, a religion that originated
in the Babylonia in the third century of the common era. Manichaeism generally contends that the
framework of world conflict and redemption hinges on the opposition of good and evil, which are
identified as light and darkness. Transported into the modern context, the West is associated with
light and good, and the rest of the world with darkness and evil. The charge of those on the side of
light and good is to civilize, tame, and conquer those on the side of darkness and evil. The problem
with négritude for Fanon is that it does not “extricate” itself from the general Manichean system of
thought—one that is symptomatic of colonial thought.
Still, Fanon, following Sartre in Black Orpheus (1948), accepts—albeit with some qualification—
the négritude movement as a necessary part of a greater dialectic. According to Sartre, “Négritude
appears to be the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical application
of white supremacy is the thesis: the position of Négritude as antithetical value is the moment of
the negativity.”8 For Sartre, this negative moment “serves to prepare the way for the synthesis or
the realization of the human society without racism,” and “Négritude is dedicated to its own
destruction.”9 But in his assessment of négritude, Sartre, according to Fanon, also failed to
acknowledge the affective appeal of the movement, dismissing it as a cognitive moment in the
adventure of the dialectic. In other words, the question of anti-Black racism is not containable to a
mere stage (Sartre’s response) nor is the solution found in négritude’s homogenized view of the
Black subject, which denies the reality that “there are many black men.”10
The work of Fanon, Sartre, Albert Memmi, and others from the 1950s and 1960s is representative
of Marxist writing from this period that dealt with the topic of colonialism, neocolonialism, and
anti-colonialism. Works like Sartre’s Colonialism and Neocolonialism (1964), for example, a
critique of French policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, were highly influential in what came
to be known in the 1980s as postcolonial theory. Whether this Marxist work from the 1950s and
1960s is regarded as first-wave postcolonial theory or just early postcolonial theory, it would come
to be significantly different from the approach of postcolonial theory in the 1980s and following.
After this early period, postcolonial theory became increasingly less dialectical, that is, there was
less of a tendency to approach the topic as one of colonizer and colonized, wherein a dialectics
involving a thesis (white supremacy/the colonizer), its antithesis (Black negativity/the colonized),
and their synthesis (a raceless society) is established as the basis of postcolonial critique as Sartre
does in Black Orpheus—and more of a tendency to view it from the perspective of discourse theory.
Here, the major influences are not Hegelian and Marxist thinking, but rather the discourse
formations of Foucault as adapted to the topic of colonialism and postcolonialism by Edward Said.
In Orientalism (1978), Said takes up the relationship between the West (or the Occident) and the
East (or the Orient). While his work is broadly in the tradition of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre, it
moves beyond their Marxist and Hegelian dialectics by drawing upon Foucault’s approach to history,
discourse, and power. “I have found it useful here,” writes Said, “to employ Foucault’s notion of a
8
Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus (1948), trans. Samuel Allen (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), 60.
9
Sartre, Black Orpheus, 60.
10
This line is adapted from “for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 136).
discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, to
identify Orientalism.”11 Said’s book traces the ways in which the West, particularly European culture,
has produced a particular discourse regarding the East in order to exert authority over it. Orientalism,
as discussed by Said, is not a specific place on the map, but rather a form of knowledge (or discourse
formation) that can be utilized to manage and control people. Writes Said, “without examining
Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by
which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively”12 after the Enlightenment, that is, in the
nineteenth century and twentieth centuries. In short, Said views Orientalism as a species of Manichean
thought, “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar
(Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).”13 One of the aims of Said’s
work is to help us to “unlearn” this relationship of absolute difference between the familiar and the
strange presented in European discourse, that is, to engage us in (following Raymond Williams) the
process of the “ ‘unlearning’ of ‘the inherent dominative mode.’ ”14
While Said is regarded by many as the originator of postcolonial theory and Orientalism one of
its foundational texts, the work of the subalterns, beginning with the first volume of Subaltern
Studies, which was published in 1982, was also formative to the field. In view of Said’s position on
Orientalism, the subaltern’s historical studies of non-Eurocentric alternatives to the histories
produced by the West might be regarded as key events in the process of unlearning the inherent
dominative mode of history. Spivak, whose criticisms of the work of the subalterns in “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” (1988) were discussed earlier, lays out a direction for postcolonial theory that
like Said is also heavily invested in the discourse of domination and the textual construction of
power. Still, if one wants to split poststructuralist hairs, whereas Said’s work on postcolonial theory
is more aligned with Foucault’s discursive formations, then Spivak’s is more aligned with Derrida’s
version of poststructuralism, namely, deconstruction. This is just another way of saying that
poststructuralist theory has a generative relationship with postcolonial theory. It is also another way
of saying that the subject and subjectivity comes to be an important topic in postcolonial theory in
the 1980s and thereafter.
Finally, two other concepts come to have an important role in postcolonial theory: hybridity and
mimicry. The former term, on the micro level, write Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and Rosa Freedman,
concerns the “study of the breaking up of racial, national, linguistic, or other identity binaries.”15
Hybridity reveals connections and influences that cross national borders and resists the
epistemological essentialism that locates knowledge as bounded by borders. On the macro level,
hybridity is “a way to analyze the impact of globalization, sometimes with direct connection to
‘reactive nationalisms or ethnicities.’ ” Homi Bhabha describes hybridity in The Location of Culture
(1994) as a “difference ‘within,’ a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality.”16 In terms
of postcolonial culture, Said, Spivak, and Bhabha all see hybridity as a way for writers to both
11
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 3.
12
Said, Orientalism, 3.
13
Said, Orientalism, 43.
14
Said, Orientalism, 28; citing Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), 376.
15
Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and Rosa Freedman, “Hybridity,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 521.
16
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 13.
GLOBALIZATION 289
understand as well as critique the West from a position that is both outside and inside. This so-
called “third space” of hybridity for Bhabha is, drawing from Lacan, “neither the one nor the
other,”17 a space that affords postcolonial writers a position both within their indigenous tradition
as well as one that is both inside and outside of the European tradition.
Moreover, Bhabha argues that the hybrid subject speaks from multiple locations. This is a form
of mimicry wherein the colonial subject engages in “a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and
discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power.”18 Bhabha calls this mimicry a
“sign of a double articulation”19—a phrasing that echoes the “double consciousness” of Du Bois.
Mimicry, however, is “also the sign of the inappropriate . . . a difference or recalcitrance which
coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an
immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary power.”20 In short, mimicry is
both a subversive force for the colonized subject because it radically destabilizes the “us/them”
binary of neocolonial discourses as well as a potential threat to them via increased levels of
surveillance.
10.2 BORDER STUDIES

“We all live our lives in terms of spaces organized around boundaries and borders,” wrote J. Hillis
Miller. There are
the boundaries of our bodies, separating inside from outside, but exposed to the outside and able
to be penetrated in various ways that are gender distinct, the walls of the various rooms in our
houses or apartments, the wall separating our living space from the outside, the edge of our land
if we own our house and the land it is on, the various geographical and topographical borders
we cross or do not cross when we go outside our houses: roads, rivers, shores, township, county,
city, state, or national borders, the border around the community with which we live, from
example, the sharp line drawn in Deer Isle, Maine, where I now live most of the year, between
those who are “from here,” and those who are “from away.” . . . Other borders can be adduced,
class distinctions, for example, that have great force in the US just because we deny that they
exist. We tend to claim that all US citizens are “middle class.” These many boundaries are so
internalized that we take them for granted. We live our lives in terms of them without thinking
much about it.21
For Miller, a “cascade of words” come to mind when the topic of boundaries and borders is
broached. These words include:
zone, edge, margin, frontier, horizon . . . barrier, wall (as in “the Berlin Wall,” “the Great
Wall of China,” “the Israeli–Palestinian Wall,” the 700-mile wall between the US and Mexico
17
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 125; Bhaba citing Lacan.
18
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.
19
20
21
J. Hillis Miller, “Boundaries in Beloved,” symploke– 15.1/2 (2007): 26.
that some Republican politicians want to build), front as in All’s Quiet on the Western Front or
“Popular Front,” partition, hedge, fence, pale (as in “That’s beyond the pale”), gate, door,
threshold, anteroom, foyer, borderline, borderland, in-between, boundary line, fault line, fissure,
rift, border zone, terminal, term, terme, barrier, barricade, demarcation, zone, meridian, limit.22
While the specific context of Miller’s comments is a reading of boundaries and borders in Toni
Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), his comments stage well the broader context of border studies—
and border theory.
“Events in the early 1990s,” writes Anssi Paasi, “gave a strong boost to border studies.”23
According to Paasi, this boost “was related to the removal of old states and borders, the rise of new
ones, the moving (and the ‘ethnicization’) of conflicts from state borders inside states, and the
related refugee problems.”24 By the late 1990s, the common refrain was that border studies are
“mushrooming, that new theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary views on borders are
needed.”25 This view resonated, claims Paasi, “with the invention of new keywords in the social
sciences, often related to globalization (space of flows, de/re-territorialization, mobility, hybridity,
post-modernity, neo-liberalism), which seemed to challenge the apparent fixity that had characterized
the world of border research during the Cold War period,” that is, the period from 1946 to 1991,
one situated between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But, as we have already encountered most of these keywords in other theoretical contexts (e.g.,
spaces of flows and de/re-territorialization in the work of Deleuze and Guattari; postmodernism has
arisen in several contexts including Jameson, Lyotard, and Baudrillard; hybridity in postcolonial
theory; and mobility in surveillance studies), an argument might be made that border studies has
been enhanced by the development of poststructuralism—a term that can be used to describe the
work of Deleuze, Guattari, Jameson, and Lyotard, and one that is closely associated with
developments in postcolonial theory and surveillance studies.
Still, in spite of growing interest, there is no “catch-all theory” of border studies. “A general
border theory,” comments Paasi, “seems unattainable, and even undesirable, for two reasons”:26
First, individual state borders are historically contingent and characterized by contextual features
and power relations. There can hardly be one grand theory that would be valid for all borders.27
. . . Second, current research in relational thinking treats bounded spaces generally as
politically regressive and suggests that territories should be seen as open networked or topological
spaces of relations.28
In short, approached through relational thinking, border studies is not concerned with specific
borders. Rather, it is concerned with the general role of state borders as products of modernity.
22
Miller, “Boundaries in Beloved,” 24.
23
Anssi Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” Political Geography 30 (2011): 62.
24
Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” 62.
25
26
27
28
GLOBALIZATION 291
Relational thinking is a kind of critique of borders, one wherein borders are both “lines that
surround spatial entities” as well as “lines that are crossed by all kinds of connections in the
‘topological’ world,” particularly connections regarding the economy.29 “Borders are never to be
found only in border areas,” comments Paasi, “but are also located in wider social practice/discourse
all around societies, and increasing in relation to global space.”30 This “open networked” or
“topological spaces of relations” approach to border studies has led some to reterm (and rethink)
the field as critical border studies—an approach that is attuned to developments in critical theory
and philosophy, particularly those associated with poststructuralism and biopolitics.
Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams have proposed an agenda for critical border studies. It
consists of three major areas for research: border epistemology, border ontology, and the space-time
of borders. First, in terms of border epistemology, critical border studies builds upon a poststructuralist
epistemology. Derrida, for example, has shown the ways in which borders are a key element of
knowledge in the West. However, as Parker and Vaughan-Williams remind us, “Western metaphysics
has been conditioned by borders that it struggles to uphold even as it averts its gaze from the
inevitably contingent, indeterminate character” of them.31 This contingency is for Parker and
Vaughan-Williams (following Derrida) “obscured by violence that underpins and is expressed in the
border.”32 For them, the idea of borders is epistemologically seductive. It is “a craving for
the distinctions of borders, for the sense of certainty, comfort and security that they offer.”33 One
of the tasks of critical border studies is to ask whether alternate epistemologies are possible, that is,
epistemologies that avoid the seduction of the border. It also asks if alternative topologies are
available that avoid the binary oppositions of inside/outside border-thinking. Among the alternate
non-binary topologies are ones marked by margins and thresholds—rather than boundaries and
borders. Finally, border epistemology asks what it feels like to exist as a border in the way that
migrants who are not welcome feel. This latter epistemological shift in border studies is one from
geopolitics to biopolitics.
Second, in terms of border ontology, critical border studies examines the ways in which “the
border” becomes a foundational element in an imagined world. This ontological question then
turns to the ways in which borders as foundations are “linked to violence, force, and the deployment
of a logic of exceptionalism à la Giorgio Agamben.”34 Critical border studies asks is it “possible to
identify a new non- or de-territorial nomos [viz., body of law] of the earth à la Carl Schmitt?”35 For
critical border studies, the biopolitics of Agamben and Schmitt afford opportunities to examine
how the border as a foundational, ontological element of an imagined world is produced and
reproduced. It also provides an opportunity to deploy new ontologies to reflect the changing and
indeterminate nature of borders in critical border studies. Unlike the “older” ontologies of borders
29
30
31
Noel Parker, Nick Vaughan-Williams, et al., “Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics
14 (2009): 584. While a total of seventeen individuals contributed to this article, only Parker and Vaughan-Williams are
listed by name on the title page—the rest are cited in a footnote.
32
Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand?” 584.
33
34
35
Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand?” 585. The reference here is to Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth
in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2001).
and boundaries, these “newer” ontologies utilize more fluid and less determinate poststructural
concepts such as the threshold (or, soglia), the margin, and the event. Deployment of alternative
ontologies is one of the major ways in which critical border studies is fundamentally different from
border studies.
Third, and finally, in terms of the space-time of borders, critical border studies asks how different
political and ethical possibilities are opened or closed through alternative border epistemologies
and ontologies. Issues here include what does it mean to transgress a border given alternative
border epistemologies and ontologies? Does “transgressing” a border now mean that “transgression
produce[s] the very border that is seemingly transgressed?”36 Or does it ethically and politically
mean something else? Also, alternative border epistemologies and ontologies ask us to reconsider
core–margin relations in a way that can change the strategic possibilities and potential of marginality.
In sum, if Miller is right that “We all live our lives in terms of spaces organized around boundaries
and borders,” then critical border studies asks, through its alternative epistemologies, ontologies,
and politics, nothing less than for us to reconsider life. These biopolitical questions are only
intensified in practices characterized by globalization, imperialism, and (as we shall see in the next
section), neoliberalism. According to Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, “the study of
territorial, geophysical, political and cultural borders today has become a primary, abiding and
growing interest across scholarly disciplines, and is related to changing scholarly approaches to
such key research subjects and objects as the state, nation, sovereignty, citizenship, migration and
the overarching forces and practices of globalization.”37 Moreover, if we follow Paasi, and further
link globalization to the space of flows, de/re-territorialization, mobility, hybridity, postmodernity,
and neoliberalism, then border studies draws upon much of the contemporary literary and cultural
theory that has been discussed earlier under the chapter heading of biopolitics. In particular, critical
border studies might be viewed as an outgrowth of key developments in poststructuralism and
biopolitics. Unlike first-generation border studies, which “centered on a localized, particularistic
and territorially focused notion of borders,”38 critical border studies is much more de-centered and
de-territorialized. Moreover, in critical border studies (rather than critical border theory), emphasis
is less on developing a general theory of borders than on utilizing concepts from areas of
contemporary literary and cultural theory (such as poststructuralism, biopolitics, and postcolonial
theory) to re-examine and rethink well-established categories from geography and the social
sciences. These categories include “region, place, space, territory, agency and power” as well as
“social practices such as politics, governance and economics” and “cultural processes such as
ethnicity or national socialization (education).”39
10.3 NEOLIBERALISM
Neoliberalism, the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, is a broadly used term that
refers to an economic and political project that rose to prominence in the 1980s and continues to
36
37
Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, “Borders and Border Studies,” in A Companion to Border Studies, eds. Thomas
M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 2.
38
Wilson and Donnan, “Borders and Border Studies,” 8.
39
Anssi Paasi, “Generations and the ‘Development’ of Border Studies,” Geopolitics 10 (2005): 670.
GLOBALIZATION 293
the present. Use of the term, though, can be confusing because it was coined in post-World War I
Germany by the Freiburg School; is sometimes associated with Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins,
and the 1930s London School of Economics; is at other times associated with the work of Milton
Friedman and the emergence of the Chicago School of economics in the 1960s; and is at still other
times associated with the neoliberalismo of Latin American pro-market economists of the 1970s.
Some even trace the foundations of neoliberalism to eighteenth-century thought—alternately, to
the French Physiocrat’s laissez-faire economics, to the classical (laissez-faire and free market)
economics of Adam Smith, or even to the social and political philosophy of Jeremy Bentham.
Critics of the term sometimes point to its contested genealogy as evidence for dismissing it wholesale.
The so-called “golden age of controlled capitalism” (1945–75) preceded the emergence of the
neoliberal project. It was inspired by the economic and political thought of John Maynard Keynes
who advocated for the market but not the free market. Keynes believed that public spending by the
government should be increased during economic recessions to spur growth, and decreased during
periods of growth to keep inflation down. This project was scrapped during the first wave of
neoliberalism in the 1980s by US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, both of whom shared the neoliberal belief that government is inefficient and strove to
end the Keynesian era of “big government.” The second wave of neoliberalism in the 1990s was
forwarded by the market globalism of US President William “Bill” Clinton and the Third Way of
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, both of whom continued the neoconservative hyper-patriotism,
militarism, neglect of the environment, and rejection of multiculturalism of first-wave neoliberalism.
Also, both waves were marked by increasing privatization, strengthening of private property rights,
market deregulation, corporate mergers and takeovers, and decreasing state intervention and
support for social provisions and public goods.
The ideology of neoliberalism champions consumerism, global trading, and international free
markets, all aimed at producing a better world. Neoliberal governance advocates individualism (or
radical self-interest), competition, decentralization, strategic plans, cost-benefit analyses, outcomes
management, and performance-based funding. Its proponents believe that the world is structured
by equations—and that it is everyone’s job to maximize their economic, social, and political
positions through mastery of these equations. Also, its proponents believe that everything is part of
a market, and if it is not, “such as land, water, education, health care, social security, and
environmental pollution,” as David Harvey points out in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005),
then these markets must be created, by the state, if necessary.40 Moreover, the neoliberal project
argues that public value is determined by the market. The promise of neoliberalism, says Maurizio
Lazzarato in The Making of the Indebted Man (2012), was that it would allow everyone the
opportunity to be a shareholder, an owner, and an entrepreneur.41 But for Lazzarato, however,
neoliberalism’s “entrepreneurial man” soon gave way to the “indebted man,” who now dominates
the global economic landscape.
Since the late 1970s, there has been a wide-ranging critique of neoliberalism. In his 1978–9
lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault explained how “neo-liberals,” at least in the US
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
40
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2011), trans. Joshua David
41
Jordan (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012), 9.

anyway, “try to apply economic analysis to a series of objects, to domains of behavior or conduct
which were not market forms of behavior or conduct; they attempt to apply economic analysis to
marriage, the education of children, and criminality, for example.”42 Henry Giroux, one of the most
outspoken critics of the neoliberal project, describes it in The Terror of Neoliberalism (2004) as
an ideology and politics buoyed by the spirit of a market fundamentalism that subordinates the
art of democratic politics to the rapacious laws of a market economy that expands its reach to
include all aspects of social life within the dictates and values of market-driven society. More
important, it is an economic and implicitly cultural theory—a historical and socially constructed
ideology that needs to be made visible, critically engaged, and shaken from the stranglehold of
power it currently exercises over most of the commanding institutions of national and global
life. As such, neoliberalism makes it difficult for many people either to imagine a notion of
individual and social agency necessary for reclaiming a substantive democracy or to theorize the
economic, cultural, and political institutions necessary for a viable global public sphere in which
public institutions, spaces, and goods become valued as part of a larger democratic struggle for
a sustainable future and the downward distribution of wealth, resources, and power.43
And William Davies describes it in The Happiness Industry (2015) as a “depressive-competitive

disorder” that “arises because the injunction to achieve a higher utility score—be that measured in
money or physical symptoms—becomes privatized.”44 For him, the authority in neoliberalism
“consists simply in measuring, rating, comparing and contrasting the strong and the weak without
judgment, showing the weak how much stronger they might be, and confirming to the strong that
they are winning, at least for the time being.”45
The eviscerating consequences of the neoliberal imperatives for corporate managerialism,
instrumentalism, rationalization, and austerity in social, political, and educational policy and
practice have been widely discussed. Harvey’s Brief History surveys its economic and political
dangers, while Giroux’s The Terror of Neoliberalism links it to the rise of authoritarianism,
militarism, and the eclipse of democracy and democratic values. Others, like Jeffrey Di Leo in
Higher Education under Late Capitalism (2017), show how academic identity has been recalibrated
by the neoliberal project, and in Corporate Humanities in Higher Education (2014) how the
humanities have been reshaped by it. Moreover, in Catastrophe and Higher Education (2020), Di
Leo argues that
the future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory. Without the aid of diverse and
critical forms of theory, higher education is always already vulnerable to the formidable and
destructive forces of economic neoliberalism. Left to its own designs, these destructive forces
will continue to eat away at the educational center of academe and replace it with a vocational
42
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 267–8.
43
Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm,
2004), xxii.
44
William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (London: Verso,
2015), 179.
45
Davies, The Happiness Industry, 179.
GLOBALIZATION 295
training center. And once the educational center of higher education is replaced by this lower
form of education, the argument for a bachelor’s degree rather a training certificate becomes
increasingly more difficult to make especially if the immediate earning potential of the certificate
is greater than the bachelor’s degree. In sum, higher education under neoliberalism is an
educational catastrophe. Higher education under neoliberalism becomes more and more a race
between education and catastrophe.46
Finally, there is also a growing body of work that explores its implications for contemporary culture
and literature, with David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) providing a fine starting
point for the cultural consequences of neoliberalism. In short, neoliberalism is a broad door through
which a dominant economic and political project has entered into the study of literature and
culture. Areas of contemporary literary and cultural theory where the logic of neoliberalism is often
a conceptual centerpiece of analysis and critique include biopolitics and ecocriticism (11.0). Finally,
it should be noted that postcritique (15.4)—one of a variety of forms of antitheory (15.0) that will
be discussed later—utilizes a defense of neoliberalism in its rejection of critique—and theory.
10.4 TRANSLATION
In 1978, André Lefevere proposed translation studies as the name of a discipline concerning “the
problems raised by the production and description of translations.”47 At the time, “there seemed to be
little interest in the study of translation,” comments Susan Bassnett.48 “Indeed,” she continues, “the
notion of an independent field, some would say discipline in its own right, focusing on the theory and
practice of translation would have been viewed with astonishment in the academic world.”49 However,
by the early 1990s, “which saw the collapse of communism and the break-up of the former Soviet
Union, China opening her doors to the world, and the end of apartheid in South Africa,” the situation
of translation studies changed significantly. During the 1990s, translation studies “came into its own,”
states Bassnett, “for this proved to be the decade of global expansion.”50 “Once perceived as a marginal
activity,” she continues, “translation began to be seen as a fundamental act of human exchange.”51
For Bassnett, the rise of translation studies can be linked to both the digital media revolution and
processes of globalization in the 1990s:
Not only has it become important to access more of the world through the information
revolution, but it has become urgently important to understand more about one’s own point of
departure. For globalization has its antithesis, as has been demonstrated by world-wide renewal
of interest in cultural origins and in exploring questions of identity. Translation has a crucial role
to play in aiding understanding of an increasingly fragmentary world.52
46
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Catastrophe and Higher Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities (Cham,
Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 241.
47
Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Translation Studies, 1st edition (London: Metheun, 1980), 1.
48
Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition (London: Routledge, 2014), 1.
49
Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 1.
50
51
52
But as interest in translation and translators grew in the 1990s, so too did two different images of
the field.
On one side, there was the image of the translator as a “force of good, a creative artist who
ensures the survival of writing across time and space, an intercultural mediator and interpreter, a
figure whose importance to the continuity and diffusion of culture is immeasurable.”53 On this
view, writes Jeffrey Di Leo, our “commitment to translation is a good barometer of our commitment
to the global community and international affairs.”54 For Di Leo, “it is unreasonable, even in an
increasingly global community, to expect people to master multiple languages and cultures as a
means of gaining an understanding of the world outside of one’s language or languages.”55 However,
asks Di Leo, “What does it say then about our commitment to global understanding and multicultural
awareness when we learn that only 3 percent of books published in the U.S. are translations?”56 For
Di Leo, this figure—3 percent—is the real indicator of our commitment to global relations and
world literature.
On the other side, however, there is the image of the translation as “a highly suspect activity, one
in which an inequality of power relations (inequalities of economics, politics, gender and geography)
is reflected in the mechanics of textual production.”57 For Spivak and other postcolonial theorists,
for example, translation has been used as “an instrument of colonial domination, a means of
depriving the colonized people of a voice.”58 Translation, according to the colonial model, is one of
the ways that the dominant culture of the colonizer reinforces its hegemonic power over the
dominated culture of the colonized. As Mahasweta Sengupta puts it, “a cursory review of what sells
in the West as representative of India and its culture provides ample proof of the binding power of
representation; we remain trapped in the cultural stereotypes created and nurtured through
translated texts.”59 Consequently, for Anuradha Dingwaney, the translation process in the colonial
(and neocolonial) model entails a certain degree of violence, particularly when the colonized culture
is regarded as the “other.”60
One of the consequences of the postcolonial position on translation is a rethinking of the
relationship between the source text (viz., the “original” text) and the target text (viz., the
“translation”). Whereas some translation theorists contend that there is an unequal relationship
between the source text and the target text, the postcolonial position on translation contends that
the relationship is one of equality. That is to say, the original text and the source text are equally
the products of the creativity of the writer of the original and its translator. For Bhabha, this
equality changes the very meaning of translation. Whereas formerly it referred to a process involving
(or transaction between) a source text and a target text (or, an original language and a translated
language), now translation is a metaphor for the increasing migration of people in our globalized
world. For Bhabha, translation is connected to the third-space of hybridity discussed earlier:
53
54
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “The Three Percent,” in The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print (Huntsville:
Texas Review Press, 2019), 47.
55
Di Leo, “The Three Percent,” 47.
56
Di Leo, “The Three Percent,” 47.
57
58
59
Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 5; Sengupta cited by Bassnett.
60
Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 5; Dingwaney cited by Bassnett.
GLOBALIZATION 297
[T]he theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing
an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of
cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of hybridity. To that end we should remember
that it is the “inter”—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space—that
carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national,
anti-nationalist histories of the “people.” And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the
politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.61
Thus, for Bhabha, translation—as an exploration of the Third Space—is a subversive force for the
colonized subject because it radically destabilizes the source/target text binary of the colonial
position on translation. Moreover, it is also a potential threat to neocolonialism as it is a key part
of the process of “envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people.’ ”
The postcolonial approach to translation might be described as dialogical in that it “happens in
a space that belongs to neither source nor target absolutely.”62 Still, it is but one of a number of
fundamentally different approaches to translation. Jakobson, for example, classifies translation into
three types: rewording (or intralingual translation) is an interpretation of verbal signs by other signs
of the same language; translation proper (or interlingual translation) is the interpretation of verbal
signs by some other language; and transmutation (or intersemiotic translation) is an interpretation
of verbal signs by nonverbal signs (for example, painting or music).63
There is also the notion of translatability, which Benjamin describes as “an essential quality of
certain works, which is not to say that it is essential for the works themselves that they be translated;
it means, rather, that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its
translatability.”64 Derrida, then taking his cue from Benjamin, wonders if there is a text that remains
“intact and virgin in spite of the labor of translation.”65 This question of what is “the intangible, the
untouchable” in translation is one that Derrida says “fascinates and orients the work of the
translator.”66 Which, finally, brings us to the question of the untranslatable, that is to say, what, if
anything, resists translation? In The Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), there are entries on a
wide range of philosophical, literary, and political terms that arguably resist translation.67 It is at this
point that the conditions of possibility of translation, in their epistemological, ethical, and global
senses, come to the fore. As to the latter, Brian O’Keeffe wonders to what extent
translation enables the forces of globalization (isn’t the supreme triumph of translation the fact
we are all suborned by the international language of finance?) or offers a means to resist
61
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 38–9.
62
63
Roman Jakobson, “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959), in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays
from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 145.
64
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923), trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume
1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 254.
65
Jacques Derrida, “Des tours de Babel” (1985), trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1, eds.
Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 214.
66
Derrida, “Des tours de Babel,” 214.
67
Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, eds., The Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical
Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
(can acts of deliberate untranslatability glitch and disrupt the smooth activities of
internationalization?).68
The notion of untranslatability being a force for or against globalization provides a glimpse of the
ways in which the major theoretical concepts of translation are now intertwined with other
theoretical concepts such as globe, planet, and world. As noted earlier, it is entirely another matter
whether the spread of translation across the globe is a good thing—or not.
10.5 WORLD LITERATURE AND THEORY

“I realize more and more that poetry is a common property of mankind,” said Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, “and that it appears everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men.”69
However, he warns Germans that if they do not look at poetry produced outside of Germany, they
risk becoming arrogant. “Therefore,” he continues, “I like to look around in foreign nations and
advise everyone to do the same on his part.”70 “National literature means little these days; the
epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must endeavor to hasten its coming.”71 With
these remarks in 1827 to his young disciple, Johann Peter Eckermann, Goethe coins the term world
literature, which in German is Weltliterature. However, the question of the arrival of the “epoch of
world literature” remains a topic of vibrant debate.
According to David Damrosch, world literature is often regarded in one or more of three ways:
(1) World Literature is an Established Body of Classics—a classic is a work that not only has
foundational and transcendent value, but also often imperial value. These classics often only
refer to ancient Greek and Roman literature.
(2) World Literature is an Evolving Body of Masterpieces—a masterpiece is a work from any time
period that is nearly equivalent in value to the classics. These masterpieces include ancient
Greek and Roman literature and sometimes are described as comprising a “great
conversation.”
(3) World Literature is Multiple Windows on the World—these windows into foreign worlds may
or may not be masterpieces, and may or may not be visibly linked to each other (as they are
in a “great conversation”).72
While Goethe holds all three conceptions of world literature, Damrosch offers the following
refinement to them: “World literature is a mode of circulation and of reading—this mode is applicable
to both individual works and bodies of works. This mode of circulation and reading is available for
classics, masterpieces, and new discoveries.”73
However, for Damrosch, world literature is something different from global literature, which he
defines as texts “that might be read solely in airline terminals, unaffected by any specific context
68
Brian O’Keeffe, “Translation,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 238; my emphasis.
69
J. P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, ed. Hans Kohn, trans. Gisela C. O’Brien (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964), 94.
70
Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 94.
71
Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 94.
72
David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 15.
73
Damrosch, What is World Literature? 5.
GLOBALIZATION 299
whatever.”74 This distinction is meant to emphasize the import of the “shaping force of local
contexts” on world literature. Nevertheless, for Damrosch, even airport bookstores and their
customers should be linked to specific contexts. “The airport bookstore is stocked by buyers who
operate first and foremost within a national context and its distribution system,” comments
Damrosch, “and the bookstore’s customers, mostly traveling to or from home, continue to read in
ways profoundly shaped by home-country norms.”75
On the one hand, Damrosch does not want world literature to “disintegrate into the conflicting
multiplicity of separate national traditions”; on the other hand, he does not want it to “be swallowed
up in the white noise that Janet Abu-Lughod has called ‘global babble.’ ”76 The latter would make it
more like an “infinite, ungraspable canon of works” than a finite, graspable one. But contra
Damrosch, the increasing impact of globalization and neoliberalism on book production and
distribution worldwide begs the question of whether world literature is not already global literature.
Consider, for example, that one in four books sold worldwide is the product of one company,
Penguin Random House. Given their disproportionately large global-market share, even if the
airport bookstore is stocked by local buyers and its patrons bring with them their home-country
purchasing norms, the majority of books available for purchase in airports are the products of
multinational corporations.
Today, Penguin Random House has more than 250 imprints and brands on six continents. It
publishes 70,000 digital and 15,000 print titles annually and has more than 100,000 eBooks available
worldwide. The company, which employs 10,615 people, is the world’s largest trade book publisher.
But Penguin Random House is only a small portion of Bertelsmann, a much larger international
media company that operates in fifty countries with divisions in broadcasting (RTL Group), magazine
publishing (Gruner + Jahr), music (BMG), service provider (Arvato), education (Bertelsmann
education Group), investment (Bertelsmann Investments), and printing (Bertelsmann Printing
Group) in addition to Penguin Random House, its book publishing division. From the perspective of
neoliberalism, the globalization of the book industry (and, by extension, world literature) is one of
increasing corporate hegemony and decreasing literature and language differentiation.
But if Damrosch’s approach to world literature aims to avoid being “swallowed up” by “global
babble,” others are taking the opposite approach. Namely, they are embracing “world” and its
cognate terms such as “planet,” “earth,” and “globe” in an effort to better understand the “worlding”
not only of literature but also areas ranging from philosophy, history, and art to architecture,
communication, and biology. In fact, Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru argue that “Disciplines
from literary-cultural criticism and cybernetics to environmental studies and economics have been
undergoing of late a spectacular and complex reorientation, the result of which is the incremental
if still contentious recentering of entire fields, epistemologies, methodologies, and vocabularies on
‘world’ and its prefixed and suffixed brethren.”77 For them, this means that two objectives are being
pursued: (1) Describing and Theorizing the World—the objective here is to offer new descriptions
and theorizations that respond to the contemporary crises of the surrounding, empirical world;
74
75
76
77
Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru, “Introduction: World Theory in the New Millenium,” in The Bloomsbury
Handbook of World Theory, eds. Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 1.
and, (2) The Worlding of the Disciplines—the objective here is to deploy new descriptions and
theorizations of the world to rethink the work done across disciplines.
From the perspective of world theory, the question of whether or not world literature is
“swallowed up” by “global babble” becomes a matter of how one theorizes world, worlding, and
worldliness—and how this theorization potentially reframes world literature. World theory often
entails a paradigm shift because of its potential to reframe entire disciplines and their intellectual
problematics. So, for example, in the case of worlding publishing, Di Leo argues that “the world
from the perspective of the publishing industry is not found on a map or by the membership in the
United Nations.”78 “Rather,” he concludes, “the world for the publishing industry is found on a
financial table, or, more bluntly, is a financial table.”79
In terms of Goethe, however, the world is not a financial table but is rather a geographical scope
that indicates the potential of literary production. Again, he is looking to world as a way for
literature to escape from national and linguistic boundaries (or borders) as well as from the limits
of local necessity. But as we know already from critical border studies, worlding as globalization can
bring to the fore many other considerations regarding the worlding of literature such as the space
of flows, de/re-territorialization, mobility, hybridity, postmodernity, and neoliberalism. Moreover,
from the perspective of world theory, each of these considerations has the potential to radically
alter the epistemology, ontology, and space-time of world literature. To bracket and not consider
them because of their potential to provide an “infinite, ungraspable canon of works” in the name
of world literature rather than a finite, graspable one is to bury one’s head in the ground of
contemporary literary and cultural theory. That is to say, globalization does not go away as a
concern for world literature just because it greatly complicates it. And while systems theory (12.3)
and computational analysis offers ways to deal with the complexities of globalization with respect
to literature, there are others including biopolitics and ecocriticism (11.0).
While ecocriticism will be taken up in the next chapter, the connection between biopolitics and
world theory can be established through Heidegger’s efforts to rethink the relationship between
world (Welt) and earth (Erde). According to Heidegger, the Western tradition regards the world as
the opposite of the earth. In this tradition, writes William Spanos, “especially since the third
(anthropological) phase bearing witness to the ascendency of man (Anthropos) as sovereign over all
he surveys, the earth, to oversimplify, has come to be seen as raw material to be shaped by man as
maker (homo faber).”80 In “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), Heidegger says that
during this anthropological phase, humans have reduced the earth to a standing- or disposable-
reserve (Bestand).81 According to Spanos, this “worlding of the earth” by Heidegger also renders
humans disposable and is the genealogical origin of the biopolitics of Foucault, Agamben, and
others. For Spanos, biopolitics is “an initiative of the worlding process that, as Agamben has put it,
is culminating in the reduction of human life (bios) to bare life (nuda vida), life that can be killed
without the killing be called murder.”82
78
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “Worlding Publishing,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory, 381.
79
Di Leo, “Worlding Publishing,” 381.
80
William Spanos, “Worldhood,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 739.
81
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper
& Row, 1977), 298.
82
Spanos, “Worldhood,” 740.
GLOBALIZATION 301
Consequently, the genealogy of world via biopolitics brings very different questions to bear on
world literature from one that seeks to avoid the complexities of globalization. In sum, as world
theory aims to develop new descriptions and theorizations that respond to the contemporary crises
of the surrounding, empirical world, it also encourages the development of new descriptions and
theorizations of world literature.
302
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ecocriticism
11.0 INTRODUCTION
Ecocriticism is an abbreviation for ecological literary criticism. It can be traced back to the late
1970s, where it was coined by William Rueckert in “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in
Ecocriticism” (1978). However, it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that it began to be
used with some frequency to refer to an interdisciplinary field in literary and cultural studies.
Cheryll Glotfelty is credited as reviving the term in 1989 as an alternative to a domain within
literary and cultural studies that was formerly referred to as the study of nature writing.
Ecocriticism, or, alternately, green theory, might be regarded as concerned with the following:
(1) The Environmental Imagination—ecocriticism analyzes the role that the natural environment
plays in the imagination of a cultural community at a specific historical moment;
(2) The Concept of Nature—ecocriticism examines how the concept of “nature” is defined;
(3) The Value of Nature—ecocriticism asks what are the values that are assigned to nature or
denied it and why;
(4) The Relationship between Humans and Nature—ecocriticism explores the way in which the
relationship between humans and nature is envisioned;
(5) Literary Genres—ecocriticism investigates how nature is used literally or metaphorically in
certain literary or aesthetic genres and tropes. It also explores the assumptions about nature
that underlie these genres and tropes; and,
(6) Environmental Activism—ecocriticism intervenes in current social, political, and economic
debates surrounding environmental pollution and preservation.1
Moreover, though the terms ecocriticism and green theory are often used interchangeably, some use
the former term in a more narrow sense to refer only to the study of literature and nature; and the
latter term in a wider sense to refer not only to the study of literature, but also art, film, music,
politics, and philosophy in relation to nature. In addition, it might be noted that ecocriticism is the
preferred term in the US, whereas green theory is more often used in the UK.
When Rueckert invented the term ecocriticism, though he clearly had the more narrow notion
in mind (literature and nature), he nevertheless aimed to treat literature as nature. The move from
and to as thereby broadened the study of literature by opening it up to the entire biosphere, that is,
1
Ursula Heise, “Science and Ecocriticism,” American Book Review 18.5 (1997): 4.
303
the entire complex of planetary life (bios). “Poems,” writes Rueckert, “are green plants among us.”2
As plants, poems
arrest the energy on its path to entropy and in doing so, not only raise matter from lower to
higher order, but help to create a self-perpetuating and evolving system. That is, they help
to create creativity and community, and when their energy is released and flows out into others,
to again raise matter from lower to higher order (to use one of the most common descriptions
of what culture is).3
This approach is one that applies the terminology of environmentalism to literature in metaphorical
ways. Here, writes Ursula Heise,
notions such as ecology, ecosystem, ecological balance, energy, resources, and scarcity have been
transferred to texts conceived of as systems with an internal logic that, when activated by the
reader, reveals the dynamic coexistence of diverse components and the text’s overall evolutionary,
negentropic thrust.4
For Heise, applications of the terminology of environmentalism to literature are problematic

because “they tend not only [to] revive the obsolete metaphor of the literary text as biological
organism, but also to reintroduce, by way of nonliterary terminology, literary visions of nature as
inherently creative, harmonious, and peaceful.”5 However, for Heise and many others, this does
not mean that we should not establish a relationship between literature and nature, but rather that
a more antagonistic relationship is needed.
One place to view such antagonistic relationships is in the couplings of the prefix eco- with other
areas of literary and cultural theory. For example, two areas that have been long coupled with
ecological theory and criticism are feminist theory (ecofeminism) and critical race theory
(environmental racism). In fact, associating the exploitation of the environment with sexism and
racism precedes even Rueckert’s coinage of ecocriticism. In 1974, for example, Sheila Collins
argued that “Racism, sexism, class exploitation, and ecological destruction are four interlocking
pillars upon which the structure of patriarchy rests.”6
More recently, queer theory has been paired with environmental studies, with Robert Azzarello
pointing out that both “articulate a profound interest in the ‘natural.’ ”7 And postcolonial theory
has been studied in connection with literatures of the environment, which Elizabeth DeLoughrey
and George Handley connect to the work of Edward Said, who “helps us to see that to speak of
postcolonial ecology is to foreground a spatial imagination made possible by the experience of
2
William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978), in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks
in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 111.
3
Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 111.
4
Heise, “Science and Ecocriticism,” 6.
5
Heise, “Science and Ecocriticism,” 6.
6
Sheila Collins, A Different Heaven and Earth: A Feminist Perspective on Religion (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press,
1974), 161.
7
Robert Azzarello, “Unnatural Predators: Queer Theory Meets Environmental Studies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in
Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 138.
ECOCRITICISM 305
place.”8 Postcolonial ecology here reminds us that ecological considerations can—and perhaps also
should—be linked to the concept of place, which DeLoughrey and Handley say has
infinite meanings and morphologies: it might be defined geographically, in terms of the expansion
of empire; environmentally, in terms of wilderness and urban settings; genealogically, in linking
communal ancestry to land; as well as phenomenologically, connecting body to place . . . Place
encodes time, suggesting that histories embedded in land and sea have always provided vital and
dynamic methodologies for understanding the transformative impact of empire and the
anticolonial epistemologies it tries to suppress.
Geocriticism (11.4), the area of literary and cultural theory that focuses on the relations between
space, place, and literature, is discussed in this chapter as a subarea of ecocritical thought; and blue
humanities (11.5), the area of literary and cultural theory that focuses on the relations between
literature and water, including its places such as the rivers, seas, and oceans, is also explored here
as a subarea of the general study of literature and the environment.
But blue humanities, with its focus on the places of water on the earth, can also be regarded as a
part of a broader conversation regarding the environment and the humanities in general. This field,
called environmental humanities, encompasses at its core ecocriticism, environmental history, and
environmental philosophy. Nevertheless, as one extends the interdisciplinary matrix of
environmental humanities, areas such as cultural geography, environmental anthropology, gender
studies, political science, religious studies, and others take on increasing significance. According to
Heise, environmental humanities focuses on:
(1) The Anthropocene—environmental humanities is concerned with the relationship of
humanism, posthumanism, and multispecies theory to the Anthropocene, a geological epoch
reflected in the notion of humans as the main drivers of the ecology of the earth;
(2) Justice and Ecological Change—environmental humanities explores the tension-fraught
intersection between the study of global ecological change and research on cultural
difference, socioeconomic inequality, environmental justice and injustice, and geopolitical
power struggles; and,
(3) Narrative and Ecology—environmental humanities examines the role that narratives of
decline, progress and change play in current accounts of ecological pasts and futures.9
While the move from ecocriticism (and green theory) to environmental humanities might seems far
removed from the Rueckert notion of poems as green plants, the addition of areas such as the
Anthropocene (11.3) and critical climate change (11.2) to ecocritical theory perhaps reflects a
theoretical shift in focus from poems as living green plants to poems as dying green plants. Critical
climate change, an area of literary and cultural theory that combines the work of environmental
humanities with critical theory asks whether extant theory is even capable of addressing an issue
such as climate change. At its most extreme, critical climate change offers that nothing in ecocriticism,
8
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, “Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth,” in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures
of the Environment, eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
9
Ursula Heise, “Environmental Humanities,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 471.
environmental history, and environmental philosophy has prepared us to address climate change—
and what is called for are new philosophies and theories that can rise to the challenge.
At a more modest level, ecocritical theory today draws upon a broad range of extant literary and
cultural theory in its quest to fulfill its aims. In addition to those areas already mentioned—postcolonial
theory (postcolonial ecology), queer theory (queer ecologies), feminist theory (ecofeminism), and race
theory (environmental racism)—there is also work that combines ecocriticism with phenomenology
(ecophenomenology), semiotics (biosemiotics), Marxism, poststructuralism, biopolitics, posthumanism,
materialism (13.2), and object-oriented ontology (15.3), among others.
11.1 GREEN THEORY

Green theory is a very large and diverse area of literary and cultural theory. When combined with
environmental humanities, it moves well beyond the mere study of nature writing. But it should be
noted that green theory does not leave it entirely behind as there is still a large subset of ecocriticism
devoted to the study of nature writing (viz., nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural
environment), which now also includes ecopoetry (viz., poetry with a strong ecological emphasis or
message), ecocomposition (viz., an approach to writing instruction using concepts from ecology),
ecobiography (viz., the representation of a human subjects’ entwinement with their environment),
phytography (viz., writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (viz., the study of nonhuman
poetic forms), among others. In this area of green theory, works such as Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden (1854) and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac (1949) are critically explored for the
ways in which the relationship between humans and nature is envisioned.
Leopold, for example, believed that the emerging conservation movement of his day was the
beginning of a societal affirmation of a land ethic that “enlarges the boundaries of the community
to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”10 According to Leopold,
“There is as yet no land ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants that
grow on it.”11 A pioneer in the field of environmental ethics and wildlife conservation, Leopold’s
work draws a straight line from nature writing to the environmental activism of green theory.
But work like Leopold’s, which deals with “man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants
that grow on it,” might also be called upon to point to some of the tensions between green theory
and some of the literary and cultural theories discussed thus far. In the case of traditional Marxism,
for example, Howard Parsons points out in Marx and Engels on Ecology (1977) that
Marx, Engels, and Marxism, generally have been criticized for certain alleged positions on
ecological matters: (1) they have pitted man against nature; (2) they have anthropocentrically
denied the values of external nature; (3) they have overstressed the conflicts in nature and have
understressed its harmony; and (4) they have denied basic human values.12
10
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949) (New York: Ballantine, 1974), 239.
11
Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 238.
12
Howard L. Parsons, ed., Marx and Engels on Ecology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 35.
ECOCRITICISM 307
These criticisms are bolstered by other claims such as “nature is man’s inorganic body”13 and “the
purely natural material in which no human labor is objectified . . . has no value.”14 The conclusion
that some draw from this is that an ecological ethic is not possible in traditional Marxism. Still,
others debate this and postulate ways for Marxism to become a viable form of ecotheory.
This general pattern occurs as well with other areas of literary and cultural theory, wherein at
first green theory appears to be incompatible with another area of theory (say, for example,
feminism), but then after some adjustments within the area of theory, it appears to be—if not
becomes—compatible. In the case of feminism, for example, Karen Warren argues that the four
leading versions of feminism—liberal, socialist, radical, and traditional Marxist feminism—are
inadequate, incomplete, or seriously problematic as a theoretical basis for ecofeminism. Therefore,
she proposes the development of a new form of feminism, namely what she terms transformative
feminism, as the theoretical grounding for ecofeminism.15
But theoretical adjustments aside, the question remains as to how one negotiates the anti-realist,
anti-humanist, and anti-essentialist positions of many literary and cultural theorists with the realism,
humanism, and essentialism of ecotheorists such as Leopold. Or, as Kate Soper put it, “It isn’t
language which has a hole in its ozone layer.”16 In short, for many green theorists, nature is not
socially constructed and is not merely a discourse. Rather, nature not only has an essence and is
real, but is something that must be saved—rather than, say, deconstructed.
One of the responses to this is an abandonment of the linguistic and textual legacies of poststructuralism
in favor of some newer and different approaches to theory. As noted earlier, these may be adaptations
or extensions of extant theories such as postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory to the aims of ecotheory
or entirely new theories such as those found in affect studies (13.0), particularly, queer affect (13.1) and
“new” materialism (13.2). However, in the case of one new approach, object-oriented ontology (15.3),
when combined with green theory it might be better termed green antitheory, as object-oriented
ontology is regarded as a form of antitheory (15.3)—but more on this later.
The point here is that if ecocriticism is about the concept of nature and its value, areas of literary
and cultural theory that challenge the essential status of nature appear to short-circuit its aims.
What, for example is there to preserve, if nature has no essential nature? And, what is pollution, if
nature has no core identity that can become polluted? But as anyone who has studied anti-
essentialism knows, even if nature has no essence, it does not necessarily follow that it is nothing
(unless you are, for example, Baudrillard, who wonders why there is nothing rather than
something)—or no thing outside of language or discourse. Rather, as discussed earlier, though
poststructuralism is often characterized as a form of linguistic idealism wherein the external world
is inaccessible to us through language, this is an inaccurate characterization. In the case of Derrida,
it is a mischaracterization reached by ignoring the traces that language gives of something beyond
language as a type of reference. However, in some poststructuralists, such as Kristeva, there is no
such difficulty: the material, the body, and affect are always reminding us in her work of the
dialectics between language and a material world.
13
Parsons, Marx and Engels on Ecology, 133.
14
Parsons, Marx and Engels on Ecology, 122.
15
Karen J. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” Environmental Ethics 9.1 (1987): 3–20.
16
Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (New York: Blackwell, 1995), 151.
In “Literature and Ecology,” Rueckert comments that there is a tendency “to over-refine our
conceptual frameworks so that they can only be used by a corps of elitist experts and gradually lose
their practical relevance as they increase their theoretical elegance.”17 This remark is perhaps
prescient given the expansion of the conceptual framework of ecocriticism into areas of literary and
cultural theory ranging from semiotics and phenomenology to postcolonial and queer theory. On
the practical side of green theory, there is an aim to intervene in social, political, and economic
debates regarding the devastation of the environment; on the theoretical side of green theory, there
is the continuous refinement of its conceptual framework into new areas of literary and cultural
theory. While activists often enter environmental debates with the practical aim of “saving the
planet,” theorists (particularly after Lyotard) have become wary of such “grand narratives”—and
focus instead on developing increasingly rigorous and complex conceptual frameworks. As an
example of the latter, consider the effort to expand the range of colors associated with green theory.
“Green,” writes Jeffrey Cohen, “has long been the favored color of ecocriticism.”18 But in Prismatic
Ecology (2013), Cohen and others encourage “following other colors in their materiality [into] the
messy intricacy,” multiplicity, and disorderliness of space. That is, into a spatial ecology that includes
mysterious forces, object[s] and organisms that do not fully disclose themselves, radiation, black
holes, distant arms of the galaxy and event horizons, shit and muck, the ephemeral and the
volatile, disability, distillation, capitalism as an ordering system, domestication, alien substances,
supernovas, urban sprawls, the undead, lost worlds, networks of travel or sonority, human
difference, negativity, depression, the aurora borealis, deep-sea dwellers, luminescence for no
audience, feedback loops, alien metals, soundscapes, slaughterhouses, environmental justice,
chimeras, the vegetal, the indistinct, the solitary, failure, queerness, violence, swamps, an errancy
of earth and seas and skies.19
But the question that may be asked apropos Rueckert’s comment is whether Cohen’s catalogue of
the “messy intricacy,” multiplicity, and disorderliness of space is indeed a loss of practical relevance
for ecocriticism at the cost of increasing theoretical elegance. In other words, while there is a
certain elegance to an ecotheory that moves beyond the “green of nature” to a chromotopia that
ranges from the “colors” of queerness and disability to those of the slaughterhouses and the undead,
does ecocriticism in the process of color diversification start to lose some of its practical relevance?
Does a polychrome ecotheory have a better chance of saving the planet than a monochrome one?
One way to respond to this question is to view the adaptability of current directions in ecotheory
to the multiplicities of human and non-human ecologies as a strong indicator of both its theoretical
range and its practical relevance—something which is only further confirmed by the theoretical
conjunction of ecotheory with many other areas of literary and cultural theory. Moreover, these
developments in ecotheory appear to be in line with Rueckert’s formative vision of field—a vision
inspired by the work of Kenneth Burke, specifically his notion of “perspective by incongruity,” that
17
18
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Ecology’s Rainbow,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xx.
19
Cohen, “Ecology’s Rainbow,” xxiii.
ECOCRITICISM 309
is, a process wherein new meanings are created by “extending the use of a term by taking it from
the context in which it is habitually used and applying it to another.”20 Writes Rueckert,
[T]here is a certain splendid resonance which comes from thinking of poets and green plants
being engaged in the same creative, life-sustaining activities, and of teachers and literary critics
as creative mediators between literature and the biosphere whose tasks include the encouragement
of, the discovery, training and development of creative biospheric apperceptions, attitudes, and
actions.21
Arguably, the “discovery, training and development of creative biospheric apperceptions, attitudes,
and actions” of Rueckert’s pioneering ecocriticism is now being continued and extended by a new
generation of ecotheorists. Today, the application of Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” is not just
to literature and ecology (as it was for Rueckert), but to other media (e.g., art, film, and music) as
well as “other” ecologies (e.g., those associated with Cohen’s catalogue of messy, multiple, and
disorderly spaces). For theorists, the extension of green theory into different media and texts
coupled with its compatibility with and complementarity to many different areas of theory increases
both its practical relevance and theoretical elegance.
11.2 CRITICAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change has a huge footprint—and not just on the planet. It is one that touches just about
every academic discipline including many areas of the humanities. This disciplinary footprint has
the ability not only to alter conversations within these areas, but also to encourage dialogue among
them. Therefore, it is in the best interest of our future to keep considerations of climate change as
broad and creative as possible so as to draw as many voices and perspectives into the conversation
as possible.
For some, this seems wrong-headed. They aim to localize discussion of climate change to
scientific calculations of greenhouse gas and average surface temperatures of the earth. These
narrow-minded individuals tend to believe that discussions of climate change are more the province
of science than say the humanities—or even critical theory. The broad-minded, however, will move
beyond basic greenhouse physics to a consideration of the political, aesthetic, ethical, and economic
impact of climate change. And it is here that discussions within the humanities can interweave with
discussions in the sciences—and hold the potential to radically transform both areas.
Climate change asks of critical and cultural theorists nothing more or less than a re-evaluation
of ourselves, even while it challenges us to put to use the critical tools we have at hand. For one
thing, it calls for us to ask how critical concepts like power, ideology, mediation, capital, colonialism,
gender, oppression, society, and construction help us to understand the challenges presented by
climate change. For another, it asks whether the current crisis wrought by anthropogenic climate
change defies or affirms the assumptions that underpin literary and cultural theory—and to what
20
Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 89.
21
extent. Can we respond—and, if so, how—through now established critical modes, such as those
signaled by deconstruction, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, or those practiced
under the rubrics of, among others, Agamben, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Žižek? Or
does climate change demand a new kind of theory?
There has been an innovative initiative of late to use anthropogenic climate change as the starting
point to gauge the capacities of established critical modes such as deconstruction, poststructuralism,
and Marxism—or more neutrally, to examine the degree to which the work of thinkers like
Agamben, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Žižek can account for environmental disasters
caused by humans. “The eco-catastrophic logics disclosed in the past decade,” comments Tom
Cohen, “were not addressed by the master thinkers of the 20th century, whose idioms form different
guilds and extensions today.”22 For Cohen and others, at issue is whether existing theory can
“account” for anthropogenic climate change or whether climate change demands a new kind of
“theory.” Also at issue is whether climate change, in the words of Cohen, “opens to an exteriority
irrecuperable by the current tropological order”—and is “in a sense unrepresentable.”23
The locus of the Critical Climate Change (C3) initiative is the Institute of Critical Climate Change
(IC3). In a series of colloquia and workshops beginning in 2005, the IC3 has embarked on discussions
that have the potential to change the way engaged intellectuals regard climate change. “The IC3
project,” write Henry Sussman and Jason Groves, “has from its outset been at its core an incitement
to torque the suggestive and empowering treasury of contemporary theoretical inquiries,
improvisations, interventions and performances toward the actuality, in several senses, of an
interrelated, if open-ended sequence of ecological, demographic, economic, and informational
contemporary disasters” (30).
The work of the members of this initiative, especially Cohen and Sussman, who have respectively
edited two landmark collections of essays on C3—Telemorphosis (2012) and Impasses of the Post-
Global (2012)—has the potential to produce innovative and significant insight on the multiple
disasters that color our present historical moment. If this were not enough, it also has the capacity
to raise the bar on what we call and expect from “theory,” and to produce ruptures and revisions
in the disciplinary fabric of the academy.
In Impasses of the Post-Global (2012), Henry Sussman and Jason Groves comment that “the IC3
initiative, since its outset, has struggled to budge the discourse and its synthesis away from the
corridors of academe into the tsunami’s debris.”24 The activism of the initiative and advocacy for
more than just the application of theory to current disasters is a distinguishing characteristic of the
work of the IC3. Write Sussman and Groves, “the discourse must also be budged away from
melancholically lingering over wreckage and debris, whose finality forecloses the initiative in advance
by staging its own belatedness, a melodrama in which the inertia of political apathy finds its perverse
22
Tom Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies: ‘Climate Change’ and the Rupture of Cultural Critique” (unpublished
manuscript, 2011), i. This unpublished manuscript was the original version of his introduction to Telemorphosis: Theory in
the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1, ed. Tom Cohen (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), which was substantially
revised and retitled “Murmurations—‘Climate Change’ and the Defacement of Theory” in the final version of the book. The
two versions of his introduction are substantially different. For the purposes of this chapter, I prefer the original version.
23
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” ix.
24
Henry Sussman and Jason Groves, “Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks,” in Impasses of the Post-Global: Essays in Critical
Climate Change, ed. Henry Sussman (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 16.
ECOCRITICISM 311
self-justification by the end of every episode, every foretold extinction event, every inundated island
community.”25 They challenge those who engage in the IC3 initiative to avoid “armchair disaster
tourism made up in the tweed of ecocriticism or ‘timely’ critical theory” and maintain that “the
discourse needs to be dragged, looking forward rather back, out into the streets, or into the Department
of Defense databases” and so on.26 The question remains, though, whether “the discourse,” as Sussman
and Groves call it, even has the capacity to capture appropriately the disasters of the present.
For Sussman and Groves, there is strong sense that the work of the IC3 is a continuation or
extension of the project of critical theory: “Critique, as the theoretically driven responsible and
rigorous decoding and reprogramming of messages, motives, trends, performances, and systematic
aberrations, has a special mission and role to play in an engagement with the composite and evolving
climate of catastrophe.”27 Though those involved in this “special mission” are encouraged not to sit
in their armchairs and ponder the catastrophes, they still follow the modus operandi established for
critique by critical theory: namely, one that is at its core a “theoretically driven responsible and
rigorous decoding and reprogramming.”
From this angle, the C3 initiative looks a lot like critical theory as usual—albeit turned toward
subject matter not directly addressed by twentieth-century critical theorists. If this were all there
were to the C3 initiative, it would be a novel though not particularly exciting appropriation of
theory—one that would produce interesting readings of or engagements with eco-catastrophes
though not really do anything outside of the normal scope of theory. Even if one held theory up to
the standard of being able to appropriately respond to eco-catastrophes, while this would be
innovative it would not be game- or theory-changing. What makes C3 a radical departure from
theory as usual is the expectation that it be forward-looking—and possibly also strive toward
reversing anthropogenic climate change. Or, more simply put: it presents the possibility that this is
theory that will save the planet.
In this regard, there seems to be two different directions for the C3 initiative: one takes it into
the realm of critique and the progress of theory as usual; the other takes it outside the realm of
critique by setting a new limit for theory. This is best seen in the vision of C3 described by Cohen.
For Cohen, the C3 initiative as one that views itself as appropriating theory to examine eco-
catastrophes is technically impossible—a non-starter. Writes Cohen, “any critical climate change
imaginary encounters its own impossibility: since technically, ‘it’ (the ‘subject’ of climate change)
may be defined as what lies outside the imaginary).”28 To get around this impossibility, Cohen
proposes that the C3 initiative adopt “modes of thinking adequate to the disasters of the present”29—
modes of thinking he terms “telemorphosis.” These modes of thinking “interface between memory
regimes, tele-technics, and the mutations of eco-catastrophic processes.”30
One of the virtues of telemorphosis is that unlike “ ‘after theory’ hybrids that have tended, more
often than not, to have consistently relapsed to recuperative and, at times, pre-theoretic positions,”31
25
Sussman and Groves, “Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks,” 16.
26
27
28
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” iii.
29
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” vi.
30
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” iv.
31
telemorphosis “names the ‘anthropogenic’ mutation of life forms in conjunction with that of tele-
technologies, perceptual programs, and what one can no longer name mere archivization as such.”32
Clearly for Cohen, the subject matter of C3 is inaccessible to the imaginary. But the conceptual
inadequacies do not end here for Cohen.
For him, the C3 initiative “revokes, strictly speaking, the notion of eras”—and brings the
telemorphotic critic into the realm of the “ex-anthropic,” a realm that eschews “referencing some
species type or animal-man.”33 “ ‘Ex-anthropic’ does not presume that ‘anthropy’ exists, but acts as
an index that operates outside the management of rigidly human perceptual, mnemonic, semio-
cultural narratives.”34 In short, all “posts” for him need to be retired including “post-humanism.”
So, what’s left for “theory” in the “era” of climate change? Not much according to Cohen.
Cohen’s work goes to great lengths to divorce itself from all known theoretical (and after
theoretical) efforts to connect theory with eco-catastrophes. In a way, his notion of telemorphosis
is theory on a scale, timeline, and alternative materiality that includes the “sixth mass extinction
event on earth.”35 Against the “clock of geology” and “the monstrous temporalities in play,”
approaches like “the recent academic hegemon of ‘cultural studies’ perhaps bursts apart,” writes
Cohen, “and its consolidated modes of oppressive regimes and colonial positioning shifts from its
declared topos: the otherness of the other, or ‘the other’ as human subject, and (as if all these
positions were now placed on one side), a supposedly ‘wholly other’ that is not human, not divine,
and involves prehistorical traces.”36 But even so, the “term ‘wholly other,’ circulated by Derrida, is
at best a placeholder here, and a weak one,” comments Cohen, “saturated with theotropic
resonance.”37
Cohen’s vision of C3 opens up a space that is not “readily assimilable to university programs”38
and breaks with “any recognizable politics (as currently defined).”39 There is a moment, though,
when Spivak’s proposal for “the planet to overwrite the globe”40 in Death of a Discipline (2003)
appears to have an affinity with Cohen’s notion of telemorphosis. Like Cohen’s notion, Spivak
claims that there is no “formulaic access to planetarity.”41 For her, globalization is located in the
“gridwork of electronic capital,” whereas the “planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to
another system.”42 “When I invoke the planet,” writes Spivak, “I think of the effort required to
figure the (im)possibility of this underived intuition.”43 Unfortunately, notes Cohen, Spivak rejects
“planetarity” because of its lack of recognizable politics.44 But even so, there is little more than a
superficial similarity between Cohen’s work and Spivak’s—which ultimately is just for Cohen
another “failed probe” into the area of C3.
32
33
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” vii.
34
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” vii.
35
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xii.
36
37
38
39
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xv.
40
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 72.
41
Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 78.
42
43
44
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xv.
ECOCRITICISM 313
In sum, “climate change” for Cohen is a “non-name.” “Its spectralities appear in glacial forms,”
writes Cohen, “in a graduated drip or sudden collapse, posted as futurity.”45 While it has a
relationship to science, economics, and technology, it does not belong to any one of these areas.
Moreover, it “implies an exteriorization without interiority of any sort.”46 If so, what then does this
extreme vision of C3 portend for theory and the humanities?
Even though Cohen would not like this characterization, the critical climate initiative gives
theorists the opportunity to “reclaim,” “reinscribe,” and “reinvent” theory for a new era. By
beginning with premises drawn from eco-catastrophes, theory in the era of climate change has the
opportunity to connect its initiatives with work that moves beyond the problems of individuals and
nations, literatures and cultures—and refocus its energies and imagination toward the disasters that
threaten our planet. If nothing else, critical climate change (or telemorphosis, if you will) reminds
us that perhaps the most significant knowledge that we can produce in the humanities is not going
to come from the standard ways of thinking.
Nevertheless, deviations from the standard ways of thinking are not to be found in the application
of Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” nor are they located in pursuit of any of the aims of
ecocriticism (or, green theory) stated in the introduction to this chapter. Hence, the dismissive
characterization of green theory as “armchair disaster tourism made up in the tweed of ecocriticism”
by C3. Work like Cohen’s suggests that we begin theory from conclusions about eco-catastrophes,
and then work back to establish the premises that brought them about, a sort of abductive approach
to theory. Namely, if theory cannot provide the premises to account for anthropogenic climate
change, then we need to reject it wholesale—and seek premises that do. Critical climate change
reminds us of both the limits of literary and cultural theory—and its potential.
11.3 ANTHROPOCENE
Paul Crutzen is an earth scientist who in 1970 demonstrated that the chemical compounds of
nitrogen oxide accelerate the destruction of stratospheric ozone. In 1995, he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery. A few years later, while attending a conference on earth
system science, he objected to the use of the word Holocene, which is a geological time span that
extends into the present. “Stop using the word Holocene,” said Crutzen to the conference
participants. “We’re not in the Holocene anymore—we’re in the Anthropocene!”47
After his comment at this 1999 conference, the word Anthropocene (anthropo is the Greek word
for “man”) quickly came into common usage and discussion. However, as Crutzen soon learned,
the term had been used since the 1980s by Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist who worked on the
photosynthesis of algae. So, a year later, they jointly published “The ‘Anthropocene’ ” (2000), where
they noted earlier analogues to their theory in a number of sources including George Perkins
Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) and Antonio Stoppani’s declaration of the “Anthropozoic Era” in
1873. In their article, Crutzen and Stoermer declared that barring
45
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xxii.
46
Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xxii.
47
Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 42.
major catastrophes like an enormous volcanic eruption, an unexpected epidemic, a large-scale

nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a new ice age, or continued plundering of Earth’s resources by
partially still primitive technology (the last four dangers can, however, be prevented in a real
functioning noösphere [viz., the sphere of human thought]) mankind will remain a major
geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come.48
Therefore, conclude Crutzen and Stoermer, “it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the
central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the
current geological epoch.”49
For context, consider that the Holocene, which means “recent scene,” is the post-glacial
geological epoch that has been around for ten to twelve thousand years. It was proposed by Charles
Lyell in 1833 and officially adopted by the International Congress in Bologna in 1885. In this
article, however, Crutzen and Stoermer date the beginning of the Anthropocene only to the
invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1784. A few years later, Crutzen adds that the
exploitation of the earth’s resources and devastation of the planet has “largely been caused by only
25% of the world population.”50 Still later, in collaboration with Will Steffen and John McNeill, he
further clarifies his position, claiming that the Anthropocene has developed in two stages: Stage 1
began 1800 to 1850 with the fossil-fueled industrialization in Britain; and, Stage 2 began after
1945, with a Great Acceleration in “human enterprise,” wherein there is a precipitous rise in
worldwide GDP, fertilizer consumption, paper consumption, foreign direct investment, international
tourism, and population, among other things.51
But still, there are other accounts of the Anthropocene. One dates its origins at 1.8 million years
ago, whereas another claims that it “actually began thousands of years ago as a result of the discovery
of agriculture and subsequent technological innovations in the practice of farming.”52 The former,
by Andrew Glikson, dates the Anthropocene to the mastery of fire by hominids,53 whereas the
latter, by William Ruddiman dates it concurrent with the origins of the anthropogenic greenhouse
gas era as evidenced in ice-core records.54 According to Jeremy Davies, these dating decisions about
the Anthropocene “very often encode deep interpretive commitments.”55 For Davies, “the general
rule is that the earlier the proposed starting date for the Anthropocene, the more emphasis its
proponents place on human actions, as opposed to the ecological consequences that follow from
them.”56
48
Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000), http://www.igbp.net/news/
opinion/opinion/haveweenteredtheanthropocene.5.d8b4c3c12bf3be638a8000578.html.
49
Crutzen and Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene.’ ”
50
Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (January 3, 2002): 23.
51
Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great
Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36.8 (2007): 614–21.
52
William Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” Climate Change 61.3 (2003):
261.
53
Andrew Glikson, “Fire and Human Evolution: The Deep-Time Blueprints of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 3 (2013):
89–92.
54
William Ruddiman, “The Anthropocene,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 41 (2013): 45–68, and “The
Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” 261.
55
Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, 47.
56
Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, 47.
ECOCRITICISM 315
Regarding the implications of the Anthropocene for social organization, Dipesh Chakrabarty, a
member of the Subaltern Studies editorial group, has argued that postcolonial and Marxist critiques
of capitalism, globalization, and imperialism do not adequately address this new epoch. According
to Chakrabarty, postcolonial and Marxist critique “do not give us an adequate hold on human
history once we accept that the crisis of climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this
planet for much longer than capitalism.”57 “A critique that is only a critique of capital,” continues
Chakrabarty, “is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of
climate change has been acknowledged.”58 In a tone echoing Cohen’s concerns about extant theory
addressing the challenges wrought upon us by the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty writes,
Whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate
as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in
which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of human existence.59
But unlike Cohen, who would have us abandon extant theory in the face of the Anthropocene,
Chakrabarty is not yet ready to give up on postcolonial critique. “Critiques of capitalist globalization
have not, in any way, become obsolete in the age of climate change.”60 Rather, for Chakrabarty
these critiques must now be combined with the long history of humans as a species—a timescale
that can span millions of years.
But as Claire Colebrook argues, the Anthropocene is different in degree and kind from the
predictions of climate change. For her, the notion that humans are readable as a geological force
seems to destroy “once and for all” the positive futurity of promissory time. “By suggesting
geological impact, and not just change within the human milieu,” comments Colebrook, “human
time—the time of justice and the polity that had been increasingly disturbed by climate change—is
now displaced.”61 In other words, whereas the lesser time and scale of climate change still offers us
the prospect of human justice and political impact in the future, the greater time and scale of the
Anthropocene negates both. For Colebrook, the Anthropocene makes us “far less likely to be just
to future humans and future life.”62 Thus, contra Chakrabarty, who finds political hope in the
combination of the long history of humans as a species with considerations of climate change,
Colebrook finds it is displaced in the longer perspective of the Anthropocene.
Furthermore, Colebrook also distances discussions of the Anthropocene from those of many
other areas of ecocriticism—and not just climate change. For her, “the Anthropocene is not just one
more claim about nature.”63 Rather, the Anthropocene erases the notion of nature as sublime:
“[N]ature” is not some idea that we must assume but never know [that is, sublime]; nature [in the
Anthropocene] is so real and so present as to have the force to erase decades of social construction,
57
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 212.
58
Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 212.
59
60
61
Claire Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, Twilight of the
Anthropocene Idols (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), 104–5.
62
Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” 105.
63
relativism, contestation, anti-humanism and theory (if theory is, as [Paul] de Man claimed, that
which is constitutively resisted precisely because to think theoretically would be to remain
suspended before parsing matters into narrative form). Nature, now, offers its own narrative and
frames the human species, placing it within the scale and register of earth system science.64
Thus, literary and cultural theory from the position of the Anthropocene, leaves the theorist with
no time “for post-humanism, anti-humanism, and—most of all—no time at all for questioning the
prima facie value and existence of the human.”65 “The Anthropocene requires that we think of
humans as a species,”66 writes Colebrook. And, in spite of the fact that what unifies humans as a
species in the Anthropocene is evidence of their destruction, “once the species comes into being as
a geological force its survival is constituted as an imperative.”67
In spite of their different approaches, Crutzen, Chakrabarty, and Colebrook agree that the
Anthropocene changes global politics regarding the environment. What they disagree on is the role
of humans and theory in global political change. Whereas Crutzen’s humanism leads him to
maintain that the era of the Anthropocene “will require appropriate human behavior at all scales,”
Colebrook offers that the Anthropocene forecloses the mandates of humanist politics in favor of
nascent geological ones (or, more precisely, Anthropocene-political ones). And while Chakrabarty
still holds out hope that extant theory can get together with work on climate change to find a path
forward, Colebrook empties humanistic and post-humanistic theory of relevancy to the kind of
issues presented by the Anthropocene.
11.4 GEOCRITICISM
Geocriticism is the area of literary and cultural theory that concerns space, place, and mapping. The
term itself was coined by Bertrand Westphal in French as géocritique in 2000, and has since then
gained in theoretical currency with the publication of further works by him such as Geocriticism
(2007). For Westphal, géocritique begins by locating a place. The critic then brings together a
variety of literary and cultural representations of that place in an attempt to provide a multifaceted
portrait of it. These representations include any and all media including everything from poems,
plays, and films to ethnographic studies, travelogues, and tourist brochures.
According to Robert Tally, one of the effects Westphal’s géocritique is that “any reading will be
far less likely to be subject to ethnocentric or narrow interpretations, as individual biases or
prejudices become leavened with multiple and diverse points of view.”68 Writes Tally, “place is not
merely coordinates on a map but the living embodiment of the polysensory experiences of those
many people who attempt to represent both it and the experiences associated with it.”69 However,
there are a number of other approaches to geocriticism including one offered by Tally himself.
64
65
66
67
68
Robert T. Tally, Jr., Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2019), 39.
69
Tally, Topophrenia, 39.
ECOCRITICISM 317
Tally, who started using the term geocriticism in 2005, focuses on how writers map “the real and
imagined places of their world.”70 For him, “the realistic London of Charles Dickens,” “the Paris of
Honoré de Balzac,” “Amaurotum, capital city of Thomas More’s Utopia,” “Minas Tirith, capital of
Gondor in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth,” and “[William] Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County,”
are all part of what he terms literary cartography.71 According to Tally, geocriticism “allows us to
understand ‘real’ places by understanding their fundamental fictionality, and vice versa.”72
But note that whereas Tally’s geocriticism begins with the author, and their mapping of the
world, Westphal’s géocritique begins with a place, and then proceeds to explore various mappings
of it. Either way, geocriticism, writes Tally,
is a way of looking at the spaces of literature, broadly conceived to include not only those places
that readers and writers experience by means of texts but also the experience of space and place
within ourselves, our situatedness in space as a condition of our own existence. With geocriticism
one emphasizes this inherent spatiality while also focusing one’s critical gaze on those aspects of
literature, along with other texts not always deemed literary, that give meaning to our spatialized
sense of being.73
Nevertheless, even though geocriticism (or géocritique) is a more recent direction in literary and
cultural theory, the concepts of space, place, and mapping have long been important in the field.
One of the more cited indications of this is Foucault’s statement in “Of Other Spaces” (1967)
that “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.”74 For Foucault, space is also
the chief cause of “anxiety in our era.”75 He notes here that while the work of Gaston Bachelard
and “the phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space,
but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with qualities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic
as well,”76 it is work that is nevertheless primarily concerned with internal space. Foucault here
would like to focus on external space, that is,
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives,
our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knaws at us, is also, in itself, a
heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could
place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse
shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one
another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.77
70
Tally, Topophrenia, 38–9.
71
72
73
Tally, Topophrenia, 49–50.
74
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967), trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22.
75
Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23.
76
77
For Foucault, these external spaces are of two types: utopias, that is, “fundamentally unreal
spaces”;78 and heterotopias, “real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very
founding of society.”79 Heterotopias are a kind of “effectively enacted utopia,” and are of two
types: crisis heterotopias—“privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who
are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis”;80
and deviation heterotopias—“those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to
the required mean or norm are placed”81—something he terms elsewhere disciplinary spaces.
Foucault’s reference to the phenomenology of inner space and the efforts of Bachelard in The
Poetics of Space (1957) as well as his own characterizations of “other spaces,” that is, the external
spaces of utopias and heterotopias, provide strong evidence that space has been a concern of literary
and cultural theory long before geocriticism. But there is nevertheless much more work to be noted
here including Henri Lefebvre’s work on space, which makes distinctions between perceived space
(space seen, touched, and felt), conceived space (space as designed and built), and lived space (space
as something that we emotionally and affectively relate to). In addition, there are the contributions
of Jameson, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Blanchot, Michel de Certeau, and many others, to consider.
In regard to Jameson, for example, as we saw earlier, not only is there the hyper-space of
postmodernism to consider, but also the notion of cognitive mapping, which, especially in The
Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), draws this notion into conversation with space, cartography, and
world theory. Moreover, also discussed earlier, and worthy of inclusion as precursors to geocriticism,
are Bhabha’s third-space of hybridity, which connects space to postcolonial theory; Deleuze and
Guattari’s territorialization, which demarcates social and cultural spaces by principles of law and
rationality, that is to say, the Symbolic order; and the economic geography of David Harvey, which
connects urban space with neoliberalism; as well as others. Moreover, one might consider the work
of critical border studies, particularly with regard to border epistemology, border ontology, and the
space-time of borders, as a field that both resonates with geocriticism and is roughly contemporaneous
with it—even if border studies in general, which is also concerned with space, place, and mapping,
also precedes geocriticism.
A parallel might be drawn between the coining of ecocriticism by Rueckert in 1978, and the
coining of geocriticism (géocritique) by Westphal in 2000. Just as Rueckert’s ecocriticism inspired
the study of nature writing to include considerations of the environmental imagination, the concept
and value of nature, how nature is utilized in literary genres, the relationship between humans and
nature, and environmental activism, Westphal’s geocriticism (or, géocritique) suggests that the study
of writing about place should include considerations of the geographical imagination, the concept
and value of space and place, how space and place are utilized in literary genres, the relationship
between humans and space (and place), and geopolitical activism.
Moreover, similar to the discussions of literature and nature that preceded the work of Rueckert,
there was also plenty of discussion of space and place in relation to literature prior to the work of
Westphal. Nevertheless, just as ecocriticism is now a subarea of the broader field of environmental
humanities, so too should geocriticism be regarded now as a subarea of the more wide-ranging work
78
79
80
81
ECOCRITICISM 319
done in spatial humanities. Finally, questions of the ecologies of space and place, or, conversely, of the
geographies of nature and the environment, bring ecocriticism and geocriticism into dialogue with
each other. That is to say, when such questions are raised, the relationship of nature and its ecologies
(viz., ecocriticism) comes to be theoretically implicated with the relationship of space and place to its
geographies and cartographies (viz., geocriticism). If further evidence of the connections between
ecocriticism and geocriticism is needed, just consider that the Greek roots of the word geography make
its literal meaning earth writing (geo means earth, and graph means written down, printed, or
drawn)—a meaning that is connotatively not very far from nature writing. Note as well that topography,
which literally means place writing (topos means place in Greek), could also be transformed into
topocriticism (or, topocritique) as an alternate name for the field of geocriticism (or, géocritique).
11.5 BLUE HUMANITIES

There is a growing body of work known as the blue humanities. One of the aims of transdisciplinary
work in this area is to raise awareness and increase activism regarding the catastrophic planetary effects
of neglecting the challenges our oceans are facing. From plastic pollution and over-fishing to acidification
and skepticism regarding climate change, humanities scholars and activists can complement the work
of environmentalists and marine scientists in an effort to “save” the ocean. Blue humanities historicizes
the ocean and makes it an important part of contemporary consciousness in a way that will hopefully
encourage more research on and political support for understanding and reversing the multi-
dimensional negative effects of neglecting to care for over two-thirds of our planet.
Oceans make up more that 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Geographers and mapmakers
segregate them into at least four major bodies of water—the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic
Oceans—with an average mean depth of 12,081 feet. The Atlantic and Indian Oceans each comprise
almost 30 million square miles of the earth’s surface, and the Pacific, over 60 million square miles.
Each of these oceans, especially the nearly 5.5 million square mile Arctic, is by common scientific
consensus facing some form of environmental catastrophe in the near future.
If, like the rotation and orbit of the planets, these approaching ocean catastrophes were beyond
human agency, there would not be much sense in changing our behaviors in order to prevent them.
However, as we have come to learn in increasing depth and detail, some of these destructive oceanic
influences have been around for centuries, while others have only come into being within the last
fifty years. Conservationist and marine scientist Callum Roberts concisely summarizes the urgency
of our situation:
The oceans are changing faster than at almost any time in Earth’s history, and we are the agents
of that transformation. Many of these changes will test the ability of its denizens to survive into
the future. The alterations are also reshaping our own relationship with the sea and threaten
many of the things that we most cherish and take for granted. Our failure to notice creeping
environmental degradation has compromised our quality of life. In extreme circumstances, it
threatens human welfare. History offers many examples of civilizations that have been destroyed
by environmental catastrophes that they have unwittingly brought upon themselves.82
82
Callum Roberts, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea (New York: Viking, 2012), 5.
But the difference today is that degradation of the oceans has the potential to destroy not just
individual civilizations but our planet itself. Moreover, given the level of information we have
regarding these threats and our options for reversing their course, we cannot say today that we have
“unwittingly” brought them upon ourselves. We know much of what we are doing to the oceans,
but many just don’t seem to care that it is destroying our planet.
General apathy, or, in more extreme cases, denial that we are the agents of oceanic transformation,
has led to a paucity of new data about our major bodies of water. James Lovelock, an independent
scientist who has been dubbed “one of the world’s top 100 global public intellectuals,” says that
“Observation in the real world and small-scale experiments on the Earth now take second place to
expensive and ever-expanding theoretical models.”83 Though this may be “administratively and
politically convenient,”84 it is not good for learning more about the earth. “Our tank is near empty
of data, and we are running on theoretical vapor: this is especially true of data about the oceans . . .
and about the responses of ecosystems to climate change—and, just as importantly, the effect of
change in the oceans and ecosystems on the climate.”85
This data is needed because there is no single “cause” or set of “effects” for climate change. In
fact, changing climates involve many elements where we rely on data including the “increase in
Arctic temperatures, reduced size of icebergs, melting of icecaps and glaciers, reduced permafrost,
changes in rainfall, reduced bio-diversity, new wind patterns, more droughts and heat waves, and
more frequent tropical cyclones and other extreme weather events.”86 But it also includes data on
human behavior as well, particularly regarding the slow violence of increasing numbers of affluent
humans on our oceans.
The notion of slow violence, coined by Rob Nixon in 2011, is central to the blue humanities,
because ecological catastrophes with respect to the ocean are seldom viewed by the human eye.
Nixon’s “slow violence” refers to the unseen and unheard violence that happens on a temporal
scale that is beyond the capacities of our senses. He associates it with “climate change, the thawing
cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnifications, deforestation, the radioactive aftermath of war, acidifying
oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes.”87
One example of this “slow violence” with regard to the ocean is the emission of carbon dioxide
by human activities. Kerry Emanuel describes its effects on our oceans well:
[A]s atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, roughly one quarter of the excess
gas is absorbed by the ocean, increasing its acidity. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution,
ocean water has become 30 percent more acidic. Between 1995 and 2010 alone, the acidity of
the uppermost 300 feet of the North Pacific Ocean increased by 6 percent. Among other potential
problems, increasing acidity compromises the ability of a wide variety of marine organisms to
form and maintain calcium carbonate shells. Such organisms are essential to the food chain: we
threaten their welfare at our own peril.88
83
James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 8–9.
84
Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 8.
85
86
John Urry, Climate Change & Society (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 6.
87
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.
88
Kerry Emanuel, What We Know About Climate Change, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 60.
ECOCRITICISM 321
In short, ocean acidification by excess carbon dioxide is a prime example of a “multiplex pathology
caused by an excess of affluent humans.”89
But, Nixon also says that without the attention of writer-activists, many environmental
catastrophes would go unnoticed, misapprehended, and unchecked.90 Ian Buchanan and Celina
Jeffery argue that we need to add “artists, film-makers, poets, and photographers” to this list as
well. For them, by leveraging transdisciplinary inquiry, we can begin “to say why we need not only
a blue humanities but also a blue humanity—a sense in which we restore our sense of connectedness
and in the words of Rachel Carson, ‘return to the sea,’ in part, through a consideration of the
contributions of creative artists and thinkers.”91
If the activism and range of texts considered separates green theory from ecocriticism, then the
same grounds for separation might also be claimed for blue humanities, which alternately might be
termed blue theory. Early work in this area includes Philip Steinberg’s The Social Construction of
the Ocean (2001), if not also Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951), which stands to blue theory in
the same way that Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) stands to green theory. Also, recent
examples of sea writing (or, thalassography, from the Greek thalassa, meaning sea) include Dan
Brayton’s Shakespeare’s Ocean (2012) and John Gillis’s The Human Shore (2012). However, in
spite of a variety of “new ontologies, epistemologies, and narratives that flow through, and frame,
oceanic engagements,” some worry how the critical theory of blue humanities can reach beyond
academe.92 “It is still unclear,” write Daniel Wuebben and Juan José González-Trueba, “how the
blue humanities and its explorations of ocean histories, cultures, and politics can reach beyond
academia and help to protect the ocean’s liminal zones.”93 To that end, the activist aims of blue
theory, blue humanities, and even, blue cultural studies (which Steven Mentz calls for in 2009),
push ecocriticism as a field further from mere criticism—and ever closer to pure activism.94 The
prospect of a transition from ecocriticism to ecoactivism calls up some of the more general questions
that have been raised in each section of this chapter: Can literary and cultural theory save the
planet? And if so, how?
89
90
Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 14–15.
91
Ian Buchanan and Celina Jeffery, “Towards a Blue Humanity,” symploke– 27.1/2 (2019): 12.
92
Daniel Wuebben and Juan José González-Trueba, “Surfing Between Blue Humanities and Blue Economies in Cantabria,
Spain,” symploke– 27.1/2 (2019): 65.
93
Wuebben and González-Trueba, “Surfing Between Blue Humanities and Blue Economies in Cantabria, Spain,” 65.
94
Steven Mentz, “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,”
Literature Compass 6.5 (2009): 997–1013.
322
CHAPTER TWELVE
Posthumanism
12.0 INTRODUCTION
In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti describes posthumanism as “the historical moment that
marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and anti-humanism and traces a different
discursive framework, looking more affirmatively towards new alternatives.”1
For Braidotti, the starting point of posthumanism is the death of “Wo/Man” (Woman/Man) in
antihumanism. This death
marks the decline of some of the fundamental premises of the Enlightenment, namely the
progress of mankind through a self-regulatory and teleological ordained use of reason and of
secular scientific rationality aimed at the perfectibility of “Man.”2
But for Braidotti, the historical decline of humanism doesn’t imply that the posthuman condition
is some type of crisis of Man. Rather, for Braidotti, posthumanism strives to formulate “alternative
ways of conceptualizing the human subject”3—and offers an “affirmative perspective on the
posthuman subject.”4
These alternate ways of conceptualizing the human subject build on the legacies of antihumanism,
specifically, on the epistemological and political legacies of poststructuralism. According to
Braidotti,
The crisis of Humanism means that the structural others of the modern humanistic subject re-
emerge with a vengeance in postmodernity. It is a historical fact that the great emancipatory
movements of postmodernity are driven and fuelled by the resurgent “others”: the women’s
rights movement; the anti-racism and de-colonization movements; the anti-nuclear and pro-
environmental movements are the voice of the structural Other of modernity. They inevitably
mark the crisis of the former humanist “centre” or dominant subject-position and are not merely
anti-humanist, but move beyond it to an altogether novel, posthuman project.5
Thus, for Braidotti, posthumanism is an extension of the antihumanist philosophies of subjectivity

that were discussed earlier, particularly ones associated with poststructuralism, feminism, and
1
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 37.
2
Braidotti, The Posthuman, 37.
3
4
5
323
postcolonialism. In her estimation, this work can be developed into what she calls critical
posthumanism—a project she develops in her trilogy, The Posthuman (2013), Posthuman Knowledge
(2019), and Posthuman Feminism (2022).
Moreover, to get a sense of the roots and range of posthumanism in the twentieth-century
literary and cultural theory discussed up to this point, consider that in Posthumanism (2000), Neil
Badmington associates it with the work of Barthes, Althusser, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Halberstam,
Foucault, and Fanon. In other words, by Badmington’s measure, we have already covered quite a
lot of posthumanism.
In How We Became Posthuman (1999), one of the leading figures in critical posthumanism, N.
Katherine Hayles, characterizes its four shaping ideas as follows:
(1) Informational Patterns—the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material
instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history
rather than an inevitability of life;
(2) Devaluing Consciousness—the posthuman view considers consciousness as an evolutionary
upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow;
(3) The Body as Original Prosthesis—the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original
prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other
prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born; and,
(4) Humans as Intelligent Machines—the posthuman view configures the human being so that it
can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.6
For Hayles, the idea that humans are intelligent machines is the most important one. “In the
posthuman,” writes Hayles, “there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between
bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot
teleology and human goals.”7
But the affirmative perspective of critical posthumanism is just one strand of contemporary
posthumanism thought. Another general approach is what Braidotti calls analytic posthumanism,
which takes its lead from science and technology studies. For Braidotti, it is an interdisciplinary
field that raises ethical and conceptual questions about the status of the human.8
Still another approach is what Braidotti calls reactive posthumanism. This approach comes from
moral philosophy and is defended by liberal thinkers such as Nussbaum, who defend humanism as
that which guarantees freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights and dignity. For Nussbaum,
humanism is not in crisis or historical decline. Rather, she rejects the insights of antihumanist
thought and defends the need for universal humanistic values—it is a defense that positions her
against, for example, the work of feminist and postcolonial thinkers who defend the politics of the
local. Reactive posthumanism—in opposition to critical posthumanism—is a negative perspective
on the posthuman subject.9
6
Adapted from N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2–3.
7
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.
8
9
Braidotti, The Posthuman, 38–9.
POSTHUMANISM 325
In short, for Braidotti what is most important in general approaches to posthumanism is one’s
position on the human subject: its subjectivity (critical posthumanism), its values (reactive
posthumanism), and its status (analytic posthumanism). But another approach offers that the
posthuman entirely break from any and all considerations of the human subject and humanity.
Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, for example, argue that the common denominator
in all posthumanisms is
a break with a pervasive, if often unacknowledged, assumption: that humanity is somehow

separate from the rest of the universe and constitutes a center for orientation—a basic set of
measures, values, and points of views—from which no judgment can escape, whether pertaining
to science, philosophy, politics, or everyday practices.10
In short, for Thomsen and Wamberg, posthumanism and postanthropocentrism mean the same
thing—a position that puts them at odds with Braidotti’s approach to posthumanism. Why? Because
if posthumanism is postanthropocentrism (as Thomsen and Wamberg claim), then critical
posthumanism (championed by Braidotti), which emphasizes the development of new approaches
to the human subject, does not appear to be postanthropocentric. Therefore, given that
postanthropocentrism and posthumanism are synonymous for Thomsen and Wamberg, critical
posthumanism by their definition does not appear to be a form of posthumanism.
Moreover, Thomsen and Wamberg argue that while Braidotti refers to herself as a critical
posthumanist, she—along with Donna Haraway and Hayles—often “let biological life come more
pervasively to the fore.”11 For Haraway, this comes in the form of the Chthulucene, that is, the new
epoch she proposes where refugees from both human and non-human environmental disaster will
come together; for Hayles, it occurs through her use of nonconscious cognition; and for Braidotti,
through the self-organizing life of zoe–.12 Moreover, Thomsen and Wamberg also point out that
Heise, Cary Wolfe, and Timothy Morton “have supplemented their principal posthumanist or post-
anthropocentric theorizing with more focused contributions to ecocriticism.”13 Their point about
the biotheory of Braidotti, Haraway, and Hayles, and the ecocriticism of Heise, Morton, and Wolfe,
is that post-anthropocentric inquiry can lead one beyond the confines or domain of critical
posthumanism. Or, as they say, “it is possible to be post-anthropocentric without referring to the
posthuman condition, just as it is possible to be post-anthropocentric while acknowledging the
Anthropocene.”14
In this chapter, rather than attempting to resolve the question of whether posthumanism should
be centered on new approaches to the human subject (critical posthumanism) or not
(postanthropocentrism)—or whether analytic humanism is preferable to both—five different
literary and cultural theories that are exemplary of posthumanist thought will be discussed: the
first, cyborg theory (12.1), is most famously established in Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985),
10
Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, eds.
Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 1.
11
Thomsen and Wamberg, “Introduction,” 3.
12
13
14
a piece where feminism, poststructuralism, and post-Marxism come together in a unique form of
posthumanism; the second, animal studies (12.2), connects posthumanism to the question of the
animal—a topic broached by Derrida, Haraway, Wolfe, and others; the third, systems theory (12.3),
is an approach to organization in terms of function, communication, and information that challenges
the primacy of humans, whom it regards as merely one system among others; the fourth, cognitive
criticism (12.4), is an approach to literary criticism grounded in science and technology studies,
specifically, neuroscience and neurohumanities; and the fifth (and final), speculative realism (12.5),
is an approach to posthumanism connected to the work of Morton, Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain
Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and others, which challenges all human-
centered understandings of the world—and seeks instead an investigation of the world-in-itself.
In sum, posthumanism consists of a wide variety of positions, many of which provide conflicting
portraits of the posthuman condition. A related term that adds another dimension to this topic is
transhumanism, a notion that implies going beyond or exceeding the human. According to Keith
Johnson, transhumanism (or h+) “embraces emergent technologies that promise liberation of one
sort or another from fixed human identities.”15 For Johnson, the utopianism of transhumanism sets
it apart from other forms of posthumanism. The main forms of transhumanism today are concerned
with a particular set of scientific developments, specifically, those associated with artificial
intelligence, artificial life, nano- and bio-technologies, the singularity (the point when self-optimizing
and self-replicating technologies such as artificial life and artificial intelligence make humans and
humanity an anachronism), neural enhancement, cyborgization, cryonics, and radical life extension,
among others. According to Johnson, these and other technologies “hold the promise of effectively
eliminating or mooting strong distinctions between, for example, male and female, child and adult,
human and machine, living and nonliving, and so on.”16 As such, transhumanists, says Johnson, are
“beta-testing the future before it arrives.”17
12.1 CYBORG THEORY

The term cyborg was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in their article “Cyborgs
and Space” for the journal Astronautics. They were medical researchers who proposed that
astronauts of the future would need to be technologically altered to live in space for extended
periods of time. One technological alteration, for example, could be a computer-controlled device
that would provide oxygen to the human body. Such a device that would replace respiration would
render unnecessary the need to provide astronauts with an oxygenated atmosphere during space
travel. Clynes and Kline defined cyborgs as “self-regulating man-machine systems.”18 Cyborg, in
turn, was derived from cybernetics, a term Norbert Wiener coined in 1948 for the interdisciplinary
study of “control and communication in animal and machine.”19
Amanpal Garcha notes that the reference to animals and machines by Wiener suggests that
“cybernetics views all information-exchanging systems equally, whether those systems are living or
15
Keith Leslie Johnson, “Transhumanism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 723.
16
Johnson, “Transhumanism,” 723.
17
Johnson, “Transhumanism,” 723.
18
Hassan Melehy, “Cyborg,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 434.
19
Amanpal Garcha, “Cybernetics,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 432.
POSTHUMANISM 327
nonliving, large or small scale.”20 Thus, from the perspective of cybernetics, comments Garcha,
there is no difference between a mind and a machine:
The components that absorb and react to inputs can be transistors, neurons, groups of cells; they
can also be whole machines or entire human beings. All of these components act in similar ways
according to cyberneticians. They self-organize according to recursive patterns of inputs and outputs,
with those patterns, inputs, and outputs able to be represented diagrammatically or mathematically.21
Moreover, cybernetics, the term at the root of cyborg, argues Garcha, “elaborated a philosophical
position that was similar in its antihumanism to the ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari,
and other poststructuralists.”22 Lydia Liu and Céline Lafontaine even respectively show that some
poststructuralists were in contact with mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers who were
associated with cybernetics—and in fact adopted concepts from cybernetics in their poststructuralist
thought. Liu terms this relationship the cybernetic unconscious of poststructuralism—and for
Lafontaine it is the cybernetic matrix.23
Though the roots of cybernetics extend through much twentieth-century poststructuralist
thought, cyborgs entered literary and cultural theory with Haraway’s publication of “A Cyborg
Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985) in
the Socialist Review. This article, subsequently reprinted in Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and
Women (1991), grew out of “New Machines, New Bodies, New Communities: Political Dilemmas
of a Cyborg Feminist,” a conference presentation at Barnard College in 1983. Among the many
sources for this piece, Haraway cites science-fiction writers such as Samuel R. Delany, who explored
how the human comes to be altered in its interactions with technology, as well as feminist science-
fiction writers, such as Octavia Butler, Anne McCaffery, Vonda McIntyre, Joanna Russ, and James
Tiptree Jr. (pen name for Alice Bradley Sheldon), who challenge binary conceptions of gender.
Additionally, around the same time as the development and publication of “A Cyborg Manifesto,”
William Gibson introduced the term cyber-space in his novel Neuromancer (1984), and cyborg
cinema in films such as Blade Runner (1982; dir. Ridley Scott) and The Terminator (1984; dir. James
Cameron) were gaining momentum. In fact, Haraway says that Rachel, the “replicant” in Blade
Runner, “stands as the image of a cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion.”24
In her article, Haraway directly brings cybernetics, fiction, and social reality to bear on her
conception of a cyborg:
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality
as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political
construction, a world-changing fiction.25
20
Garcha, “Cybernetics,” 432.
21
22
23
Céline Lafontaine, “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory,’ ” Theory, Culture & Society 24.5 (2007): 27–46; and Lydia
H. Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010): 288–320.
24
Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”
(1985), in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178.
25
Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 149.
Thus, as a creature of social reality, cyborgs are political constructions with the potential to liberate
as well as oppress.
Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of

oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that
changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over
life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.26
Moreover, as a creature of fiction, cyborgs are radically contingent and malleable. Their nature is
illusory and limited only by imagination.
Haraway describes the boundaries between organisms and machines as a “border war,” one that
has been carried out in “the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics,” namely, “the tradition of
racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of
nature as resource for the production of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the
reflection of the other.”27 But her manifesto does not aim to clarify these boundaries or call for their
destruction. Rather, Haraway strives to present “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of
boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”28
This confusion of boundaries and constructive responsibility leads Haraway to conclude that we
are all cyborgs:
By the late twentieth-century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and
fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs. The cyborg is our
ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and
material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.29
In addition, not only is the cyborg a creature of social reality and fiction, it is also a creature of a
post-gender world. The cyborg,
has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to
organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.
In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a “final” irony since the cyborg
is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individuation,
an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.30
For Haraway, the cyborg has no origin story because such stories depend on the myth of original
unity and fullness. The cyborg, however, is committed to partiality and irony. It is an oppositional
creature as well as a utopian one. It is also a creature that is not structured by the polarity between
public and private.
26
27
28
29
30
Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150–1.
POSTHUMANISM 329
In short, Haraway’s cyborg theory reworks the relationship between the major dualisms in
Western traditions: “self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/
appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion,
total/partial, God/man.”31 These dualisms, which become inoperative in cyborg theory, are a key
component of the “logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers,
animals—in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self.”32 Writes
Haraway,
Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our
bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful
infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the
circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines,
identities, categories, relationships, space stories.33
As political constructions, cyborgs reveal posthumanism as deeply political and potentially

emancipatory.
Cyborg theory’s dream of a “powerful infidel heteroglossia” recalls the work of Bakhtin discussed
earlier, wherein heteroglossia shows how multiple voices can coexist in literature and the ways in
which this exhibits a form of ideological or class struggle. Again, for Bakhtin, whereas the ruling
class aims to narrow the meanings of words or discourse, the multi-accentuality identified by him
allows for class interests to wage battles within language for control over meaning. Haraway is
suggesting here that a related thing happens with cyborg imagery—albeit in a post-Marxist context.
Finally, cyborg theory also recalls the biopolitics of Foucault discussed earlier, which Haraway
describes as a “flaccid premonition of cyborg politics”—a statement that probably also holds as well
for the heteroglossia of Bakhtin.
12.2 ANIMAL STUDIES

In “And Say the Animal Responded” (1997), Derrida said that he was committed to tracking down
“the whole anthropomorphic reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the animal
order, of the law over the living.”34 For Derrida, philosophy’s assertion of human superiority and
refusal of the animal order is unacceptable. According to him, the anthropocentric perspective on
the animal refuses them many of the powers attributed to humans, including “speech, reason,
experience of death, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughter, tears, respect, and so
on—the list is necessarily without limit.”35 Moreover, Derrida seems to be more concerned with the
attribution of these powers to humans—than the denial of them to animals.
31
32
33
34
Jacques Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?” (1997), trans. David Wills, in Zoontologies: The Question of the
Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 138.
35
Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?” 137.
Derrida is a key figure in animal studies in that his work renders problematic the Western
philosophical approach to the animal. But what is perhaps even more surprising is that when he
writes about these philosophical problems he uses “real” animals as examples. In “The Animal That
Therefore I am (More to Follow)” (1997), he writes:
The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It
doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats of the earth, the felines that traverse
myths and religions, literature, and fables.36
In this essay, Derrida challenges an old philosophical position that animals are only capable of
reacting like a machine. The question for him is not whether animals can speak, but rather the
ability of this real cat to know the difference between a reaction and a response. Commenting on
his work here in When Species Meet (2008), Haraway observes that Derrida “did not fall into the
trap of making the subaltern speak”37—a comment that establishes a deep link between animal
studies and subaltern studies. Nevertheless, comments Haraway, Derrida “did not seriously consider
an alternative form of engagement either, one that risked knowing something more about cats and
how to look back, perhaps even scientifically, biologically, and therefore also philosophically and
intimately.”38
From the anthropocentric perspective, animal studies investigates the relationship of humans to
the biological kingdom. Such studies often deal with animal rights, that is, the moral obligations of
humans to animals. Debate here concerns whether humans (members of the species homo sapiens)
should be free to use animals (non-human members of the biological kingdom animalia) in any way
they desire, or whether our ethical practice should extend to animals. Animal ethics (a subarea of
animal studies) asks whether it wrong to wear a fur coat, to harm animals in scientific research, or
to raise animals for food even if we do not require these practices to live. Contemporary animal
rights advocates reduce the moral difference between humans and (other) animals, while their
antagonists work to widen it.
Parallels are often made between our treatment of animals and our treatment of other humans.
Some animal rights advocates argue that speciesism, or discrimination based on species, is just as
objectionable as racism and sexism. In the case of speciesism, the interests of animals are subordinated
to the interests of humans. Most people who argue that we should treat animals of all species
equally believe that being a member of one species rather than another species is not a morally
relevant difference. Consequently, the differences between species, like the differences between
races and sexes, is nothing more than a difference in genetic code, and not sufficient grounds for
discrimination.
The Judeo-Christian tradition seems to support speciesism. Humans, according to this tradition,
are different from animals. Humans are created in the image of God and have immortal souls,
whereas animals are not created in the image of God and do not have immortal souls. Animals were
placed on the earth to serve the needs of humans. Therefore, the Judeo-Christian tradition gives
36
Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)” (1997), trans. David Wills, in Signature Derrida, ed.
Jay Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 385.
37
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 20.
38
Haraway, When Species Meet, 20.
POSTHUMANISM 331
humans the right to dominate and discriminate against animals. As a result, animal rights advocates
often turn either to utilitarian arguments or rights-based argumentation to support their positions,
and not the Judeo-Christian tradition.
According to a utilitarian argument for animal rights, the maximization of happiness is possible only
if we stop animal research, refrain from eating animals, and cease using animals for clothing and
research. Eating animals is not necessary for a happy and healthy life, and may even detract from our
health; cosmetics and animal-product clothing are merely a product of our vanity; and the use of
animals in research is unnecessary. Opponents have strong counter-arguments for these claims: for
example, using animals in research often results in faster conclusions to medical studies, which can save
human lives. Therefore, the happiness brought about by new treatments discovered through animal
research outweighs the unhappiness that would have resulted from not using animals in research.
Utilitarian proponents of animal rights, such as Peter Singer, often bolster their arguments by
pointing out that because most animals are sentient (have conscious experience) and can experience
pain, pleasure, and happiness, we have a moral obligation to maximize their happiness as well as
our own. If we do not, we are guilty of animal discrimination, or speciesism. In Animal Liberation
(1975), Singer argues that speciesism is analogous to sexual and racial discrimination. If it is unjust
to ignore the interests of women (sexism) and members of other races (racism), then it is also unjust
to ignore the interests of members of other species (speciesism), particularly their interest in not
suffering. According to Singer, all sentient beings are equal because all sentient beings have the
ability to suffer. Therefore, we share with animals an interest in avoiding suffering, and each of our
interests should be given equal consideration. Some, however, respond by saying that this only
shows that we refrain from making animals suffer, not that we should stop killing them for food,
using them in experimentation, or making clothing out of them.
The rights-based defense of animals charges that animals have rights because they have interests.
For example, if an animal has an interest in keeping its skin, then the loss of that skin is bad for the
animal. Rights-based animal advocates thus argue that many of the rights of animals are violated
when we use them for clothing, food, and research. One of the common objections to this line of
argument is that to have rights one must also have duties. Since animals do not have duties, they
cannot have rights. Others argue that even if animals have some rights, they do not have a right to
life. Beings only have a right to life if they understand the concept of the future. Thus, because
animals do not understand what the future is, they do not have a right to life.
It should be noted that animals do not fare any better under either Kantianism or social contract
theory. In Lectures on Ethics (1775–80), Immanuel Kant argued that animals are different from
humans because they are not autonomous and they lack the capacity to reason about their actions.
Therefore, they are not subject to the moral law. Nevertheless, Kant believed that frivolous cruelty
towards animals would indicate a depraved and immoral inclination. “We can judge the heart of a
man,” writes Kant, “by his treatment of animals.”39 In addition, a “master who turns out his ass or
his dog because the animal can no longer earn its keep manifests a small mind.”40
According to social contract theorists, we only have moral obligations to beings that enter into
the social contract. Since animals cannot enter into such an agreement, we are not morally obligated
39
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (1775–80), trans. Louis Infield (London: Methuen, 1932), 240.
40
Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 241.
to them. The Kantian and social contract arguments are two of the main anthropocentric arguments
against animal rights. Both views contend that morality is developed, maintained, and improved for
human beings and other possible beings that can enter into moral agreements. Therefore, we treat
animals differently not because they are not human, but because they cannot enter into moral
agreements. Hence, according to this line of argument, the use of animals for food or research
cannot be considered speciesism.
Animal rights advocates make two major criticisms of the Kantian and social contract views.
First, they argue that our treatment of animals is based not on the view that humans have better
reasoning abilities, but rather on the view that the human species has a higher moral worth. In real
life, we do not treat humans who lack the ability to enter into contracts (e.g., infants, comatose
humans) as we treat animals. Thus, we are inconsistent in our application of the Kantian and social
contract positions. Second, animal rights advocates argue that the ability to enter into a contract
should not be the criterion which determines whether we are morally obligated to a being.
Moreover, the limitations of anthropocentric approaches to animals become even more
pronounced when one engages in animal studies from the post-anthropocentric perspective. Animal
studies, when approached from this perspective, is about the relationships among all species.
Furthermore, if one contends like Thomsen and Wamberg that postanthropocentrism and
posthumanism mean the same thing (as noted in the introduction to this chapter), then the
postanthropocentric approach to animal studies is also the posthuman approach. From the
perspective of posthumanism (and postanthropocentrism), the issue of human exceptionalism,
dominion, and superiority that embarrasses (per Derrida) the Western philosophical approach to
the animal is traded for a vast array of interrelations, interdependencies, and interactions among
species. These species include humans (members of the species homo sapiens) and animals (non-
human members of the biological kingdom animalia)—and, depending on how far one wants to
push species inclusivity, it could include all living things (zoe–).
Moreover, from the perspective of posthumanism (and postanthropocentrism), advocacy for
animals is often cut from the same political cloth as general advocacy for the “other.” So, just as
various forms of theory and studies advocate against discrimination based on race, class, gender,
sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age, animal studies advocates against discrimination based on
species. But, unlike the politics of representation that maintains that we must give a voice to those
who do not have one or that we must speak for “the other,” the posthuman (and postanthropocentric)
perspective does not maintain that humans must speak for animals or give them a voice. To do so
would be to fall back into the anthropocentric perspective on animal studies—as well as risk the
problems associated with speaking for the subaltern raised by Spivak and others.
Rather, what Haraway—one of the central figures in postanthropocentric animal studies—
proposes is that “instrumental relations” between species be established so that all species may
flourish. A key idea here is the notion of response-ability in the relations between humans and
animals as well as among animals. However, rather than conceive of the entities responsibly
interacting with each other as ones with “fully secured boundaries called possessive individuals
(imagined as human or animal),” Haraway speaks of responsive entities, that is, ones with “connections
that demand and enable response, not bare calculation or ranking.”41 “Response,” she says,
41
Haraway, When Species Meet, 70–1.
POSTHUMANISM 333
grows with the capacity to respond, that is, responsibility. Such a capacity can be shaped only in
and for multidirectional relationships, in which always more than one responsive entity is in the
process of becoming. That means that human beings are not uniquely obligated to and gifted
with responsibility; animals as workers in labs, animals in all their worlds, are response-able in
the same sense as people are; that is, responsibility is a relationship crafted in intra-action
through which entities, subjects and objects, come into being.42
These relations constitute an instrumental economy in which we are “companion species to one
another.”43 It is one based on a fluid “animal” ontology wherein “entities, subjects and objects”
ontologically “come into being” through their response-ability. For Haraway, this idea is “not
romantic or idealist but mundane and consequential in the little things that make our lives.”44
In short, Haraway’s postanthropocentric and posthuman approach to animal studies reconceives
the relationship between animals and humans—and along with this, their ontology (or being) as
well. Still, her position does not entirely leave behind anthropocentric arguments aimed at avoiding
animal suffering such as Singer’s—a position which is turn is derived from Bentham’s famous
question regarding animals, namely, “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? but,
Can they suffer?”45 Rather, Haraway transmutes them into postanthropocentric terms by arguing
for the “responsible sharing of suffering” between species. A similar transmutation occurs when it
comes to the anthropocentric Judeo-Christian tradition command “Thou shalt not kill” when
viewed from the position of postanthropocentric responsibility:
The problem is not figuring out to whom such a command applies so that “other” killing can go
on as usual and reach unprecedented historical proportions. The problem is to learn to live
responsibly within the multiplicitous necessity and labour of killing, so as to be in the open, in
quest of the capacity to respond in relentless historical, nonteleological, multispecies contingency.
Perhaps the commandment should read, “Thou shalt not make killable.”46
In sum, both anthropocentric and postanthropocentric perspectives on animal studies are deeply
concerned with animal ethics. However, their differing accounts of the relationship of humans to
animals yield radically different ethical theories.
The adoption of a postanthropocentric and posthuman perspective also leads Haraway to be
highly critical of theorists such as Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, who offer alternative accounts
of the animal: in the case of Derrida, “he failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did
not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps
making available to him in looking back at him in the morning”;47 in the case of Deleuze and
Guattari, however, Haraway’s criticisms are much harsher.
42
43
44
45
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 283, n.
46
47
In “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible” from A Thousand

Plateaus, while Deleuze and Guattari work hard to get beyond the human–animal divide “to find
the rich multiplicities and topologies of a heterogeneously and nonteleologically connected world,”
Haraway abhors their “scorn for all that is mundane and ordinary and the profound absence of
curiosity about or respect for and with actual animals.”48 And, given Haraway’s profound intellectual
curiosity about animals, Deleuze and Guattari’s statement “Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool”
does not sit well with her either.49 “I am not sure I can find in philosophy,” writes Haraway of
Deleuze and Guattari, “ a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and
horror at the ordinariness of flesh, here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist
project.”50 Finally, though Deleuze and Guattari as well Derrida offer alternative paths for animal
studies, for those who advocate for real animals, Haraway’s position appears here as the only
responsible option.
12.3 SYSTEMS THEORY

Systems theory, says Francis Halsall, refers to a number of differing theories “which consider
organization in terms of function, communication, and information.”51 These theories include
chaos and complexity theory, cybernetics, second-order cybernetics, dynamical systems theory, and
social systems theory. Also, according to Henry Sussman, deconstruction should be added to this
list. This is important to note because it provides a direct route from systems theory, which
originated in science and engineering, to literary and cultural theory. But this should not be much
of a surprise as the connections between cybernetics and poststructuralism (e.g., the cybernetic
unconscious of poststructuralism) have already been noted.
“Deconstruction is a leading branch of contemporary systems theory,” states Sussman, “conducted
under an aura of nonchalance that is merely the disguise both for the comprehensiveness and scholarly
rigor of its analyses and its situation at the microscopic level of linguistic and semiotic articulation
(committing it to joint-processing at the ‘lower’ as well as ‘upper’ levels).”52 To establish this
connection, consider that Gregory Bateson, who applied second-order cybernetics to anthropology,
states in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) that all systems are governed by the following principles:
(1) The system shall operate with and upon differences.
(2) The system shall consist of closed loops of networks or pathways along which differences
and transformations of differences shall be transmitted.
(3) Many events within the system shall be energized by the respondent part rather than by
impact from the triggering part.
(4) The system shall show self-correctedness in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the
direction of a runway.53
48
49
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 240; original emphasis.
50
51
Francis Halsall, “Systems Theory,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 712.
52
Henry Sussman, “Deconstruction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 114.
53
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 490.
POSTHUMANISM 335
Sussman notes the teleology (in Greek telos means end or purpose) in Bateson’s systems thinking,
which, he explains, “is in the thrust toward self-correction that [Bateson] believes can be implanted,
through meticulous thinking, into machines, whether their configuration happens to be mechanical,
cognitive, cybernetic, or ecological.”54 For Sussman, the self-correction of systems is “a messianic
aspiration [that] marks the point at which the writing of systems (the program with which they have
been uploaded) swerves unmarked into the metaphysics of ethical perfectibility and redemption.”55
Nevertheless, against the teleology of Bateson’s systems, Sussman situates the non-teleological
systems of Deleuze, Guattari, and Derrida—thinkers whose works “demonstrate that systems are
also the interface to open-ended networks of signification that proliferate, disseminate, verge
toward no specific point or destination,”56 that is, telos. Sussman finds a kind of playfulness in the
“random dispersions and haphazard coincidences of [the] constitutive signifiers that make
systems.”57
In Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014), Bruce Clarke says that “while a system may be any
complex totality composed of interdependent elements, the strong sense of the system concept
denotes a complex ensemble unified in such a way that a process emerges from, and only from, the
interdependent interactions of those elements.”58 According to him, the systems of the world are as
numberless as are the “materialities involved in their constitution and communication.”59 He
describes the connection between narrative and systems theory as follows:
As a complex structure of signs, the literary object, such as a narrative text, is a social element
and media object ready to be taken up and processed by an observing system. However, the
narrative subject—the observer of the text—can be one of, or comprised of, multiple systems,
most immediately the psychic systems (or minds) producing perception and intuitions of the text
and the social systems (or conversations) within which the text circulates as an element of literary
communication.60
Furthermore, Clarke notes that “systems may be physical or technological, biological or cultural,
natural or designed, or some combination of these.”61 “Unlike stories,” he continues, “nothing
restricts the nature of systems to ‘man’s dominion.’ ”62 In other words, systems theory is posthuman
because humans are just one of countless systems in the world.
Bateson directly critiques humanism in Steps to an Ecology of Mind by combining anthropology,
astrology, biology, chemistry, and physics to form a transdisciplinary theory of cybernetics. For him,
systems thinking occurs not within the human individual, but rather within a complex and
conflicting set of relations. To get a sense of how this posthuman systems-thinking works, let’s look
at Bateson’s description of a man cutting down a tree:
54
Henry Sussman, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 272–3.
55
Sussman, Around the Book, 273.
56
Sussman, Around the Book, 211–12.
57
Sussman, Around the Book, 212.
58
Bruce Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 1.
59
Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative, 1.
60
61
62
Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected,
according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective
(i.e. mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree–eyes–brain–muscles–axe-stroke–
tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind.63
Bateson argues that his systems approach results in an ecological mind, wherein eco-mental systems
replace anthropocentric approaches to the mind (e.g., Kantian epistemology). Moreover, whereas
the anthropocentric approach to the mind pits man against nature, a systems approach is a
postanthropocentric, relational one. For Bateson, the anthropocentric approach is “an ecology of
bad ideas” that propagates a narrow epistemology, that focuses only on “ ‘What interests me is me,
or my organization, or my species.”64 In doing so, “you chop off consideration of other loops of the
loop structure,”65 that is, loops relating to non-human systems.
Cybernetics is the study of biological and technical systems as adaptive and informational. These
systems are communicational circuits that can be both formalized and subject to regulative
intervention. In How We Became Posthuman (1999), Hayles separates the development of
cybernetics into three waves of development based on the central concept of each:
(1) First-Wave Cybernetics—from 1945 to 1960, homeostasis was the central concept of
cybernetics. It theorizes organisms through their ability to retain their place and identity
against changes in an external environment. First-wave cybernetics resulted in a theory of
communication and control that applied equally to animals, humans, and machines. The
concepts surrounding homeostasis are circular causality, feedback loops, information as
signal and noise, instrumental language, and quantification. Some principal figures here are
Norbert Wiener (who coined the term cybernetics), John von Neumann, Claude Shannon,
and Warren McCulloch.66
(2) Second-Wave Cybernetics—from 1960 to 1980, reflexivity was the central concept of
cybernetics. Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a
system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.
The concept of reflexivity in second-wave cybernetics is similar to the one used in critical
theory, cultural studies, and social studies of science. However, whereas feedback loops were
in the first wave linked to homeostasis, in the second wave they are linked to reflexivity.
Also, the conceptual addition of observers who are inside the system differs from the first-
wave wherein observers are outside the system. The concepts surrounding reflexivity are
autopoiesis (self-making), reflexive language, structural coupling, and system environment.67
Of these, autopoiesis radically alters the idea of the informational feedback loop such that it
no longer (like in the first wave) connects a system to its environment, but now no information
crosses the boundary separating the system from its environment. Autopoiesis does not
allow us to see a world “out there,” but only see what our systemic organization allows us
63
Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 318.
64
65
66
67
POSTHUMANISM 337
to see. Some key figures here are Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Niklas Luhmann, Humberto
Maturana, and Francisco Varela.68
(3) Third-Wave Cybernetics—from 1980 to the present, virtuality was the central concept.
Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information
patterns. This definition plays off the duality at the heart of the condition of virtuality—
materiality on the one hand, information on the other.69 The world here is essentially
informational patterns as if the universe was ultimately a computer simulation. The third
wave swelled into existence when self-organization began to be understood not merely as
the (re)production of internal organization, but as the springboard to emergence. The
concepts surrounding virtuality are emergent behavior, functionalities, and computational
universe. Some key figures here are Rodney Brooks, Francisco Varela, and Hans Moravec.70
Of Wiener, Hayles says his aim in developing cybernetics was not to “dismantle the liberal humanist
subject,” but rather to fashion “human and machine alike in the image of an autonomous, self-
directed individual.”71 For Weiner, writes Hayles, “the point was to extend liberal humanism, not
subvert it.”72 “The point,” she continues, “was less to show that man was a machine than to
demonstrate that a machine could function like a man.”73
Heidegger, however, was not as kind to Wiener as Hayles. He contends that cybernetics has
taken the place of thought,74 and that with its development, “the destruction of the human being is
complete.”75 Derrida, however, whose deconstruction draws heavily upon the work of Heidegger,
says in Of Grammatology that
whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be
the field of writing. If the field of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—
including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently
served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè
[written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.76
Nevertheless, deconstruction is just one subarea of systems theory, a field that has entered many
different disciplines ranging from biology, meteorology, and management to communication,
economics, and literary and cultural studies. Response to the question of whether the advent of
systems theory marks the end of thinking (as Heidegger claims) or not is one of the ways to
68
69
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 10–11.
70
71
72
73
74
Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us” (1966), in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, trans.
William J. Richardson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1981), 45–67.
75
Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters, ed. Medard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard
Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 123.
76
distinguish humanism (and anthropocentrism) from posthumanism (and postanthropocentrism). In

short, systems thinking is to posthumanism (and postanthropocentrism) as thinking is to humanism
(and anthropocentrism).
12.4 COGNITIVE CRITICISM

Cognitive criticism (or, alternately cognitive literary studies) is the intersection of cognitive science
and literary and cultural theory. It is “the work of literary critics and theorists vitally interested in
cognitive science,” says Alan Richardson, who have a “good deal to say to one another, whatever
their differences.”77 These differences perhaps start with the question of whether work in this area
is a species of humanism or posthumanism. If we regard posthumanism as equivalent to
postanthropocentrism, then given that cognitive science is interested in human cognition, cognitive
criticism would appear to be anthropocentric. But as one starts to dig down into some of the beliefs
of cognitive scientists, cognitive criticism begins to look increasingly like a version of posthumanism.
Still, whether cognitive criticism is critical posthumanism, which is centered on new approaches to
the human subject, or analytic posthumanism, which takes its lead from science and technology
studies, or a combination of both, arguably depends on the area of cognitive science foregrounded
in the specific form of cognitive criticism.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary investigation of cognition by artificial intelligence,
linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. Cognitive processes such as reasoning and perception are
approached by cognitive scientists as a form of information-processing that involves the manipulation
of mental representations. Moreover, according to Tim Crane, “cognitive scientists also hold either
that these mental processes can be modeled by computers, or that these processes actually are
computational processes (i.e. that the mind is a computer).”78 According to the classical approach
to cognitive science, a representational system of symbols with syntactic and semantic properties is
computationally processed. However, this approach was challenged by connectionism, which
rejects the notion that mental representations are structured syntactically. Rather, for connectionists,
cognition involves neural networks in which “representational content is holistically distributed
across entire networks of simple representational units.”79
But, of course, contemporary cognitive science is continuously developing and refining its
accounts of the neuroscience of consciousness, decision-making, empathy, mental imagery,
perception, reading, and social behavior. Moreover, cognitive scientists have also developed non-
dualistic accounts of cognition, that is, accounts that challenge a distinction between the mind and
the body. Dualism is the view that existence is composed of two separate, independent, and unique
realms, and that neither one can be reduced to the other. Plato’s distinction between a world of the
senses and a world of the intellect and Kant’s distinction between a noumenal world and a
phenomenal world are types of dualism. So too is Descartes’ famous argument in Meditations on
First Philosophy (1641) that the mind is separate from the body. For Descartes, the body and the
77
Richardson quoted by Zunshine in “Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive
Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.
78
Tim Crane, “Cognitive Science,” in The Oxford Guide to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 146.
79
Crane, “Cognitive Science,” 146.
POSTHUMANISM 339
mind (or soul—he uses these terms interchangeably) have entirely opposite natures: the body (viz.,
res extensa or “extended thing”) is divisible and extended, and the mind (viz., res cogitans or
“thinking thing”) is indivisible and unextended. Descartes’ position on the relationship between
mind and body is referred to by a number of different phrases including Cartesian dualism, mind–
body dualism, and psychophysical dualism.
At the same time, Paul Churchland, for example, argues in Matter and Consciousness (1984) that
talk about the mind and its mental states is mistaken and should be replaced with a scientific theory
concerning how the brain works. Churchland begins by criticizing identity theory, the view that
there is a one-to-one correspondence between mental states and brain states. Identity theorists
believe that all discussion of mental states such as hoping, imagining, and believing can be reduced
to discussion of brain states. Whereas the identity theorist believes that intertheoretic reduction
between mental states and brain states is possible, Churchland maintains that it is not.
Intertheoretic reduction is the name of the process whereby the terms and principles of an older,
weaker theory are reduced or translated to the terms and principles of a newer, more powerful
theory. According to Churchland, mental states are a remnant of a severely flawed and pseudo-
scientific theory, “folk” psychology, a theory so mistaken that its terms and principles must be
completely dismissed. In place of folk psychology, Churchland defends eliminative materialism,
which maintains that all human behavior can be explained in terms of neuroscience, the study of
how the brain works. Eliminative materialists maintain that the terms and principles of folk
psychology will cease to be used as we learn more about how the brain works. Churchland’s
eliminative materialism concludes that there is no such thing as the mind and mental states, only
the brain and brain states. Thus, Churchland’s non-dualistic approach to cognitive science not only
refutes the mind/body distinction, but also any theory that refers to mental states including
psychological theories.
The various theories and methodologies of cognitive science have entered literary and cultural
studies at a number of different points. One, mentioned earlier, is by providing a new direction for
narratology. Cognitive narratology, a subarea of cognitive criticism (and narratology), focuses on
the “mental states, capacities, and dispositions,” writes David Herman, “that provide grounds for—
or, conversely, are grounded in—narrative experiences.”80 According to Herman, cognitive
narratology addresses two broad questions:
(1) How do stories across media interlock with interpreters’ mental states and processes, thus
giving rise to narrative experiences?; and,
(2) How (to what extent, in what specific ways) does narrative scaffold efforts to make sense of
experience itself?81
Major areas of research in cognitive narratology include:
(1) Storyworlds as Mental States—inquiry into how do mental states and processes interface
with storyworld character-inventories, spacio-temporal profiles, and ontological make-up;
80
David Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, §1, September 22, 2013, http://www.
lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/38.html.
81
Herman, “Cognitive Narratology.”
(2) Narrative Perspective—inquiry into cognitively inflected accounts of narrative perspective

or focalization in fictional and nonfictional texts;
(3) Reader-Response—inquiry into cognitive reception theories;
(4) Data and Diagrams—empirical studies ranging from measuring reading times to diagrams
of storyworlds;
(5) Transmediality—transmedial studies suggesting that narrative functions as a cognitive
macro-frame enabling interpreters to identify stories or story-like elements across any
number of media including literary, musical, and pictorial media;
(6) Characterization—inquiry into characters and methods of characterization including
techniques used by storytellers to figure forth their character’s mental lives;
(7) Self-Conduct—inquiry into how stories provide a means for evaluating the conduct of self
and others;
(8) Emotions—inquiry into the way emotional responses undergird the telling and
interpretation of stories;
(9) Evolution—inquiry into the theory of evolution and evolutionary psychology with regard
to narrative thinking;
(10) Counterfactuals—inquiry into how counterfactual scenarios support efforts to negotiate
experience; and,
(11) Non-Human Narrative—inquiry into what it might be like for nonhuman animals to
encounter the world—and thereby reshape humans’ own modes of encounter.82
Finally, Herman qualifies the association of narratology with cognitive science by stating that it is
preferable that cognitive narratology not be conflated with cognitivism, a position in cognitive
science that views the mind as reducible to “disembodied mental representations that are disattached
from particular environments for acting and interacting.”83 Instead, writes Herman, “research on
storytelling and the mind can investigate how a culture’s narrative practices are geared on to
humans’ always-situated mental states, capacities and proclivities.”84 Note as well that Herman
frequently refers to “mental states” and their role in cognitive narratology—a theoretical choice
that both puts him at odds with Churchland’s approach to cognitive science and speaks to some of
the major differences in the field noted by Richardson.
But cognitive narratology is just one of many ways that cognitive science has coupled with a
major area of literary and cultural theory. Others include combining cognitive science with
historicism, viz., cognitive historicism; queer theory, viz., cognitive queer theory; aesthetics, viz.,
neuroaesthetics; postcolonial studies, viz., cognitive postcolonial studies; and, disability studies,
viz., cognitive disability studies. Contributors to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies
(2015), for example, make the case for these connections between cognitive science and literary
and cultural studies, as well as others.
82
Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” adapted from §3.2.
83
Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” §3.1.
84
Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” §3.1.
POSTHUMANISM 341
What becomes clear when surveying the recent contributions of cognitive criticism is that many
of its areas of inquiry have already been explored by literary and cultural theory without the aide
of cognitive science. For example, if we look back to the New Criticism, we will recall that I. A.
Richards called for literary criticism to emulate science. And among the things that Richards focused
on were the attitudes that are triggered by our emotional responses when reading a literary work.
One can easily imagine now cognitive science as updating his work in Principles of Literary Criticism
(1924), wherein it would now offer a cognitive science approach to the mental events that occur
during the reading of a literary work. Or, think of the phenomenological approach to the literary
work of art, wherein one studies like Roman Ingarden the cognition of a literary work of art.
The question, however, is what does the incorporation of cognitive science add to early theory?
For that matter, what does it add to more recent areas of literary and cultural theory such as critical
race theory or critical climate change? For some, the advances in cognitive science today are
significant enough to warrant a reconsideration and re-evaluation of older areas of literary and
cultural theory. This surely holds for Ingarden’s The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, which
was published in 1937. New theories of cognition provide a different standard against which to
measure his work. But for others, such as critical climate change, the prefix cognitive will never be
a substitute for the prefix critical. Finally, while the field of cognitive criticism (or, cognitive literary
studies) is a burgeoning one, the field of cognitive critical theory has attracted far less attention.
12.5 SPECULATIVE REALISM

Speculative realism, writes Graham Harman, is “a loose philosophical movement opposed to trends
that have dominated continental philosophy from its inception.”85 Its inception is linked to the
work of Quentin Meillassoux, whose 2006 book, After Finitude, launched a philosophical ship that
has attracted many supporters, opponents, and those like Harman who work hard to distinguish
their own work within the speculative realism movement. What makes work in this general area
particularly difficult to master is that it really is not a cohesive philosophical movement. “What
prevented speculative realism from becoming a cohesive philosophical movement,” writes Harman,
“was the vast range of options available within its rather general founding principles: realism plus
unorthodox speculation.”86
In After Finitude, Meillassoux argues that after Kant, philosophy has been caught in the problem
of correlationism, a philosophical approach wherein reality is defined in terms of how it appears or
relates to humans. “Correlationism,” says Meillassoux, “rests on an argument as simple as it is
powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and
theory about X without a positing of X.”87 “If you speak about something,” he continues, “you
speak about something that is given to you, and posited to you.”88 Moreover, adds Meillassoux,
85
Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43
(2012): 184.
86
Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 184.
87
Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” Collapse III
(2007): 409. This is a transcript of the remarks made at the 2007 University of London speculative realism conference.
88
Brassier, et al., “Speculative Realism,” 409.
Correlationism takes many forms, but particularly those of transcendental philosophy, the
varieties of phenomenology, and post-modernism. But although these currents are all
extraordinarily varied in themselves, they all share, according to me, a more or less explicit
decision: that there are no objects, no events, no laws, no beings which are not always-already
correlated with a point of view, with subjective access. Anyone maintaining the contrary, i.e., that
it is possible to attain something like a reality in itself, existing absolutely independently of his
viewpoint, or his categories, or his epoch, or his culture, or his language, etc.—this person would
be exemplarily naïve, or if you prefer: a realist, a metaphysician, a quaint dogmatic philosopher.89
In short, speculative realists reject correlationism. Rather, they offer different forms of anti-
correlationism, the view that reality can be examined in itself independent of any subjective
mediation from a human observer.
Correlationists argue, writes Peter Gratton, “that reality and human beings go together like
conjoined twins: where you find one, you find the other.”90 Moreover, he notes two different types
of correlationism that have been identified by speculative realists:
(1) Weak Correlationism—the view that reality exists and we can think it, that is, that it exists
and that it is non-contradictory, but we cannot know about it given the filters through which
reality is understood. The speculative realists’ chosen representative of this position is
Immanuel Kant.
(2) Strong Correlationism—the view that there is no thinking about what is outside our own
being in the world. Representatives of this view include Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger,
Michael Dummett, Nelson Goodman, and Bruno Latour. As examples of this position,
consider Latour’s claim that Pharaoh Ramses could not have died of tuberculosis, since it
was not discovered until 150 years ago; and Merleau-Ponty’s comment that “Nothing will
ever bring home to my comprehension what a nebula that no one sees could possibly be.”91
Both of these types of correlationism are rejected by speculative realism. Moreover, also rejected
are all forms of idealism, including the versions posited by Plato, George Berkeley, and Hegel. As
Plato’s version was discussed earlier, let’s turn briefly to Berkeley’s version of idealism.
In Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley argues that nothing
exists outside of the mind. For him, the existence of things consists in their being perceived. “Their
esse is percipi,”92 writes Berkeley, meaning that to be is to be perceived. Nothing has “any existence
out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”93 Berkeley’s position on knowledge is
that we only know what we find in our experience. Like John Locke, he is an empiricist. However,
Berkeley believes that Locke had not followed his empiricism to its logical limit. Consequently,
89
Quentin Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” Lecture at Middlesex University, London (8 May 2008): 1, https://
speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729–time_without_becoming.pdf.
90
Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 16.
91
Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” 15; adapted. Also, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945),
trans. Donald Landes (London: Routledge, 2013), 432.
92
George Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), ed. Colin M. Turbayne (Indianapolis,
IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 24; §3.
93
Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 24; §3.
POSTHUMANISM 343
Berkeley strenuously disagrees with Locke on a number of positions, such as the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities. Where Locke maintained that primary qualities refer to qualities
that exist independent of being experienced, and secondary qualities refer to qualities that exist
dependent on being experienced, Berkeley can find no difference between these two types of
qualities since both are dependent upon perception. For Berkeley, Locke’s primary qualities of
extension, figure, motion, and so on, “are only ideas existing in the mind.”94
Berkeley calls his philosophy immaterialism, emphasizing in this label its rejection of matter. For
him, “it is plain that the very notion of what is called Matter or corporeal substance, involves a
contradiction in it,”95 and that “there is not any other Substance than Spirit, or that which
perceives.”96 Berkeley’s argument against the existence of matter might be formulated as follows:
(P1) Whatever can be thought of is an idea in the mind of the person thinking it.
(P2) Nothing can be thought of except ideas in minds and anything else is inconceivable.
(P3) What is inconceivable cannot exist.
(Concl.) Therefore, matter, which by definition is not an idea in a mind, cannot exist.
Thus, according to Berkeley, the world is not composed of both material substances (matter) and
immaterial substances (minds, spirits, or souls), but only of the latter, which he simply calls “Spirit.”
As such, Berkeley’s doctrines are best termed idealism. In terms of metaphysics, idealism is the
position that reality is ultimately mental, spiritual, or nonmaterial in nature; in terms of epistemology,
idealism is the position that all we know are our ideas. Berkeley’s positions are in accord with both
epistemological and metaphysical idealism.
Hegel’s idealism is often referred to as absolute idealism. For the purposes of speculative realism,
it is an important type of absolute idealism because “there is a necessary relation between being and
thinking, since for Hegel, the dialectic or relation between thinking and being is the absolute—the
‘and’ here is what is ultimately real.”97 For Meillassoux, Hegel’s idealism is also speculative because
“it advances into thinking reality as it is: the correlation is taken as the absolute in-itself.”98 According
to Gratton, compared with the infinite dialectical movement of Hegel’s absolute, strong
correlationism appears as a modest alternative. Whereas the speculative idealism of Hegel posits an
infinite and necessary being, strong correlationism rejects metaphysics—which is for Meillassoux,
the positing of a necessary being—and embraces “our human finitude as well as our inability to
establish assorted grounds for being, whether it be the Hegelian spirit, Leibniz’s monad of monads,
or the other necessary entities of metaphysics.”99
Thus, speculative realism rejects not only the philosophical traditions of British empiricism (e.g.,
the work of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), but also all German idealism, including Hegel’s absolute
idealism and Kant’s transcendental idealism, the view that the content of knowledge comes from
our senses and that the form of our knowledge comes from reason. Moreover, also rejected by
94
95
96
97
Gratton, Speculative Realism, 15.
98
Gratton, Speculative Realism, 15–16.
99
Gratton, Speculative Realism, 16.
speculative realism are efforts at blending British empiricism and German idealism, such as F. H.
Bradley’s version of absolute idealism in Appearance and Reality (1899), which holds that there
must be an absolute or a harmonious reality that transcends our thought and in which “mere
thinking is absorbed.”100
What is very clear from speculative realists is that any anthropocentric approach to understanding
reality must be rejected. This includes naïve realism, the view that real things exist and that we can
have direct access to them. On this view, you do not question the existence of the baseball that hits
you on the head. Rather, you simply assume that the baseball is real and exists. But while naïve
realism might be a common-sense approach to the world, it is not an approach posited by many
philosophers including the speculative realists.
So, if all anthropocentric approaches to understanding reality including naïve realism are
rejected, what is the view of speculative realism? Well, to begin with, as noted earlier, there are
many different approaches to speculative realism. Just among the original four keynote speakers at
the first conference on the topic of speculative realism in 2007 at the University of London—
Meillassoux, Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier—there are widely divergent positions:
(1) Transcendental Realism—for Brassier, existence is worthless. For him, “this apparently banal
assertion harbours hidden depths which have yet to be sounded by philosophers, despite the
plethora of learned books and articles on the topic.”101 Nihilism, argues Brassier, is “the
unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality,
which, despite the presumptions of humans, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to
the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.
Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home,’ nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers
would do to re-establish the meaningfulness, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered
concord between man and nature.”102 Brassier’s nihilistic approach to speculative realism
has been termed transcendental realism.
(2) Vitalist Idealism—for Grant, idealism does not mean what it traditionally means for
philosophers, namely, that the existence of the world depends on its human observer. “I’m
very concerned to show that idealism, as it were” says Grant, “doesn’t look like we think it
does. I’m very concerned that we see and acknowledge this to be the case, because the
speculative tools that it has built into it are immense.”103 Continues Grant, “it seems to me
that idealism is committed to a realism about all things, a realism that applies equally to
nature and to the Idea.”104 According to Grant, the production of animals, flowers, forces,
and species in nature is the same production process that results in thoughts. Moreover,
none of these can be reduced to one product that preceded the other. “The Idea is external
to the thought that has it, the thought is external to the thinker that has it, the thinker is
external to the nature that produces both the thinker and thought and the Idea,”105 says
100
F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 182.
101
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), x.
102
Brassier, Nihil Unbound, xi.
103
104
105
POSTHUMANISM 345
Grant. For him, “we no longer have a series of interiorities with which it’s possible for
anyone to recognize themselves in the production of their thoughts.”106 Grant’s vitalistic
approach to speculative realism has been termed vitalist idealism.
(3) Object-Oriented Ontology [OOO]—for Harman, aesthetics is first philosophy, that is to say,
the root of all philosophy.107 “Aesthetic experience is crucial to OOO,” writes Harman, “as
a form of non-literal access to the object.”108 “It occurs,” he continues, “when sensual
qualities no longer belong to their usual sensual object, but are transferred instead to a real
object, which necessarily withdraws from all access. For this reason, the vanished real object
is replaced by the aesthetic beholder herself or himself as the new real object that supports
the sensual qualities. Thus we can speak of the necessary theatricality of aesthetic
experience.”109 Moreover, Harman aims to empty the aesthetic of all social, political,
cultural, and biographical considerations, and focus purely on formal ones. Harman’s
aesthetic approach to speculative realism has been termed object-oriented ontology.
(4) Speculative Materialism—for Meillassoux, factiality is the fact of the contingency of
everything. Against the idealist, the correlationist claims that we can conceive of the
contingency of correlation, that is, the possibility that correlation will disappear with the
extinction of humanity. This means, says Meillassoux, that the correlationist “can positively
think of a possibility which is independent of correlation, since this is precisely the possibility
of the non-being of the correlation.”110 Thus, for Meillassoux, “the effective ability of every
determined entity—event, thing, or law of subjectivity—to appear or disappear with no
reason for its being or non-being”111 is an absolute. The principle of factuality allows him to
arrive at “a speculative realism which clearly refutes correlationism.”112 According to
Meillassoux, “I can think an X independent of any thinking,”113 something which he has
learned from correlationism and its fight against the absolute. Thus, the “principle of
factuality unveils the ontological truth hidden beneath the radical skepticism of modern
philosophy: to be is not to be a correlate, but to be a fact: to be is to be factual—and this is
not a fact.”114 Meillassoux’s factual approach to speculative realism has been termed
speculative materialism.
To be sure, each of these positions on speculative realism, that is, Brassier’s transcendental realism,
Grant’s vitalist idealism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Meillassoux’s speculative
materialism, offer differing ways out of correlationism—and its human-centered understanding of
the world. In addition, in the case of Meillassoux, correlationism is used to make his case for
speculative realism: in other words, he both rejects and utilizes it. Harman says that this is a paradox
106
107
Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Penguin Random House, 2018),
59–102.
108
Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 260.
109
110
111
112
Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” 9.
113
114
that gives Meillassoux’s speculative materialism its “unique cast.”115 For Harman, one example of
this paradox is that Meillassoux contends both that “it is possible to gain direct access to the
primary qualities of things as they really are,” and is “in agreement with the correlationist objection
that killed off primary vs. secondary qualities in the first place.”116
In sum, while there is wide agreement among speculative realists as to what they reject, there is
little agreement as to what to do after correlationism has been rejected. Nevertheless, Brassier’s
nihilism, Grant’s vitalism, Harman’s aesthetics, and Meillassoux’s factuality each offer points of
entry into speculative realism that have sparked interest in many fields other than academic or
professional philosophy. For that matter, much of the work in speculative realism is regarded by
academic philosophers as anti-philosophy. Statements such as Grant’s that idealism is really a form
of realism are to professional philosophers what a statement such as comedy is really a form of
tragedy would be to professional literary critics: namely, nonsense. Nevertheless, just as there are
audiences for the latter, so too are there audiences for the former. “Though barely a decade old,”
comments Harman, “Speculative Realism is already one of the most influential philosophical
movements in art, architecture, and the humanities.”117 Finally, there are some who argue that
speculative realism is also be a form of anti-theory, a claim that will be taken up in the final chapter
in the context of object-oriented ontology (15.3).
115
Graham Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction (Medford, MA: Polity, 2018), 135.
116
Harman, Speculative Realism, 135.
117
Harman, Speculative Realism, 1.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Affect Studies
13.0 INTRODUCTION
“Affect,” write Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “is found in those intensities that pass body
to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about,
between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between
intensities and resonances themselves.”1 Its study in literary and cultural theory is often dated to the
1995 publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” and
Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect.” In fact, Seigworth and Gregg, co-editors of The Affect
Theory Reader (2010), an authoritative anthology of work in this area, dub this date the “watershed
moment” regarding affect and theories of affect.2
In the case of Sedgwick, her affect theory, which was introduced earlier in the context of her
contributions to queer theory, is one of the major strands of affect theory today. In this regard, you
will recall that following Silvan Tomkins, Sedgwick argues that affects can be qualitatively separated
into two groups: negative affects and positive affects. Moreover, regarding these two groups of
affects, there are two goals: the first is the general goal of seeking to minimize negative affect; and
the second is the general goal of seeking to maximize positive affect. Queer affect, which goes in a
number of different directions, will be the topic of the first section of this chapter (13.1). Here, the
work of Sedgwick and Sara Ahmed will be discussed as major contributions to affect theory.
Another major strand of affect theory comes via the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, who describes
affect as the ability to affect and to be affected. His theory of affect (affectus), which includes an
account of its origin and nature, is extensively and uniquely developed in The Ethics (1677).
Spinoza, however, enters contemporary literary and cultural theory regarding affect via Deleuze,
who wrote two books on Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, Spinoza (1968), and, Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy (1970/1981). Deleuze, perhaps more than any other philosopher after Spinoza,
is the one most closely associated with affect theory. Moreover, it is through a version of materialism
linked to his philosophy that the second major strand of affect theory today has developed. Thus,
materialism will be the topic of the second section of this chapter (13.2), wherein the formative
contributions of Spinoza and Deleuze (and Guattari) will be discussed along with those of other
major contributors to the topic of affect and materialism including Massumi, and Hardt and
Negri—the latter of whom you will recall offer a theory of the immaterial labor of cognitive
capitalism that brings affect, intellect, and bodies into capitalist production in ways not accounted
1
Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and
Gregory J. Seigworth (London: Duke University Press, 2010), 1.
2
Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 5.
347
for in industrial capitalism. As such, Hardt and Negri’s notion of affective labor is an important
development regarding the coming together of affect and materialism. In addition, with respect to
Deleuze and Guattari, it might be further noted that Massumi is the English translator of A Thousand
Plateaus (1980), which was published in 1987. Also recall that Deleuze and Guattari’s body without
organs is defined by its power to be affected or to affect various external relations, something that
will become a key notion in affect studies.
But these are only two of many different strands of affect studies today. To get a broad sense of
the possibilities here, consider the eight areas of affect theory identified by Seigworth and Gregg:
(1) Phenomenology—here affect is studied through the interlaced practices of human and
nonhuman nature. Phenomenologies and post-phenomenologies of embodiment are often
utilized in this approach to affect. Representatives of this approach include Vivian Sobchack,
Don Ihde, Michel Henry, Laura Marks, and Mark B. N. Hansen.
(2) Cybernetics—here affect is studied through assemblages of the human/machine/inorganic such
as the ones discussed earlier in cyborg theory. Cybernetics, the neurosciences (of matter, of
distributed agency, of emotion/sensation, and so on), artificial intelligence, robotics, and
bioinformatics and bioengineering (where life technologies work increasingly to blur the
affectional line between the living and the non-living) are all utilized in this approach to affect.
(3) Spinozistic—here affect is studied through work inspired by Spinoza that links materialism
and affect. This includes contemporary approaches in philosophy that try to move beyond
various gendered and other cultural limitations, whether in feminism (Braidotti, Elizabeth
Grosz, Genevieve Lloyd, and Moira Gatens), in Italian autonomism (Paulo Virno and
Maurizio Lazzarato), in philosophically inflected cultural studies (Lawrence Grossberg,
Meaghan Morris, and Massumi), or in political philosophy (Agamben, Hardt, and Negri).
This approach is discussed below (13.2).
(4) Psychology and Psychoanalysis—here affect is studied through psychology and psychoanalytic
theory where a biologism is open to impingements and pressures from intersubjective and
interobjective systems of social desiring. Representatives of this approach include early
Freud, Tomkins, Daniel Stern, and Mikkel Borch-Jacobson. With regard to the early Freud,
recall his collaboration with Breuer, which foregrounded the factor of affect—one that he
defines as “pertaining to the feeling bases of emotion.” With regard to Tomkins, note again
the heavy influence of his work on Sedgwick. Work in this area, therefore, is directly
connected to some of the work on queer affect, particularly the contributions of Sedgwick.
(5) Activist—here affect is approached through politically engaged work. This work is most
often undertaken by feminists, queer theorists, disability activists, and subaltern people
living under the thumb of normalized power. Activist work of this kind attends to a hard and
fast materialism as well as to the fleeting and flowing ephemera of the daily and the workaday,
of the everyday and everynight-life, and of experience, where persistent practices of power
can simultaneously provide a body with predicaments and potentials for realizing a world
that subsists within and exceeds the horizons and boundaries of the norm.
(6) Against the Linguistic Turn—here affect is approached in an effort to turn away from the
linguistic approaches to affect. Approaches here range from cultural anthropology to geography
to communication and cultural studies to performance-based art practices to literary theory—
AFFECT STUDIES 349
and often toward work increasingly influenced by neuroscience and cognitive science; but also
by returning to and reactivating work that had been taking place well before and alongside the
linguistic turn and its attendant social constructions including Raymond Williams’s “structures
of feeling,” Fanon’s “third person consciousness,” Benjamin’s non-sensual mimesis, Susan
Langer’s “open ambient,” and John Dewey’s pragmatic idealities. Frequently work here
focuses on ethico-aesthetic spaces that are opened up or shut down by a wide assortment of
affective encounters.
(7) Emotions—here affect is approached through critical discourses on the emotions and
histories of the emotions. Work here includes studies of sociality, crowd behaviors, contagions
of feeling, matters of belonging, and a range of postcolonial, hybridized, and migrant voices
that forcefully question the privilege and stability of individualized actants possessing self-
derived agency and solely private emotions within a scene or environment.
(8) Science and Science Studies—here affect is approached through science and science studies,
particularly work like that of Alfred North Whitehead that embraces a pluralist approach to
materialism. Here work is the hinge where mutable matter and wonder perpetually tumble
into each other.3
Moreover, we might also add to this list the intersection of narratology and cognitive criticism,
which has been called affective narratology. Here theorists such as Patrick Colm Hogan strive to
bring affect theory into the study of narratology.
Also, there is the semanalysis of Kristeva, wherein she grafts psychoanalytic theory onto semiotics.
As you will recall, Kristeva argues that love is essential to the body because it helps to reconnect
words with affects, that is, the physical and psychical manifestation of drives. For her, the connection
between words and affects is established during the child’s acquisition of language, and when the
connection between words and affects is broken or missing, particular forms of mild psychosis can
appear.
Recall as well that Jameson proposes time and affect schizophrenia as one of the characteristics
of postmodernism. This form of schizophrenia breaks down temporality, leaving us to live in a
continual present that is a series of unrelated moments where we are not able to imagine the future.
Experience amounts to intensities, not memories or development. The materiality of the signifier
overwhelms us to the point that language becomes fragmented along with the fragmentation of the
subject. Jameson’s observation reminds us that affect theory is also a way to theorize the present.
Thus, in this chapter, presentism (13.3) will be introduced as one of the developments of affect
theory. One of the ways this is achieved is through an affective mapping of the present—a notion
that derives from Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping. Another way is through what Lauren
Berlant terms the affective present, a focus on the present that is neither “shallow” nor “the
narcissism of the now.”4 Berlant’s affective presentism will here be presented in contrast to another
version of presentism, one that emerged around the same time as a response to the New Historicism.
But what should not be overlooked in an affective mapping of the present is the question of
affective mappings of the past. Arguably, this is one of the points of entry into trauma theory (13.4)
3
Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 6–8; adapted.
4
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.
and Holocaust studies (13.5), which will be taken up in the final two sections of this chapter. Both
are important dimensions of affect studies wherein the very concepts of trauma and the Holocaust
are theoretically rearticulated. Still, some, such as Berlant, argue that their focus on exceptional
events that shatter the ordinary is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over
time, once crisis itself has become ordinary.
In short, the many different strands of affect studies link it in one way or another to much of the
literary and cultural theory discussed in the previous chapters of this volume. From narratology and
psychoanalytic theory to biopolitics and posthumanism, there is not a single area of twentieth-
century literary and cultural theory where affect studies does not strengthen and deepen the critical
work in that area—except, perhaps, one: the New Criticism.
As you will recall, one of the centerpieces of the New Criticism is the affective fallacy, that is,
the fallacy of confusing “the poem and its results (what it is and what it does).”5 “It begins by trying
to derive the standard of criticism from psychological effects of the poem,” write Wimsatt and
Beardsley, “and ends in impressionism and relativism.”6 Nevertheless, affect theory not only shows
how and why this New Critical position is wrong-headed, it also offers many different endings for
the study of affect other than impressionism and relativism. But, perhaps more importantly, affect
theory opens the door for the study of feelings in literary and cultural theory—one which the New
Criticism would rather we leave closed.
13.1 QUEER AFFECT

Sedgwick and the physicist Adam Frank open “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” (1995) by listing a
few things that theory at the end of the twentieth century knows when it offers accounts of human
beings or cultures:
(1) To Avoid Biology—theory knows that it must distance itself from a biological basis if it aims
to do justice to contingency, to performative force, to the possibility of change, and to
individual, historical, and cross-cultural difference;
(2) To Embrace the Linguistic Turn—theory knows that the most productive model for
understanding representation is human language;
(3) To Rely on Sight—theory knows that the physical sense of sight is central to the dismantling
of dominant dualisms such as subject/object, self/other, and active/passive. Moreover, the
preoccupation of theory with sight extends to other processes such as subjectification, self-
fashioning, objectification, and Othering; to the gaze; and to the core of selfhood; and
(4) To Rely on Binaries—theory knows that binaries have not only survived structuralism, but
have been propagated even more broadly. In addition to the above binaries, some others are
presence/absence, lack/plenitude, nature/culture, repression/liberation, and subversive/
hegemonic.7
5
6
7
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” (1995) in Touching Feeling, 93–4.
AFFECT STUDIES 351
However, the aim of Sedgwick and Frank is to challenge these things that theory knows “not from
the vantage point of the present but from (what we take to be) a moment shortly before their
installation as theory.”8 They do this by drawing upon Tomkins’s work on affect, which they
describe as a “phenomenology of emotions.”9
What is noteworthy here regarding the queer affect of Sedgwick is its indebtedness to psychology
and phenomenology via Tomkins (whose work on affect has already been noted). What is also
important to note is how it presents queer affect as going against the grain of dominant versions of
theory. Namely, by embracing the biological and rejecting the linguistic turn as well as by troubling
theory’s reliance upon binaries and sight. All of these aspects come together for Sedgwick in
Touching Feeling (2003), where she says her aim is to “explore some ways around the topos of
depth or hiddenness, typically followed by a drama of exposure, that has been such a staple of
critical work of the past four decades.”10 Connected to the topos of depth or hiddenness is the
effort to go beneath, behind, and beyond—all prepositions that her queer affect avoids. Instead, she
invokes “a Deleuzian interest in planar relations, the irreducibly spatial positionality of beside”—a
preposition that offers “some useful resistance to the ease with which beneath and beyond turn
from special descriptors into implicit narratives of, respectively origin and telos.”11 As such, then,
Sedgwick’s queer affect is a combination of Tomkins’ psychology and phenomenology of affect, and
(Guattari) and Deleuze’s body without organs, which is defined by its power to be affected or to
affect various external relations.
The beside of queer affect for Sedgwick aims not to expose essentialisms, nor to unearth
unconscious drives, nor to uncover violent or oppressive historical forces. Rather,
Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic
thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus
object . . . Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling,
paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting,
aggressing, warping and other relations.12
Moreover, beside allows Sedgwick to further distance her work from old epistemological questions
(such as “whether or not there are essential truths and how we could, or why we can’t, know
them”) to “asking new questions about phenomenology and affect” such as “what motivates
performativity and performance”?13 A focus on touching and texture leads her to some of these new
affective phenomenological questions. Why? Because “texture and affect, touching and feeling
seem to belong together” as both are irreducibly phenomenological.14 “To describe them primarily
in terms of structure is always a qualitative misrepresentation,”15 says Sedgwick. “Attending to
8
Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” 94.
9
Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” 94.
10
Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Touching Feeling, 8.
11
12
13
14
15
psychology and materiality at the level of affect and texture,” she continues, is “to enter a conceptual
realm that is not shaped by lack nor by commonsensical dualities of subject versus object or of
means versus ends.”16 Rather, it is to enter the conceptual realm of queer affect.
Another major contributor to queer affect is Sarah Ahmed, whose work is more generally termed
queer phenomenology. According to Lauren Berlant, work in this area follows “the tracks of longing
and belonging to create new openings for how to live, and to offer the wild living or outside
belonging that already takes place as opportunities for others to re-imagine the practice of making
and building lives.”17 Moreover, queer phenomenology, writes Berlant, calls for “a political analysis
of the ongoing activity of bodily orientation and the modes of circulation through which subjects
enter into contemporary worldliness, identity and belonging.”18
Ahmed utilizes queer phenomenology to analyze “unhappy queers as a crucial aspect of queer
genealogy.”19 Here she is responding to a need of queer affect identified by Heather Love in Feeling
Backward (2007). “We need a genealogy of queer affect,” says Love, “that does not overlook the
negative, shameful and difficult feelings that have been so central to queer existence in the last
century.”20 Ahmed’s contribution to this genealogy in The Promise of Happiness (2010) is an
examination of the queer politics of unhappiness. The question she poses is what does it mean for
queer affect to affirm unhappiness?
By staging happiness, and its opposite, unhappiness, as affective forms of bodily orientation,
Ahmed is able to give an account of the “bad feelings” of the figure of the “feminist killjoy”—a
figure comparable to the figure of the “female troublemaker.”
Both figures are intelligible if they are read through the lens of the history of happiness. Feminists
might kill joy simply by not finding the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising.
The word feminism is thus saturated with unhappiness. Feminists by declaring themselves
feminists are already read as destroying something that is thought of by others not only as being
good but as the cause of happiness. The feminist killjoy “spoils” the happiness of others; she is a
spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness.21
Ahmed maintains that from this “feminists are thus attributed as the origin of bad feeling, as the
ones who ruin the atmosphere.”22 But she is skeptical of this attribution because of her “childhood
experiences of being a feminist daughter in a relatively conventional family always at odds with the
performance of good feeling in the family.”23 Whenever she would point out sexism in the talk of
others, she would always be viewed as “causing the argument,” while at the same time the “violence”
of what was said by others to her, and the violence of their provocation, would go completely
unnoticed.24 For her, situations like this one points to “a political struggle about how we attribute
16
17
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 198.
18
19
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 89.
20
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: The Politics of Loss in Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 127.
21
Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 65.
22
23
24
AFFECT STUDIES 353
good and bad feelings, which hesitates around the apparently simple question of who introduces
what feelings to whom.”25 “It is not just that feelings are ‘in tension,’ ” writes Ahmed, “but that the
tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another
body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its organic
enjoyment and solidarity.”26
For Ahmed, queer affect is a way to theorize the positions of those subject to homophobia, sexism,
and racism. The woman’s body, the queer body, and the body of color are all attributed as the cause
of tensions and bad feelings—and they do not even have to say anything. “The mere proximity of
some bodies involves an affective conversion,” writes Ahmed. “To get along,” she continues,
[y]ou have to go along with things which might mean for some not even being able to enter the
room. We learn from this example how histories are condensed in the very intangibility of an
atmosphere, or in the intangibility of the bodies that seem to get in the way. Perhaps atmospheres
are shared if there is an agreement in where we locate the points of tension.27
For Ahmed, the killjoy is a social threat not because of what they say, but because of the way they
come between bodies “that would be, or should be, in agreement.”28 For her, the killjoy “teaches us
that the nature of organic agreement depends on the localization of disagreement to ‘whatever’ gets
in the way.”29 Thus, Ahmed sees it as her task to refuse this indifference to the “whatever,” that is,
to bodies that get in the way.
In sum, Ahmed’s genealogy of queer affect reveals that “those who refuse the promise of
happiness become the cause of bad feeling, which causes unhappiness to take form in specific
ways.”30 Nevertheless, “we need to think about unhappiness as more than a feeling that should be
overcome.”31 Why? Because unhappiness both provides pedagogical insight into queer affect and
reveals the limits of the promise of happiness.
13.2 MATERIALISM
Terry Eagleton points out that there is a link between radicalism and materialism. It is one that is
found both in the work of Spinoza and of Deleuze. In the radical lineage of Spinoza, writes Eagleton,
matter is both alive and
self-determining, rather like the populace of a democratic state. It is unnecessary to posit a

sovereign power that sets it in motion. Besides, to repudiate a realm of spirits is to take the
material world with unswerving seriousness, along with the material well-being of the men and
women in it. It admits of no ethereal distractions from the business of setting poverty and
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
injustice to rights. It also allows one to reject all clerical authority, since if spirit is everywhere
one looks then the priesthood can have no monopoly on it. It is thus that one can speak of the
politics of matter.32
Thus, according to Eagleton, when one adopts the materialism of Spinoza, one is also investing
“human beings with a degree of dignity by seeing them as part of a material world which is identical
with the Almighty.”33 Spinoza, who was a monistic pantheist, believing that the world and God
exist in an indissoluble unity, demonstrates to Eagleton not only the link between radicalism and
materialism, but also the link between materialism and humanism.
Eagleton’s comment regarding Spinoza’s humanism is important because it reminds us that the
focus of The Ethics is human beings, specifically, their nature, possibilities, and psychology. Though
he begins it with a proof of the existence of God, as Eagleton points out, it is a conception of God,
wherein God is in everything, and everything is in God. The term pantheism captures well the latter
aspect (Everything is in God), but sometimes misses the former (God is in everything). Moreover, for
Spinoza, who uses the phrase “God, or Nature,” God is in some sense identical to nature. For
Spinoza, God is the immanent (that is, indwelling) cause of the world, and is one substance (monism)
that can be expressed in infinite ways, including as mind and as body. This position puts him at odds
with Descartes, who argued that there are two substances (dualism) that have entirely opposite
natures: the mind (viz., res cogitans or “thinking thing”) is indivisible and unextended, and the body
(viz., res extensa or “extended thing”) is extended and divisible. Thus, for Spinoza, a human being
as substance can be conceived of as mind (viz., a mode of thought) and as body (viz., a mode of
extension), but there is no interaction between these two modes because they are different expressions
of the same substance—one that can also be expressed or looked at in an infinite variety of ways
other than simply as mind and as body. Consequently, human beings as mind and as body are
autonomous ways of expressing the same substance, and each get their own account in The Ethics.
One of the consequences of Spinoza’s monism is that there is no discussion of the mind controlling
the body because this does not make any sense according to his metaphysics. Moreover, while he
speaks of the emotions and happiness, his approach to them is very different from both the classical
and modern tradition through Descartes. This difference is seen in his theory of affects, which
might be summarized as follows:
(1) Human bodies are capable of having affects (or, emotions).
(2) These affects are either actions or passions.
(3) Actions are affects that are clearly and distinctly understood. We are the cause of actions.
Actions are active affects. Actions reveal our ability to affect.
(4) Passions are affects that are not clearly and distinctly understood. They occur when human
beings are affected by some stimulus that produces in them an affect. We are not the cause
of passions. Passions are passive affects. Passions reveal our ability to be affected.
(5) Our self-knowledge and agency are revealed through active affects, that is, actions. Here we
act through knowledge.
32
Terry Eagleton, Materialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 4.
33
Eagleton, Materialism, 4.
AFFECT STUDIES 355
(6) Our lack of self-knowledge and agency is revealed through passive affects, that is, passions.
Here we respond to external and internal stimulus without knowledge, that is, either blindly
or inadequately.
This theory of affects can be found in Part III of Spinoza’s Ethics, entitled “Concerning the Origin
and Nature of Emotions,” which has become one of the founding texts of materialist approaches to
affect theory. It is also here that Spinoza speaks of the potential of this theory of affects, saying
“nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capacities: that is, nobody as yet has learned
from experience what the body can and cannot do, without being determined by the mind, solely
from the laws of its nature in so far as it is considered corporeal.”34
Spinoza’s challenge of determining the body’s capacities independent from their determination
by the mind for the most part lay dormant until Deleuze started to develop a version of materialism
inspired by the work of Spinoza—but also in many ways very different from it. To get a sense of the
similarity and difference, consider what Deleuze and Guattari say about affect in What is Philosophy?
(1991). For them, philosophy and art “think” differently: art “thinks through affects and percepts,”35
whereas philosophy thinks through concepts. “In the one [that is, art], there is the constellation of
a universe or affects and percepts; in the other [that is, philosophy], constitutions of immanence or
concepts.”36 Moreover, there is also science, which “thinks” through “functions.” Still, no one of
these ways of thinking “is better than the other, or more fully, completely, or synthetically
‘thought.’ ”37 Nevertheless, as our concern is affect, Deleuze and Guattari’s frame of thinking that
concerns us here is art.
For Deleuze and Guattari, “artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of
affects,”38 and “the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of
a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another.”39
For them,
Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience
them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who
undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and
exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught
in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work
of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.40
As such, the notion of affect in Deleuze and Guattari is very different from that of Spinoza, wherein
affects are either actions or passions, but not beings. Whereas Spinoza’s affects are linked to man’s
34
Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics (1677), ed. Seymour Feldman, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1982), 106;
Bk. III, Prop. 2, scholium.
35
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 66.
36
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 66.
37
38
39
40
knowledge of them and are not just limited to the realm of art, Deleuze and Guattari detaches their
validity from self-knowledge—and place it in the very being of affect. Moreover, Deleuze and
Guattari contend that “no art and no sensation have ever been representational.”41 Rather, either
sensation is “realized in the material and does not exist outside of this realization,” or it is “the
material that passes into sensation.”42 Aesthetic figures for them “have nothing to do with
resemblance or rhetoric but are the condition under which the arts produce affects of stone and
metal, of strings and wind, of line and color, on a plane of composition of a universe.”43
In Parables for the Virtual (2002)—in which “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) is the first
chapter—Massumi develops an “asignifying philosophy of affect” that draws on the work not only
of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, but also the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson (who, not
coincidently, Deleuze wrote a book on in 1966) and the process philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead. By terming his philosophy of affect asignifying, Massumi strives to differentiate it from
signification and theories of the signifier. “Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of
signification,” writes Massumi, “that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable
differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable, or interminable?).”44 In an
effort to break from the “vocabulary” of signification, his asignifying affect theory adopts an
entirely new one, which is one that is also careful not to “slip back in” “received psychological
categories” such as emotion.45
For Massumi, it is important to maintain a conception of emotion, but also to clearly distinguish
it from affect. For him, affect is an unqualified intensity, whereas emotion is a qualified intensity.
And while affect and emotion share a relationship with intensity, each is of an entirely different
order, and each follows a different logic. “An emotion is a subjective content,” writes Massumi, “the
sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as
personal.”46 It is intensity that is “owned,” “recognized,” and “conventional.” Emotion is the
“consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions,
into narrativizable action-circuits, into function and meaning.”47
By contrast, affect cannot be reduced to emotion because “affect concerns the movements of the
body.”48 But by “the body” Massumi means (following Spinoza) the body as one with its transitions,
which is another way of saying, there is no body. There is, rather, for Massumi,
a continuous bodying. Each transition is accompanied by a variation in capacity: a change in

which powers to affect and be affected are addressable by a next event and in how readily
addressable they are, or to what degree they are present as futurities. That “degree” is a bodily
intensity, and its present futurity is a tendency.49
41
42
43
44
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), 20th anniversary edition (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2021), 30.
45
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30.
46
47
48
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxv.
49
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxiii.
AFFECT STUDIES 357
In brief, Massumi develops from Spinoza’s theory of affect “a way weaving together concepts of
movement, tendency, and intensity.”50 While affect for Massumi “is not subjective in the sense of
belonging to a subject to which the body belongs,” it is subjective in the sense that (following
Spinoza) “every transition is accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity.”51 Lastly, affect is
regarded by Massumi as autonomous to the extent that it “escapes confinement in the particular
body whose vitality, or potential for interaction it is.”52 “The autonomy of affect,” writes Massumi,
“is its participation in the virtual: potential remaindered by the past, left in reserve for the future.”53
Thus, autonomy is regarded as a kind of openness, an openness that provides affect an “escape
hatch to its own futurity.”54
Finally, like queer affect, the Spinozistic strand of affect theory also has a politics. Massumi
describes affective politics as “an art of emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the cues, that
attune bodies while activating their capacities differentially.”55 For him, affective politics is inductive
in the sense that it is possible to induce bodies to “certain regions of tendency, futurity, and
potential.”56 For Hardt and Negri, however, affective politics is about the shift from material labor
to affective labor, which we described earlier as a form of immaterial labor associated with cognitive
capitalism that brings affect, intellect, and bodies into capitalist production in ways not accounted
for in industrial capitalism. Nonetheless, in view of the affective materialisms of Deleuze and
Guattari, and Massumi (which some also term, new materialisms), one might question whether
immaterial labor is really the right term for the type of affective labor discussed by Hardt and
Negri. Or, at the very least, we might want to reassess the concept of affective labor as one that
produces, maintains, and reproduces affects in view of both queer and materialist affect theories.
13.3 PRESENTISM
Presentism is the view that we should read the past only in terms of the present. This position,
which can be traced back to the early twentieth century, encourages scouring the past only for those
materials directly relevant to the present. Over the past twenty years, there has been a revival of
interest in presentism both as a response to the rise of cultural materialism and New Historicism in
the 1980s, and as a development in affect theory.
Cultural materialists, as you will recall, contend that the history of the material base of society
helps us to understanding literature and culture, whereas New Historicists reverse this position and
argue that the study of literature and culture helps us to understand history. Cultural materialists
like Raymond Williams, for example, argue that “the whole lived social process, as practically
organized by specific and dominant meanings”57 must be utilized in the study of literature, while
New Historicists, following Foucault, claim that to analyze a discursive field we must “grasp the
50
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxiii.
51
52
53
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxvi.
54
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxvi.
55
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxviii.
56
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxviii.
57
statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence, determine its conditions of existence, fix at least
its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show
what other forms of statement it excludes.”58 Either way, the role of the present with respect to the
study of literature is virtually non-existent.
“At present,” writes Hugh Grady, “the trend toward historicizing Shakespeare appears to have
become so dominant in the field and therefore so highly valued that more ‘presentist’ approaches,
that is, those oriented towards the text’s meaning in the present, as opposed to ‘historicist’
approaches oriented to meanings in the past—are in danger of eclipse.”59 Grady, who made this
comment in Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf (1996), along with Terrence Hawkes, author of
Shakespeare in the Present (2002), co-edited Presentist Shakespeare (2006). They are two of the
leading figures of the presentist revival. Hawkes, for his part, regards presentism as a form of
literary criticism “whose roots in and connections with the here and now are fully and actively
sought, deliberately foregrounded, [and] exploited as a first principle.”60 His presentism is built on
the claim that it is not possible “genuinely to capture, or repeat, the past.”61 Rather, for him, like
Gadamer, our access to the past is always informed by present concerns. “A presentist criticism’s
engagement with the text takes place precisely in terms of those dimensions of the modern world,”
writes Hawkes, “that most ringingly chime—perhaps as ends to its beginnings—with the events of
the past.”62 In short, he views presentism as a form of literary criticism that takes the material
present as its starting point.
Because of its oppositional and formative relationship with New Historicism—and as a way to
distinguish it from the presentism of affect theory—we might term the presentism of Grady and
Hawkes as new presentism. The presentism of affect theory, at least as developed by Lauren Berlant
in Cruel Optimism (2011), concerns “conceiving of a contemporary moment from within that
moment.”63 For Berlant, “the present is perceived, first, affectively.”64 This affective present is “what
makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else, such as an orchestrated collective event
or an epoch on which we can look back.”65 On this view, “the present is not at first an object but a
mediated affect,” which is “a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre
whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that
are happening in an extended now whose very parameters (when did ‘the present’ begin?) are also
always there for debate.”66
Unlike new presentism, which locks the present into a relationship with the past, affective
presentism is focused only on what is happening here and now. But this focus on the present should
not be regarded as a “shallow presentism, or ‘the narcissism of the now.’ ”67 Rather, says Berlant, it
58
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 28.
59
Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 4–5.
60
Terrence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2002), 21.
61
Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, 3.
62
Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, 22.
63
64
65
66
67
AFFECT STUDIES 359
“involves anxiety about how to assess various knowledges and intuitions about what’s happening
and how to eke out a sense of what follows from those assessments.”68
Quickly, however, these epistemological anxieties become political ones when an effort is made
to negotiate among different “styles of managing simultaneous, incoherent narratives of what’s
going on and what seems possible and blocked in personal/collective life.”69 For Berlant, these
political anxieties reveal the need to understand how to track the present in terms of the impasse,
which is something that “designates a time of dithering from which someone or some situation
cannot move forward.”70 The impasse, for Berlant, “is a stretch of time in which one moves around
with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living
demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and hypervigilance that collects material that
might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic
crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event.”71
These emerging events are variously referred to by Berlant as “the situation, the episode, the
interruption, the aside, the conversation, the travelogue, and the happening.”72 In turn, “the
situation” and these other references to “emerging events” become emerging genres for reflection
about contemporary historicities. In the case of “the situation,” for example, Berlant contends that
we have a genre emerging wherein a “state of animated suspension provides a way of thinking
about some conventions with which we develop a historical sense of the present affectively as
immanence, emanation, atmosphere, or emergence.”73 These emergent affective genres are regarded
by Berlant as a sign of the waning of older realist genres including melodrama whose conventions
“of relating fantasy to ordinary life and whose depictions of the good life now appear to mark
archaic expectations about having and building a life.”74
History finds its way into Berlant’s affective presentism as a function of the ongoing present, “a
place where pasts are specialized among many elsewhere that converge in the sensorium of the
people feeling out the conditions of their historical sense.”75 Key to this approach to the past as the
ongoing present is the notion of affective atmospheres as shared, not solitary. For Berlant (as well as
Massumi), “bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and responding to atmospheres
in which they find themselves.”76 Moreover, this notion of affective atmospheres should be regarded
as a way of incorporating into affect theory what Raymond Williams termed structures of feeling. It
is also a way of drawing out of cultural materialism notions relevant to presentism.
For Williams, the judging of environments and response to atmospheres involves a wide variety
of ways of thinking about these matters. He uses the term feeling as opposed to world-view or
ideology to capture the idea that not all of these differing ways of thinking are systematic or formally
held beliefs. Rather, they are more like “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.”77
68
69
70
71
72
73
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 5–6.
74
75
76
77
“We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone,” continues Williams,
“specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but
thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and
interrelating continuity.”78 While Williams deploys this concept to explain how new formations of
thought emerge, what links it to affective presentism is the way it captures the notion that “affective
responses may be said significantly to exemplify shared historical time,”79 regardless of one’s
position on the subject as the sovereign agent of history. For Berlant, the “ ‘structure of feeling’ is a
residue of common historical experience sensed but not spoken in a social formation, except as the
heterogeneous but common practices of a historical moment would emanate them: Williams wrote
and interpreted all literary works in terms of the articulation of historical and bodily events.”80
This latter remark is important because is shows how affective presentism is concerned with
history but not the one articulated by a New Historicism (and new presentism) still caught up in the
linguistic turn. The emphasis of affect and bodily events in Williams refracts his cultural materialism
as an early form of affective presentism (Williams coined the term structures of feeling in his 1954
book, Preface to Film). Ultimately, what Berlant demands of historians (including literary ones) in
affective presentism is that they “produce as the present a sense of ‘noncontemporaneous
contemporaneity,’ a history of the forces that bear on the every day and interrupt its appearance of
apparent homogeneity to reveal the cracks in the local experience of life that can be mobilized
toward alternative imaginaries.”81 In sum, affect theory allows Berlant to make the case for histories
of the present, something that has been disrespected in literary and cultural theory because it is
often presented as “a scene in which duped or epistemologically limited subjects grope their ways
toward survival, except in exceptional moments.”82
13.4 TRAUMA THEORY

In 2010, Stef Craps announced that trauma theory “is among the hottest research topics in the field
today.”83 A year earlier, however, Berlant said “affect is the new trauma.”84 In Cruel Optimism
(2011), discussed in the previous section, Berlant criticizes the work of trauma theorists such as
Cathy Caruth for detaching “the subject from the historical present, sentencing subjects to a
terrifying suffusion of the past into something stuck in the subject that stands out ahistorically from
the ordinary.”85 But the claim of “newness” for affect theory relative to trauma theory here by
Berlant is curious considering that the landmark studies in each area were published around
the same time: Sedgwick and Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” and Massumi’s “The
Autonomy of Affect” were published in 1995, whereas Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience was
published in 1996.
78
79
80
81
82
83
Stef Craps, “Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Textual Practice
24.1 (2010): 52.
84
Lauren Berlant, “Affect is the New Trauma,” Minnesota Review 71–72 (2009): 131.
85
AFFECT STUDIES 361
Craps explains that trauma theory arose in the mid-1990s “as a product of the ‘ethical turn’
affecting the humanities,” a turn that promised “to infuse the study of literature and cultural
artefacts with new relevance.”86 The “old relevance” implied by this statement is poststructuralism,
most specifically, deconstruction and the linguistic turn. The ethical turn, to which trauma theory
contributed, aimed to be a correction to the linguistic turn, which was said to be turning its back to
the world. “Amid persistent accusations that literary scholarship, particularly in its deconstructive,
post-structuralist, or textualist guise, had become indifferent or oblivious to ‘what goes on in the
real world,’ ” notes Craps, “trauma theory confidently announced itself as an essential apparatus for
the understanding ‘the real world’ and even as a potential means for changing it for the better.”87
Moreover, trauma theory did so by adopting a deconstructive approach tempered by a psychoanalytic
position on traumatic memory.
Cathy Caruth, one of the founders of trauma theory, had not only been a student of Paul de
Man, who was one of the leading proponents of deconstruction in America, but also thanks another
member of the Yale School, Harold Bloom, in Unclaimed Experience “for his remarkable teaching,
and conversations with me, about Freud.”88 Moreover, Caruth’s conversations with Bloom on
psychoanalysis and literature would continue well after graduate school as she acknowledges them
as ongoing ones in Unclaimed Experience. Just as it was important to note the influence of Spinoza,
Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, and Whitehead on the affect theory of Massumi, it is equally
important to note the influence of Freud, de Man, and Bloom on the trauma theory of Caruth. For,
like Massumi, Caruth both draws upon and goes beyond the work of her predecessors in the
establishment of trauma theory.
Unlike many at the time who were claiming that poststructuralist thought leads us away from
history, and that “the epistemological problems raised by poststructuralist criticism necessarily lead
to political and ethical paralysis,”89 Caruth challenges these charges. Trauma theory becomes a way
for her to defend poststructuralist thought against the criticism that it implies that “we may not
have direct access to others’, or even our own, histories.”90 For Caruth, the textualist approach of
deconstruction, that is, the approach wherein all “reference is indirect,” provides access to history—
albeit a unique form of access.91 Trauma theory involves “a rethinking of reference” in a way
“aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding.”92 More specifically,
trauma theory provides an account of understanding that permits “history to arise where immediate
understanding may not.”93
In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth defines trauma as “an overwhelming experience of sudden or
catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled
repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”94 An example of this
86
Craps, “Wor(l)ds of Grief,” 52; my emphasis.
87
Craps, “Wor(l)ds of Grief,” 52.
88
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2016), ix.
89
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11.
90
91
92
93
94
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11–12.
definition of trauma is the “soldier faced with sudden and massive death around him,” writes
Caruth, “who suffers this sight in a numbed state, only to relive it later on in repeated nightmares.”95
Moreover, she points to the growing set of experiences associated with trauma that are “now often
understood in terms of the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD].”96 For her, the fact that
there is something we term trauma (including PTSD) confirms the “possibility of a history that is
no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and
reference).”97
But by choosing to focus on trauma as the point of access to a form of history that is “no longer
straightforwardly referential,” Caruth appears to equate history with trauma. This is a position that
aligns her work with Jameson’s position on history in The Political Unconscious (1981), namely,
that “history is what hurts.”98 For Caruth, all history must be understood in terms of trauma. The
focus, however, of trauma theory on exceptional events that shatter the ordinary, is one that Berlant
argues is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has
become ordinary.
Nevertheless, for Caruth, following Freud and Lacan, trauma narratives speak to a crisis that
never becomes what Berlant terms ordinary. For Caruth, the story of trauma is a narrative of a
belated experience. Rather than telling of an escape from reality, that is, the escape from death, or
from its referential force, trauma narratives attest “to its endless impact on life.”99 “The crisis at the
core of many traumatic narratives,” writes Caruth,
often emerges, indeed, as an urgent question: Is the trauma the encounter with death or the
ongoing experience of having survived it? At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a
kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life:
between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of
its survival. These two stories, both incompatible and absolutely inextricable, ultimately define
the complexity of what I refer to as history in the texts that I read . . . In these texts, as I suggest,
it is the inextricability of the story of one’s life from the story of a death, an impossible and
necessary double telling, that constitutes their historical witness.100
In short, the experience of trauma presents some serious or insoluble problems (aporia), such as the
oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life. Trauma also reveals language
as something that “defies, even as it claims, our understanding,”101 another of the many aporias of
traumatic experience.
For Caruth, the experiences of trauma are not accessible to us consciously. Therefore, following
Freud, they are repressed as “unclaimed experience” and subject to a repetition compulsion. As she
notes,
95
96
97
98
99
100
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7–8.
101
AFFECT STUDIES 363
the returning traumatic dream perplexes Freud because it cannot be understood in terms of any
wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event
against the will of the one it inhabits. Unlike the symptoms of a normal neurosis, whose painful
manifestations can be understood ultimately in terms of the attempted avoidance of unpleasurable
conflict, the painful repetition of the flashback can only be understood as the absolute inability
of the mind to avoid an unpleasurable event that has not been given psychic meaning in any way.
In trauma, that is, the outside has gone inside without mediation.102
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud argues that the shape of our lives is defined not by
the meaningful distortions of neurosis, but rather this non-meaningful traumatic repetition. It is at
this point, writes Caruth, that Freud “ultimately asks what it would mean to understand history as
the history of a trauma.”103
This notion of traumatic experience that is subject to repetition was introduced by Freud some
sixty years before PTSD was first listed and defined in the third edition of the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1980). Like Freud’s traumatic
repetition, PTSD remains unknown to memory and is not felt as a past event. It should also be
noted that Lacan associated The Real with trauma. For him, The Real is the order of the unattainable
materiality of existence and primal needs. Also, as you will recall, it is an order that “resists
symbolization absolutely.” At one point, he termed that which was inexpressible by the subject from
within the Symbolic as troumatique, a traumatic void.
But there appears to be a paradox in Caruth’s theory of trauma: she at once dissociates the
traumatic event from meaning, while at the same time infers a causal relationship between the
traumatic event and its effects. If an event does not have meaning, how then can it be said to have
meaningful effects? Likewise, if a traumatic event has effects, this implies that it was meaningful
enough to elicit an effect. The literal return of this traumatic event infers a relationship between the
past and the present—without which, there would be nothing from the past that returns to the
present. Caruth aims to explain this paradox in her notion of witnessing.
For her, trauma resides in the unconscious. But it is not something that has been repressed in the
unconscious. Rather, it is something that has always been latent in the unconscious. “If repression,
in trauma, is replaced by latency,” comments Caruth, “this is significant in so far as its blankness—
the space of unconscious—is paradoxically what preserves the [traumatic] event in its literality.”104
Thus, the witness has no grasp of the traumatic event either consciously or unconsciously. What
then was witnessed? For Caruth, the answer is: impossibility.
In short, trauma theory appears to deny the possibility of empirical knowledge of traumatic
history. “The historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its
forgetting,” says Caruth, “but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first
experienced at all.”105 So, yes, trauma theory deals with “history” and the “real world,” but trauma
does not reside in an event, nor does the traumatic witness have access to an event. For Caruth,
102
103
104
Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
105
when one listens to the crisis of a trauma, one listens not only for the event but also “to hear in
testimony the survivor’s departure from it.”106 And it is by speaking and listening to these departures
from the site of trauma that cultures can become linked. “In a catastrophic age,” writes Caruth,
“trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not simply as understanding the pasts of
others but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the
departures we have all taken for ourselves.”107 Ultimately, trauma departs from actual events and
those who witnessed them, and travels into cultural memory where it is available for all to
participate.
13.5 HOLOCAUST STUDIES

Shoah means catastrophe in Hebrew. It is often used to refer to the Holocaust, the killing of nearly
six million Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between the years 1941 and
1945. The Holocaust resulted in the death of around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
Holocaust studies is an area of study within literary and cultural theory that started to develop a
few decades after the genocide.
“Despite the magnitude of the historical events we call the Holocaust,” write Marianne Hirsch
and Irene Kacandes, “its study developed slowly.”108 It would not be until that 1960s that academic
books, such as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), would begin to address
the topic. University courses on the Holocaust started to appear in the mid-1960s, with Erich
Goldhagen’s course on “The Destruction of European Jewry” (1965) at Brandeis University and
Sander Gilman’s “The Holocaust in Literature” (1973) at Cornell University among the first. By the
late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the number of university courses devoted to Holocaust
literature and history had increased greatly. Commentators note this as a period wherein there was
a shift in Holocaust consciousness that coincided with the airing of a television miniseries in the US
on the Holocaust in 1978 that was viewed by 120 million people.109
Still, as university courses devoted to Holocaust literature and history became increasingly
commonplace through the 1980s, so too did questions regarding how to represent the Holocaust.
“By the late 1980s,” writes Michael Roth, “it had been common to ask the postmodern historian
whether all representations of the Shoah were equally valid.”110 As he explains, the ethical turn,
which resulted in trauma theory, was “an attempt to respond to this question without relying on
some new epistemological foundation.”111 That is to say, trauma theory attempts to respond to the
question of whether all representations of the Holocaust are equal by means of an antifoundational
theory of knowledge, which, as we saw in the case of Caruth, leaves traumatic experiences such as
the Holocaust as “no longer straightforwardly referential.” But does this also mean that all indirectly
referential representations of the Holocaust are equally valid? In the case of Caruth, this is arguably
106
Caruth, “Introduction,” 10.
107
Caruth, “Introduction,” 11.
108
Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, “Introduction,” in Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, eds. Marianne
Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2004), 5.
109
Hirsch and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 5–6.
110
Michael S. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History: Essay on Living with the Past (New York: Columbia University Press,
2012), xxiii.
111
Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History, xxiii.
AFFECT STUDIES 365
not a valid question because traumatic experience is not subject to representation. Nevertheless,
questions about the limits of representation with respect to the Holocaust still linger.
“As a subject of representation,” comment Hirsch and Kacandes, “the Holocaust stretches the
limits of representability.”112 It also stretches the limits of literary and cultural theory because
Holocaust studies concerns much more than just issues of reference and representation. Additionally,
according to Hirsch and Kacandes, Holocaust studies concerns issues regarding:
(1) Good versus evil;
(2) Violence, authority, obedience, conformity, resistance, and rescue;
(3) Tolerance and prejudice;
(4) Trauma, memory, and survival;
(5) Racism and anti-Semitism,
(6) Assimilation and marginality,
(7) Exclusion and genocide;
(8) The limits of art;
(9) Speech in the face of unspeakability;
(10) The intersections of ethics and aesthetics;
(11) The line between fiction and truth;
(12) The possibilities of speaking and hearing trauma;
(13) Imagining an atrocity while at the same time acknowledging one’s own distance from it;
(14) Evading exploitation, appropriation, and trivialization;
(15) The genres (e.g., fiction, poetry, drama, film, video, diaries, oral testimonies, memoirs,
memorials, and museums) that do justice to the scope of the Holocaust;
(16) The acceptable forms of identification, empathy, and active listening; and,
(17) The appropriate pedagogical approaches to this subject.113
In sum, because of the wide range of issues in Holocaust studies, a broad array of theoretical work
can be and is utilized in response to them.
Moreover, Holocaust studies involves a tension between analysis and affect, which Saul
Friedländer says is constitutive of work in this area. “The numbing or distancing effect of intellectual
work on the Shoah is unavoidable and necessary,”114 writes Friedländer. Additionally, “the recurrence
of strong emotional impact is also often unforeseeable and necessary.”115 Nevertheless, according to
Friedländer, affect related to the study the Holocaust—both in the form of protective numbing and
disruptive emotions—is something that is not completely accessible to consciousness.
112
Hirsch and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 22.
113
Hirsch and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 6–7; adapted.
114
Saul Friedländer, “Trauma, Transference, and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah,” History and
Memory 4 (1992): 51.
115
Friedländer, “Trauma, Transference, and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah,” 51.
One of the ways this affect is explained in Holocaust studies is through traumatic dissociation
theories such as Caruth’s, which was discussed earlier. These dissociation theories largely stem from
the pioneering the work of Pierre Janet, from whom the notion of the “wounding” of the mind
gained prominence. For Janet (as well as Freud, Breuer, and others), trauma (which stems from the
Greek word for wound) comes about by means of a sudden and unexpected emotional shock that
results in a mental “wound.”
But if trauma became a key concept in the ethical turn via an effort to reconnect theory with “the
real world,” then new understandings of the concept of memory have been one of the most
significant theoretical developments of Holocaust studies. Among the notable work in this area are
the contributions of Charlotte Delbo, who writes about sense memory (la mémoire du sens) in the
context of the unbearable wound of the Holocaust, and deep memory (la mémoire profonde) in the
context of the inescapable and persistent presence of the Holocaust.
Delbo’s deep memory aims to describe the way in which the Holocaust survivor can never set
themself apart from what they have experienced. Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück,
writes,
Auschwitz is so deeply etched in my memory that I cannot forget one moment of it.—So you are
living Auschwitz?—No, I live next to it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped
in the skin of memory, an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self . . . In this
underlying memory sensations remain intact.116
For Delbo, this deep memory coexists in the survivor with common memory (la mémoire ordinaire),
which consists of ordinary experiences. Furthermore, there is still another type of memory. It is one
that allows Delbo to write about the Holocaust. She calls it external memory (la mémoire externe).
It allows her to depart emotionally from the camp in order to write about her experiences. Says
Delbo, “when I talk to you about Auschwitz, it is not from deep memory my words issue.”117
Rather, the words “come from external memory, if I may put it that way, from intellectual memory,
the memory connected with thinking processes.”118
In addition, there is Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which is a form of retrospective memory
assumed by surrogates on behalf of those with direct experience of an event. For Hirsch, postmemory
describes “the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences
of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the narratives and images with which
they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own
right.”119
But like Delbo’s deep memory, though Hirsch’s concept of postmemory was developed through
her research on the Holocaust, it may also be used with respect to traumatic memory not related to
the Holocaust. As such, postmemory in this broader sense is “defined through an identification with
the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by an unbridgeable distance that separates the participant
116
Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory (1985), trans. Rosette Lamont (Marlboro, NY: Marlboro, 1990), 2–3.
117
Delbo, Days and Memory, 3.
118
Delbo, Days and Memory, 3.
119
Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism
14.1 (2001): 9.
AFFECT STUDIES 367
from the one born after.”120 In this sense, postmemory involves what Hirsch describes as
“retrospective witnessing by adoption,” that is, a process “of adopting traumatic experiences—and
thus also the memories—of others as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing
them into one’s own life story.”121 In short, the “notion of postmemory identifies an intersubjective
transgenerational space of remembrance, linked to a cultural or collective trauma that is not strictly
based on identity or familial connection.”122
Moreover, there is also Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, which is an
alternative to notions of collective memory that relegate different victim groups to exclusive spheres
of memory that compete with each other for recognition and remembrance. Rather, Rothberg’s
multidirectional memory describes the ways in which traumatic memories relating to colonialism,
slavery, and the Holocaust dialogue with one another. For Rothberg, memories are not private or
essentially linked to identities, but are rather multidirectional, that is, “subject to ongoing
negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing.”123
This latter point is pushed even further in the notion of transcultural memory developed by Rick
Crownshaw, wherein memory is said to travel. Against the position that memories belong to
particular groups and cultures, Crownshaw argues that memory travels because of the demographic
displacement brought about by social and political violence, the increased use of mass media
technologies to disseminate memories, and the increasing trade and migration that is the result of
globalization. The notion of transcultural memory reminds us that memory is not only
multidirectional but is also continuously moving through and across cultures.124
In sum, advancements in the concept of memory in Holocaust studies has in part contributed to
the creation of memory studies, a new academic field devoted to the study of memory as a tool for
remembering the past. And, in 2008, the journal Memory Studies published its first issue. While
some of these memory studies put Holocaust studies into a dialogue with psychoanalytic accounts
of memory, others push it in the direction of neurobiology and neuroscience. Of the latter, the
work of Catherine Malabou stands out, particularly The New Wounded (2007), where she re-
evaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather at its center.
Finally, it should be noted that Agamben’s biopolitics regards the death camp as the state of
exception par excellence. For him, “the camp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical
space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)—will appear as the hidden paradigm
of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to
recognize”125—a task in no small part aided through the wide-ranging work of Holocaust studies.
120
Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 10.
121
Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 10.
122
Hirsch and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 14.
123
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 3.
124
Rick Crownshaw, ed., Transcultural Memory (New York: Routledge, 2014).
125
368
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pop Culture
14.0 INTRODUCTION
Pop culture, which is the short form of popular culture, greatly expands the range of texts and
practices considered by literary and cultural theory. Because the term pop culture is more commonly
known than many of the other terms associated with literary and cultural theory, it gives the false
impression that it is not a very complicated one. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.
In fact, as Stuart Hall contends, when the terms popular and culture are combined, the resultant
“difficulties can be pretty horrendous.”1
In The Long Revolution (1961), Raymond Williams says that the definition of culture is comprised
of three general categories:
(1) Culture as a Process—culture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain
absolute or universal values. This is the ideal definition of culture.
(2) Culture as Works and Practices—culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in
which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded. This is the
documentary definition of culture.
(3) Culture as a Particular Way of Life—culture is a description of a particular way of life, which
expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions
and ordinary behavior. This is the social definition of culture.2
Elsewhere, Williams describes four different contemporary senses of popular:
(1) Popular means Inferior—what is popular involves inferior kinds of work, as in popular
literature and popular presses as distinguished from quality presses.
(2) Popular means Made by the People—what is popular is work actually made by people for
themselves.
(3) Popular means Well Liked—what is popular is work or practices that are well liked by many
people.
(4) Popular means Aiming to Gain Favor—what is popular is work or practices that deliberately
sets out to gain the favor of the people.3
1
Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ ” (1981), in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd
edition, ed. John Storey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 442.
2
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 57; adapted.
3
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
180; adapted.
369
Finally, Hall further complicates our understanding of popular by adding three additional senses of
the term:
(1) The Market or Commercial Meaning of Popular—things are said to be popular because
masses of people listen to them, buy them, read them, consume them, and seem to enjoy
them to the full. This, for Hall, is the common-sense definition of popular.
(2) The Anthropological Meaning of Popular—popular culture is all those things that “the
people” do or have done. This is very close to the anthropological definition of the term,
namely, the culture, mores, customs, and folkways of “the people,” or, more simply, their
distinctive way of life.
(3) The Social and Material Meaning of Popular—popular culture are those forms and activities
from any period which have their roots in the social and material conditions of particular
classes, which have been embodied in popular traditions and practices.4
Thus, given the varying ways that the individual terms culture and popular can be defined, it should
come as no surprise that their combination in the term popular culture make it especially difficult
to define.
Moreover, there is also the added difficulty of periodizing popular culture, that is, what came
before pop culture? Another difficulty is that much of what is termed culture is often not popular,
and what is dubbed popular is often not considered culture. For that matter, there is also the
question of to whom does popular culture belong given that the Latin popularis means “belonging
to the people.” Who are these “people”?
For Hall, the social and material meaning of popular is the preferable one because it insists that
“what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define ‘popular culture’
in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture,” a tension
he describes as a cultural dialectic.5 For Hall, the cultural dialectic of the social and material meaning
of popular culture works as follows:
It treats the domain of cultural forms and activities as a constantly changing field. Then it looks
at the relations which constantly structure this field into dominant and subordinate formations.
It looks at the process by which these relations of dominance and subordination are articulated.
It treats them as a process: the process by means of which some things are actively preferred so
that others can be dethroned. It has at its centre the changing and uneven relations of force
which define the field of culture—that is, the question of cultural struggle and its many forms.
Its main focus of attention is the relation between culture and questions of hegemony.6
Thus, for Hall, popular culture is a site of struggle between relations of force.
4
Williams, Keywords, 446–9; adapted.
5
Williams, Keywords, 449.
6
Williams, Keywords, 449.
POP CULTURE 371
But then again, this is just one of a number of different possible definitions of popular culture.
Here, along with Hall’s definition, are some others:
(1) Popular Culture is Mass Culture—popular culture is commercial work that is mass produced
for mass consumption.
(2) Popular Culture is not High Culture—popular culture is whatever culture is not determined
by some means to be high culture. These means of determination might include mode of
production, formal complexity, moral value, and critical insight, among others.
(3) Popular Culture and High Culture are not Distinct—there is no way to distinguish between
popular culture and high culture. All culture is regarded in this view as postmodern culture.
A variation of this is Jameson’s view that postmodernism collapses the boundary between
high culture and mass culture by incorporating material from both realms not just as
“quotation,” but in their structure and substance.
(4) Popular Culture is Well Liked—popular culture is culture that is well liked and widely
favored by the people.
(5) Popular Culture is Made by the People—popular culture is culture that originates from the
people.
(6) Popular Culture is a Site of Struggle—popular culture is a site of struggle between the forces
of resistance of the subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation of dominant groups.
As Hall notes above, the main focus of this view is the relation between culture and questions
of hegemony.
One of the contributions then of literary and cultural theory in this area is to provide a range of
conceptions of and approaches to culture, popular, and popular culture.
Moreover, while the study of popular culture as a subarea of literary and cultural theory is often
associated with the rise of cultural studies in the 1990s, we have already noted earlier theoretical
interest in popular culture as mass culture in both the semiology of Barthes—in particular, in his
mythological analysis grounded in Saussurean linguistic theory—and in the critical theory of
Benjamin and Adorno, in particular their debate concerning the emancipatory potential of mass art.
Thus, both semiotics, which treats mass culture as a sign-system, and critical theory, which
systematically studies mass and commodity culture in relation to authoritarianism, capitalist ideology,
and modernity, must be considered as key contributions to the theoretical study of popular culture.
One of the key differences, though, between these earlier approaches to popular culture and the
ones associated with the rise of cultural studies was a change in attitude toward theory. The
beginning of the new century marked the close of a particular view of theory that had dominated
literary studies in the US for over a quarter of a century. In the 1970s, literature departments’
doubts about the usefulness of theory began to give way to the practice of rich, theoretical readings
of literary artifacts. Elegant and close structuralist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive
interpretations began to seriously compete with older, more traditional ways of reading like the
New Criticism and influence studies, not just for credibility among academics, but also for limited
institutional space. The practice of theory in the academic curriculum as well as the hiring and
tenuring of theorists would serve both to legitimate and promote the varying political and social
agendas of the theorists. Increasingly, emphasis on the libidinal, political, and/or social nature of
signification would come to challenge the very profession of literary studies by laying the
groundwork for cultural studies. In retrospect, the death of the literary in literature departments
was hastened by the birth of theory.
Through the 1980s, theory came to encompass a widening field of perspectives. Race, class, and
gender studies began to eclipse the more formalist theories of the literary that dominated the late
1970s and early 1980s. Structuralism and deconstruction were becoming traditional in comparison
to the emerging discourses of cultural studies. Increasingly, emphasis was being placed by theorists
on the personal, social, and political dimensions of interpretation. After the institutionalization of
deconstruction and structuralism in the US lost sight of the social and political dimensions
of interpretation, a growing generation of critics sought to contextualize criticism. The high theory
of the 1970s which was coming to acquire a timeless, ahistorical permanence in the 1980s through
its codification in method was giving way to the low theory of cultural studies which re-emphasized
the contingent, local, historical, and contextual character of all cultural artifacts.
By the 1990s, cultural studies broadened to include postcolonial, queer, and media studies (14.2),
while theory was showing only the faintest signs of life. Not only did theory no longer give the
appearance of a unitary body of work—an appearance that it had held for some time—but it had
also come to be regarded in many English departments similar to the way that the New Criticism
had been regarded by those same departments twenty years earlier. High theories like deconstruction
and structuralism were regarded as antiquated, and were at best seen only as flawed predecessors
to the low theories of cultural studies.
It might be argued that the low theory of the 1980s that eclipsed the high theory of the 1970s in
turn had given way to the studies of the late 1990s. English departments at the time were said to do
cultural studies, not cultural theory, postcolonial studies, not postcolonial theory, and so on.
Moreover, this shift from theory to studies was widely regarded to be more than cosmetic. Studies
were said to be produced by critical writing practices and did not necessarily immediately provide
the meaning of a cultural artifact. At their best, they were said to be self-reflective enterprises
that were credited and discredited relative to historical and social pressures. Moreover, there
was said to be no absolute method for studies. What counted as a study was said to change over
time.
Theory, on the other hand, has come to be associated with method. One of the major differences,
say, between deconstruction and cultural studies is that the former can be and has been reduced to
a method, whereas the latter (supposedly) cannot be totalized in this way. Furthermore, theory, it
was said, does not continually seek to redefine itself through a process of self-analysis and self-
reflection, whereas this is not the case with studies. But are these studies really that radically different
from theory? My own suspicion is that they are not. Rather, they were part of an effort to repackage
theory into a politically and ideologically palatable form.
Regardless, it was within the context of theory versus studies that the study of popular culture
came to be regarded by some as co-extensive with cultural studies. The first section of this chapter
is devoted to both the characteristics of cultural studies in the 1990s (which is widely regarded as
their high point) and to some of the approaches to the study of culture that preceded them. The
remaining sections of this chapter take up four different dimensions of current interest in the study
of popular culture: media studies (14.2), sound studies (14.3), game studies (14.4), and celebrity
studies (14.5). Given the formative influence of cultural studies on each of these areas of concern,
they are designated as studies. However, just like popular culture, which can also be associated with
POP CULTURE 373
areas of theoretical interest (e.g., semiotics and critical theory), each can also be linked to the work
of theory and theorists.
In sum, the study of popular culture has come become a site where cultural studies has been said
to reveal the limits of theory. But this position is contingent on two things: first, our conception of
theory; and second, our conception of popular culture. If one contends, as I do, that there are at
least eight different views of theory, then pursuit of some of these approaches will foreground the
limits of theory via the concerns of cultural studies (e.g., theory is methodology). Others, however,
will present an image of theory much more consistent with cultural studies (e.g., theory is a way of
life). And still others will flatly reject the claims of cultural studies (e.g., theory is high theory).
Additionally, if one contends, as I do, that there are at least six different views of popular culture,
then some can be shown to reveal the limits of theory (e.g., popular culture is made by the people),
whereas others can be shown to draw heavily upon theory (e.g., popular culture is mass culture
draws upon work in semiotics and critical theory, and popular culture is a site of struggle upon
hegemony theory and Marxism).
14.1 CULTURAL STUDIES

In the 1860s, Matthew Arnold established an approach to culture that would remain dominant in
Britain until the 1950s. Arnold’s work on the problems facing Victorian society in Culture and
Anarchy, published in 1869, not only established his reputation as a cultural critic, but also laid the
foundations for the “culture and civilization” tradition in cultural studies. As noted earlier, Arnold
argues here that the wellbeing of society and political progress depends upon culture, which he
defined as “the best knowledge and thought of the time.”7 Arnold’s definition of culture can be
expressed in four points:
(1) Culture is the ability to know what is best.
(2) Culture is the best that has been thought and said in the world.
(3) Culture is the mental and spiritual application of what is best.
(4) Culture is the pursuit of what is best.
Beginning in the early 1930s, especially in Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930) and
Culture and Environment (1933), F. R. Leavis took up Arnold’s work on cultural politics and
applied it to the contemporary “cultural crisis.”
Leavis (and his followers, the Leavisites) bemoaned the cultural decline that had begun in
Arnold’s day, and that was only getting worse in their own. For Leavis, culture has always been
something that has been kept by the “minority.” In Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, he
writes:
In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature
depends; it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of
unprompted first-hand judgment . . . The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante,
7
Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognising their latest successors
constitute the consciousness of the race (or a branch of it) at a given time . . . Upon the minority
depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the
subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that
order the finer living of an age, the sense that this is worth more than that, this rather than that
is the direction to go, that the centre is here rather than there. In their keeping . . . is the
language, the changing idiom, upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of
spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By “culture” I mean the use of such language.8
For Leavis, the minority was being challenged and had lost its authority. He believed that prior to
the nineteenth century, particularly during the Elizabethan period, England had a vigorous common
culture, but that during the Industrial Revolution it was split in two: one half, minority culture, the
best that has been thought and said, was now merely a literary tradition; the other half, mass
civilization, got in the way of genuine feeling and responsible thinking.
The common culture that was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution involved a golden age of
organic community. In Culture and Environment, he writes (along with Denys Thompson):
What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied. Folk songs, folk
dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products are signs and expressions of something more:
an art of life, a way of living, ordering and patterning, involving social arts, codes of intercourse
and a responsive adjustment, growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment
and the rhythm of the year.9
This common culture posited by Leavis united intellectual stimulation and affective pleasure.
Literary masters such as Shakespeare were said by him to belong to a community where the theater,
for example, appealed both to cultivated and popular audiences. However, Leavis contends that the
“mob” had “revolted” against literary masters such as Shakespeare. The resultant mass civilization
and mass culture are regarded by him as a subversive threat—one with the potential for “irreparable
chaos.” As a consequence of these impending threats, Leavis proposed “training” in resistance to
mass culture and wrote manifestos to aide in this effort. In this regard, the subtitle of Culture and
Environment, namely, The Training of Critical Awareness, refers directly to these efforts.
The “culture and civilization” tradition, which included Arnold and Leavis as major figures, was
eclipsed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the work of the “culturalists.” Richard Hoggart,
Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Paddy Whannel are some of the main writers
associated with culturalism. All contend that by analyzing culture it is possible to reconstitute the
patterned behavior and ideas shared by the people who were responsible for producing it. This
stress on the active production of culture, rather than passive consumption of it, foregrounds the
value of human agency in culturalism.
F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930), 3–5.
8
F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (1933) (London: Chatto
9
& Windus, 1964), 1–2.

POP CULTURE 375
In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Hoggart argues that the traditional working-class culture of his
childhood in the 1920s and 1930s was a “lived culture,” which by the 1950s had come to be
threatened by mass culture. Unlike Leavis, who thought the working-class culture of the 1920s and
1930s was part of the decline of culture, Hoggart was nostalgic for the lived culture of this period.
For Hoggart, the working-class culture of the 1950s was the working-class culture that was in
decline. Not only did it lack moral seriousness, but the rise of television during this period
represented the decline of movies, which had come to rely on gimmicks like CinemaScope to
thwart this decline. Hoggart believed that it was possible through human agency for the working
class to resist the manipulation of mass culture. “This is not simply a power of passive resistance,”
writes Hoggart, “but something which, though not articulate, is positive.”10 “The working classes
have a strong natural ability to survive change,” he continues, “by adapting or assimilating what
they want in the new and ignoring the rest.”11
Moreover, for Hoggart, the working class are saved from the “worst effects” of mass culture
because “they are living elsewhere, living intuitively, habitually, verbally, drawing on myth,
aphorism, ritual,” that is to say, “a large part of themselves [is] just ‘not there’ ” when they engage
with mass culture.12 For him, mass entertainment destroys working-class culture. “The strongest
argument against modern mass entertainments,” writes Hoggart, “is not that they debase taste—
debasement can be alive and active—but that they over-excite it, eventually dull it, and finally kill
it.”13 In the final analysis, for Hoggart, art done for the people is bad, whereas art done by them is
good.
Works like Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961) and Culture
and Society (1958) are sometimes called examples of “left-Leavisism.” Though uncomfortable with
Leavis’s middle-class biases, they both break with and share some of Leavis’s doctrines. Thompson,
author of The Making of the English Working Class (1963), considered his own work as simply a
version of Marxism, even if he broke with the mechanistic and economic forms of it. Nonetheless,
neither the culturalist nor the culture and civilization movements are regarded as the beginning of
the “cultural studies” movement; rather, it is Hoggart’s founding of the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 that marks the beginning of cultural studies.
Under the direction of Hoggart, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was
an interdisciplinary mix of almost equal parts philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, and history.
In 1968, Stuart Hall succeeded Hoggart as director of the Birmingham Centre, and increasingly
emphasized sociology over the other disciplines. During Hall’s tenure, the members of the
Birmingham Centre began to employ more and more Marxist continental philosophy, especially
the hegemony theory of Gramsci, the ideology theory of Althusser, and the critical theory of
Marcuse, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, and Löwenthal. Neglected aspects of contemporary
culture, particularly popular culture and subcultures, gained prominence as the objects of cultural
studies under Hall’s direction.
Cultural studies in Britain would come to do a lot of work under the phrase “cultural materialism,”
which we considered earlier, if you will recall, in the context of the New Historicism. Raymond
10
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957), intro. Andrew Goodwin (New York: Routledge, 2017), 17.
11
Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 17.
12
13
Williams coined the phrase to show both a relation to Marxist versions of historical materialism,
and a difference from them. He wanted to avoid the naive Marxist position that the economic base
of society determines culture, but at the same time follow through on Marx and Engel’s statement
from The German Ideology (1846), cited earlier, that “Consciousness does not determine life, but
life determines consciousness.”14 Cultural materialism takes as well its politically charged attitude
towards the canon from Marx.
In Grundrisse (1857), as we also noted earlier, Marx argues that Achilles is not possible in an age
with powder and lead, nor the Iliad in the age of the printing press, not to mention the printing
machine. “The difficulty,” writes Marx, “lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are
bound up with certain forms of social development.”15 “The difficulty is that they still afford us
artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.”16
For Marx, to regard works of literature as timelessly canonical is dangerous and, worse yet,
“childish.” “A man cannot become a child again,” writes Marx, “or he becomes childish.”17
All told, though, compared with cultural studies in Britain, cultural studies in the US is much
more broadly conceived and practiced. While it has been influenced by the rich traditions of cultural
studies in Britain, especially the work done at Birmingham University on popular culture, cultural
studies in the US draws its institutional identity as well from multidisciplinary and multicultural
work done on everything from race, class, gender, and sexual preference to the relationship between
technology, science, and popular culture. The disciplinary liberty which it has enjoyed has resulted
in not only an increased sense of the importance of the social or public dimensions of meaning, but
also in more university programs supporting work and teaching in this area.
In Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), Cary Nelson, one of the leading proponents of cultural
studies in the US, outlines in manifesto fashion what it is and is not:
(1) Cultural studies is not simply the close analysis of objects other than literary texts.
(2) Cultural studies does not, as some people believe, require that every project involve the
study of the artifacts of popular culture.
(3) Cultural studies does not mean that we have to abandon the study of high culture.
(4) Cultural studies is not simply the neutral study of semiotic systems.
(5) Cultural studies is committed to studying the production, reception, and varied use of texts,
not merely their internal characteristics.
(6) Cultural studies conceives culture relationally, that is, in terms of competitive, reinforcing,
and determining relations with other objects and cultural forces.
(7) Cultural studies is not a fixed, repeatable methodology that can be learned and thereafter
applied to any given cultural domain. It is the social and textual history of varying efforts
to take up the problematic of the politics and meaning of culture.
14
15
Karl Marx, “Production. Means of Production and Relations of Production. Relations of Production and Relations of
Circulation. Forms of the State and Forms of Consciousness in Relation to Relations of Production and Circulation. Legal
Regulations. Family Relations” (1857), in Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random
House, 1973), 111.
16
17
POP CULTURE 377
(8) Cultural studies takes seriously the work of Marxism, feminism, and the politics of race.
(9) Cultural studies is concerned with the social and political meaning and effects of its own
analyses.
(10) Cultural studies seeks to empower students to understand the social and political meaning
of what they learn throughout the university.
(11) Cultural studies has a responsibility to continue interrogating and reflecting on its own
commitments.
(12) Cultural studies is properly an enterprise in which people can explore their race, ethnicity,
or gender and articulate its relations within the larger culture.
(13) Cultural studies has a historicizing impulse which is in dialogue with an awareness of the
contemporary rearticulation of earlier texts, contexts, and social practices.
(14) Cultural studies is often concerned with intervening in the present and with encouraging
possible futures rather than others.
(15) Cultural studies does not believe that it is possible to theorize for all times and places.
Rather, it contends that theories are produced for the world in which we live.
(16) Cultural studies is concerned with and critical of the politics of disciplinary knowledge. If
it is to be institutionalized, cultural studies might be better served by a variety of programs
outside of traditional departments (such as English, philosophy, or history departments).18
For Nelson, while not every work of cultural studies will fulfill all of these points, they nevertheless
represent some of the key aims of cultural studies in the US and are “part of the cultural studies
paradigm and part of the cultural studies challenge to the contemporary world.”19
There are, of course, other models, paradigms, and so on for cultural studies.20 John Frow
describes them as consisting of “a heterogeneous and uneven plethora of . . . approaches” wherein
none of them are regarded as the “received model of cultural studies.”21 Moreover, the same holds
for the objects of cultural studies; that is, they too can be described as “a heterogeneous and uneven
plethora.” Among the objects and approaches Frow lists as associable with cultural studies are many
that have already been covered in this volume, including neoliberalism, disability, trans+, borders,
as well as others. Even presentism is associable with cultural studies via some observations on this
topic by Berlant. “Dedicated to engaging with and writing the history of the present,” writes
Berlant, “cultural studies seeks to address and explicate the geopolitical specificity of cultural forms
and practices.”22 In addition, for Berlant, cultural studies seeks “to describe not only the hierarchical
mechanisms that produce identities of all kinds but also the contexts for agential practice, resistance,
and experience articulated around those mechanisms; to track in particular people’s ordinary lives
18
Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 64–9; adapted.
19
Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, 69.
20
See, for example, Lawrence Grossberg, “The Formation(s) of Cultural Studies: An American Birmingham,” Strategies 2
(1989); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980); Richard Johnson, “What is
Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text 6.1 (1987); Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” Discourse 10.2 (1988);
and Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution.
21
John Frow, “Cultural Studies,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 146.
22
Lauren Berlant, “Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies,” Profession (1998): 106.
FIGURE 7: The Circuit of Culture. Source: Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith
Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 3.
the effects of discursive and institutional practices of domination, subordination, and hegemony; to
appraise technologies of intimacy, longing, aversion, and ecstasy; and to historicize political spaces
and forms like bodies, schools, cities, nations, and transnational corporations.”23
In general, however, all models of cultural studies emphasize in one way or another that culture
(or, a cultural object) must be analyzed in the social and historical conditions of its production and
consumption. One group of proponents of cultural studies that includes Hall proposes that we add
identity, representation, and regulation to these conditions and view them as five process that
together complete a kind of circuit of culture.
By passing cultural artefacts through this circuit of culture and articulating these five processes—
that is, “how it is represented, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced and
consumed, and what mechanisms regulate its distribution and use”—one produces a sort of cultural
“biography” of the artefact.24 Articulation is the “form of the connection that can make a unity of
two or more different or distinct elements, under certain conditions.”25 This articulation is neither
23
Berlant, “Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies,” 106.
24
Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony
Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 3.
25
Du Gay, et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 3.
POP CULTURE 379
“necessary, determined, [nor] absolute for all time; rather it is a linkage whose conditions of
existence or emergence need to be located in the contingencies of circumstance.”26
This circuit of culture, which is similar to one developed earlier by Richard Johnson,27 who, like
Hall, was a former director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, contends
that any analysis of a cultural text or artifact must pass through the circuit of culture if it is to be
adequately studied. On this model of cultural studies, none of the processes are privileged—such as
identity or representation—rather, in order to explain adequately the meaning an artifact comes to
possess, the various combinations of these processes must be explored. The beginnings of an
explanation of the meaning of cultural artifacts or texts are found in the articulation of these
processes. However, the articulation of these processes can and does lead to variable and contingent
outcomes.
Finally, for many proponents of cultural studies, cultural texts and practices do not simply reflect
processes; rather, they make (or constitute) them. This holds as well for economic and political
processes. Hall and his colleagues write,
Rather than being seen as merely reflective of other processes—economic or political—culture

is now regarded as being as constitutive of the social world as economic or political processes.
Not only this, in recent years “culture” has been promoted to an altogether more important role
as theorists have begun to argue that because all social practices are meaningful practices, they
are fundamentally cultural. In order to conduct a social practice we need to give it a certain
meaning, have a conception of it, be able to think meaningfully about it. The production of
social meanings is therefore a necessary precondition for the functioning of all social practices
and an account of the cultural conditions of social practices must form part of the sociological
explanation of how they work.28
Moreover, for Hall, media has a particularly important role in the constitution of the world:
[W]hat cultural studies has helped me to understand is that the media play a part in the formation,
in the constitution, of the things that they reflect. It is not that there is a world outside, “out
there,” which exists free of the discourses of representation. What is out there is, in part,
constituted by how it is represented.29
According to Hall, culture is also one of the principal sites where the divisions of society along racial,
ethnic, generational, and class lines are established and contested. “The reality of race in any society
is,” comments Hall, “to coin a phrase, ‘media-mediated.’ ” In this regard, the media studies discussed
below (14.2) is always already concerned with the ways in which cultural processes establish and
contest race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age—among other matters.
26
Du Gay, et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 3.
27
Richard Johnson, “The Story So Far: And for the Transformations,” in David Punter, Introduction to Contemporary
Cultural Studies (London: Longman, 1986), 277–313.
28
Johnson, “The Story So Far,” 2.
29
Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies” (1992), in
Rethinking Gramsci, ed. Marcus E. Green (London: Routledge, 2011), 15.
14.2 MEDIA STUDIES

Media studies was founded in the US a century ago. It was around the same time, that is, in the
1920s, that the now commonplace phrase the media started to be used. According to Toby Miller,
today it might be said to constitute and to be constituted by the following:
(1) Technologies—these technologies are the conditions of possibility of the media;
(2) Policies—these policies determine the field in which the media operates;
(3) Genres—the genres of media include drama, music, sports, and information, among others;
(4) Workers—media workers are those who make texts through performance and recording;
(5) Audiences—the audiences of media are those who receive its content; and,
(6) Environment—the environment of media are the sites where its debris is housed.30
To be sure, what we term the media and what we study with respect to it covers an extremely wide
range of communications and cultural processes, genres, and machines.
Nevertheless, the field of media studies has its foundational roots in speech communication and
rhetoric, which in the case of the latter topic of study can be traced back to antiquity. As noted
earlier, rhetoric, the study of written and oral communication, which flourished in ancient Greece
and Rome, has been studied and developed ever since, particularly in the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a great amount of attention was
given to it. Thus, depending on the genealogy one adopts, the history of media studies spans
anywhere from 100 to 2,500 years.
In the shorter version of its history, writes Miller, media studies was developed “to assist with the
assimilation of white, non-English-speaking migrants into the emergent manufacturing workforce.”31
This was a “period of massively complex urbanization,” wherein “the spread of adult literacy,
democratic rights, labor organization, and socialist ideas then gave rise to a social-science equivalent
to the study of speech: mass communication.”32 “First radio,” continues Miller, “then cinema, then
TV were simultaneously prized and damned for their demagogic qualities, which it was hoped and
feared could turn people into consumers or communists alike.”33
After the two world wars, there was shift in media studies toward propaganda, that is, information
disseminated to win people over to a given doctrine. Later, the meaning of communication was
widened by theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, whom you will recall interprets kinship as a system of
communication, a language, in which women are the messages exchanged between clans, lineages,
or families. Additionally, the radio age elicited media studies interest in oral communication (and a
concomitant consideration of its role in ancient Greece and the Middle Ages), while the dawn of
the television age in the 1950s raised interest in visual communication. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke
note that research into oral and visual communication resulted in an interdisciplinary approach to
theorizing media. “Contributions were made from economics, history, literature, art, political
30
Toby Miller, “Media Studies,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 243.
31
Miller, “Media Studies,” 244.
32
Miller, “Media Studies,” 244; my emphasis.
33
POP CULTURE 381
science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology,” write Briggs and Burke, “and led to the
emergence of academic departments of communication and cultural studies.”34
For Briggs and Burke, some of the key theorists of media in the twentieth century are Jack
Goody, who traced the “domestication of the savage mind,” wherein he noted the tendency of oral
cultures to acquire structural amnesia, that is, to forget the past or more precisely, to remember it
as if it were the present, while in written cultures, the permanence of written records acts as an
hindrance to this form of amnesia, and fosters a difference between present and the past;35 Harold
Innis, who worked on bias in communication; Jürgen Habermas, who identified the public sphere
as “a zone for ‘discourse’ in which ideas are explored and ‘a public view’ can be expressed”;36 and
Marshall McLuhan, who spoke of the “global village” and coined the well-known phrase “the
medium is the message,” which encapsulated his belief that the content of communication was not
as important as the form it took.
McLuhan, who trained as a literary critic, also made the distinction between hot media, such as
print, photographs, radio, and cinema, which engages one sense completely and “spoon-feeds” the
content to the user; and cool media, such as television, speech, cartoons, and the telephone, which
engages several senses less completely, but in turn demands much more interaction by the user
because it requires them to “fill-in” content gaps.37 McLuhan along with Innis, Eric Havelock,
Susanne Langer, Neil Postman, Walter Ong (who was McLuhan’s student), and Lewis Mumford are
representatives of media ecology, which is defined by Andrew Baerg as “the interdisciplinary theory
of media studies that considers how communication media shapes the way we think, feel, and
understand the world.”38
One of the consequences of this theoretical work on mass ecology is an ongoing debate between
structure versus agency with respect to new mediums of communication. Briggs and Burke frame
the structure versus agency debate well:
On one side [namely, agency], there are those who claim that there are no consequences of
computers as such, any more than there are consequences of literacy (including visual and
computer literacy). There are only consequences for individuals using these tools. On the other
hand [namely, structure], there are those who suggest that using a new medium of communication
inevitably changes people’s views of the world, in the long term if not earlier. One side [namely,
agency] accuses the other [namely, structure] of treating ordinary people as passive, as objects
undergoing the impact of literacy or computerization. The reverse accusation is that of treating
the media, including the press, as passive mirrors of culture and society rather than as agencies
transforming culture and society.39
34
Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 2nd edition (Malden, MA:
Polity, 2005), 1.
35
Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 10.
36
37
38
Andrew Baerg, “Media Ecology,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 567.
39
Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 11–12.
Still, according to Briggs and Burke, no single theory of media can account for the “ ‘high-definition,
inter-drive, mutually convergent technologies of communication,’ where relationships, individual
and social, local and global, are in continuous flux.”40
In one way, the conclusions of media studies regarding theory converge with those of cultural
studies, namely, the view that no one theory can be utilized to study culture or media. However, the
structure versus agency debate noted above is really not one that interests cultural studies. For many
in cultural studies, this debate is a relic of structuralism that is rendered obsolete, dissolved, or
complicated by models such as the circuit of culture or even the affective presentism of Berlant’s
vision of cultural studies. Again, as Hall puts it, “What is out there is, in part, constituted by how
it is represented,” whereas for Berlant, “the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect.”
Still again, as if speaking directly to the structure–agency debate, Berlant says that cultural studies
seeks “to describe not only the hierarchical mechanisms that produce identities of all kinds but also
the contexts for agential practice, resistance, and experience articulated around those mechanisms.”
Thus, for Hall and Berlant, media does not raise questions of structure or agency, but rather presents
an opportunity to explore the mediation of both structure and agency.
Be this as it may, media studies pursues three interrelated topics:
(1) The Political Economy of Media—the political economy of the media concerns the ownership
and control of its technology. Major theoretical approaches to the political economy of the
media include neoliberalism, which favors limited regulation of the media in order to maximize
entry into and competition within the market; Marxism, which critiques bourgeois media for
controlling the socio-political agenda; and ecocriticism, which investigates the impact of media
gadgetry on the environment, including the Anthropocene, climate change, and the oceans.
(2) The Textuality of Media—the textuality of the media concerns its meaning. Major theoretical
approaches to the textuality of the media include hermeneutics, which unearths the meaning
of individual texts and links them with broader social formations and problems; and content
analysis, which establishes patterns across a significant number of similar texts, rather than
a close reading of individual texts.
(3) The Audiences of Media—the audiences of the media concerns its public. Major theoretical
approaches to the audiences of the media include social psychology, which explores
correlations between social conduct and both genres of media, such as drama and sports,
and technologies of media, such as television and computers; politico-economic critique,
which examines texts that threaten national culture; and spectator interpretations, which
celebrate the interpretations of spectators.41
Moreover, these three topics of media studies inquiry are each emphasized and addressed differently
depending on their disciplinary home in the academy. Broadly speaking, in the humanities, media
are judged for their representativeness and quality by means of history and cultural criticism,
whereas in the social sciences, the focus of media studies are the languages, religions, customs,
times, and spaces of different groups, which are explored statistically and ethnographically.42
40
41
Miller, “Media Studies,” 244–5.
42
POP CULTURE 383
In addition, as articulated through various academic disciplines, the focus of media studies tends
to differ. For example,
(1) Literature, Cinema Studies, Television Studies, Languages, and Cultural Studies—these
disciplines tend to focus on evaluating representation in media, justifying protectionism, and
calling for content provision;
(2) Communication Studies—this discipline tends to focus on propaganda, marketing, and
citizenship with respect to the media;
(3) Economics—this discipline tends to focus on theorizing and policing doctrines of media
scarcity as well as managing overproduction through overseas expansion;
(4) Psychology—this discipline tends to focus on examining child development and social issues
such as sexual violence and gender representation in relation to media exposure;
(5) Sociology, Political Science, and the Law—these disciplines tend to focus on looking at
media regulation, violence, contracts, and treaties; and,
(6) Journalism, Film Schools, Engineering, and Computing—these disciplines tend to focus on
creating and running media production and reception via business, the military, the
community, and the public service.43
Furthermore, Miller cites a number of methodologies from these disciplines that have become
important in media studies:
(1) Ethnography—media studies utilizes the ethnographic methods of sociology and anthropology
to investigate the experience of audiences;
(2) Experimentation and Testing—media studies utilizes the experimentation and testing
methods of psychology to establish cause-and-effect relations between media use and
subsequent conduct;
(3) Pattern Analysis—media studies adapts the content analysis of sociology and communication
studies to evaluate texts in terms of generic patterns;
(4) Ideological Analysis—media studies adopts the textual analysis of literary theory and
linguistics to identify the ideological tenor of content;
(5) Political Economy—media studies deploys political economy to examine ownership, control,
regulation, and international exchange; and,
(6) Historiography—media studies utilizes archival, curatorial, and historiographic methods to
give the media a record of their past.44
Thus, through the topics it pursues (political economy, textuality, and audience), its articulation in
various disciplines including literary and cultural studies, and the methodologies it draws upon
from some of these disciplines, media studies is a thoroughly interdisciplinary field of inquiry.
Moreover, in one way or another it draws upon and utilizes much of the literary and cultural theory
43
44
Miller, “Media Studies,” 245–6.
discussed in this book. From its formative relationship with rhetoric to its current relationship with
cultural studies, media studies incorporates much of the work done by literary and cultural theory
into the topics it pursues, its various disciplinary homes, and its wide range of methodologies.
One of the more interesting connections links the semiotics of Umberto Eco to the cultural
studies of Stuart Hall. Eco, like Barthes, made major theoretical contributions to the study of
popular culture, with the application of his semiotics to a variety of media including visual
communication. Among them were his notions of the open text, aberrant audience readings, and
encoding-decoding, which together revealed the ways in which the meanings that were put into
visual communication such as television programming were often subject to aberrant readings by
their audiences. These ideas were in turn picked up by Hall, which in part explains Nelson’s desire
to separate the work of semiotics from the work of cultural studies. It is also to say that the
semiotics of Eco, Barthes, and others should be considered as a key theoretical dimension of both
media studies and the study of popular culture—if not also, cultural studies.
The notion of encoding-decoding marked a shift in thinking regarding media effects. Up until
the middle of twentieth century, media studies “were understood through the metaphor of the
hypodermic needle,” writes Baerg. “Media would presumably present a direct message,” he
continues, “that would be uniformly internalized by audiences experiencing it.”45 But two versions
of the notion of encoding-decoding changed the view of media effects. The first version, the uses
and gratifications theory of media effects, focuses on fundamental psychological drives that define
how people use the media to define themselves, and claims that audiences make active choices in
their consumption of media. The second version, the ethnographic/cultural studies notion of media
effects, show the limits of the view that audiences are woven into media by examining the
interrelations between images, narrative, and dialogue in cultural artifacts. Both approaches to
media effects challenge the metaphor of the hypodermic needle regarding media effects.
Moreover, one of the more recent dimensions of media studies, namely, new media studies, also
challenges notions that the media is all-powerful. For some, writes Miller, “new media represent
the apex of modernity, the first time in history when central, political, and commercial organs and
agendas became receptive to the popular classes.”46 On this view, rather than being an apparatus
that exerts ultimate power over its audience, new media affords the public the opportunity to make
“its own meanings, outwitting institutions of the state, academia, and capitalism that seek to
measure and control it.”47
But then again, there is also Baudrillard’s claim that new media represents the apex of
postmodernity, which leaves us in the “desert of the real” with no “dialectic stage” on the horizon
to transition us to another critical stage of history. While new media is not the only reason for the
postmodern predicament, with others ranging from the expansion of consumer society to the loss
of a sense of use-value and history, its expansion is still an important aspect of Baudrillard’s theory.
Finally, there is also global media studies, which combines work on international communication
and comparative media systems in the social sciences with work on world cinema and national
cinema in the humanities. In this area of media studies, the contributions of literary and cultural
45
Andrew Baerg, “Media Effects,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 568.
46
47
POP CULTURE 385
theorists on globalization since the 1990s have been just as formative as the work on rhetoric was
to the nascent field of media studies in the 1920s.
14.3 SOUND STUDIES

The composer John Cage once said, “Hearing sounds which are just sounds immediately sets the
theorizing mind to theorizing.”48 Famous for his composition “4ʹ33ʹʹ,” a piece for piano wherein no
keys are struck and no notes are played in its performance, Cage’s reflections on sound were part
of a growing interest in the study of sound after World War II. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,
there was a great deal of philosophical reflection on sound by avant-garde artists, writers, and
musicians including Cage, who is one of the most well known. His own reflections on sound,
though, go back even further, when in his mid-twenties he delivered a talk in 1937 entitled “The
Future of Music: Credo.” Here, he says, “If this word ‘music’ is sacred and reserved for eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of
sound.”49
Moreover, forty years before Jacques Attali’s Noise (1977), a landmark work of sound studies,
Cage was already theorizing on noise. In “The Future of Music,” he writes:
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we
listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles an hour. Static between the
stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but
as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of “sound effects” recorded on film. With
a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these
sounds and to give it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film
phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and
landslide.50
Whereas Cage was interested in theorizing sound as a philosophical complement to his work as a
composer, his early comments here also connect the study of sound to media studies—as film
technology is the condition of possibility of film sound-effects, and sound technology is the condition
of possibility of the phonographic recordings that would be used in a composition for “four film
phonographs.”
Sound studies can be regarded as the academic discipline that aims to make sense of sound.
According to John Mowitt, sound studies include a strong current that “treats sound empirically, that
is, as the sort of object (whether physiological, physical or psychological) that can have a history, and
that it is tied to the human ear and the faculty of hearing.”51 This empirical aspect of sound studies,
continues Mowitt, “concentrates on detailing the facts of how hearing happens or doesn’t.”52 As
48
John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
49
John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo” (1937),” in Silence, 3.
50
Cage, “The Future of Music,” 3.
51
John Mowitt, “Sound,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 691–2.
52
Mowitt, “Sound,” 692.
such, work in this area of sound studies concerns hearing in both the presence and absence of
listening, with work in the latter area concerning matters of deafness, hearing without the use of the
inner ear (or, non-cochlear hearing), and noise abatement.
But there is also much work in sound studies that does not approach it empirically, but rather
focuses on analyzing “sonic practices, and the discourses and institutions that describe them.”53
Jonathan Sterne says that by taking “sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival,” sound
studies of this type “redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the
sonic world.”54 He uses the term redescribe rather than describe “because good scholarship always
goes beyond the common-sense categories used in everyday descriptive language—it tells us what
we don’t already know.”55 In the case of sound studies, scholarship in this area “reaches across
registers, moments, and spaces, and it thinks across disciplines and traditions, some that have long
considered sound, and some that have not done so until more recently.”56 But unlike media studies,
a field that also emerged a hundred years ago, sound studies “exhibits a strong tendency to remain
that way,” writes Michele Hilmes, “always emerging, never emerged.”57
Part of the reason for this is that most of the practitioners of sound studies only have one foot in
the academic discipline. The other foot is in disciplines such as anthropology, art history, geography,
history, literary criticism, musicology, and philosophy, or fields of study such as American studies,
cinema studies, communication studies, disability studies, gender studies, media studies, postcolonial
studies, queer studies, and science and technology studies. These latter areas, particularly the ones
already discussed in this book, reveal the strong connection between sound studies and many of the
areas of concern in literary and cultural theory.
Jeffrey Di Leo’s work in sound studies is a good example of this. In Vinyl Theory (2020), he
examines how the resurgence of vinyl records is connected to the political economy of music by
drawing on the work of Adorno, Attali, Nietzsche, and others. One of Di Leo’s main theses is that
the fall and resurrection of vinyl records over the course of the last twenty-five years is evidence of
the resiliency of neoliberalism. He accomplishes this by examining the work of Nietzsche and Attali
on music through the lens of Foucault’s biopolitics.58 With one foot in sound studies, the other is
not just in one but several other areas, including his major academic disciplines (philosophy and
English) as well as several areas of literary and cultural theory, including biopolitics, neoliberalism,
and media studies.
According to Sterne, sound studies as an academic discipline might be characterized as follows:
(1) Sound Studies combines Object and Approach—sound studies is an academic field in the
humanities and the social sciences defined by a combination of object and approach.
However, not all scholarship about or with sound is “sound studies,” just as not all scholarship
with a concept of culture is cultural studies.
53
Jonathan Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), 2.
54
Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 2.
55
56
57
Michele Hilmes, “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter,” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005):
249.
58
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Vinyl Theory (Amherst, MA: Lever Press, 2020), 11–36.
POP CULTURE 387
(2) Sound Studies is Interdisciplinary—sound studies contends that sound cuts across academic
disciplines, methods, and objects. It can begin from obviously sonic phenomena like speech,
hearing, sound technologies, architecture, art or music, but it does not have to. It may think
sonically as it moves underwater, considers religions or nationalisms, explores cities, tarries
with the history of philosophy, literature, or ideas, or critiques relations of power, property
or intersubjectivity. The field’s institutional existence varies across different national
university cultures.
(3) Sound Studies is Reflexive—sound studies reflexively attends to its core concepts and objects.
Following the theoretical methodology of Pierre Bourdieu and Donna Haraway, reflexivity
refers to a process wherein knowers place themselves in relation to what it is they want to
know: they must account for their own positions and prejudices, lest scholars misattribute
them as qualities of the object of study. This reflexive knowledge production regarding
sound includes cultural, political, environmental, and aesthetic considerations.
(4) Sound Studies in its Historicity—sound studies is conscious of its own historicity. It is aware
that it is part of an ongoing conversation about sound that spans eras, traditions, places, and
disciplines. It is also aware of the specific histories of inquiring about and writing about
sound in the various disciplines.
(5) Sound Studies is Critique—sound studies has an essential critical element, in the broadest
sense of critique. It may also take on characteristics of a producer, policy, technical, political,
artistic or training discourse. But without critique, it is art, technical discourse, science,
cultural production, or training practices “about sound,” and not sound studies—even if this
non-critical work will be of great interest to students of sound studies.59
This latter point about critique is a particularly important one with regard to sound studies as it
emphasizes that a distinction be made between the critical and non-critical study of sound. In short,
critical sound studies (or what Sterne simply terms sound studies) utilizes critique, what Sussman
and Groves broadly defined earlier (in the context of critical climate studies) as “the theoretically
driven responsible and rigorous decoding and reprogramming of messages, motives, trends,
performances, and systematic aberrations.” Without this theoretically driven responsible and
rigorous decoding and reprogramming of sound, the study of sound is a non-critical endeavor more
akin to a training manual than a theoretical discourse. Moreover, if sound studies were only the
latter, that is, the study of sound without critique, it would have no place in a book dedicated to
literary and cultural theory. Therefore, sometimes the adjective critical is used in conjunction with
the term sound studies to distinguish between approaches to sound with and without critique.
One of the things that critique brings to the study of sound is a challenge to the presumed
differential attributes of hearing versus vision. Stern calls these presumed attributes the audiovisual
litany, which include the following:
(1) Subjectivity/Objectivity—hearing tends toward subjectivity, whereas vision tends toward
objectivity;
59
Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 3–5; adapted.
(2) Life/Death—hearing brings you into the living world, whereas sight moves us toward
atrophy and death;
(3) Affect/Intellect—hearing is about affect, whereas vision is about intellect;
(4) Spherical/Directional—hearing is spherical, whereas vision is directional;
(5) Immersion/Perspective—hearing immerses its subject, whereas vision offers a perspective;
(6) Coming/Going—sound comes to us, whereas vision goes to its object;
(7) Contact/Distance—hearing involves physical contact with the outside world, whereas
vision requires distance from it;
(8) Inside/Outside—hearing places you inside an event, whereas seeing gives you a perspective
on the event by placing you outside of it;
(9) Temporal/Spatial—hearing is primarily a temporal sense, whereas vision is primarily a
spatial sense; and,
(10) Worlding/Unworlding—hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, whereas vision
removes us from the world, that is, unworlds us.60
One of the problems with these differential attributes is that though they are “cultural prenotions
about the senses,” comments Sterne, for some, they have risen “to the level of theory.”61 Leigh
Schmidt attributes this to the view of some that hearing is primitive, whereas vision is modern. This
has been achieved through a process of othering, that is, by “the identification of visuality as
supremely modern and Western . . . (most noticeably in the work of Marshall McLuhan) through
the othering of the auditory as ‘primitive’ or even ‘African.’ ”62 Continues Schmidt, the gaze of
modernity has “often upheld some of the most basic cultural oppositions of us and them,”63 like the
one associated with the differential attributes of modern vision and primitive hearing.
The critical work of sound studies strives to both identify the coding of these cultural messages
regarding sound and to decode and reprogram them, whenever possible. To this end, literary and
cultural theory developed outside of sound studies can and does play a central role, particularly
when sound studies calls upon these complementary critical discourses to assist in this process. So,
for example, with regard to challenging the audiovisual litany, work on biopolitics can lend critical
assistance with regard to life/death sonic distinctions; affect theory with affect/intellect ones; world
theory with worlding/unworlding ones; geocriticism with temporal/spatial ones; and poststructuralism
with ones relating to subjectivity/objectivity.
14.4 GAME STUDIES

Game studies is a field of study that focuses on games, particularly in their digital forms. Much like
sound studies, it is a multidisciplinary field wherein, according to Frans Mäyrä, the majority of game
60
Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 9; adapted.
61
62
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
63
Schmidt, Hearing Things, 7.
POP CULTURE 389
studies are “practiced by individuals who are nominally situated in some other field: in literary, film
or media studies, or in departments of communication research, sociology, psychology, computer
science, or in some other of the numerous fields where game studies is currently exercised.”64
In general, the academic study of games has existed for a long time, particularly in history and
ethnography, where two of the classics of the field are ethnographer Stewart Culin’s Games of the
North American Indians (1907) and historian Harold James Ruthven Murray’s A History of Chess
(1913). Also, the study of simulation, that is, the imitation of the operations of a large system by
another more simplified one, has a long history, which can be traced back to Johann Christian
Ludwig Hellwig’s adaptation of chess into a war game in 1780—and forward in literary and cultural
theory through Baudrillard’s poststructuralist intervention.65 Interestingly, the oldest journal in
game studies, Gaming and Simulation, which was established in 1970, has a genealogy that dates
back to a group of war gamers that formed in the 1950s, the East Coast War Games Council.66 In
addition, there is the study of play, which originated in 1974 with the Cultural Anthropology of
Play Reprint Society and later became The Association for the Study of Play in 1987. Their journal,
which has been called Play and Culture (1988–92), the Journal of Play Theory and Research (1993–
7), and Play and Culture Studies (1998 to date), gives a sense of the quickly developing scholarly
character of game studies over the past fifty or so years.67
Then, in 1999, Gonzalo Frasca, proposed the term ludology for the “yet non-existent ‘discipline
that studies game and play activities.’ ”68 This is important for our purposes because according to
Mäyrä, many of these ludologists came to the field from literary studies in general, and narratology
in particular.69 However, a “counter-narratology reaction” arose from those who regarded games
as significantly different from any traditional narrative.70 As we shall see below, there are those who
still link game studies to narratology, but there are also those who view games as distinct from the
study of narrative. Hence, to some extent, while the ludology–narratology debate in game studies
still exists, game studies has also moved in some other directions.
In general, game studies, according to Simon Egenfelt-Nielsen and his colleagues, approaches the
study of games from five major perspectives:
(1) The Game—game studies from the perspective of the game focuses on subjecting one or
more particular games to analysis. The point of this type of analysis is to look at games in
themselves and to say something about their structure and how they employ certain
techniques—of player reward, of player representation in the game world, and so on—to
achieve the player experience aimed for by the game designer. The common methodology
here is textual analysis, which is one often chosen by those with a background in comparative
literature, film studies, and related disciplines.
(2) The Players—game studies from the perspective of the players focuses on the activity of
playing games. The point of this type of analysis is to explore how players use games as a
64
Frans Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture (London: Sage, 2008), 5.
65
Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies, 7.
66
67
68
Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies, 8; Frasca cited by Mäyrä.
69
70
type of medium or social space. The common methodology here is observation, interviews,
and surveys, which is one often chosen by those with a background in sociology, ethnography,
and cultural studies.
(3) The Culture—game studies from the perspective of the culture focuses on the wider culture
of which games are a part. The point of this type of analysis is to understand how games and
gaming interact with wider cultural patterns. For instance, some are interested in the
subcultures that evolve around gaming. Others are interested in discourses surrounding
gaming. The common methodology here is interviews and textual analysis, which is one
often chosen by those with a background in sociology and cultural studies.
(4) The Ontology—game studies from the perspective of ontology focuses on the philosophical
foundations of games. The point of this type of analysis is to make general statements that
apply to all games, which may enable us to understand things like the relationship between
rules, fiction, and the player. The common methodology here is philosophical inquiry and
logical analysis, which is one often chosen by those with a background in philosophy, literary
and cultural theory, and cultural history.
(5) The Metrics—game studies from the perspective of the metrics focuses on the data-driven
design research. The point of this type of analysis is to understand through various metrics
(e.g., quantitative measures of player behavior) the relationship between game design and
player behavior (or sentiment). The common methodology here is statistical analysis of
logged data, which is one often chosen by those with a background in software development
and behavioral psychology.71
While these perspectives indicate major trends in game studies, actual studies do not always fall so
neatly into these five areas. Like other areas that utilize the term studies, there is no predetermined
methodology in game studies—even though some trends are identifiable. Additionally, within the
field of game studies, two schools of thought can generally be identified:
(1) Formalist—the formalist approach to game studies tends to use game analysis or ontological
analysis. They represent a humanistic approach to media and focus on the works themselves
or philosophical questions relating to the nature or use of those works. One group of
formalists prioritize the study of representation and are associated with narratology. Another
group of formalists prioritize the study of rules and are associated with ludology.
(2) Situationist—the situationist approach to game studies tends to use culture analysis or player
analysis. They tend to be interested in the analysis of game players or the culture at large.
Situationalists search less for general patterns or laws and more for analysis and descriptions
of specific social events or social practices.72
Furthermore, if cultural studies might be said to mark the closest literary and cultural theory context
of the situationalists of game studies, then narratology might be regarded as one of the major
literary and cultural theory contexts for formalists. So too might the perspective on speculative
71
Simon Egenfelt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, Understanding Video Games: The Essential
Introduction, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2013), 10.
72
Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 11–12.
POP CULTURE 391
realism noted earlier as object-oriented philosophy, which is also discussed below in the context of
antitheory, be further associated with the work of formalists in game-studies.
Regarding narrative, Henry Jenkins argues in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” (2003)
that games tell stories albeit in a unique way not found in the simplistic linear manner often found
in films and novels. Rather, game stories are both spatial, that is, they tell of the travels of the
protagonist; and environmental, that is, they are related to literary genres such as fantasy and
science fiction, which focus on the depiction of worlds. Additionally, Jenkins identified four ways
that narrative is located in games:
(1) Evoked Narratives—evoked narratives are narratives that reproduce a world that is known
to the players through other works of fiction. These narratives are part of an encompassing
system of meanings. For example, the video game Blade Runner (1997) reproduces the
world of the film and the novel such that players can “live out” the stories that exist in their
imagination by visiting that world.
(2) Enacted Narratives—enacted narratives are narratives where the story itself is structured
around a character moving though space wherein features of the environment may speed up
or slow down the trajectory of the plot. These narratives tend to favor spatial exploration
over plot development.
(3) Embedded Narratives—embedded narratives are narratives where the gamespace becomes a
memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the
plot. These narratives are ones where the player finds a world of clues that they then utilize
to detect the story that has already happened. An example of this is the video game Myst
(1994).
(4) Emergent Narratives—emergent narratives are narratives where the gamespace is rich with
narrative potential, enabling the story-construction activity of the players. This process is
also called object-oriented narration, wherein the gamespace is filled with objects with their
own behaviors, so that the player interaction creates unique events that feel significant. An
example of this is the video game The Sims (2000), which allows players to create their own
stories.73
In addition, there is the notion of interactive narrative, which refers to “a sort of role-playing in
which the computer can anticipate the player’s reactions and give an illusion of interactivity.”74 This
form of storytelling is regarded as “an ideal form of digital storytelling, deeply engaging and
immersive.”75
In Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), Janet Murray, a proponent of interactive narrative, argues
that the computer is the new medium of storytelling. For her, digital storytelling has four defining
properties:
(1) Procedural—this is the property of narrative that refers to the computer’s ability to execute
rules in succession and thus generate behaviors.
73
Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game,
eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
74
Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 219.
75
(2) Participatory—this is the property of narrative that refers to the fact that humans can
influence the production of behavior when interacting with a computer.
(3) Spatial—this is the property of narrative that refers to the computer’s ability to represent
navigable space.
(4) Encyclopedic—this is the property of narrative that refers to the computer’s storage ability,
that is, memory which can hold enormous amounts of information that provide us [with]
the ability to interact with information-rich environments.76
For Murray, the procedural and participatory properties of digital environments “make up most of
what we mean by the vaguely used word interactive,” while the spatial and encyclopedic properties
“help to make digital creations seem as explorable and extensive as the actual world.”77 Together,
for Murray, these four properties make up “much of what we mean when we say that cyberspace is
immersive.”78
On the ludology (as opposed to the narratology) side of game studies, Roger Caillois’s sociology
of play is one of the more influential notions of games. In Man, Play, and Games (1958), Caillois
argues that games exist on a continuum between ludus (formal, rule-based behavior) and paidia
(playfulness). In addition, games may be divided on the basis of their dominant features into four
categories:
(1) Ago–n (competition)—games wherein competition is central and skill determines whether the
player is successful or not are said to have ago–n as their dominant feature. Examples here
include chess, physical sports, and most video games of the action genre.
(2) Alea (chance)—games wherein chance is central and determines whether the player is
successful or not are said to have alea as their dominant feature. Examples here include the
lottery and games using a die or dice.
(3) Mimicry (imitation)—games wherein imitation is central are said to have mimicry as their
dominant feature. In this type of play, the important experience centers on being someone
else, that is, the ability to take on and play a role. Winning is usually not an important
feature of this form of play. Examples here include role-playing games and adventure video
games.
(4) Ilinx (vertigo)—games wherein the chance of a pleasurable sensation is central are ones said
to have ilinx as their dominant feature. Examples here include activities such as riding a
roller coaster and video games that involve racing such as Stunt Car Racer (1988).79
When these categories are combined in game descriptions, the results are more complex forms of
play. Moreover, each of these categories of play can be placed on a continuum (or, scale) involving
greater and lesser degrees of ludus and paidia. For example, in terms of alea, playing “heads or
tails” involves a high degree of paidia and a low degree of ludus, whereas playing the lottery
76
77
Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative on Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 71.
78
Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 71.
79
POP CULTURE 393
involves a high degree of ludus and a low degree of paidia. In the middle, with equal degrees of
ludus and paidia, is roulette.
But whereas some, like Caillois, treat games as entirely separate from the outside world, others,
like Marshall McLuhan, regard them as reflections of culture. For McLuhan, the most popular
games in a culture are a reflection of its core values. In Understanding Media (1965), he writes:
Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture.
Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are
extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of
adjusting to the stress of specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the
popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of culture.80
McLuhan applies Aristotle’s notion of catharsis to games as “our favorite games provide a release
from the monopolistic tyranny of the social machine.”81 Consequently, the games that we enjoy the
most are those “that mimic other situations in our work and social lives.”82 Ultimately, for McLuhan,
“Aristotle’s idea of drama as a mimetic reenactment and relief from our besetting pressures”83
applies perfectly to games of all kinds. Gregory Bateson adds, however, that when playing games
we engage in meta-communication (that is, communication about communication) about them,
namely, that what we are doing through play should not be regarded as play and not taken at face
value. In other words, we utilize a number of cues such as body language and tone of voice that we
are, for example, play fighting, not really fighting.
Finally, the notions of play as catharsis (McLuhan) and play as meta-communication (Bateson)
mark a division between two more differing schools of thought in game studies. On one side, there
is active media, which emphasizes that media activity involves mostly passive recipients;84 on the
other, there is active user, which stresses the active filtering and interpretation of game players.85
Each is associated with several major theories:
Active Media Theories
(1) Catharsis Theory—a theory that our aggressive feelings are mirrored in media and that
experiencing them will reduce internal tensions.
(2) Cultivation Theory—a theory regarding the degree to which experiencing media leads to a
distorted perception of social reality.
(3) Social Learning Theory—a theory that says behavior is learned through imitation of attractive
models with attached rewards.
(4) General Arousal Theory—a theory that says games increase the player’s arousal level and
thus increase their energy and the intensity of their actions.
80
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 235.
81
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 238.
82
83
84
85
(5) Cognitive Neo-Association Theory of Aggression—a theory that contends that violent media
lead to hostility and aggression due to reinforcement of related association nodes in the
brain.
(6) General Aggression Model—a theory that combines earlier work on aggression with cognitive
schemata theory, the view that we order our experiences in different schemata that we use
when we perceive new experiences. The general aggression model contends that violent
media content causes aggressive behavior by influencing the person’s internal state, which is
measured through cognitive, affective, and arousal variables.86
Active User Theories
(1) Reader-Response and Reception Theory—a theory that says readers create meaning by
engaging with texts in a variety of ways. The key figures here, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang
Iser, and Stanley Fish, all come from literary and cultural theory.
(2) Play as Meta-Communication—a theory that says that humans are capable of communicating
that actions should be interpreted based on their context. The key figure here, Gregory
Bateson, is associated with systems theory.
(3) The Children’s Perspective—the theory that children can construct a frame around their play
and culture that is almost impenetrable by adults. A key work here is Flemming Mouritsen’s
Childhood and Children’s Culture (2003).87
Overall, active media theory is theoretically associated with behaviorism, social psychology, and
experimental psychology, which in terms of literary and cultural theory places it in opposition to the
psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, Guattari and Deleuze, and Žižek. Active user theory, however, is
theoretically associated with anthropology, ethnography, semiotics, cultural studies, and media
studies, which in terms of literary and cultural theory links it to a number of major areas of concern
that also include systems theory, and reader-response and reception theory.
Finally, Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that to understand what is common to all games we must
not think about them, but rather look at them. Consider, for example,
board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them
all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ”—but
look and see whether there is anything common at all.—For if you look at them you will not see
something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at
that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!88
Wittgenstein goes on to characterize the similarities we find in games as “ ‘family resemblances’; for
the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait,
86
87
88
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §66; 31e.
POP CULTURE 395
temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.”89 In short, for Wittgenstein, “ ‘games’
form a family.” These comments are part of an effort to explain “the essence of a language-game,
and hence of language.”90 As such, his Philosophical Investigations (1953), the source of these quotes,
offers yet one more way for game studies to look at games—an approach that allows it to seamlessly
overlap board games, language games, video games, and so on in one philosophical inquiry.
14.5 CELEBRITY STUDIES

With the release of the record album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
in 1972, David Bowie achieved the rock stardom he had worked so hard to attain. In a song on the
album entitled “Star,” he sings directly of this aspiration: “I could make it all worthwhile as a rock
& roll star.”
By 1975, however, Bowie had teamed up with ex-Beatle John Lennon on the song “Fame,”
where he bemoans the stardom he has only recently achieved. “Fame (fame) put you there where
things are hollow,” he sings with Lennon. Fifteen years later he said that “fame is not a rewarding
thing,” quipping “[t]he most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.”91 Finally, in
December of 2015, less than a month before he died, Bowie released the single “Lazarus,” where
he predicts that he will be even more famous after his death. “Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve
got scars that can’t be seen / I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen,” starts the first verse, which concludes
with the line, “Everybody knows me now.”
Both Simon Critchley and John Mowitt have written books about Bowie where they take this
song in very different directions. Mowitt’s Tracks from the Crypt (2019) proposes that “Lazarus”
manages to communicate nothing. It is “the very sound, not of a failure to communicate, but of
‘speaking’ emptied of what protects it from mediation.”92 To make his case, Mowitt draws on
Jacques Derrida’s “Fors” (1986), an essay on the topic of “What is a crypt?”93 Critchley’s Bowie
(2016), however, takes “Lazarus” in a completely different direction by asking “Is Bowie Lazarus?”94
“Is this why he chooses to use this final persona,” asks Critchley, “in order to say goodbye to us?”95
“And in choosing the character of Lazarus as the one who is unable to die,” he concludes, “is Bowie
even saying goodbye?”96
The work of Mowitt and Critchley offer two different approaches to the study of a work of
popular culture. Whereas Mowitt’s work fits more closely with what we have termed sound studies,
Critchley’s observations are a version of what has come to be known as celebrity studies, which, like
all studies, can and do vary in the way they approach their topic. Critchley, begins with “a rather
89
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §67; 32e.
90
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §65; 31e.
91
Paul Du Noyer, “Interview with David Bowie,” Q Magazine (April 1990), https://www.pauldunoyer.com/david-bowie-
interview-1990/.
92
John Mowitt, Tracks from the Crypt (Lüneberg, Germany: Meson Press, 2019), 22.
93
Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas
Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), xi.
94
Simon Critchley, Bowie (London: OR Books, 2016), 219.
95
Critchley, Bowie, 219.
96
embarrassing confession: no person has given me greater pleasure throughout my life than David
Bowie.”97 “It all began,” writes the well-known philosopher, “as it did for many other ordinary
English boys and girls, with Bowie’s performance of “Starman” on BBC’s iconic Top of the Pops on
July 6, 1972, which was viewed by more than a quarter of the British population.”98 And “Starman,”
for those unfamiliar with Bowie’s work, was a track from Ziggy Stardust.
Celebrity studies is a relatively recent field that considers the production and consumption of
celebrity—and fame. Graeme Turner writes, with respect to production, that celebrity studies
examines “the promotions and publicity industries that produce celebrity,” whereas with respect to
consumption, it is interested in “the modes and purposes of the consumption of celebrity, ranging
from the public reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to the attraction provided by
celebrity websites” and other digital media environments such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.99
The case of Bowie, for example, provides prime material for the study of the consumption of the
death of a celebrity in relation to digital environments, as the music video for “Lazarus” was
released on January 7, 2016, three days before Bowie’s death on January 10. In the video, Bowie
appears with his head wrapped by a cloth that has buttons taking the place of his eyes—as though
he were risen from the dead like the biblical Lazarus.
According to Turner, the “cultural functions served by celebrity emerge as highly varied and
contingent, challenging any simple definition of what might constitute a celebrity culture.”100 These
challenges extend as well to the term celebrity, which he defines as follows:
Celebrity is a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by the

promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects;
and it is a cultural formation that has a social function we can better understand . . . [Celebrity]
is implicated in debates about how identities are constructed in contemporary cultures, and
about how the individual self is culturally defined.101
For Turner, the celebrity industry is the sum of three processes:

(1) The Popular Media Process—the process wherein the popular media tends to regard modern
celebrity as a symptom of a shift towards a culture that privileges the momentary, the visual,
and the sensational over the enduring, the written, and the rational.
(2) The Talent Discovery Process—the process wherein those who consume and invest in
celebrity tend to describe it as an innate or “natural” quality, which is possessed only by
some extraordinary individuals and “discovered” by industry talent scouts. Celebrities here
are said to possess qualities such as “presence,” “star quality,” and “charisma.”
(3) The Cultural Production Process—the process wherein cultural studies and media studies has
tended to focus on celebrity as the product of a number of cultural and economic processes.
These include the commodification of the individual celebrity through promotion, publicity,
97
98
Critchley, Bowie, 9–10.
99
Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2014), ix.
100
Turner, Understanding Celebrity, ix; my emphasis.
101
Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 10.
POP CULTURE 397
and advertising; the implication of celebrities in the processes through which cultural
identity is negotiated and formed; and most importantly, the representational strategies
employed by the media in their treatment of prominent individuals.102
Of course, Turner’s use of the term celebrity industry immediately associates it with Horkheimer
and Adorno’s culture industry, one wherein Hollywood films were associated with fascism,
totalitarianism, and political propaganda. This is most evident in that aspect of Turner’s definition
of celebrity as a commodity, “one that is produced, traded and marketed by the media and publicity
industries.”103
Horkheimer and Adorno’s work on the culture industry creates a political cloud that must be
addressed in any work focused on a related industry such as the celebrity industry. Moreover, this
holds as well for any industries that can be connected to other concepts of public individuals such
as the star, the hero, the leader, and so on. Celebrity is more of a general term, whereas star, leader,
hero, and so on are more specific conceptions of public individuals as they relate to their functions
in the public sphere.104 Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the celebrity in the context of the cult of
the personality in Hollywood, wherein “personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining
white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” For them, writes P. David Marshall, “the
star is part of a system of false promise in the system of capital, which offers the reward of stardom
to a random few in order to perpetuate the myth of potential universal success.”105 The masses
identify with stars as the epitome of human potential under capitalism but do so only because they
are psychologically immature. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, comments Marshall, they are
“drawn to the magic of these larger than life personalities in the same way children identify with
and implicitly trust their parents.”106
In Heavenly Bodies (1986), Richard Dyer develops the notion of how stars are connected to the
interests of their audiences, and how the power of stars works in the public sphere. For Dyer, stars
embody the cultural contradictions of identity. While we know that stars are only appearances, “the
whole media construction of stars,” writes Dyer, “encourages us to think in terms of ‘really.’ ”107
This is particularly evident in the division between the public and private realms, which leads the
star’s audience to constantly search for the real star (viz., their private self) as opposed to their
screen image (viz., their public self). Moreover, Dyer identifies a number of aspects of stars that are
important to understanding the construction of celebrity:
(1) The Celebrity as Epitome of the Individual—the celebrity is the epitome of the individual for
identification and idealization of society.
(2) The Celebrity is not Completely Determined by the Culture Industry—the celebrity is not
wholly determined by the culture industries and is therefore somewhat created and
constructed by the audience’s reading of dominant cultural representations. Gramsci’s
102
Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 4; adapted.
103
Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 10.
104
P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), 7.
105
Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 9.
106
107
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 18.
conception of hegemony best expresses this reworking of the dominant ideological images
into social categories of class, gender, age, and so on.
(3) The Celebrity as Commodity—the celebrity is a commodity and therefore expresses a form
of valorization of the individual and personality that is coherent with capitalism and the
associated consumer culture.108
For Dyer, the star provides a means of confirming the status of the power of the individual amidst
its disintegration through the establishment of mass society. Individual freedom here is the freedom
to choose what one consumes and to make money. For Dyer, the star ideologically bolsters this
conception of the individual. Stars, says Dyer, “articulate the promise and the difficulty that the
notion of the individual presents for all of us who live by it.”109
In Celebrity and Power (1997), Marshall draws upon the work of Horkheimer and Adorno,
Dyer, and others regarding conceptions of the individual and the mass in modern consumer culture
to offer an extensive analysis of celebrity as a form of cultural power. Marshall identifies the
following functions of the celebrity and what he terms the celebrity system:
(1) The Celebrity as a Human Agent—the celebrity is both a proxy for someone else and an
actor in the public sphere. On one level, the proxy of the celebrity relates to their close
proximity to the institutions of power and their dependence on those institutions for
elevation to the public sphere. On another level, the celebrity expresses the more radical
conception of human agency as it has developed in the Marxist tradition. Celebrities are
proxies of change that often define the construction of change and transformation in
contemporary culture, the very instability of social categories and hierarchies in contemporary
culture. They are the active agents that in the public spectacle stand in for the people.
(2) The Celebrity as a Stable Figure of Collective Formations—collectivities in contemporary
culture are inherently unstable. Celebrities represent flags, markers, or buoys for the
clustering of cultural significance through patterns of consumption. The celebrity operates
like a brand name for the organization of production and consumption of cultural
commodities. The celebrity functions as a semi-stable identity and cultural icon that runs
through several cultural forms and establishes an identity through which an audience can
estimate the cultural forms’ relative value.
(3) The System of Celebrity as a Spectacle of Individuals—as a system, celebrities provide a
spectacle of individuality in which human will itself can produce change and transformation.
The spectacular quality of the code of individuality that is enacted by public personalities
works ideologically to maintain the idea of continuity between wealth and the disenfranchised
rest of society. Celebrities reinforce the conception that there are no barriers in contemporary
culture that the individual cannot overcome.
(4) Celebrity and the Defining of the Private and Public Spheres—celebrities represent the
disintegration of the distinction between the private and the public. The private sphere is
constructed through celebrities to be revelatory, the ultimate site of truth and meaning for
Adapted from Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 19.

108
Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 8.

109
POP CULTURE 399
any representation in the public sphere. The representation of public action as a manifestation
of private experience exemplifies a cultural pattern of psychologization of the public sphere.
The celebration of affective attachment to events and moments is represented by the
celebrity, where further cultural connections are dematerialized. The celebrity can be seen as
instrumental in the organization of an affective economy.110
Marshall’s conclusion is that the affective economy “has become central to the way in which our
politics and culture operate.”111 His analysis of this affective economy through the contributions
made to it by celebrities, which include not only the stars of the entertainment industry but also
political leaders, is a contribution to both celebrity studies and affect theory.
In his introduction to the 2014 edition of Celebrity and Power, Marshall further elaborates on
the disintegration of the distinction between the private and the public by declaring “we have
become a culture that accepts what I call a new public intimacy.”112 Writes Marshall,
Celebrity is a very public form of discourse about the dimensions of what is public and what is
private and, ultimately, what is intimate. The level of exposure—the capacity of our technologies
to record and to transmit images, text, and sound—and an online culture that has new
expectations of exposure have helped expand our comfort with public intimacy.113
In many ways, Bowie’s turning his impending death into art through online technologies epitomizes
this new public intimacy connected with celebrity.
In sum, celebrity studies has emerged in the past decade or so as a field with a wide-angle lens on
the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of celebrity. The journal Celebrity Studies, launched in
2010, is the locus for much of this research, which includes: literary celebrity; celebrity activism;
gender studies and celebrity; sport and celebrity; border studies and celebrity; law and celebrity,
particularly in relation to privacy and intellectual property issues; and even academics and celebrity.
Regarding the latter topic, in “The Star System in Literary Studies” (1997), David Shumway
concludes that the “star system has given literary academics greater public visibility, but this celebrity
has not made the knowledge that the stars produce any more widely known or given that knowledge
great public authority.” “On the contrary,” says Shumway, “to the public academic stars are
curiosities rather than intellectual leaders.”114 Relatedly, Jeffrey Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock argue
that in “the age of late or neoliberal capital, society at large no longer affords its iconic or star
public intellectuals much respect.”115 Arguably, this can be best understood through their celebrity
status, that is, through their role in the celebrity system as it operates under neoliberal capital.
110
Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 243–7.
111
112
P. David Marshall, “Introduction: Celebrity in the Digital Era—A New Public Intimacy,” in Celebrity and Power
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xii.
113
Marshall, “Introduction: Celebrity in the Digital Era—A New Public Intimacy,” xii.
114
David R. Shumway, “The Star System in Literary Studies,” PMLA 112 (January 1997): 98.
115
Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock, “Before the Beginning, After the End: Toward the New Public Intellectual,” in The
New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere, eds. Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), x.
400
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Against Theory
15.0 INTRODUCTION
The case against theory goes hand in hand with the case for theory. “[A]lmost as quickly as they
became known,” writes Robert Tally, “scholars and critics [start] pooh-poohing the various schools
of theory.”1 The Pooh Perplex (1963) and Postmodern Pooh (2001) by Frederick Crews, for example,
satirize New Criticism, Marxism, and Freudian theory, among others in 1963, and deconstruction,
feminist theory, and postcolonial theory, among others in 2001.
For Tally, a symbol of their co-dependency is the publication of “Against Theory” (1982) by
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, and Literary Theory (1983) by Terry Eagleton within a
year of each other. Whereas Eagleton’s book is the bestseller that has introduced generations of
students to theory (including me), Knapp and Michaels’ article made the case four decades ago that,
as Tally puts it, “literary criticism and scholarship would be better off without theory entirely.”2
Their neopragmatist argument that “meaning and intention, language and speech acts, and
knowledge and belief were each inseparable” is described by Tally as “bizarre.”3 Even the editor of
Critical Inquiry, the journal in which it was published, points out Tally, “noted with irony that
nobody in practice, but only ‘in theory,’ could buy Knapp’s and Michaels’s conclusion, since, for
example, ‘in practice, to say I believe something to be the case is tantamount to saying that I do not
know it for a fact.’ ”4
Daniel T. O’Hara, however, argues that the “against theory” movement began with Michaels and
Knapp’s essay. For him, it appears to be an institutional form of psychosis. O’Hara claims it is blind
revisionism in the service of a new professional hierarchy of one-time theorists and/or their students
who, under the guise of the latest interpretive community at the time, put a limit to theory and its
certified pragmatic users. This self-serving and deceptive syndrome only ends, O’Hara claims, in
the self-destructive repetition of the vicious cycle without end. Michaels and Knapp’s essay and
O’Hara’s critical response, along with many others, including one from Stanley Fish, Michaels and
Knapp’s teacher and at the time a widely-read theorist, are collected in Against Theory (1985),
which was edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, the editor of Critical Inquiry noted above.
Given these claims, there are at least two possible ways to approach the case against theory. The
first involves looking at the material from the preceding chapters not as evidence of the case for
theory but rather as refracted through its other, the case against theory including satires like those
1
Robert T. Tally, Jr., For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in the Age of Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zero
Books, 2022), 71.
2
Tally, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists, 71.
3
4
401
of Crews. Approached as such, that is, by listening only to the arguments against specific theories—
as well as against theory in general—would be kind of like playing this book backwards. But
practically speaking, this would be a different book: not an overview to contemporary literary and
cultural theory, but rather an overview to contemporary literary and cultural antitheory. The
second way to approach the case against theory is by examining the general concept of antitheory—
and some of its contemporary instantiations. This is the approach we will take. It is also the one
that was taken in What’s Wrong with Antitheory? (2020), which was edited by Jeffrey Di Leo.
The first section of this chapter (15.1) is thus devoted to the concept of antitheory in the broad
sense of the term. It provides a glimpse of how a volume devoted to contemporary literary and
cultural antitheory might begin to make its case. The remaining sections discuss some contemporary
work that has been described as against theory, or antitheory, if you will. Roughly speaking, these
major areas of antitheory are each separated by a decade: if the neopragmatism of Knapp and
Michaels was the dominant antitheory of the 1980s, then posttheory (15.2) was the dominant
antitheory of the 1990s, object-oriented ontology (15.3) of the 2000s, and postcritique (15.4) of the
2010s. The final section, on the new new criticism (15.5), speculates on what might become of
these versions of antitheory in the 2020s and thereafter.
15.1 ANTITHEORY
Antitheory is nothing new. As long as there has been theory, there has also been antitheory. The two
fit together in a co-dependent relationship that has served not to enervate the other, but rather to
energize it. The rise then of antitheory coincides with the rise of literary and cultural theory in the
1970s. Moreover, just as theory in the new millennium is stronger and more robust than it has ever
been in its roughly fifty-year history, so too is antitheory. New directions in antitheory arise on a
regular basis, albeit with more or less the same mandate: to express discontentment with theory.
At its most rudimentary level, antitheory takes the form of opposition to some of the major
mandates of theory. For example, there is a faction of antitheory that opposes the use of race, class,
gender, and sexuality in the analysis of literature and culture. There is another that rejects critique
and calls for forms of criticism that do not involve ideological analysis. There is still another form
of antitheory that rejects the epistemological and metaphysical project of structuralism and
poststructuralism, and its so-called “social construction of knowledge.” In short, antitheory has a
long and varied list of complaints about theory that can include but is not limited to the commitments
of structuralism, poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and race, class, gender, and sexuality studies.
But there are other complaints by antitheorists that really have nothing to do with specific
theories. Rather, these complaints are directed at the general tenor of theory, which is viewed as
replete with “inflated claims,” “facile slogans,” and “political pretensions.” There are also complaints
from these antitheorists about the lack of “reason and science” in theory, its “paucity of evidence,”
“the incoherence of certain theorists,” its “flagrant identity politics,” its neglect of aesthetics, its
lack of logic, and its “fashionableness.” Of the last complaint, one wonders, though, if the zeal of
antitheorists would wane if it were not for the fact that theory has a knack for eliciting critical
interest and generating scholarly excitement in the humanities. Shiny objects are well known to
attract attention.
Still, perhaps the ultimate complaint of antitheorists is the alleged way in which theory impairs
our appreciation of literature. “All [antitheorists] share an affection for literature,” write a couple
AGAINST THEORY 403
of prominent antitheorists—share “a delight in the pleasure it brings, a respect for its ability to give
memorable expression to the vast variety of human experience, and a keen sense that we must not
fail in our duty to convey it unimpaired to future generations.”5 In short, theory destroys our
appreciation of literature—and will continue to do so until it is cast out of the house of literary
criticism. By eliminating theory from the academy, the valiant warriors of antitheory will have
thereby rescued literature from appreciative peril. Antitheory, writes the novelist Mario Vargas
Llosa, “returns sanity and rationality to literary criticism,” rescuing it from the esotericism, jargon,
and delusions under which it [has] been buried by the ‘theorizers’ ”—something he feels that “lovers
of genuine literature and criticism” desperately desire.6
Nevertheless, to say there are central tenets to antitheory would be misguided. Though its
discontentment is generally localized to what it regards as “theory,” just as there are many different
types of theory, so too are there many different types of antitheory. Moreover, unlike other terms
with the same prefix such as anti-foundationalism, which refers to a rejection of foundational
beliefs or principles in philosophical inquiry, and anti-essentialism, which refers to the non-belief
that things or ideas have essences, anti-theory does not necessarily imply the rejection of theory or
a non-belief in theory. In fact, in many cases, antitheory simply means another type of theory. This
is one of the things that makes antitheory not only a fascinating topic for consideration, but also an
important topic for consideration in a volume of this type.
Jeffrey Nealon, who self-professedly “has been toiling in the vineyards of anti-theory for more
than twenty-five years,”7 well recognizes the theoretical nature of antitheory. “Anti-theory,” writes
Nealon, “has long been a venerable brand of theory.”8 His comment might seem odd to those who
view antitheory like antifoundationalism, that is, as a rejection of theory. But he is correct in his
branding assessment. The only question is what “brand of theory” is antitheory? In Nealon’s case,
antitheory was initially movements that offered theoretical alternatives to structuralism and
poststructuralism such as cultural studies, globalization studies, feminism, race and gender studies,
queer theory, postcolonialism, Marxism, and New Historicism, but has now in its later stages of
development moved on to some new brands of theory.
Nealon’s assumption is that the “theory” in “antitheory” refers to “structuralism and post-
structuralism,” which he describes as “a loose grab-bag of movements also dubbed ‘the linguistic-
turn.’ ”9 Antitheory then is not work that directly follows from the linguistic turn like the “far-
reaching revolutions in thinking about everything from the nature of kinship systems (Claude
Lévi-Strauss) and historical events (Hayden White) to the workings of political power (Louis
Althusser) or sex and gender (Judith Butler), all the way to the workings of African-American
cultural production (Henry Louis Gates’s ‘signifyin’) and even the unconscious itself (Jacques
5
Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, “Introduction,” in Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, eds. Daphne Patai and Will
H. Corral (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 14. All of the quoted descriptions in this paragraph and the one
above come either from their introduction or from their description of the book on the back cover.
6
Back-cover blurb for Patai and Corral, Theory’s Empire.
7
Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Notes on Contributors,” in What’s Wrong with Antitheory?” ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (London: Bloomsbury,
2020), xi.
8
Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Antitheory 2.0: The Case of Derrida and the Question of Literature,” in What’s Wrong with Antitheory?
25.
9
Nealon, “Antitheory 2.0,” 26.
Lacan’s famous dictum that the unconscious is structured like a language is specifically scaffolded
on Saussure’s relation between the signifier and the signified).”10 Rather, antitheory is work that
takes another “turn,” specifically one that is not linguistically-based. So, for Nealon, antitheory is
theory that does not directly follow from the linguistic turn. Or, otherwise stated, antitheory is
work that is more closely associated with the theoretical movements that are not considered part of
the linguistic turn, which is, of course, not a small body of theory.
What is interesting about this position is that antitheory is not the rejection of theory. Rather, on
this view, antitheory is the multiplication of theories—a way to build out the house of theory
beyond the constraints of the linguistic turn, or, if you will, beyond the parameters of structuralism
and poststructuralism. In effect, then, antitheory from this perspective involves discontentment
with only one form of theory, and offers in its stead, other forms of theory. This version of antitheory
opens the path to regarding, for example, not only the very long list of “studies” today as antitheory
(for example, subaltern studies, sound studies, surveillance studies, and so on) but also new
materialism, object-oriented-ontology, and surface reading. On this view, the house of theory is
large and regularly expanding through the multiplication of antitheories.
Nevertheless, for some, the rejection of theory does not entail the adoption of another version
of it. Rather, it is the simple and categorical rejection of theory—all theory, no exceptions. This
rejection holds equally for structuralism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, globalization studies,
feminism, race and gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism, Marxism, New Historicism, and
so on. Vincent Leitch, who, like Nealon, may also be described as having “toiled in the vineyards
of antitheory for a very long time,” has said that this group of antitheorists includes “traditional
literary critics; aesthetes; critical formalists; political conservatives; ethnic separatists; some literary
stylisticians, philologists, and hermeneuticists; certain neopragmatists; champions of low and
middlebrow literature; creative writers; defenders of common sense and plain style; plus some
committed leftists.”11 I too have toiled in the vineyards of antitheory probably just as long as
Nealon, and can say too from my professional experience in comparative literature and philosophy
departments that some first-generation champions of “comparative literature” as well as most
analytic philosophers need to be added to Leitch’s list. I know all too well their scorn for theory.
But even so, this level of antitheory is perhaps easier claimed than accomplished. It assumes that
these so-called “antitheorists” have no theoretical position of their own or that it is possible to
regard them as theory “neutral.” Otherwise, they would be in the same boat that Nealon puts his
antitheorists, though with one major difference: their “theory” would not be the “linguistic turn.”
Rather, it would be one of a host of “earlier” alternatives such as philology, stylistics, formalism,
aestheticism, hermeneutics, or, even, dare I say, some version of “philosophy” other than that
found in the works of Saussure, Derrida, Richard Rorty, et al. So, for example, the proponent of
“stylistics” as their preferred theory might argue that everything that comes after it is “antitheory.”
Still, what if we posited that “theory” is not just the linguistic turn or the structuralism–
poststructuralism dyad? And that one of the lessons of theory is that it is no longer possible to be
theory neutral? Moreover, isn’t this just the assumption of folks who call themselves “antitheorists”
only to brand their own work as another version of theory? The difference between those who
10
Nealon, “Antitheory 2.0,” 26.
11
Vincent Leitch, “Antitheory,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 373.
AGAINST THEORY 405
formulate their theoretical positions in comparison to the work of structuralists and poststructuralists
and those who do not is merely then a historical contingency. Just because the antitheoretical “New
Historicists” happened to formulate their positions after the theoretical work of the structuralists
and poststructuralists does not make their work any less theoretical than the philologists whose
positions were established before the theoretical work of the structuralists and poststructuralists.
There are parallels here too with the case of philosophy. Just as we do not believe that pre-
Socratic thinkers such as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides were not philosophers because
they “preceded” Socrates, the “father” of philosophy, by the same token we should also not contend
that pre-Saussurean or pre-Derridean thinkers were not also theorists. Perhaps, as a concession to
the formative powers of Socrates, Saussure, and Derrida, we might respectively then dub these
thinkers “early philosophers” and “early theorists,” which is exactly what is done in Chapter 1
(“Early Theory”) of this book. Nevertheless, we surely would not dismiss any of them from
philosophical or theoretical consideration.
But the point regarding the history of philosophy goes forward too. For example, consider the
case of Nietzsche, who was widely rejected as a “legitimate” philosopher by many twentieth-century
American analytic philosophers because of his aphoristic style. Just as philosophy is not just Socratic
philosophy or analytic philosophy, so too is theory not just Derridean theory and its variants. In
addition, just because one does not self-identify as a philosopher or theorist does not mean that one
should not be considered one. The same too applies with antitheorists.
The discontents then of antitheory are many. First and foremost among them is an inability to
escape or make a clean break from theory. This is especially true in the new millennium, where the
reach of theory is greater now than at any time in history. Today there is arguably no non-theoretical
position from which one can claim to read literature or study culture. Theory now consumes all
possible approaches to literature and culture—or at least this is the belief of those who choose to
observe the theoretical field as a whole, rather than merely view it from only their own position
within it, which can lead to the mistaken view that one’s own approach is somehow “outside” of
or “beyond” the purview of theory.
Stepping back from our critical practices and reading positions to situate them within the
theoretical field is one of the central tasks of those who are committed to a progressive future for
the humanities. There are many things wrong with antitheory but perhaps the biggest one is that it
promotes the illusion that it is possible for the humanities to consider literature and culture without
theory. Fifty years ago, it was still possible for the humanities to consider literature without theory.
Twenty-five years ago, it was still debatable whether this was possible. Today, however, it is not
possible to be a legitimate proponent of the humanities and at the same time an antitheorist who
categorically rejects theory. To attempt the impossible, that is, to claim to be a proponent of the
humanities and categorically reject theory, is at this moment in history to place not only theory in
jeopardy but also the future of the humanities. In short, antitheory of this ilk is wrong because it
plays dice with both the future of theory and the humanities.
15.2 POSTTHEORY
Posttheory is a term that was first used in the mid-1990s to reference a range of frustrations with
the state of literary and cultural theory. At the time, there was growing resistance to deconstruction
in particular, and poststructuralism in general. This work was pejoratively called at the time high
theory or grand theory, and a bit later sky-high theory and theoreticism. The emerging wave of
interest in cultural and other “studies” in the 1990s was one of the sources of this antagonism
toward this “high” theory. But there were others including antitheorists who rejected both “theory”
and “studies.”
In peaceful moments, these various “studies” were defined in opposition to “high” theory as
“low” theory. In more antagonistic moments, the term “theory” was entirely rejected in favor of
“studies” or some other -ism, such as “New Historicism.” One of the major areas of contention was
the allegation that “theory” could be reduced to a method, whereas “studies” could not. Another
was over the alleged apolitical or non-political character of “high” theory. Still another was over its
allegedly ahistorical or non-historical character. And textbooks at the time on “How to Do Theory”
did not help the cause of theory as they furthered the belief that theory was as sort of game played
by following a prescribed set of rules (or a fixed set of methods). In the introduction to this book,
this process was described as a kind of theoretical recipe.
In retrospect, the emergence of a multitude of studies in the 1990s, including race, class, ethnic,
sexuality, and gender studies, was not the end of theory or the first chapter of a new posttheory
generation as some speculated at the time, but rather a move toward a more robust and mature
sense of theory. The fact that twenty-five years later there is still interest in what is “post-” or
“after” theory is a testament to both the resolve of anti-theorists and the strength and efficacy of
theory as a means to make sense not just of literature and culture but also many other aspects of the
world including politics, society, and institutions.
As such, the other meaning of “post-theory” is simply what is next for theory and theorists.
Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru saw this back in the mid-1990s when they described posttheory
as “a pragmatic approach to theory which leads [the posttheorist] to assess various theoretical
models on the basis of the socio-cultural and political understanding that these models bring
about.”12 Posttheory was described more as involving theorists who were much less obsessed with
how they accomplished the study of the object or subject at hand than why they were pursuing it.
In other words, method for the posttheorist took a back seat to things such as public interest, social
and political activism, and ethics. Thus, posttheory is a trend in theory that continues to this day,
namely, to do theory with an eye toward making the world a better place, rather than avoiding it
or trying to deny its existence. It is seen, for example, in the progressive work of contemporary
theorists like Butler, Henry Giroux, and Žižek.
15.3 OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY

Object-oriented philosophy was inaugurated by Graham Harman with the publication of Tool-Being
in 2002. Five years later it came to be entangled with speculative realism, which was discussed
earlier. Thus, much of Harman’s work as a proponent of object-oriented philosophy has been to
distinguish it from speculative realism, particularly the work of Quentin Meillassoux. In the process,
Harman establishes, by his own acknowledgment, a reactionary form of literary and cultural theory,
one that by some accounts is a prime example of antitheory.
12
Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru, “Posttheory Postscriptum,” symploke– 3.1 (1995): 120.
AGAINST THEORY 407
In this section, however, rather than go back to the relationship of object-oriented philosophy to
speculative realism, which we have already discussed, we will focus instead on the efforts of Harman
to develop and defend his own version, which he generally terms, object-oriented ontology (OOO)
and regards as a part of “the broader framework of speculative realism.”13 However, as we shall see,
his so-called “object-oriented literary criticism,” that is, the application of OOO to literary criticism,
is very closely related to the approach of the New Criticism, an early theory that has long been
retired by contemporary literary and cultural theory.
Like the New Criticism, which has been dubbed “the aesthetic view,” Harman’s object-oriented
philosophy, as we noted earlier, regards aesthetics as the root of all philosophy. While one might be
tempted to group OOO with what has come to be known as the radical aestheticism (or new
aestheticism—as opposed to “older” forms of aestheticism, such as the ones discussed earlier), this
would be inappropriate.
Radical aesthetics is a straightforward return to the wheelhouse of the New Criticism, that is, the
“aesthetic view.” Efforts to “rethink” the aesthetic and “remake” aesthetic discourse, such as Isobel
Armstrong’s in The Radical Aesthetic (2000) and Terry Eagleton’s in The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(1990), are a return to a form of criticism rejected by proponents of a contemporary depiction of
text as well as by the work done by cultural studies and the multitude of studies it spawned.
Nevertheless, radical aestheticism does not simply reproduce the New Critical aesthetic of old,
but rather often gives it a “political” twist, which in Armstrong’s case is referred to as a ludic
feminism that is potentially disruptive and transgressive.14 In Eagleton’s case, a “conflict . . . between
two opposing notions of the aesthetic” is identified: “one figuring as an image of emancipation, the
other ratifying domination.”15 Nevertheless, the intrepid Eagleton continues to build his case for a
radical materialist aesthetics in later work, albeit by both pointing out the flaws of the “high theory”
in a new edition of Literary Theory (2008) (“a male-dominated high theory had austerely excluded:
pleasure, experience, bodily life, the unconscious, the affective, autobiographical and interpersonal,
questions of subjectivity and everyday practice”)16 and by pointing out the limits of cultural studies
in After Theory (2003) (“It cannot afford simply to keep recounting the same narratives of class, race,
and gender, indispensible as these topics are. It needs to chance its arm, break out of a rather stifling
orthodoxy, and explore new topics, not least those which it has so far been unreasonably shy”)17 with
a radical materialist aesthetics being one of those “new topics.” Understanding the ideology or
performativity of the aesthetic and its historicity has a place in contemporary theoretical discourse
regarding literary studies so long as it is not a return to the autonomous, organic wholes of the New
Critical aesthetic—a task that is very difficult if not impossible to avoid when engaging the aesthetic.
While OOO shares with Armstrong and Eagleton a radicalization of aesthetics by necessitating
its “theatricality,” a move akin to the necessity of Armstrong’s performativity and Eagleton’s
ideology to the aesthetic, unlike them, Harman rejects the use of any social, political, cultural, and
biographical considerations in object-oriented criticism. By contrast, radical aestheticism uses
13
14
Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 214–15.
15
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 411.
16
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1st edition, 1983; 2nd edition, 1996; anniversary edition with a new
preface (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 194.
17
Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 222.
social, political, and cultural considerations to radicalize the aesthetic. Object-oriented criticism,
however, much like the New Criticism, aims to empty the aesthetic of all social, political, cultural,
and biographical considerations, and focus purely on formal ones.
Object-oriented criticism in the hands of Harman arguably tries to make the New Criticism
“great again” by doubling-down on its most recognizable characteristics. In the case of the
relationship of criticism to political concerns, for example, the New Criticism was wrought through
its conservative and segregationist political vision, which although a failed one, still landed them
positions as tenured conservatives at numerous colleges and universities across America. In the case
of object-oriented criticism, however, we supposedly do not have to worry about it being a form of
criticism wrought through a Heideggerian or any other political vision (a point, though, that some
will surely want to contest).
For Harman, not only are political concerns unrelated to literary criticism and theory (a view he
shares with the New Criticism), but, additionally, “[t]here is no political knowledge”18 (a view he
does not share with the New Criticism). “Political theory cannot be based on a claim to knowledge:
whether it be the supposed knowledge of what the best polity is, or merely the cynical claim that
it’s all just a struggle for power,” writes Harman.19 “Along with the need to recognize itself as a
non-knowledge, political theory must give a much larger role to non-human entities than has
previously been the case.”20 In this regard, Harman’s vision of the reinvention of aesthetics for the
new millenium is very different from the highly politicized radical aesthetics of Armstrong and
Eagleton. Harman’s work not only goes against the Marxist traditions in theory (and praxis) that
both reject non-ideological criticism like the New Criticism, but also work against the tendencies
of neoliberal aesthetics to erase the political from literary and cultural criticism.
Nonetheless, it is really through Harman’s use of autonomy with regard to the text of object-
oriented criticism that the association with the New Criticism is most apparent. While he realizes
that the “deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things [at] the heart of object-oriented
philosophy . . . will immediately sound deeply reactionary,” he nevertheless finds many different
ways to defend the autonomy of texts.21 Moreover, Harman continues on this reactionary path in
spite of being well aware that “most advances in the humanities pride themselves on having
abandoned the notion of stale autonomous substances or individual human subjects in favor of
networks, negotiations, relations, interactions, and dynamic fluctuations.”22 “This,” he continues,
“has been the guiding theme of our time.”23 This theme is, of course, the contemporary depiction
of text.
Harman has no problem supporting the autonomy of the text but believes that certain conceptions
of it are wrongheaded: “The problem with individual substances was never that they were
autonomous or individual, but that they were wrongly conceived as eternal, unchanging, simple, or
directly accessible by privileged observers.”24 He tries to distance his view of the autonomy of the
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
AGAINST THEORY 409
text in object-oriented literary criticism from that of the New Criticism by at once recognizing the
“obvious similarities between [OOO’s] relationless concept of objects . . . and the New Criticism’s
long unfashionable model of poems as encapsulated machines cut off from all social and material
context,”25 but also by citing his own doctrinal disagreements with the ontology at the heart of the
New Criticism’s “heresy of paraphrase.”
This heresy, as noted earlier, was posited by Cleanth Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn (1947). His
thesis here, again, is that a poem cannot be paraphrased, that is, a poem cannot be rephrased into
a series of statements or propositions. Writes Brooks, “any good poem sets up against all attempts
to paraphrase it.”26 “For the imagery and the rhythm,” continues Brooks, “are not merely the
instruments by which this fancied core-of-meaning-which-can-be-expressed-in-a-paraphrase is
directly rendered.”27 Quoting William Marshall Urban’s Language and Reality (1939), Brooks
brings home his point about the relationship of form and content to the “essential core of the poem
itself ”:
The general principle of the inseparability of intuition and expression holds with special force
for the aesthetic intuition. Here it means that form and content, or content and medium, are
inseparable. The artist does not first intuit his object and then find the appropriate medium. It is
rather in and through his medium that he intuits the object.28
Generally speaking, this position is one wherein paraphrase, quotation, and translation necessarily
alter the content of texts. It assumes, of course, a particular relationship between form and content,
of which there are three basic variations wherein content is regarded as an autonomous object:
monism, dualism, and pluralism.
These three potential relationships between form and content have been widely discussed in
literary studies and philosophy. Each, though, is founded upon a classical depiction of text. Monism
regarding form and content, as Gustave Flaubert famously put it, “is like body and soul: form and
content . . . are one.”29 Therefore, for monists (like Brooks), any change in form will result
necessarily in a change in content. Dualism contends that form and content are separate entities and
that there is no necessary connection between them. With respect to artworks, dualism entails that
considerations of form (or style) are purely or simply matters of expression rather than content.
Finally, pluralism is the position that there are many different functions that articulations of content
may serve. Jakobson, for example, argued that there were six basic functions of verbal
communication—referential, emotive, poetic, phatic, conative, and metalingual.30 As such, pluralism
leaves open the possibility of an indefinite number of different relationships between form and
content. Pluralism regards form as the characteristic or specific ways in which language is used in a
given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on. Content then for the pluralist is
25
26
Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 196.
27
Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 197.
28
Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 199; Urban cited by Brooks.
29
Gustave Flaubert, “Letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 12 December 1857,” in Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert,
Vol. 2, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1973), 785.
30
Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1960): 350–77.
determined only through a functional analysis of the characteristic or specific ways in which
language is used.
Now that we have established a broader context for understanding the relationship between
form and content within the context of the classical depiction of text, let us turn to Harman’s effort
to distance his own object-oriented literary criticism from the work of the New Criticism. Harman
hopes to achieve this by leveling two criticisms against the New Criticism, specifically targeting “the
heresy of paraphrase”: the first is that the New Criticism is guilty of what he calls “the taxonomic
fallacy, which consists in the assumption that any ontological distinction must be embodied in
specific kinds of entities”;31 the second criticism is that the New Criticism fails in its efforts to
maintain the autonomy of the literary object.32 Let us now look at each of these criticisms in a bit
more detail.
Harman agrees with the fallacy of paraphrase to the extent that it means “The poem differs from
any literal expression of its content just as Heidegger’s hammer itself differs from any broken,
perceived, or cognized hammer.”33 However, because the New Critics were not object-oriented
ontologists, the heresy of paraphrase needs to be adapted to the requirements of OOO. Here, the
first order of business for Harman is to point out that the “irreducibility of reality to literal presence
applies as much to the sciences as it does to poetry.”34 “The literal and the nonliteral cannot be
apportioned to different zones of reality, but are two distinct sides of every point in the cosmos.”35
Therefore, because the New Critics “treat literature as a uniquely privileged zone standing outside
the rest of space-time,” OOO must reject their taxonomically suspect ontological assumptions.36
For OOO, everything stands “partially outside” the cosmic network, and partially inside it.
Ontological privilege leads the New Critics to assert a distinction between literary objects and non-
literary ones. Whereas, according to OOO, there is no ontological distinction that is embodied in
specific kinds of entities—and those that believe as much, such as the New Critics, commit the
“taxonomic fallacy.”
So, while Harman agrees with aspects of the New Critics heresy of paraphrase (viz., primarily its
general notion of the autonomy of objects), other aspects of it violate the principles of OOO (viz.,
primarily the taxonomical ontological assumptions it makes). To be clear where he stands on the
ontology of the New Critical heresy of paraphrase, Harman writes, “we can accept Brook’s claim
of an absolute gulf between literalized prose sense and the nonprose sense that it paraphrases or
translates. Yet, it does not follow that there should be a division of labor in which poetry has all the
non-prose sense while other disciplines have all the literal sense.”37
Moreover, Harman has a different problem with paraphrase than the one stated by Brooks. It is
not that we should reject paraphrase in toto, but rather we should be aware of its limits. He makes
this point through the example of Moby-Dick: “[W]hy not try shortening it to various degrees in
order to discover the point at which it ceases to sound like Moby-Dick? Why not imagine it
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
AGAINST THEORY 411
lengthened even further, or told by a third-person narrator rather than Ishmael, or involving a
cruise in the opposite direction around the globe?”38 The point he is establishing here is that objects
are “to some extent autonomous from even their own properties.”39 The phrase “to some extent
autonomous” reveals the dualism between form and content at the heart of Harman’s object-
oriented literary criticism. For him, form (viz., various expressions of Moby-Dick or “any broken,
perceived, or cognized hammer”) and content (viz., Moby-Dick or Heidegger’s hammer) are
separate entities, and while there are no necessary connections between form and content, they are
connected in the sense that at some point changing the properties of Moby-Dick will result in “it
[ceasing] to sound like Moby-Dick”—or more accurately, cease to be or express Moby-Dick.
Consequently, while Harman and the New Critics agree on the autonomy of the literary object,
they disagree about whether to posit a monist or dualist approach to the classical depiction of text
at the center of their respective literary criticisms.
Before closing, Harman’s second criticism of the New Criticism is worth mentioning as well, as
it further confirms his commitment to ontological autonomy. For Harman, while the New Critics
do a great job establishing “the poem as [existing] in pristine isolation from the rest of the cosmos,”40
they do a poor job maintaining this autonomy “once we have entered the gates of the poem,” where
“nothing is autonomous at all according to Brooks: instead, we inhabit a holistic wonderland in
which everything is defined solely by its interrelations with everything else.”41 For Harman, “by
turning [the poem’s] interior into a relational wildfire in which all individual elements are
consumed,” the New Critics again have failed to produce a model of literary criticism consistent
with the principles of OOO. To be fair, though, the New Critics tended to find the coexistence of
ambiguity and coherence in an object not to be contradictory characteristics. But rather than seeing
these as tensions that could be resolved through close reading, Harman would rather that object-
oriented literary criticism posit a non-relational literary-object, rather than a radically relational
one. The exercise of altering senses of Moby-Dick is also meant to show “how each text resists
internal holism by attempting various modifications of these texts and seeing what happens.”42
In sum, Harman’s approach is an effort to provide a proper ontology for the New Criticism and
its classical depiction of text. By focusing on improving autonomy in literary criticism, it serves as
both a rejection of the contemporary depiction of text and a reactionary form of anti-theory
thoroughly grounded in aesthetics. “ ‘Everything is connected’ is one of those methods that has long
since entered its decadence, and must be abandoned,”43 comments Harman. “The call for ‘the death
of the author’ needs to be complemented by a new call for ‘the death of the culture.’ ”44 For his part,
Harman has done a yeoman’s job in rehabilitating the New Criticism. “Instead of dissolving a text
upward into its readings or downward into its cultural elements,” states Harman, “we should focus
specifically on how it resists such dissolution.”45 The New Critics would be proud of him given all
38
39
40
41
42
Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 201–2.
43
44
45
the pounding they have taken from various contemporary views of text over the last quarter of the
twentieth century and thereafter. Object-oriented literary criticism’s thoroughgoing commitment
to the autonomy of the text is best viewed as New Criticism with an upgraded ontology and shiny
new dualism. It also signals the complete reversal of OOO with regard to contemporary trends in
the humanities that are based on the rejection of “stale autonomous substances.” As a form of
antitheory, it is among the most widely recognized and debated today.
15.4 POSTCRITIQUE
Vincent Leitch has humorously said that “theorists refer to antitheorists as the ‘I love literature
crowd.’ ”46 And while some antitheorists tolerate theory, he continues, it is only as “a handmaiden
to appreciation of literary texts.”47 For the others, they argue that literary criticism and scholarship
does not need a handmaiden—and that the study of literature is better off without theory. Again,
antitheory arguments like this go back to the institutional rise of theory in the 1970s. And while
this line of thinking preceded Knapp and Michaels’s 1982 provocation “Against Theory,”
antitheorists found in this essay an antitheory “argument” to rally around.
Still, there has perhaps been no higher profile and higher funded antitheory movement ever than
the one initiated by Rita Felski. The funding came in the form of a $4.2 million grant in 2016 from
the Danish National Research Foundation. A press release from her university announcing the
grant says that it stems from work done in her 2015 book, The Limits of Critique, which “encouraged
her fellow scholars to explore alternatives to increasingly predictable and formulaic styles of
‘suspicious reading’ ”48—and codified postcritique. Felski, continues the release, says
Literary scholars should spend less time looking behind a text for hidden causes and suspicious
motives and more time placing themselves in front of it to reflect on what it suggests, unfolds or
makes possible. What literary studies needs, she said, is less emphasis on “de” words –
demystifying, debunking, deconstructing – and more emphasis on “re” words – literature’s
potential to remake, reshape and recharge perception.49
Felski claims that she will use the grant to “develop new frameworks and methods for exploring the
many social uses of literature,” something she has already begun in her course “Theories of
Reading,” where “students first learn to become skeptical readers, drawing on ideas from Freud,
Foucault or feminism to criticize the works of the canon or to challenge their assumptions of their
favorite TV shows,” and then learn “to reflect on why they love certain novels or movies and to
develop more sophisticated vocabularies for describing and justifying these feelings.”50
Felski’s comments betray the basic parameters of her antitheory. For her, theory has become
“predicable and formulaic,” and she aims to provide it with “new frameworks and methods.” These
46
Leitch, “Antitheory,” 373.
47
Leitch, “Antitheory,” 373.
48
Lorena Perez, “UVA English Professor Lands Large Danish Grant to Explore Literature’s Social Use,” UVAToday, May 25,
2016, https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-english-professor-lands-large-danish-grant-explore-literatures-social-use.
49
Perez, “UVA English Professor Lands Large Danish Grant to Explore Literature’s Social Use.”
50
Perez, “UVA English Professor Lands Large Danish Grant to Explore Literature’s Social Use.”
AGAINST THEORY 413
new “frameworks and methods,” that is to say, antitheories, will establish “more sophisticated
vocabularies for describing and justifying” why we “love certain novels and movies”—and, of
course, television shows. Given this, perhaps we need to alter Leitch’s pronouncement to the “I
love Netflix crowd.”
Felski finds in Harman, whose antitheory we just discussed, a loyal ally in the rejection of
critique. “I join a growing groundswell of voices,” says Felski in The Limits of Critique, “including
scholars of feminist and queer studies as well as actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology,
and influential strands of political theory.”51 But his name only appears once in her book and there
is no other discussion or mention of OOO aside from a long footnote to the above sentence, which
after citing specific works of scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Toril Moi, Linda M. G.
Zerilli, Stephen M. Best, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Jane Bennett, concludes with the
sentence, “I have also learned much from the work of Graham Harman . . . .”52
Even more curiously, Felski finishes this sentence with “and of course am deeply influenced by
the work of Bruno Latour.”53 In comparison to Latour, whose actor-network theory index entry has
fifteen subheadings, and whose own entry has eleven subheadings, there is no entry in her index for
Harman, and the only direct reference in the book to OOO is the one above. Why then does Latour
get an “of course” from Felski but the “deep influence” of Harman is directly stated nowhere in her
postcritical manifesto? It is because while Felski shares with Harman a passion for the classical
depiction of text and the associated characteristic of textual autonomy, she hides behind the work
of Latour in order to avoid any association through Harman with aesthetics and the New Criticism.
Nonetheless, in spite of her cloaking devices, she too presents a version of antitheory indebted to
aestheticism and the New Criticism, albeit by a different path from Harman.
In her co-written introduction to Critique and Postcritique, a collection of essays on the
postcritique moment that followed two years after the publication of The Limits of Critique, the
editors, Elizabeth S. Anker and Felski, share what links together the disparate postcritical work of
Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “these critics are all
committed to treating texts with respect, care, and attention, emphasizing the visible rather than
the concealed in a spirit of dialogue and constructiveness rather than dissection and diagnosis.”54
One would be hard-pressed to say that these same characteristics, that is, a commitment to “treating
texts with respect, care, and attention, emphasizing the visible,” are not also characteristics of the
New Criticism. But, more to the point, the autonomy of the text immediately begins to appear here
as an important consideration of critics sympathetic to postcritique. This also comes out in the
descriptions of the specific contributions of Best, Love, Marcus, and Sedgwick by Anker and Felski:
Best and Marcus “urge greater attention to what lies on the surface [of a text]—the open to view,
the transparent, and the literal,” that is, they urge the use of a method called surface reading, one
that embraces a broad array of critical practices including old and new formalisms, cognitive
science, affect studies, critical description, history of the book, and data-driven approaches; Love
51
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8.
52
Felski, The Limits of Critique, 195–6, n. 4.
53
Felski, The Limits of Critique, 195–6, n. 4.
54
Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Critique and Postcritique, eds. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 16.
“calls for a model of what she calls ‘thin description’ and for renewed attention to empiricism ‘after
the decline of the linguistic turn’ ”; Marcus “develops a model of ‘just reading’ that attends carefully
to what is given by the text”; and Sedgwick’s “account of paranoid reading . . . culminates with an
acknowledgement of the value of the reparative impulse that is ‘additive and accretive,’ aiming ‘to
assemble and confer plenitude.’ ”55
In the same introduction, though separately discussed, Latour’s actor-network theory [ANT] is
treated as an objection to literary critics who try “to reconcile the spheres of literature and politics,
enlisting their expertise and training in close reading in the service of combatting social injustice.”56
For postcritics such as Anker and Felski, “it is not at all obvious that literary analysis offers a direct
conduit to a sharper understanding of the social, or that individual texts can be seen as microcosms
of broader ideological structures or cultural forces.”57 Actor-network theory scholars are then cited
responding to this problem by “replac[ing] the notion of ‘society’ with an emphasis on networks of
associations, conceiving of the artwork as embedded within multiple chains of mediation rather
than serving a microcosm of a social totality.”58 On this view, ANT shares an affinity with the New
Criticism by agreeing that social and political concerns are not determinable through the close
reading of literary texts. “The politics of a text are not dictated by its form, structure, or internal
dynamics,” conclude Anker and Felski regarding ANT. “Rather, they are forged in the history of its
various diverse entanglements.”59
Many of the concerns then of postcritique are also those of the New Criticism. This is most
obvious in its rejection of politics and ideology as relevant to textual criticism (viz., “The politics of
a text are not dictated by its form, structure, or internal dynamics”), and its rejection of the
contemporary depiction of a text (viz., the depiction that results from the “linguistic turn”). But the
novelty of Felski’s version of New Criticism is felt most palpably in her desire that artworks be both
“connected” and “autonomous.” For her, “works of art cannot help being social, sociable, connected,
worldly, immanent—and yet they can also be felt, without contradiction, to be incandescent,
extraordinary, sublime, utterly special.”60 That is to say, for Felski, “[t]heir singularity and their
sociability are interconnected, not opposed.”61 How then does she resolve this apparent
contradiction? Namely, the postcritical contradiction that artworks are both autonomous and non-
autonomous? Social and non-social? That they exhibit singularity and plurality?
For one thing, unlike Harman, she does not rely on aesthetics as the first principle of her postcritique,
and unlike the new aestheticism, she does not use aesthetics to bring performativity or ideology into
her postcritique. “This book,” writes Felski, “does not take up arms against social meanings under the
stirring banner of . . . a ‘new aestheticism,’” nor does it “champion aesthetics over politics.”62 For her,
the social aspects of literature cannot be “peeled away from its ‘purely literary’ ones.”63 “No more
separate spheres!” she adds. But here again she appears to be going in the opposite direction to
55
Anker and Felski, “Introduction,” 16.
56
57
58
59
60
Felski, The Limits of Critique, 11.
61
62
63
AGAINST THEORY 415
Harman, whose object-oriented philosophy has a “deeply non-relational conception of the reality of
things,” rejects “networks, negotiations, relations, interactions, and dynamic fluctuations,”64 and last,
but not least, regards objects as “cut off from all social and material context.”65
If anything, Felski’s postcritique is an effort to provide a new type of relationship between text and
context, that is, between the singularities of the text and the pluralities of context. “Refusing to stay
cooped up in their containers, texts barge energetically across space and time,” opines Felski, “hooking
up with other coactors in ways that are both predicable and puzzling.”66 By why do these autonomous,
singular texts venture out into context? Because this allows them as agents (or actors, as Latour terms
them) “to make a difference” in the network. “Only by making attachments and forging alliances [and
‘hooking up’],” claims Felski, “are they able to make a difference.”67 For her resolving the contradiction
of the autonomy and non-autonomy of texts is merely a matter of “stress”:
Rather than stressing their otherness, autonomy, nontransferability, we point out their portability,
mobility, and translatability. Instead of asking “What does this text create, build, make possible?
Against those who declare “The text is singular! It cannot be appropriated!” we intone our own
mantra: “The text is singular! Of course it will be appropriated!”68
In the final analysis, what Felski offers in place of a hermeneutics of suspicion and the contemporary
depiction of text has a lot more in common with reader-response criticism than object-oriented
ontology:
Reading is now conceived as an act of composition—of creative remaking—that binds text and
reader in ongoing struggles, translations, and negotiations. The literary text is not a museum
piece immured behind glass but a spirited and energetic participant in an exchange—one that
may know as much as, or a great deal more than, the critic. This text impinges and bears on the
reader across time and space; as a mood changer, a reconfigurer of perception, a plentitude of
stylistic possibilities, an aid to thought . . . Don’t texts, after all, routinely transcend their
circumstances of conception—straying into new networks that have little or nothing to do with
their original meaning or purpose?69
For Felski, understanding how autonomous texts can “resonate” and “move across time” is the
central problem of literary criticism in the new millenium.70 What puts her firmly under the
influence of Latour is her adoption of his unorthodox position that “Literary texts can be usefully
thought of as nonhuman actors,” and as such, exhibit a form of agency.71
In a way, by recalling the work of Stanley Fish (on textual autonomy), Felski’s postcritique might
be seen as taking us back to the twentieth-century debate regarding the source of the identity of the
64
65
66
67
68
69
Felski, The Limits of Critique, 182–3.
70
71
autonomous, stable, and coherent classical depiction of text as well as to the unique type of antitheory
he advocates. For Fish, a reception theorist in the tradition of Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser,
the identity of the text is not an inherent property of the object, but is rather bestowed upon it by its
interpreter. Fish’s position that textual identity is a social construction implies, for example, that
authorial intention plays little role in the identity of the text. It also implies that different
interpretations entail different texts. For Fish there is no difference between explaining a text and
changing it. His view then might be said to conflate questions of interpretation with those of identity.
Nevertheless, Fish’s place among classical depictions of text is not as obvious as say the New Critics.
Much the same holds for Felski, though her categorical rejection of the contemporary depiction of
text à la the linguistic turn makes it easier to view her postcritique as a limit case (like Fish) of the
classical depiction of text. Felski’s position in this respect affords her the opportunity to pursue some
of the more extreme, relativistic, and speculative implications and possibilities of this depiction.
For both Fish and Felski, texts are changing entities, though while the former claims that they
are not definable outside of a perceptual awareness of them and do not exhibit agency, the latter
locates the source of their change in their agency as non-human actors within networks. As with
Fish, the key to situating Felski’s work within the tradition of the classical depiction of text is her
repeated insistence that texts have autonomy and a determinate identity—two of the four main
characteristics of a classical depiction of text. Whereas for Fish, texts are autonomous in the sense
that they gain their identity by being isolated from the whole of signification either by a single
interpreter or an entire interpretive community, for Felski, however, texts are autonomous in the
sense that they gain their identity by being isolated from the whole of signification either by a single
reader or by serving as a singular “actor” in a network. In the case of both Fish and Felski, the
source of the identity and autonomy of the text is relative to something else (e.g., an interpreter, a
reader, a network, an interpretive community) in spite of the fact that texts for both of them are
basically also unstable and incoherent entities.
Like OOO (and, relatedly, speculative realism), postcritique is not a cohesive philosophical or
critical movement. If speculative realism is realism plus unorthodox speculation, then postcritique
is the rejection of critique plus even more unorthodox speculation. One need not go much further
than trying (speculatively) to imagine Felski’s image of the life of texts as “one text as an ‘actor’
‘hooking up’ with other ‘coactor’ texts in ‘predicable and puzzling’ ways.”
Still, OOO gave postcritique the philosophical, critical, and speculative courage to be confident
in reasserting the authority of what Harman calls “stale autonomous substances”72—and, by doing
so, put postcritique like OOO in immediate comparison with the once-celebrated form of criticism
that championed “stale autonomous substances,” namely, the New Criticism. Ultimately, postcritique
makes the same move as OOO regarding these autonomous substances by fundamentally agreeing
with Harman that the “problem with individual substances was never that they were autonomous
or individual, but that they were wrongly conceived as eternal, unchanging, simple, or directly
accessible by privileged observers.”73 Nevertheless, OOO and postcritique disagree with how
textual change occurs, with Harman following a path laid out by Heidegger, and Felski a path laid
out by Fish and Latour.
72
73
AGAINST THEORY 417
15.5 NEW NEW CRITICISM

If the last quarter of the twentieth century was one of the most vibrant periods in the history of the
humanities, then the first quarter of the new millenium is quickly becoming one of its most
reactionary. The contemporary depiction of text brought with it exciting new ways of dismantling
the autonomy of the text and replacing it with a myriad of energizing possibilities. The critical
measure of the difference between the classical depiction of text as autonomous, stable, coherent,
and of determinate identity, and the contemporary depiction of text as not autonomous, stable,
coherent, and of determinate identity was often the New Criticism. For at least a twenty-five-year
period, New Criticism often stood as the barometer of everything that contemporary depictions of
text sought to undermine. But the reactionary winds of critical change started to gather force at the
turn of the century through new forms of antitheory.
While antitheory of the form that rejects the epistemological and metaphysical project of
structuralism, poststructuralism, and the social construction of knowledge predates the new
millenium, so too does antitheory that opposes the use of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the
analysis of literature and culture. However, postcritique, a particularly virulent strain of antitheory,
took root in the mid-2010s through the leadership of Felski. It was preceded by another strain of
antitheory called object-oriented ontology, which has gained steam through the contributions of
Harman. What these strains of antitheory share, that is, postcritique and object-oriented ontology,
is a reverence for the classical depiction of text, one that exhibits autonomy as its paradigmatic
feature. This has led many to call work in this area reactionary because of its reversal from the
progressive criticism that stemmed from the contemporary depiction of text.
Also caught up in the whirlwind of reactionary work on text was a return to aestheticism through
both OOO and the radical (or new) aestheticism. This begs the question as to whether a new form
of the New Criticism is in play through the antitheoretical interventions of postcritique, OOO, and
the radical (or new) aestheticism. The only thing left to consider now is whether this new New
Criticism is a cohesive movement or not.
Given that we have said virtually the same thing about the New Criticism, OOO, and the radical
(or new) aestheticism, namely that none of them was or is a monolith, it only seems fair to say the
same about the new New Criticism. Still, the shared commitment of the different forms of the new
New Criticism to the autonomy of the literary text is nothing less than a marvel given their
epistemological and ontological variations. In conclusion, for those who are proponents of literary
and cultural theory in one or more of its guises as depicted in this book, the hope will surely be that
this current wave of reactionary criticism is short-lived. But then again, didn’t the first New Criticism
hold court in the humanities for nearly fifty years? What is going to happen now that it has been
made “great again” via a new New Criticism? Given the co-dependency of theory and antitheory,
one might be led to conclude that this particularly virulent strain of antitheory is a sign of the
power and promise of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Otherwise, why would anyone
even be interested in them, let alone grant them millions of dollars of support?
418
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abelove, Henry, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. “Introduction.” In The Lesbian and Gay
Studies Reader. Edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York:
Routledge, 1993. xv–xviii.
Adams, Abigail. “Letter to John Adams, 31 March 1776.” In Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings.
Edited by Miriam Schneir. New York: Vintage, 1972. 3–4.
Adams, Rachel, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin. “Disability.” In Keywords for Disability Studies. Edited by
Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 5–11.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (2011). In The Omnibus Homo
Sacer. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 880–1009.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). In The Omnibus Homo Sacer.
Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 1–159.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government
(2007). In The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini). Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 362–641.
Agamben, Giorgio. Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (2012). In The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Translated by
Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 642–759.
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999). In The Omnibus Homo
Sacer. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 760–879.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Sacrament of Language: The Archaeology of the Oath (2008). In The Omnibus
Homo Sacer. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 294–361.
Agamben, Giorgio. Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (2003). In The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Translated
by Nicholas Heron. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 246–293.
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception (2003). In The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Translated by Kevin Attell.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 160–245.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies (2014). In The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Translated by Adam Kotsko.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 1010–1279.
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Althusser, Louis. “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962). In For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster.
New York: Vintage, 1970. 87–128.
Althusser, Louis. “On the Materialist Dialectic” (1963). In For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York:
Vintage, 1970. 161–218.
Althusser, Louis. “Reply to John Lewis” (1972). In Essays in Self-Criticism (1974). Translated by Grahame
Lock. London: New Left Books, 1976. 33–99.
Althusser, Louis. Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan. Edited by Olivier Corpet and François
Matheron. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)” (1969). In
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971). Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2001. 85–126.
Althusser, Louis. “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
(1971). Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. 151–6.
Althusser, Louis. “Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon” (1968). In Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (1971). Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. 1–10.
419
420 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital (1968). London: New Left Books, 1970.
Amadeus. Directed by Miloš Forman. Orion Pictures/Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment, 1984.
American Graffiti. Directed by George Lucas. Universal Pictures, 1973.
American Psychiatric Association. “Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.” In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders DSM-III. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980. 236–239.
Anker, Elizabeth S., and Rita Felski. “Introduction.” In Critique and Postcritique. Edited by Elizabeth S.
Anker and Rita Felski. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 1–28.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Racisms.” In Anatomy of Racism. Edited by David Theo Goldberg. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 3–17.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992.
Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
Aristotle. Poetics. Third edition revised. Translated by S. H. Butcher. London: Macmillan, 1902.
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by Lane Cooper. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960.
Aristotle. Generation of Animals. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. 1111–218.
Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy (1869). Edited by J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge: At the University
Press, 1955.
Attali, Jacques. Noise (1977). Translated by Brian Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
1984.
Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by D. W. Robertson, Jr. New York: Macmillan, 1958.
Azzarello, Robert. “Unnatural Predators: Queer Theory Meets Environmental Studies in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula.” In Queering the Non/Human. Edited by Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2008. 137–58.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (1957). Translated by Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin Random
House, 2014.
Badmington, Neil. Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury, 2000.
Baerg, Andrew. “Media Ecology.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 567–8.
Baerg, Andrew. “Media Effects.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–5). In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by
Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981. 259–422.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929). Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (1965). Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An
Experiment in Philosophical Analysis” (1959–61). In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. 103–30.
Bakhtin, Mikhail, and P. N. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction
to Sociological Poetics (1928). Translated by Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1957.
Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology (1964). Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1968.
Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero (1953). Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1968.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies (1957). Selected and translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang,
1972.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 421
Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today (1957).” In Mythologies (1957). Selected and translated by Annette Lavers.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. 109–159.
Barthes, Roland. “The Structuralist Activity ” (1963). In Critical Essays (1964). Translated by Richard
Howard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972. 213–20.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text (1973). Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang,
1975.
Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966). In Roland Barthes, Image–
Music–Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 79–124.
Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1957). Translated by Richard Howard. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1979.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author ” (1968). In The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 49–55.
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text” (1971). In The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 56–64.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z (1970). Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. Translation Studies. First edition. London: Metheun, 1980.
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. Translation Studies. Fourth edition. London: Routledge, 2014.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production (1973). Translated by Mark Poster. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press,
1975.
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972). Translated by Charles Levin. St.
Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981.
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Order of Simulacra” (1976). In Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. Translated by Paul
Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. 81–159.
Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction (1979). Translated by Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976). Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage
Publications, 1993.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation (1981). Translated by Sheila Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1994.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). Translated by Paul Patton. Bloomington: Indiana
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects (1968). Translated by James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2012.
Baudrillard, Jean. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2007). Translated by Chris Turner. London:
Seagull Books, 2016.
Beckman, Frida. Gilles Deleuze. London: Reaktion Books, 2017.
Bell Jr., Derrick. “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma.” Harvard Law
Review 93.3 (1980): 518–33.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History ” (1940). In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.
Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 253–64.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). In Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken,
1968. 217–52.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator ” (1923). Translated by Harry Zohn. In Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 253–63.
Bennington, Geoffrey. Lyotard: Writing the Event. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Edited by J. H. Burns
and H. L. A. Hart. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
Berkeley, George. Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Edited by Colin M.
Turbayne. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957.
Berlant, Lauren. “Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies.” Profession (1998): 105–16.
422 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berlant, Lauren. “Affect is the New Trauma.” Minnesota Review 71–72 (2009): 131–6.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Bros., 1982.
Bleich, David. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. Urbana, IL: National Council
of Teachers of English, 1975.
Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Bloom, Harold. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1976.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace &
Company, 1994.
Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why (2000). New York: Touchstone, 2001.
Bloom, Harold. Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Bloom, Harold. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Grand Central,
2003.
Bloom, Harold. The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon. Edited by David Mikics.
New York: Library of America, 2019.
Bloom, Harold. Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity, 2013.
Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge: Polity, 2022.
Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Brassier, Ray, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. “Speculative Realism.”
Collapse III (2007): 306–449.
Braunstein, Néstor. “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 102–15.
Brayton, Dan. Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2012.
Brewster, Ben. “Overdetermination.” In Louis Althusser, For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York:
Vintage, 1970. 252–3.
Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Second edition.
Malden, MA: Polity, 2005.
Brooks, Cleanth. “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (1947). In The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of
Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956. 192–214.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Buchanan, Ian, and Celina Jeffery. “Towards a Blue Humanity.” symploke– 27.1/2 (2019): 11–14.
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Ninth edition. London: Printed for J.
Dodsley, in Pall-Mall, 1791.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Third edition. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973.
Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Third edition. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519–31.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1991). In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.
Edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993.
307–20.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 423
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.
Cage, John. “Experimental Music” (1957). In Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover, NH:
Wesleyan University Press, 1973. 7–13.
Cage, John. “The Future of Music: Credo” (1937). In Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. 3–7.
Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games (1958). Translated by Meyer Barash. Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2001.
Cardozo, Benjamin. “Law and Literature.” Yale Review (July 1925): 489–507.
Carnap, Rudolph. “Semiotic; Theory of Signs.” In Dictionary of Philosophy. Sixteenth edition, revised.
Edited by Dagobert D. Runes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1960. 288–9.
Carpenter, Edward. Love’s Coming-of-Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes. Manchester:
Labour Press, 1896.
Carpenter, Edward. The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908).
New York: Routledge, 2017.
Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us (1951). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Edited by Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996). Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Cassin, Barbara, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, editors. The Dictionary of Untranslatables:
A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Caute, David. “Introduction.” In Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? London: Methuen, 1978.
vii–xvii.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. “Lacan with Artaud: j’ouïs-sens, jouis-sans, jouis-sens.” In Lacan: The Silent Partners.
Edited by Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 2006. 336–64.
Churchland, Paul. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
Cicero. De Oratore. In Cicero on Oratory and Orators. Edited and translated by J. W. Watson. London:
George Bell & Sons, 1903. 89–115.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976):
875–93.
Cixous, Hélène. “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays” (1975). In Hélène Cixous and Catherine
Clément, The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986. 63–134.
Cixous, Hélène. Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2001). Translated by Beverley Bie
Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Clarke, Bruce. Neocybernetics and Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Clarke, Roger. “Information Technology and Dataveillance.” Communications of the ACM 31.5 (1988):
498–512.
Cochrane, Kira. “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Meet the Rebel Women.” Guardian, March 14, 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Ecology’s Rainbow.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green. Edited by
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. xv–xxxv.
Cohen, Tom. “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies: ‘Climate Change’ and the Rupture of Cultural Critique.”
Unpublished manuscript. 2011.
Cohen, Tom. “Murmurations—‘Climate Change’ and the Defacement of Theory.” In Telemorphosis: Theory
in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1. Edited by Tom Cohen. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press,
2012. 13–42.
Colebrook, Claire. “What is the Anthro-Political?” In Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller,
Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols. London: Open Humanities Press, 2016. 81–125.
Colebrook, Claire. “Can Theory End the World?” symploke– 29.1/2 (2021): 521–34.
Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Second edition. Medford, MA: Polity, 2020.
424 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collins, Sheila. A Different Heaven and Earth: A Feminist Perspective on Religion. Valley Forge, PA: Judson
Press, 1974.
Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977). In Home Girls: A Black
Feminist Anthology. Edited by Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983.
264–74.
Crane, Tim. “Cognitive Science.” In The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Edited by Ted Honderich. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005. 147.
Craps, Stef. “Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-Cultural Perspective.”
Textual Practice 24.1 (2010): 51–68.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, Politics, and Violence against
Women of Color ” (1991). In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. Edited
by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas. New York: The New Press,
1995. 357–83.
Crews, Frederick. The Pooh Perplex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Crews, Frederick. Postmodern Pooh. New York: North Point Press, 2001.
Critchley, Simon. Bowie. London: OR Books, 2016.
Crownshaw, Rick, editor. Transcultural Memory. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Cruikshank, Margaret. The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’ ” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000). http://www.
igbp.net/news/opinion/opinion/haveweenteredthe anthropocene.5.d8b4c3c12bf3be638a8000578.html.
Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (January 3, 2002): 23.
Culin, Stewart. Games of the North American Indians, Volume 1 (1907). Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1992.
Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.
Davies, William. The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.
London: Verso, 2015.
Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.
Davis, Lennard J. “Disability.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 454.
Dawes, James. That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex (1949). Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1974.
de Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities—An Introduction.” differences 3.2 (1991):
iii–xviii.
Delbo, Charlotte. Days and Memory (1985). Translated by Rosette Lamont. Marlboro: Marlboro, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970/1981). Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA:
City Lights Books, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968). Translated by Martin Joughin. New York:
Zone Books, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense (1969). Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. Translated by Mark Lester and
Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism (1967). Translated by Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter, 1992): 3–7.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (1968). Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Translated by
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). Translated by Dana Polan.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Translated
by Brian Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 425
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? (1991). Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Third edition. New York: New
York University Press, 2017.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley. “Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth.” In Postcolonial
Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 3–39.
D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York:
Harper & Row, 1988.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In The Structuralist
Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1972. 247–64.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (1967). Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination (1972). Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981. 61–172.
Derrida, Jacques. “Interview with Richard Kearney.” In Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers.
Edited by Richard Kearney. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. 105–26.
Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Translated by Barbara
Johnson. In Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. xi–xlviii.
Derrida, Jacques. “And Say the Animal Responded?” (1997). Translated by David Wills. In Zoontologies: The
Question of the Animal. Edited by Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
121–46.
Derrida, Jacques. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” In Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues
with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Edited by Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003. 85–136.
Derrida, Jacques. H.C. for Life, That Is to Say (2000). Translated by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques. “Des tours de Babel” (1985). Translated by Joseph F. Graham. In Psyche: Inventions of the
Other, Volume 1. Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2007. 191–225.
Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 (2008). Translated by Geoffrey Bennington.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 2 (2010). Translated by Geoffrey Bennington.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (1997). Translated by David Wills.
In Signature Derrida. Edited by Jay Williams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 380–435.
Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (2019). Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Desai, A. R., editor. Peasant Struggles in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics (1916). Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye
with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983.
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Edited by David Weissman. New Haven, CT: Yale
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. “The Divine Structure of Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan: God, Transcendence, and
Coincidentia Oppositorum.” Tristania XVI (1995): 45–62.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition.
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
426 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. “Running with the Pack: Why Theory Needs Community.” Intertexts 20.1 (2017): 65–79.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. “The Three Percent.” In The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of
Print. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2019. 45–50.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Catastrophe and Higher Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the
Humanities. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Vinyl Theory. Amherst, MA: Lever Press, 2020.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R., editor. What’s Wrong with Antitheory? London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. “Can Theory Save the World?” symploke– 29.1/2 (2021): 535–42.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. “Worlding Publishing.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory. Edited by Jeffrey
R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. 377–94.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R., and Peter Hitchcock. “Before the Beginning, After the End: Toward the New Public
Intellectual.” In The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere. Edited by Jeffrey R.
Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ix–xxix.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R., and Christian Moraru. “Posttheory Postscriptum.” symploke– 3.1 (1995): 119–22.
Di Leo, Jeffrey R., and Christian Moraru. “Introduction: World Theory in the New Millennium.” In The
Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory. Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru. London:
Bloomsbury, 2022. 1–20.
Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Second edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Dowling, Linda. “Aestheticism.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1. Edited by Michael Kelly. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 32–7.
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903). Fifth edition. Chicago: A. C.
McClurg & Co., 1904.
Dufresne, Todd. Killing Freud: 20th Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis. London: Continuum,
2004.
du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of
the Sony Walkman. London: Sage Publications, 1997.
Duras, Marguerite. “An Interview.” In New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Edited by Elaine Marks and
Isabelle de Courtivron. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981. 174–6.
Duvall, John N. “New Criticism.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: British Film Institute, 1986.
Eagleton, Mary. “Introduction.” In Feminist Literary Criticism. Edited by Mary Eagleton. New York:
Routledge, 1991. 1–23.
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990.
Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. First edition, 1983; Second edition, 1996. Anniversary
edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Eagleton, Terry. Materialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (1989). Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Eckermann, J. P. Conversations with Goethe. Edited by Hans Kohn. Translated by Gisela C. O’Brien. New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1964.
Egenfelt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The
Essential Introduction. Second edition. London: Routledge, 2013.
Eichenbaum, Boris. “The Theory of the Formal Method” (1927). In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four
Essays. Translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
99–140.
Eliot, T. S. “The Perfect Critic.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1921. 1–16.
Eliot, T. S. “The Function of Criticism” (1923). In Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1932. 12–24.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 427
Eliot, T. S. “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919). In Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1932. 121–6.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917). In Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1932. 3–11.
Emanuel, Kerry. What We Know About Climate Change. Second edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Emerson, Caryl. “Mikhail Bakhtin.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited
by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 382–3.
Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2004). Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (2002). Translated by Zakiya Hanafi.
Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove
Press, 1967.
Fawaz, Ramzi. “ ‘An Open Mesh of Possibilities’: The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times.” In Reading
Sedgwick. Edited by Lauren Berlant. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 6–33.
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1980.
Flaubert, Gustave. “Letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 12 December 1857.” In Correspondance de
Gustave Flaubert, Vol. 2. Edited by Jean Bruneau. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1973.
785.
Fokkema, Douwe. “Continuity and Change in Russian Formalism, Czech Structuralism, and Soviet
Semiotics.” PTL 1 (1976): 153–96.
Foster, Jeannette H. Sex Variant Women in Literature. New York: Vantage Press, 1956.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York:
Pantheon, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966). New York: Vintage,
1973.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). Translated by Alan Sheridan. New
York: Vintage, 1979.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction (1976). Translated by Robert Hurley.
New York: Vintage, 1980.
Foucault, Michel. “Preface.” In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1972). Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983. xi–xiv.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History ” (1971). In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow.
New York: Pantheon, 1984. 76–100.
Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 (1984). Translated by Robert
Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces” (1967). Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22–7.
Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” In The Politics of Truth. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa
Hochroth. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997. 41–82.
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. Edited by
Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Edited by
Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Edited by Michel
Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Foucault, Michel. The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1983–1984. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
428 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frege, Gottlob. “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100
(1892): 25–50.
Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. New York: Knopf, 1939.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913).
Translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Vintage, 1946.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Defence Neuro-Psychoses” (1894). In Collected Papers, Volume 1. Translated by Joan
Rivière. London: Hogarth Press, 1948. 59–75.
Freud, Sigmund. “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law” (1906). In Collected
Papers, Volume 2. Translated by Joan Rivière. London: Hogarth Press, 1948. 13–24.
Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940). Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1949.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Translated by James Strachey. New York: Liveright,
1950.
Freud, Sigmund. “Psycho-Analysis” (1922). In Collected Papers, Volume 5, Miscellaneous Papers, 1888–1938.
Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. 1–130.
Freud, Sigmund. “Repression” (1915). In Collected Papers, Volume 4, Papers on Metapsychology and Applied
Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Joan Rivière. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. 84–97.
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id (1923). Edited by James Strachey. Translated by Joan Rivière. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1962.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905). Translated by A. A. Brill. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1962.
Freud, Sigmund. “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (1933). In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(1933). Edited and translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. 81–111.
Freud, Sigmund. “Femininity (1933). In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933). Edited and
translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. 112–35.
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933). Edited and translated by James
Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. Studies in Hysteria (1895). Translated by Nicola Luckhurst. New York:
Penguin, 2004.
Friedan, Betty. Feminine Mystique (1963). New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Friedan, Betty. The Second Stage. New York: Summit Books, 1981.
Friedländer, Saul. “Trauma, Transference, and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah.”
History and Memory 4 (1992): 39–59.
Frow, John. “Cultural Studies.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Gabbard, D. Christopher. “Ableism.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method (1960). Second, revised edition. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1989.
Gallagher, Catherine. “Marxism and the New Historicism.” In The New Historicism. Edited by H. Aram
Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989. 37–48.
Garcha, Amanpal. “Cybernetics.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes” (1985). In The Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Reader. Edited by Abby Wolf. New York: Basic Civitas, 2012. 212–27.
Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of
Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. 3–30.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972). Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1980.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 429
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.

Giddens, Anthony. The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical
Materialism. Berkley: University of California Press, 1985.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982/1993).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Gillis, John R. The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions (1956). Edited by Barry
Miles. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (1961). Baltimore, MD:
John Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Giroux, Henry. The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. Boulder, CO:
Paradigm, 2004.
Glikson, Andrew. “Fire and Human Evolution: The Deep-Time Blueprints of the Anthropocene.”
Anthropocene 3 (2013): 89–92.
Golden, James L. “Plato Revisited: A Theory of Discourse for All Seasons.” In Essays on Classical Rhetoric
and Modern Discourse. Edited by Robert J. Conners, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford. Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois Press, 1984. 16–36.
Goodman, Robin Truth. “Feminism.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited
Goodman, Robin Truth. “Introduction.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory.
Edited by Robin Truth Goodman. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 1–18.
Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996.
Grahn, Judy. The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition. San Francisco, CA: Spinter’s Ink,
1985.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1929–35). Edited and
translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
Gratton, Peter. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance.” Genre 15.1/2
(1982): 1–4.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” In The New Historicism. Edited by H. Aram Veeser.
New York: Routledge, 1989. 1–14.
Greimas, A. J. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966). Translated by Daniele McDowell,
Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Grossberg, Lawrence. “The Formation(s) of Cultural Studies: An American Birmingham.” Strategies 2
(1989): 114–49.
Halberstam, Jack. “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity.” In The Lesbian Postmodern. Edited by Laura
Doan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 210–28.
Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity (1998), Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2018.
Halberstam, Jack. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2018.
Hall, Donald E., and Annamarie Jagose. “Introduction.” In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Edited by
Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter. London: Routledge, 2013.
xiv–xx.
430 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57–72.
Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ ” (1981). In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A
Reader. Second edition. Edited by John Storey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. 442–53.
Hall, Stuart. “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies”
(1992). In Rethinking Gramsci. Edited by Marcus E. Green. London: Routledge, 2011. 11–18.
Hall, Stuart. Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Halsall, Francis. “Systems Theory.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited
Haraway, Donna J. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System
Discourse.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 1.1 (1989): 3–43.
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century ” (1985). In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge,
1991. 149–82.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hardt, Michael. “The Withering of Civil Society.” In Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics,
Philosophy, and Culture. Edited by Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998. 23–39.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York:
Penguin, 2004.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Harman, Graham. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary
History 43 (2012): 183–203.
Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Penguin Random
House, 2018.
Harman, Graham. Speculative Realism: An Introduction. Medford, MA: Polity, 2018.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989).
New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Hawkes, Terence. Shakespeare in the Present. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Hawkes, Terence, and Hugh Grady, editors. Presentist Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821). Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1952.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell.
New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 283–318.
Heidegger, Martin. “Only a God Can Save Us” (1966). In Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Edited by
Thomas Sheehan. Translated by William J. Richardson. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
1981. 45–67.
Heidegger, Martin. Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters. Edited by Medard Boss. Translated
by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
Heise, Ursula. “Science and Ecocriticism.” American Book Review 18.5 (1997): 4–6.
Heise, Ursula. “Environmental Humanities.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory.
Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 470–2.
Herman, David. “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology.” PMLA 112
(1997): 1046–59.
Herman, David, editor. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003.
Herman, David. “Cognitive Narratology.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, §1, September 22, 2013.
http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/38.html.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 431
Heywood, Leslie L. The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, A–Z. 2 vols.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006.
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961.
Hilmes, Michele. “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?” American Quarterly
57.1 (2005): 249–59.
Hirsch Jr., E. D. Validity in Interpretation (1967). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973.
Hirsch Jr., E. D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York: Vintage Books, 1987.
Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” Yale Journal of
Criticism 14.1 (2001): 5–37.
Hirsch, Marianne, and Irene Kacandes. “Introduction.” In Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust. Edited
by Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004. 1–36.
Hitchcock, Peter. “Theory Saves, But only Practice Pays Interest.” symploke– 29.1/2 (2021): 543–6.
Hjelmslev, Louis. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943). Translated by Francis J. Whitfield. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1962.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2011.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy (1957). New York: Routledge, 2017.
Hogue, W. Lawrence. “Double Consciousness.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural
Theory. Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 460–1.
Holbek, Bengt. Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a European Perspective. Helsinki:
Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1987.
Holquist, Michael. “Glossary.” In Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by
1981. 423–34.
Holquist, Michael. “Introduction.” In M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by
1981. xv–xxxiv.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Translated by John
Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1972.
Horowitz, Daniel. Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement that Aspired to Transform America. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and
Theory of Literature (1931). Translated, with an introduction by, George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman (1974). Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Irigaray, Luce. “Sexual Difference” (1984). Translated by Seán Hand. In French Feminist Thought: A Reader.
Edited by Toril Moi. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 118–32.
Irigaray, Luce. Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (1990). Translated by Alison Martin. London:
Routledge, 2007.
Isocrates. “Antidosis.” In Isocrates, Vol. 2. Translated by George Norlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1929. 181–365.
Jacobus, Mary. “Review of The Madwoman in the Attic.” Signs 6 (1981): 517–23.
Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language. Edited by Thomas
Sebeok. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. 350–77.
Jakobson, Roman. “The Dominant” (1935). In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist
Views. Edited by Ladislav Matějka and Krystyna Pomorska. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications,
1978. 82–90.
Jakobson, Roman. “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959). In Theories of Translation: An
Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992. 144–51.
432 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Jameson, Fredric. “Foreword.” In Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge (1979). Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984. vii–xxi.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1991.
Jameson, Fredric R. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Jameson, Fredric. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977; revised, 1988). In The Jameson Reader. Edited
by Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000. 89–115.
Jameson, Fredric. “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism” (1975). In The Ideologies of
Theory. London: Verso, 2008. 415–33.
Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. New York: Verso, 2009.
Jameson, Fredric. “An American Utopia.” In An American Utopia: Variations on the Need to Censor Our
Dreams. Edited by Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 2016. 1–96.
Jay, Karla, and Allen Young, editors. Lavender Culture (1978). New York: New York University Press, 1994.
Jeffreys, Sheila. Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective. Cambridge: Polity, 2003.
Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance,
and Game. Edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 118–30.
Johnson, Keith Leslie. “Transhumanism.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory.
Johnson, Richard. “The Story So Far: And for the Transformations.” In David Punter, Introduction to
Contemporary Cultural Studies. London: Longman, 1986. 277–313.
Johnson, Richard. “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text 6.1 (1987): 38–80.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement (1790). Second edition, revised. Translated by J. H. Bernard.
London: Macmillan and Co., 1914.
Kant, Immanuel. Lectures on Ethics (1775–80). Translated by Louis Infield. London: Methuen, 1932.
Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Translated by John T.
Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
King, Stephen. The Shining (1977). New York: Anchor Books, 2013.
Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard. Sexual Behavior in the
Human Female (1953). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Klein, Melanie. “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9
(1928): 167–80.
Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): 723–42.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1969/1977). Edited by Leon
S. Roudiez. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia
Kristeva, Julia. “Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science” (1969). Translated by Seán Hand.
In The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater ” (1977). Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. In The Kristeva Reader. Edited by
Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 160–86.
Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time” (1979). Translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. In The Kristeva
Reader. Edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 187–213.
Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love (1983). Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press,
1987.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 433
Kristeva, Julia. New Maladies of the Soul (1993). Translated by Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia
Lacan, Jacques. The Problem of Anxiety (1926). Translated by Henry Alden Bunker. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1936.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” (1957). In Écrits: A
Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. 146–78.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (1949). In Écrits: A Selection.
Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. 1–7.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1973). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Edited
by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1991.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan III: The Psychoses, 1955–56. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960.
Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
LaCroix, Alison, Jonathan Masur, Martha Nussbaum, and Laura Weinrib. “Introduction.” In Canons and
Codes: Law, Literature, and America’s Wars. Edited by Alison LaCroix, Jonathan Masur, Martha
Nussbaum, and Laura Weinrib. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 1–13.
Lafontaine, Céline. “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory.’ ” Theory, Culture & Society 24.5 (2007):
27–46.
Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical
Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2011).
Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles, CA: semiotext(e), 2012.
Lear, Martha Weinman. “The Second Feminist Wave.” New York Times, March 10, 1968: 24–5, 50–62
(Sunday Magazine).
Leavis, F. R. Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930.
Leavis, F. R., and Denys Thompson. Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (1933).
London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Lechte, John. “Interview with Julia Kristeva: Sharing Singularity.” In John Lechte and Maria Margaroni,
Julia Kristeva: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2004. 143–63.
Leitch, Vincent. “Antitheory.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 343–54, 373.
Lemay-Hébert, Nicolas, and Rosa Freedman. “Hybridity.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and
Cultural Theory. Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 521–2.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac (1949). New York: Ballantine, 1974.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 428–44.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology (1958). Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest
Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1955). Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969.
Liu, Catherine. “Surveillance.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Liu, Lydia H. “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory.” Critical Inquiry 36
(2010): 288–320.
Lotman, Jurij. The Structure of the Artistic Text (1970). Translated by Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1977.
434 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: The Politics of Loss in Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007.
Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Ludden, David. “A Brief History of Subalternity.” In Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested
Meaning, and the Globalization of South Asia. London: Anthem Press, 2002. 1–39.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923). Translated by Rodney
Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972.
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.
Lynn, Steven. Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory. Second edition. New York:
Longman, 1998.
Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994.
Lyon, David. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). Translated by Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983). Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Phenomenology (1954). Tenth edition, 1986. Translated by Brian Beakley. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1991.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure (1971). Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy (1974). Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London:
Continuum, 1993.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Political Writings. Translated by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geimen. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
MacKinnon, Catharine. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato, editors. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism
and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
Mailloux, Steven. “Rhetoric.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Malabou, Catherine. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (2007). Translated by Steven
Miller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism (1972). Translated by Joris De Bres. London: New Left Books, 1975.
Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864).
Edited by David Lowenthal. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997.
Marshall, P. David. “Introduction: Celebrity in the Digital Era—A New Public Intimacy ” (2014). In Celebrity
and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture—with a New Introduction. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997, 2014. xi–xlvi.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857–8). Translated by Martin
Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 1973.
Marx, Karl. “Production. Means of Production and Relations of Production. Relations of Production and
Relations of Circulation. Forms of the State and Forms of Consciousness in Relation to Relations of
Production and Circulation. Legal Regulations. Family Relations” (1857). In Grundrisse. Translated by
Martin Nicolaus. New York: Random House, 1973. 109–11.
Marx, Karl. “Marginal Notes on (Adolph) Wagner ” (1879–1880). In Value: Studies by Karl Marx. Edited
and translated by Albert Dragstedt. London: New Park Publications, 1976. 197–229.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (1867). Translated by Ben Fowkes.
London: Penguin, 1990.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 435
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three (1894). Translated by David Fernbach.
London: Penguin, 1991.
Marx, Karl. “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859). In Karl Marx: Selected
Writings. Edited by Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994. 209–213.
Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach (1845). In Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Edited by Lawrence H. Simon.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994. 98–101.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology (1845–46). In Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Edited
by Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994. 102–156.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Introduction by Tariq Ali.
London: Verso, 2016.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83–109.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002). Twentieth anniversary edition.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
Matě jka, Ladislav, and I. R. Titunik. “Translators’ Preface.” In V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy
of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matě jka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986. vii–xii.
Mäyrä, Frans. An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture. London: Sage, 2008.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics (2011). Translated by Steve Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2019.
McIntosh, Mary. “The Homosexual Role.” Social Problems 16.2 (1968): 182–92.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.
Meillassoux, Quentin. “Time without Becoming.” Lecture at Middlesex University, London (May 8, 2008):
1–12. https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729–time_without_becoming.pdf.
Melehy, Hassan. “Cyborg.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by Jeffrey
R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 433–5.
Mentz, Steven. “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English
Literature.” Literature Compass 6.5 (2009): 997–1013.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Translated by Donald Landes. London:
Routledge, 2013.
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women (1869). Third edition. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and
Dyer, 1870.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Boundaries in Beloved.” symploke– 15.1/2 (2007): 24–39.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Law.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by Jeffrey R.
Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 548–9.
Miller, Paul Allen. “Confessions of the Flesh: Between Pleasure and Sexuality.” symploke– 29.1/2 (2021):
653–4.
Miller, Toby. “Media Studies.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1969.
“Mission Statement.” Off Our Backs 1.1 (1970). https://web.archive.org/web/20051224044533/http://www.
offourbacks.org/Mission.htm.
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and
Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Mitchell, W. J. T., editor. Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985.
Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. Second edition. London: Routledge,
2002.
Moi, Toril, editor. “Introduction.” In French Feminist Thought: A Reader. New York: Basil Blackwell,
1987. 1–13.
436 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Monahan, Torin, and David Murakami Wood. “Introduction: Surveillance Studies as a Transdisciplinary
Endeavor.” In Surveillance Studies: A Reader. Edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. ix–xxxiv.
Montrose, Louis. “The Poetics and Politics of Culture.” In The New Historicism. Edited by H. Aram Veeser.
New York: Routledge, 1989. 15–36.
Moraru, Christian. “Globalization.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited
Morgan, Michael. Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Athens. New Haven, CT: Yale
Morris, Charles. Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and Scientific Empiricism. Paris: Hermann and Cie, 1937.
Morris, Charles. The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy. New York: George Braziller, 1970.
Morris, Meaghan. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” Discourse 10.2 (1988): 3–29.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved (1987). New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. “Introduction.” In Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges.
Edited by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989.
1–60.
Mouritsen, Flemming, and Jens Qvortrup, editors. Childhood and Children’s Culture. Odense: University
Press of Southern Denmark, 2003.
Mowitt, John. “The Gold-Bug.” In Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (1971). Translated by Antony
Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. xi–xxiii.
Mowitt, John. Tracks from the Crypt. Lüneberg: Meson Press, 2019.
Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010.
Murray, H. J. R. A History of Chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913.
Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1997.
Murray, Stuart. “Thanatopolitics.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
My Cousin Vinny. Directed by Jonathan Lynn. 20th Century Fox, 1992.
Namaste, Viviane. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. “Antitheory 2.0: The Case of Derrida and the Question of Literature.” In What’s Wrong
with Antitheory? Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. 25–39.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. “Notes on Contributors.” In What’s Wrong with Antitheory? Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo.
London: Bloomsbury, 2020. ix–xii.
Nelson, Cary. Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Newton, Esther. “Will the Real Lesbian Community Please Stand Up?” (1982, 1998). In Margaret Mead
Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 155–64.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Translated by
Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011.
Noyer, Paul Du. “Interview with David Bowie.” Q Magazine (April 1990). https://www.pauldunoyer.com/
david-bowie-interview-1990/.
Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination in Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
O’Keeffe, Brian. “Translation.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
OnlyWomen Collective. “Political Lesbianism: The Case Against Heterosexuality.” In Love Your Enemy? The
Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism. Edited by OnlyWomen Collective.
London: OnlyWomen Press, 1981. 5–10.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Edited by John Bowen. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2021.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 437
Paasi, Anssi. “Generations and the ‘Development’ of Border Studies.” Geopolitics 10 (2005): 663–71.
Paasi, Anssi. “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking.” Political Geography 30 (2011):
61–9.
Page, Ruth E. Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006.
Paglia, Camille. Vamps and Tramps: New Essays. New York, Penguin, 1995.
Parker, Noel, and Nick Vaughan-Williams et al. “Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border
Studies.” Geopolitics 14 (2009): 582–7.
Parsons, Howard L., editor. Marx and Engels on Ecology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Patai, Daphne, and Will H. Corral. “Introduction.” In Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Edited by
Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 1–18.
Patton, Cindy. “Foreword to the New Edition” (1994). In Lavender Culture (1978). Edited by Karla Jay and
Allen Young. New York: New York University Press, 1994. ix–xxviii.
Pavel, Thomas G. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Peirce, Charles. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 6 vols. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–5.
Peirce, Charles. The New Elements of Mathematics. 4 vols. (in 5 books). Edited by Carolyn Eisele. The
Hague: Mouton, 1976.
Perez, Lorena. “UVA English Professor Lands Large Danish Grant to Explore Literature’s Social Use.”
UVAToday, May 25, 2016. https://news.virginia.edu/ content/uva-english-professor-lands-large-danish-
grant-explore-literatures-social-use.
Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State
Plato. The Republic. In The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III. Second edition. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875. 1–520.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Reginald Hackforth. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. 475–525.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith
Plato. Symposium. Translated by Michael Joyce. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith
Plato. Phaedrus. In Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters. Translated by Walter Hamilton. New York:
Penguin, 1973. 19–104.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1974.
Posner, Richard A. Law and Literature. Third edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Poster, Mark. “Databases as Discourse or Electronic Interpellations.” In Computers, Surveillance and
Privacy. Edited by David Lyon and Elia Zureik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
175–92.
Prince, Gerald. “Narrative and Narratology.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale (1928). Second revised edition. Translated by Laurence Scott.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.
Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Vol. 1. Translated by H. E. Butler. New York: Putnam’s, 1920.
Radicalesbians. The Woman[-]Identified Woman. Pittsburgh, PA: Know, Inc. 1970.
Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. First edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924.
Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929). New York: HarperCollins, 1956.
Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism (1926). Second edition. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1970.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, Volume 1 (1983). Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
438 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, Volume 2 (1984). Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, Volume 3 (1985). Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993.
Rivière, Joan. The Inner World and Joan Rivière: Collected Papers, 1920–1958. Edited by Athol Hughes.
New York: Routledge, 2018.
Roberts, Callum. The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. New York: Viking, 2012.
Robinson, John Mansley. An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Roiphe, Katie. “Date Rape’s Other Victim.” New York Times Magazine, June 13, 1993. https://www.nytimes.
com/1993/06/13/magazine/date-rape-s-other-victim.html.
Roiphe, Katie. The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.
Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Rose, Jacqueline. “Introduction-II.” In Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. Edited by
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Translated by Jacqueline Rose. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. 27–58.
Roth, Michael S. Memory, Trauma, and History: Essay on Living with the Past. New York: Columbia
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile (1762). Translated by Barbara Foxley. London: Dent, 1911.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782/1789). Translated with an
introduction by J. M. Cohen. New York: Penguin, 1953.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology
of Women. Edited by Ranya R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. 157–210.
Ruddiman, William. “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago.” Climate Change
61.3 (2003): 261–93.
Ruddiman, William. “The Anthropocene.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 41 (2013): 45–68.
Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978). In The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1996. 105–23.
Ruse, Michael. Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Narrative Codes.” In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches,
Scholars, Terms. Edited by Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 599–600.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Black Orpheus (1948). Translated by Samuel Allen. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? (1948). Translated by Bernard Frechtman. London: Methuen, 1978.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Colonialism and Neocolonialism (1964). Translated by Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer,
and Terry McWilliams. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000.
Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York:
Telos Press, 2001.
Schneir, Miriam. “Abigail Adams.” In Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. Edited by Miriam Schneir.
New York: Vintage, 1972. 2–3.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably
Think This Essay is About You” (1997). In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 123–52.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 439
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” (1995). In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 93–122.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet (1990): Updated with a New Preface. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008.
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader. Edited
by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. London: Duke University Press, 2010. 1–28.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique” (1917). In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Translated by Lee
T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 3–24.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Sterne’s Tristam Shandy: Stylistic Commentary ” (1921). In Russian Formalist Criticism:
Four Essays. Translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1965. 25–60.
Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose (1925). Translated by Benjamin Scher. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey
Archive, 1990.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Expanded
edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Showalter, Elaine. “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” In Women Writing and Writing about Women. Edited by
Mary Jacobus. London: Routledge, 1979. 22–41.
Shumway, David R. “The Star System in Literary Studies.” PMLA 112 (January 1997): 85–100.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: Random House, 1975.
Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2007.
Snyder, R. Claire. “What is Third-Wave Feminism?: A New Directions Essay.” Signs 34.1 (2008): 175–96.
Sommers, Christina Hoff. Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994). New York:
Touchstone, 1995.
Sontag, Susan. “Preface.” In Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953). Translated by Annette Lavers and
Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968. vii–xxi.
Soper, Kate. What is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. New York: Blackwell, 1995.
Spanos, William. The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Spanos, William. “Worldhood.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by
Spinoza, Baruch. The Ethics (1677). Edited by Seymour Feldman. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett, 1982.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313.
Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Righting Wrongs.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004): 523–81.
Spivak, Gayatri. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012.
Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming
the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36.8 (2007): 614–21.
Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983.
Sterne, Jonathan. “Sonic Imaginations.” In The Sound Studies Reader. Edited by Jonathan Sterne. London:
Routledge, 2012. 1–18.
Stokes, Eric. The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India
(1978). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Straus, Tamara. “Lipstick Feministas: Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Create a Manifesto for Third
Wave Feminism.” Metro Santa Cruz, November 29-December 6, 2000. http://www.metroactive.com/
papers/cruz/11.29.00/feminism-0048.html.
440 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sullivan, Nikki. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
Sussman, Henry. Around the Book: Systems and Literacy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.
Sussman, Henry. “Deconstruction.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited
Sussman, Henry, and Jason Groves. “Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks.” In Impasses of the Post-Global: Essays
in Critical Climate Change. Edited by Henry Sussman. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012.
11–31.
Tally Jr., Robert T. Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana
Tally Jr., Robert T. For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in the Age of Capitalist Realism.
Winchester: Zero Books, 2022. The Terminator. Directed by James Cameron. Orion Pictures, 1984.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class (1963). New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.
Thomsen, Mads Rosendhal, and Jacob Wamberg. “Introduction.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of
Posthumanism. Edited by Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
1–12.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (1854). In Walden and Other Writings. Edited by Brooks Atkinson.
Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. 1–312.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Grammaire du Décaméron. In Approaches to Semiotics, Volume 3. Berlin: Mouton, 1969.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol (1977). Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Tolstoy, Leo N. What is Art? (1897). Translated by Aylmer Maude. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina (1878). Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York:
Penguin, 2004.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace (1867). Translated by Antony Briggs. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Troubetzkoy, Nikolai. “La Phonologie actuelle.” In Psychologie du language. Paris: Alcan, 1933. 227–46.
Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851). New York: Penguin, 2021.
Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. Second edition. London: Sage, 2014.
Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand (1930). New York: P. Smith, 1951.
Urban, Wilbur Marshall. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939.
Urry, John. Climate Change & Society. Malden, MA: Polity, 2011.
Veeser, H. Aram. “Introduction.” In The New Historicism. Edited by H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge,
1989. ix–xvi.
Vickers, Brian. In Defense of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Vico, Giambattista. On the Study of Methods of Our Time (1708–9). Translated by Elio Gianturco. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Vološinov, Valentin. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929). Translated by Ladislav Matě jka and I.
R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Vološinov, Valentin. Freudianism (1927). Translated by I. R. Titunik. London: Verso, 2013.
Walker, Rebecca. “Becoming the 3rd Wave.” Ms. (January–February 1992): 39–41.
Walker, Rebecca. “Being Real: An Introduction.” In To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of
Feminism. Edited by Rebecca Walker. New York: Anchor, 1995. xxviii–xl.
Warner, Michael. “Introduction.” In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Edited by
Michael Warner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. i–xxviii.
Warren, Karen J. “Feminism and Ecology.” Environmental Ethics 9.1 (1987): 3–20.
Weisberg, Richard H. Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1984.
Weisberg, Richard H. Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992.
Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. First edition, 1948; Second edition, 1955; Third
edition, 1962. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2007). Translated by Robert T. Tally, Jr. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 441
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
White, James Boyd. The Legal Imagination (1973). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Wilde, Oscar. The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1891). In Intentions: The Writings of Oscar Wilde,
Volume 5. Introduction by Edgar Saltus. New York: Gabriel Wells, 1925. 7–66.
Wilde, Oscar. The Critic as Artist (1890). In The Portable Oscar Wilde. Edited by Richard Aldington. New
York: Viking, 1946. 51–137.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In The Portable Oscar Wilde. Edited by Richard Aldington.
New York: Viking, 1946. 138–391.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New Edition. Oxford: Oxford
Wilson, Thomas M., and Hastings Donnan. “Borders and Border Studies.” In A Companion to Border
Studies. Edited by Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 1–25.
Wimsatt Jr., W. K., and Monroe Beardsley. “The Affective Fallacy ” (1946). In W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal
Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954. 21–40.
Wimsatt Jr., W. K., and Monroe Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy ” (1946). In W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The
Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954. 3–20.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York:
Macmillan, 1953.
Wolbring, Gregor. “The Politics of Ableism.” Development 51.2 (2008): 252–8.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1929). In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Edited by
Anna Snaith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 3–86.
Wuebben, Daniel, and Juan José González-Trueba. “Surfing Between Blue Humanities and Blue Economies
in Cantabria, Spain.” symploke– 27.1/2 (2019): 65–78.
Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.
Zalloua, Zahi. “Il Faut Bien Détruire Ensemble, or Solidarity after Afropessimism.” symploke– 29.1/2 (2021):
547–58.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1991.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the
Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13.3/4 (2001): 190–8.
Žižek, Slavoj. On Belief. London: Routledge, 2001.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London:
Verso, 2002.
Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991). London: Verso, 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Routledge, 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?” YouTube video, 2:01, June 25, 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w.
Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso, 2009.
Žižek, Slavoj. A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Medford, MA: Polity, 2020.
Žižek, Slavoj, and Jordan Peterson. “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.” YouTube video, 2:37:47, April 20,
2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT1 vutd4Gnk.
Zunshine, Lisa. “Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary
Studies. Edited by Lisa Zunshine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 1–9.
Zunshine, Lisa, editor. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015.
442
INDEX
Note: Figures are indicated by an italic f following the page numbers.
ability studies 279 After Finitude (Meillassoux) 341

ableism 278–279 After Theory (Eagleton) 407
Abu-Lughod, Janet 299 Against Theory (Mitchell) 401
actants 69 Agamben, Giorgio 268–271
active media theories 393–394 Ahmed, Sarah 352, 353
active user theories 394 The Aims of Interpretation (Hirsch) 27
activists 348 alt culture 212
actor-network theory 414 Althusser, Louis 75, 76, 96–102
Adams, Abigail 175 ancient Greece 11
Adams, John 175 androgyny 182–183
Adler, Alfred 112 angel of history 84–85
Adorno, Theodor 75, 397 Angelus Novus (Klee) 84–85, 86f
debate with Benjamin on emancipatory Animal Liberation (Singer) 331
potential of mass art 83–91 animal rights 330–332
advertising 90 animal studies 326, 329–334
An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 55
(Spivak) 283 Anthropocene 305, 313–316
aesthetic function 52–53 antihumanism 12, 323
aesthetic knowledge 33 anti-essentialism 223, 245–246, 257, 279–280,
aestheticism 30–33, 52, 417 403
affect studies 347–367 anti-identitarianism 291–220, 245, 281
affect theory 347, 358 anti-modernism 75
The Affect Theory Reader (Seigworth and Gregg) 347 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 130, 134
affective atmospheres 359 anti-psychiatry 111
affective economy 399 antitheory 402–405, 417
affective fallacy 350 Apophrades 127
affective labor 272, 348 Appearance and Reality (Bradley) 344
affective multiplicities 229 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 242–243
affective narratology 349 Aquinas, Thomas 179
Affective Narratology (Hogan) 71 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault)
affective politics 357 265
affective presentism 349, 358, 360 Arendt, Hannah 84, 277
affects 347 Aristippus 17
approaching by turning away from linguistic Aristotle 15–16, 20, 67, 179, 265
approaches to 348–349 beauty for 33
autonomy of 357 on rhetoric and philosophy 23–24
Deleuze and Guattari notions of 355 Armstrong, Isobel 407
emotions and 356 Arnold, Matthew 34–35, 373
positive and negative affects 347 art 14, 15
queer affect 347, 350–353 as autonomous 31
Spinoza’s theory of 354–355 politicization of 87
443
444 INDEX
realism and romanticism views of 30 biopolitics 146, 261–281

reproduction of works of 86–87 and world theory 300
Tolstoy on 32 The Biopolitics of Disability (Mitchell) 280
articulation 378–379 biopower 262, 263, 264, 265
artists, Deleuze and Guattari on 355–356 biotheory 261
Askesis 127 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Athenaeum (journal) 163 Studies 375
Attali, Jacques 385 bisexuality 201–202, 214
Augustine of Hippo 11, 18–19, 24–26, 28, 41, 179 Black Lives Matter movement 255
autonomous self 173 Black Orpheus (Sartre) 287
autonomous text 173 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 286
autopoiesis 336–337 Blair, Tony 293
Azzarello, Robert 304 Bleich, David 7
Bloom, Harold 111, 124–129, 173, 239,
Bachelard, Gaston 317 361
Badmington, Neil 324 Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural
Baerg, Andrew 381 Theory (Di Leo) 10
Bakhtin, Mikhail 42, 53, 75, 91–96, 154, 329 blue humanities 305, 319–321
bare life (zo¯e), relationship between sovereign blue theory 321
power and 270 Boccaccio, Giovanni 70
Barthes, Roland 41, 42, 46, 56–61, 67, 145 body without organs 132
Bassnett, Susan 295 body-objectifying surveillance 278
Bates, Laura 197 Booth, Wayne 17, 68
Bateson, Gregory 334, 335–336, 393 border studies 284, 289–292, 318
Baudrillard, Jean 146, 163–168 Boswell, John 211
Baumgardner, Jennifer 195–196 bourgeoisie 76–77
Baumgarten, Alexander 32–33 Bowie, David 395, 396
Beardsley, Monroe 38 Bradley, F. H. 344
beauty, in art and nature 33 Braidotti, Rosi 323–325
Beauvoir, Simone de 175, 184–185 Braunstein, Néstor 120
Bedeutung (denotation or reference), of a sign breast cancer 231
49 Brecht, Bertolt 75
Bell, Derrick 244, 245 Breuer, Josef 112
Beloved (Morrison) 290 A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Harvey) 293,
Benjamin, Walter 75 294
debate with Adorno on emancipatory potential Briggs, Asa 380–381
of mass art 83–91 British Commonwealth 285–286
Bentham, Jeremy 266 Brooks, Cleanth 34, 39, 409
Bergson, Henri 356 Brown, Rita Mae 223
Berkeley, George 342–343 Brown v. Board of Education 245
Berlant, Lauren 352, 358–359 Buchanan, Ian 321
Berlin Wall, fall of, in 1989 76 Burke, Edmund 182
Bertelsmann (media company) 299 Burke, Kenneth 17, 33, 40, 308
Between Men (Sedgwick) 229 Burke, Peter 380–381
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 117, 363 Butler, Judith 225–229, 252
Bhabha, Homi 288, 296–297
Bible, the 25–26 Cage, John 385
Bilge, Sirma 255 Caillois, Roger 392
biology 261 Callistratus 21, 23
biopolitical control 273 Capital, Volume One (Marx) 82
biopolitical production 272 Capital, Volume Three (Marx) 79
as reproduction 273 capital punishment 265
INDEX 445
capitalism 73, 104 cognitive capitalism 272

capitalist production 82 cognitive criticism (cognitive literary studies) 326,
carbon dioxide, effects on the oceans 320 338–341
Cardozo, Benjamin 247–248 cognitive mapping 318
Carnap, Rudolf 47 cognitive narratology 339–340
carnival 92, 94 cognitive science 338
Carpenter, Edward 215 cognitivism 340
Carson, Rachel 321 Cohen, Jeffrey 308
Caruth, Cathy 360, 361–364 Cohen, Tom 310, 311, 312, 313
castration complex 201 coincidentia oppositorum 204
Catastrophe and Higher Education (Di Leo) 294 Colebrook, Claire 315, 316
causality 103 Collins, Patricia Hill 255
Celebrity and Power (Marshall) 398–399 Collins, Sheila 304
celebrity culture 396 colonialism, consequences of 285
celebrity industry 396–397 Colonialism and Neocolonialism (Sartre) 287
celebrity studies 395–399 Combahee River Collective 224–225
construction of celebrities 397–398 comedy 15
distinction between the private and the public commodities 82–83
399 commodity fetishism 83
functions of celebrities 398 common, the 275
Celebrity Studies (journal) 399 common culture 374
celebrity system 398–399 common memory 366
Césaire, Aimé 286 Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri) 274
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 315 commonwealth studies (commonwealth literary
characters, functions of 68–69 studies), 286
Chicago School of literary criticism 68 communication, structure verus agency in media
children, identification with own image in mirrors studies 381
119 complementarity 108
christian rhetoric 18–19 The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey) 295
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality Confessions (Augustine of Hippo) 11
(Boswell) 211 connectionism 338
Christine de Pisan 175 consciousness 96
chronotopes 92 double 286
Chthulucene 325 consensus 160
Churchland, Paul 339 constructivism 206, 213–216
Cicero 18, 25 consumer objects 164
citizen orators 18 The Content of the Form (White) 71
civil rights 251 contradiction 108
civil rights movement, in the US 241 contrariety 108
Cixous, Hélène 198–203 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Clarke, Bruce 335 (Marx) 78–79, 80
Clarke, Roger 275 control society 263
class struggle, between the bourgeoisie and the Cookie-Cutter Theory 8
proletariat 73 cool media 381
climate change 305–306, 309–313 Corporate Humanities in Higher Education
Clinamen 126, 127 (Di Leo) 294
Clinton, William “Bill” 293 correlationism 341–342, 345
Clynes, Manfred 326 Course in General Linguistics (Saussure) 41, 43
Cochrane, Kira 197 Crane, Tim 338
codes 59 Craps, Stef 360, 361
The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art Crenshaw, Kimberlé 241, 255
(Ingarden) 341 Crews, Frederick 401
446 INDEX
crip/queer 280 second-wave 336–337

Critchley, Simon 395–396 third-wave 337
critical border studies 291 cyberspace 327, 392
border epistemology 291 cyborg cinema 327
border ontology 291–292 “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway) 325–326
space-time of borders 292 cyborg theory 325, 326–329
critical climate change 305–306, 309–313 cyborgs 326
critical disability studies 279 Haraway’s concept of 327–329
anti-essentialism of 280 in literary and cultural theory 327
non-normative and anit-identitarian approaches Cynic philosophers 57–58
to 281
critical distance 107 Daemonization 127
Critical Inquiry (journal) 401 Dalai Lama 139
critical legal studies 244 Damrosch, David 298–299
critical race theory 243, 244–247, 248, 255 Daring to Be Bad (Echols) 223
as anti-essentialist and intersectional 245 dataveillance 275
differential racialization 245 date rape crisis 192
idealist strand of 246 Davies, Jeremy 314
legal storytelling movement within 245 Davies, William 294
materialists/economic determinists 246 Davis, Lennard 278, 281
revisionist interpretations of history 247 Dawes, James 254
structural determinism in 246 De Lauretis, Teresa 213, 218–219, 222–223
critical theory 83–84, 371 De Man, Paul 143, 316, 361
critical white studies 247 death camp 367
criticism death drive 141
extrinsic 34 death instinct 117
intrinsic 33–34 Death of a Discipline (Spivak) 312
Critique and Postcritique (Anker and Felski) 413 “The Death of the Author” (Barthes) 58–59
Crownshaw, Rick 367 The Decameron (Bocaccio) 70
Cruel Optimism (Berlant) 360 Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Girard) 229
Cruikshank, Margaret 214 deconstruction 146, 151, 170, 231, 334, 337,
Crutzen, Paul 313–314 372
cultural dialetic 370 deep memory 366
cultural forces, residual 105 defamiliarization 53, 54
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Delbo, Charlotte 366
Know (Hirsch) 28 Deleuze, Gilles 111, 130–135, 334, 347, 356
cultural materialism 170, 357, 375–376 Delgado, Richard 243, 244
cultural poetics 169 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 304, 305
cultural studies 372, 373–379, 382 D’Emilio, John 209, 210
in the US 376–377 Derrida, Jacques 22, 34, 42, 43, 147–152, 307
culturalism 374 and animal studies 329–330
culture assertion of human superiority 329
circuit of 378f, 379 concept of center 144–145
definitions of 106, 369, 373 definition of structure 145
mass culture 106 on structuralism 143–144
Culture and Anarchy (Arnold) 34, 373 Desai, A. R. 258
Culture and Environment (Leavis and Thompson) Descartes, René 19, 338–339, 354
373, 374 descriptive phenomenology 152
culture industry 88–90, 397 desire, psychoanalytic concept of 131
cybernetics 327, 336 desiring-machine 135
affect in 348 The Destruction of the European Jews (Hilberg)
first-wave 336 364
INDEX 447
deterritorialization 133, 134 economic contradictions, overdetermined 97

Di Leo, Jeffrey 294–295, 296, 299, 300, 386, 399, economic man (homo oeconomicus) 262
406 écriture féminine (female writing) 177, 201, 202,
dialectic 22 203
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and educational apparatus 99
Adorno) 88 Egenfelt-Nielsen, Simon 389
dialectical criticism 103 ego, the 117
dialectical materialism 73, 74, 77 Eichenbaum, Boris 51
dialectician 24 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 241
dialogism 92–93 The Electronic Eye (Lyon) 275
diegesis 67 The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss)
The Differend (Lyotard) 162 229
différance 147, 150, 200 Elements of Semiology (Barthes) 46, 58
differends 162, 247 eliminative materialism 339
differing, and deferring 147, 150 Eliot, T. S. 34, 35–36, 37, 128
digital storytelling, properties of 391–392 Ellis, Havelock 215
dilemma of law reform 246 Emanuel, Kerry 320
Dilthey, Wilhelm 24, 26, 27 Emerson, Caryl 91
Dingwaney, Anuradha 296 Emile (Rousseau) 180
disability, concept of 279 emotions
disability studies 278–281 and affects 349, 356
disablism 278 literature and the 16
disappearance 166–167 empathic fallacy 246
disciplinary society 272 empire 273, 274
disciplinary spaces 318 as a mode of sovereignty 271
Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 266 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 271
discourse 60, 158–159 Enforcing Normalcy (Davis) 279
Discourse, Figure (Lyotard) 158, 159 Engels, Friedrich 74, 76–83
discourse analysts 246 English literature, phases of female tradition in
“Discourse in the Novel” (Bakhtin) 93, 95 191
discursive formations 265–266 enthymemes 23
Dissemination (Derrida) 43 environmental humanities 305
Donnan, Hastings 292 environmental racism 304
Donnelly, Jack 251 environmentalism, applications to literature
dramatism, theory of 40 304
dreams 113–114 Epaminondas 21, 23
dream-symbols 114 epistemology 13
Du Bois, W. E. B. 286 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick) 230,
dualism 338, 409 232
Duras, Marguerite 176 essentialism 206–208, 213–216, 223, 237, 245,
duration, of narrative events 71 257, 279, 280, 288, 307, 351
Dworkin, Andrea 187 Essentially Speaking (Fuss) 206
Dyer, Richard 397–398 ethics
dynamic objects 48–49 animal 330, 333
inhuman 140
Eagleton, Mary 176 The Ethics (Spinoza) 347, 354
Eagleton, Terry 353, 354, 401, 407 ethnography 383
Echols, Alice 223 everyday surveillance 278
Eckermann, Johann Peter 298 external memory 366
ecocriticism 303–321 external spaces 317
ecofeminism 304, 307 heterotopias 318
ecological literary criticism see ecocriticism utopias 318
448 INDEX
“F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity” on neoliberalism 293–294

(Halberstam) 235 on shift in societies of sovereignty to
factiality 345 disciplinary societies 276
false consciousness 80, 97–98, 142 Frank, Adam 350, 351
Familiar Stranger (Hall) 257 Frasca, Gonzalo 389
Fanon, Frantz 215–216, 286 Freedman, B. 210
fascism 87, 133–134 Freedman, Estelle 209
Fear of a Queer Planet (Warner) 212 Freedman, Rosa 288
feeling 359 Freeman, Alan 244
Feeling Backward (Love) 352 freeplay 144
Felski, Rita 412–415 Frege, Gottlob 49
female masculinity 235–236 French feminism 177
Female Masculinity (Halberstam) 235–236 second-wave 189
feminine mystique 186 frequency, in a narrative 71
The Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 185–187 Freud, Sigmund 29, 109, 112–117, 156, 201, 214,
feminine sexuality 122 363
feminism Freud and Philosophy (Ricoeur) 29
first-wave 175, 176, 179–185 Freudianism (Vološinov) 91
second-wave 176, 185–192 Friedan, Betty 185–187, 220
third-wave 177, 192–198 Friedländer, Saul 365
fourth-wave 197–198 Frow, John 377
fifth-wave 178 Frye, Northrop 39
green theory and 307 Fuss, Diana 206
keywords 178
and social media technology 197–198 Gabbard, D. Christopher 278–279
without exclusion 196 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 24, 26–27
without foundations 196 Gallagher, Catherine 170–171
without women 196 game studies 388–395
Feminism Unmodified (MacKinnon) 187 active media theories 393–394
feminist critique 191 active user theories 394
feminist theory 175–208 categories of games 392–393
feminists, intersectional 197 formalist approach to 390
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 209 narratives in games 391
Feuerbach, Ludwig 77 perspectives of 389–390
Fictional Worlds (Pavel) 71 situationist approach to 390
figures 158–159 Gaming and Simulation (journal) 389
film technology 385 Garcha, Amanpal 326–327
First International 73 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 239
Fish, Stanley 7, 28–29, 38, 415, 416 The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement
Flaubert, Gustave 57, 67, 409 (Cruikshank) 214
folk psychology 339 Gay Liberation Front 220
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign Geertz, Clifford 170
(Baudrillard) 164 gender, Butler’s concept of 226
For They Know Not What They Do (Žižek) 138 gender identity 182
form, and content 248 gender theory 211
The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship Gender Trouble (Butler) 226
(Medvedev) 91 gendered behavior 225
formalism 50–51 gendered bodies 227
Foster, Jeannette 215 genealogy 267
Foucault, Michel 12, 97, 111, 134, 146, 210, Generation of Animals (Aristotle)
261–262, 263–267 179
on external spaces 318 Generation X 195
INDEX 449
Genette, Gérard 70 Habermas, Jürgen 140, 381

genotext 154 Halberstam, Jack 237, 238
geocriticism 305, 316–319 Halberstam, Judith 235–236
geography 319 Hall, Donald E. 219
The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson) 318 Hall, Stuart 257, 369–370, 375, 379
The German Ideology (Engels and Marx) 77, 79, Halle, Randall 280
98, 376 Halsall, Francis 334
Gibson, William 327 Hamlet on the Holodeck (Murray) 391
Giddens, Anthony 277–278 Handley, George 304, 305
Gilbert, Neil 192 happiness 352
Gilbert, Sandra M. 189–190 The Happiness Industry (Davies) 294
Gilligan, Carol 176, 188–189 happiness studies 111, 137–141
Gilman, Sander 364 Haraway, Donna 327, 330, 332–333
Ginsberg, Allen 209 Hardt, Michael 271–275, 348, 357
Girard, René 229 Harman, Graham 341, 346, 406, 407, 408–409,
Giroux, Henry 294 410, 413
Glikson, Andrew 314 Harvey, David 293, 295
global literature 298 Hawkes, Terrence 358
see also world literature Hayles, N. Katherine 324, 336, 337
global media studies 384 Hays, Will H. 89
globalization 283–301 Heavenly Bodies (Dyer) 397
beginnings of 283 hedonism 17
post-1989 285 Hegel, Georg W. F. 33, 76
Glotfelty, Cheryll 303 hegemony 80–81
Goclenius, Rudolf 110 Heidegger, Martin 27, 300, 337
God 204, 354 Heise, Ursula 304
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 298, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (Brooks) 39
300 Herman, David 71
Goffman, Erving 228 on cognitive narratology 339–340
Goldhagen, Erich 364 hermeneutic circle 26, 27
González-Trueba, Juan José 321 hermeneutics 24–29, 152
Goodman, Robin 178 heteroglossia 75, 93, 96, 329
Gorgias (Plato) 20 heterosexuality
Grady, Hugh 358 hierarchical oppositions based on 199–200
Grahn, Judy 211 normative 227
grammar of language 69 heterotopias 318
Gramsci, Antonio 80–81, 258 Heywood, Leslie 196
grand theory 406 hierarchical oppositions, based on the heterosexual
Gratton, Peter 342, 343 couple 199–200
Great Books of the Western World 11 high culture 212
green theory 303, 306–309 high modernism 104, 105
see also ecocriticism high theories 372, 405–406
Greenblatt, Stephen 169–170 Higher Education under Late Capitalism (Di Leo)
Gregg, Melissa 347 294
Greimas, A. J. 69 The Highest Apple (Grahn) 211
semiotic square 107f, 108 Hilberg, Raul 364
Groves, Jason 310, 311 Hill, Anita 194
Grundrisse (Marx) 81–82, 376 Hilmes, Michele 386
Guattari, Félix 111, 130–135, 334, 356 Hirsch, E. D. 27, 28
Gubar, Susan 189–190 Hirsch, Marianne 364
gynesis 202 historical materialism 77, 170
gynocritics (gynocriticism) 192, 202 historicism 26
450 INDEX
history idealism 342, 343

from above 260 absolute 343, 344
in affective presentism 359 vitalist 344–345
from below 258, 260 Ideas 13
bourgeois-humanist model of 96 identity, and identifications 257
Foucault’s view of 267 identitarianism 238
Marxist notion of 102–103 identity politics 224, 226
meaning of history by way of phenomenology identity theory 339
158 Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) 75, 99, 102
science of 96 ideology 57, 75, 79–80, 81, 98–99
textuality of 171 Althuser’s account of 98–100
History and Class Consciousness (Lukács) 80 relationship between literature and 101–102
The History of Sexuality (Foucault) 210, 264, 265 The Image of the City (Lynch) 107
history writing, Eurocentrism of 259 Imaginary Order, the 98, 119
Hitchcock, Peter 399 imitation (mimesis) 15
Hitler, Adolf, Nazi regime 270 immaterial labor 272
Hjelmslev, Louis 42 immaterialism 343
Hobbes, Thomas 251 immediate object 48–49
Hogan, Patrick Colm 71 impasse 359
Hogue, W. Lawrence 286 Impasses of the Post-Global (Sussman and Groves)
Hollywood 89 310
Holocaust studies 350, 364–367 In a Different Voice (Gilligan) 188, 189
Holocene 313, 314 In My Father’s House (Appiah) 243
Holquist, Michael 91 index (sign) 49
homeostasis 336 India
Homo Sacer (Agamben) 268 elite domain in 259
homosexuality 210 subaltern studies in 258–259
in late twentieth-century America 212 induction 23
in non-Western cultures 216 industrial capitalism 272
homosociality 229 Industrial Revolution 76
Horkheimer, Max 88, 397 inner word 28
hot media 381 Innis, Harold 381
How to Read Lacan (Žižek) 136 Institute of Critical Climate Change (IC3)
How We Became Posthuman (Hayles) 324, 336 310–312
Howl (Ginsberg) 209 Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian) 22
Hughes, Athol 214 interactive narrative 391
human rights 240, 250–255 internal space 317
international 254 International Psychoanalytical Association 118
universal 251 International Workingmen’s Association 73
Human Rights, Inc. (Slaughter) 253 interpellation 75, 100
humanism 11, 12–17, 55, 96, 188 interpretant 48
humanities, media studies in 382 dynamical 48
Husserl, Edmund 27, 28, 147 final 48
Hutchins, Robert Maynard 11 immediate 48
hypnosis 109–110, 112–113 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 113
Hyppolite, Jean 144–145 intersectionality 241, 255–258
hysteria (seduction theory) 110, 112, 114 intertheoretic reduction 339
hysterical sublime 106–107 Intimate Matters (D’Emilio and Freedman) 209
Invisible Lives (Namaste) 237
icon 49 Irigaray, Luce 203–208
id, the 117 Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of
Ideal Objects 28 Interpretive Communities (Fish) 7
INDEX 451
Isocrates 18, 21 semiotic 153

Ivanov, V. V. 91 symbolic 153
Language and Reality (Urban) 409
Jagose, Annamarie 219 langue 46, 101
Jakobson, Roman 50, 51, 52, 53, 143 The Last Utopia (Moyn) 254
classification of translation 297 late capitalism 104
work on phonemes 61 Late Capitalism (Mandel) 104
James, Henry 68, 248 latent dream-thoughts 113
Jameson, Fredric 76, 102–108 Latour, Bruno 168, 413, 414
Janet, Pierre 366 Lavender Culture (Jay and Young) 212
Jay, Karla 212 lavender menace 220
Jefferson, Thomas 251 law, and literature 241, 247–250
Jeffery, Celina 321 Law and Literature (Posner) 248
Jeffreys, Sheila 222 laying bare 109
Jenkins, Henry 391 Russian Formalist notion of 54–55
Johnson, Keith 326 Lazzarato, Maurizio 293
Johnson, Richard 379 Lear, Martha 185
Johnson, Samuel 129 Leavis, F. R. 373–374
jouissance 120 Lectures on Ethics (Kant) 331
The Journal of Peasant Studies 258 Leeds Revolutionary Feminists 221
Judeo-Christian tradition, inhuman dimension of Lefevere, André 295
Neighbor 140 The Legal Imagination (White) 248
Jung, Carl 112 legisign 49
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 167
Kacandes, Irene 364 Leitch, Vincent 404, 412
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Lemay-Hébert, Nicolas 288
Guattari) 135 Lennon, John 395
Kant, Immanuel 19, 28, 331 Leopold, Aldo 306
beauty for 33 lesbian and gay studies 217–218
on education and place of women 179–180 The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Abelove et al)
Kennedy, John F. 241 217
Kenosis 126–127 lesbian and gay theory 213–220, 228
Keynes, John Maynard 293 lesbian communities 220
killjoy 353 lesbian culture 211
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 241 lesbian feminism 220–225
Kinsey, Alfred 215 lesbian–feminist groups 220
kinship systems 63 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 42, 61–66, 118, 143, 144,
Klee, Paul 84 227
Klein, Melanie 215 analysis of kinship systems 229
Kline, Nathan 326 analysis of myths 63–66
knowledge, and paranoia 233 principles of structural analysis 62
Kohlberg, Lawrence 188 LGBTQ+ theory 209–238
Kripke, Saul 160 liberal feminism 187
Kristeva, Julia 42, 110, 145–146, 152–157, 349 liberalism, critique of 247
Libidinal Economy (Lyotard) 159
Lacan, Jacques 110, 118–124, 130 libido 115, 159
signifier entering the signified 123f, 124 life, Greek terms for 268
Lafontaine, Céline 327 The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy,
language Gentleman (Sterne) 54
acquisition of 120, 155 limit Marxism 74
ideological nature of 95 The Limits of Critique (Felski) 412–413
poetic 34 linguistic sign, structure of the 43–50
452 INDEX
linguistic structure 43–44 The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar) 189
linguistic turn 41 The Making of the English Working Class
linguistics (Thompson) 258, 375
aims of 43 The Making of the Indebted Man (Lazzarato) 293
combination and selection of words in sentences Malabou, Catherine 367
46 male subjects, castration complex 121
diachronic theoretical approach to 46 Man, Play, and Games (Caillois) 392
synchronic approach to 46 Mandel, Ernest 104
Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Manichaeism 287
Narratology (Page) 71 manifest dream-content 113
literary history, male and female 189–190 Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (Nelson) 376
literary studies Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and
historical 50 Engels) 74, 77, 274
moral and social 50 Margaret Mead Made Me Gay (Newton) 224
philogical 50 market capitalism 104
literary texts, as nonhuman actors 415 Marsh, George Perkins 313
Literary Theory (Eagleton) 407 Marshall, P. David 397, 399
The Literary Work of Art (Ingarden) 152 Marx, Karl 29, 73, 76–83, 376
literature Marx and Engels on Ecology (Parsons) 306
and the emotions 16 Marxism 73–108, 170–171
interpretation of 7 ecotheory and 306–307
reader-response criticism 7 general ideas of 73–74
as a source of morality 16 post-1989 76
as a source of pleasure 17 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
as a source of spirituality 17 (Vološinov) 91
as a source of truth 16 Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Leavis)
A Literature of Their Own (Showalter) 183, 191 373–374
Liu, Lydia 327 mass communication 380
Llosa, Mario Vargas 403 Massumi, Brian 348, 356, 357
The Location of Culture (Bhabha) 288 material world 13
Locke, John 251, 342 materialism 347, 353–357
logic 47 speculative 345
critical 47 matter, existence of 343
logical positivism 88 Matter and Consciousness (Churchland) 339
logocentrism, of Western philosophy 147 Mäyrä, Frans 388
The Long Revolution (Williams) 369 The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer) 284
Lotman, Jurij 43 meaning
Love, Heather 352 as an ideal object 28
Lovelock, James 320 as an intentional object 28
low theories 372 of text 27
ludology 389, 392 media, and cultural studies 379
Lukács, Georg 74–75, 80 media ecology 381
Lyell, Charles 314 media effects 384
Lynch, Kevin 107 media studies 380–385
Lyon, David 275, 278 audiences of media 382
Lyotard, Jean-François 146, 157–163 focus of 383
Lysias 21 methodologies in 383
political economy of media 382
machine, difference between a mind and 327 textuality of media 382
McIntosh, Mary 216, 228 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes)
MacKinnon, Catharine 187–189 338–339
McLuhan, Marshall 381, 393 Medvedev, Pavel 75
INDEX 453
Meillassoux, Quentin 341–342, 345–346, 406 multinational capitalism 104

memory studies 367 Murray, Janet 391–392
mental states 340 Murray, Stuart 262
metafiction 55 My Cousin Vinny (film) 249
metanarratives 160 mythemes 64
metaphysics 13 Mythologies (Barthes) 56, 58
Metaphysics (Aristotle) 16 myths 57–58, 66
Mill, Harriet Taylor 182 Oedipus myth 63–65, 66
Mill, John Stuart 182
Miller, J. Hillis 249, 254, 289 Namaste, Viviane 237
Miller, Toby 380 Name-of-the-Father 100–101, 121, 201
Millett, Kate 176 narrative adjectives 70
mimesis (imitation) 15, 67 Narrative as Rhetoric (Phelan) 71
minor literature 135 Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Genette)
The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard) 165 70
mirror stage 119 narrative grammar 69
Mitchell, David T. 280 narrative perspective 71
Mitchell, W. J. T. 401 narrative sequences, types of 69
moderate androgynism 184 Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences
modern philosophy, as indistinguishable from (Herman) 71
science 20 narrative verbs 70
modernist texts 105 narrative voice 71
Moi, Toril 183–184, 190–191, 198–199 narratology 42, 47, 52, 67–71, 247
Monahan, Torin 275 cardinal functions (kernels) 67
monism 409 functional catalyzers (satellites) 67
monoandrogynism 184 The Nation-State and Violence (Giddens) 278
monophonic text 92 natural history 261–262
monopoly capitalism 104 natural rights 240, 251
Montaigne, Michel de 163 nature, as sublime 315–316
Montrose, Louis 171–172 nature writing 303, 306
moods 70, 71 Nealon, Jeffrey 403–404
moral absolutism 251 Negri, Antonio 271–275, 348, 357
moral development 188 négritude movement 286–287
morality Nelson, Cary 376–377
literature as a source of 16 Neocybernetics and Narrative (Clarke) 335
of men and women 188 neoliberalism 283–284, 292–295
role in law and literature 249 foundations of 293
Moraru, Christian 285, 299, 406 higher education under 294–295
The Morning After (Roiphe) 193 neuroses 114
Morphology of the Folktale (Propp) 68 New Criticism 33–40, 341, 350, 407, 408,
Morris, Charles 47, 48 410–411, 417
Morrison, Toni 290 new feminism (second-wave feminism) 176,
Morson, Gary Saul 91 185–192
motherhood 156–157 New Historicism 169–173, 357–358
Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 89 new media studies 384
Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors new presentism 358
Association (MPPDA) 89 The New Wounded (Malabou) 367
movies 88 Newton, Esther 224
Mowitt, John 385, 395 Nicholas of Cusa 204
Moyn, Samuel 254 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 16
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 55 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 126
multidirectional memory 367 nihilism 167–168
454 INDEX
Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 276 paranoia 232–235

Nixon, Rob 320, 321 parapraxes (Freudian slips) 113
Noise (Attali) 385 Parker, Noel 291
nomadology 135 Parks, Rosa 241
noumena (noumenal world) 28 parole 46, 101
novels Parsons, Howard 306
definition of 93 Parts of Animals (Aristotle) 16
polyphonic and heteroglossic 93 Patton, Cindy 212
NOW (National Organization for Women) 185 Pavel, Thomas 71
Nussbaum, Martha 240, 249–250 The Peasant and the Raj (Stokes) 258
Peasant Struggles in India (Desai) 258
object 48 The Peasant Studies Newsletter 258
object-oriented literary criticism 407, 408 Peirce, Charles 25, 47, 48
object-oriented ontology 345, 406–412, 416, Penguin Random House 299
417 penis envy 201
object-oriented philosophy 406 perception, general laws of 53
obscenity laws 209 performativity, politics of 229
oceans, ecological catastrophes of 319–321 personality in Hollywood 397
Oedipus complex 112, 115–116, 121, 130–131 Peterson, Jordan 137
Of Grammatology (Derrida) 147, 149, 151, Phaedrus (Plato) 20, 21, 22, 26, 147, 148,
337 150
Off Our Backs (magazine) 223 phallocentrism 201
O’Hara, Daniel T. 401 phallus 200–201
O’Keeffe, Brian 297 pharmakon 150
old feminism (first-wave feminism) 175, 176, Phelan, James 71
179–185 phenomena (phenomenal world) 28
On Belief (Žižek) 138 phenomenological interpretation 28, 151
On Christian Doctrine (Augustine) 24–25 see also hermeneutics
On Our Backs (magazine) 223 phenomenology 27–28, 157–158, 348
On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 126 Phenomenology (Lyotard) 157
ontology (being) 200 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty)
opposites, coincidence of 204 152
oral communication 380 phenotext 154
oral cultures, structural amnesia in 381 philologists 39
The Order of Things (Foucault) 261 philology 43
organismicism, (organismic biology) 261 philosopher-orator-statesmen 18
Orientalism 288 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 160,
Orientalism (Said) 287 395
Orwell, George 276 philosophy
Other, the 120 relationship between rhetoric and 17–24
outer word 28 topical 19
Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies The Philosophy of Literary Form (Burke) 40
(Zunshine) 340 phonemes 61
phonology 61
Paasi, Anssi 290 Physics (Aristotle) 16
Page, Ruth 71 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) 30
Paglia, Camille 193–194 Plato 12–15, 16, 18, 23
panopticon 266–267 arguments against rhetoric 20–21
pantheism 354 beauty for 33
Parables for the Virtual (Massumi) 356 critique of writing 147–148
paralogism 162 Ideal Objects 28
paralogy 146, 160–161 theory of dialectic 22
INDEX 455
“Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida) 147 postcolonial theory 260, 283, 285–289

play hybridity 288–289
as catharsis 393 and literatures of the environment 304
as meta-communication 393 mimicry 289
study of 389 postcritique 412–416, 417
pleasure, literature as a source of 17 Poster, Mark 278
The Pleasure of the Text (Barthes) 59–60 postfeminism 192, 193
pleasure principle 117 The Posthuman (Braidotti) 323
plot formation 68 posthumanism 323–346
pluralism 409 analytic 324
poems/poetry 15, 34–36 critical 324, 325
Bloom’s criticism of 124 reactive 324
emotion in 35 Posthumanism (Badmington) 324
as green plants 304 postmemory 366–367
structure and form of 39 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard) 146, 157,
poethics 250 159–160
Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature postmodern texts 105, 106–107
(Weisberg) 250 postmodernism 104, 146, 273
Poetic Justice (Nussbaum) 240, 249–250 poststructuralism 22, 143–173, 307, 327
poetic language 51, 155 posttheory 405–406
poetic meanings 40 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 363
poetic work Pouvoir Ouvrier (Worker’s Party) 159
aesthetic function 52–53 power 266
versus non-poetic work 52 power relations 256
Poetics (Aristotle) 16, 67 Practical Criticism (Richards) 37
poets pragmatics 47
banishment from the ideal state 14 Prague Linguistic Circle 50
life cycle 126 Precarious Life (Butler) 252
poiesis 14 preconscious 116
see also art pregnancy 157
political theory 408 prejudice in interpretation 27
The Political Unconscious (Jameson) 102, 103, present, affective mapping of the 349
362 presentism 349, 357–360
Political Writings (Lyotard) 159 primitive communism 73
Politics (Aristotle) 16 Principles of Literary Criticism (Richards) 37,
polyandrogynism 184 341
polyphony 92 Prismatic Ecology (Cohen) 308
pop culture 369–399 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci) 80, 258
Popper, Karl 51 prison reform 266
popular Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin) 91,
contemporary senses of 369–370 92
social and material meaning of 370 production
popular culture, definitions of 371 forces of 78
pornography 187, 188 modes of 78
positive psychology 111 relations of 78
positivism 88 proletariat 76–77
Posner, Richard 248–249 The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed) 352
Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and propaganda 380
Narrative Theory (Ryan) 71 propositions 70
postanthropocentrism 325 Propp, Vladimir 42, 64, 68
postclassical narratology 71 Protagoras 12, 17
postcolonial ecology 305 Protagoras (Plato) 12
456 INDEX
Proust, Marcel 57 realism 75

psychoanalysis naïve 344
affect in 348 speculative 344, 346
connection between capitalism and 131 transcendental 344
psychoanalytic criticism 110–111 reality television 278
psychoanalytic theory 109–142 reductionism 261
psychology 110, 348 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke)
psychosexual development 119 182
reflexivity 336, 387
qualisign 49 reification 83
queer affect 347, 350–353 relativism 12
queer cultures 212 Renaissance 16
queer identities 280 Renaissance studies 169
queer phenomenology 352 repression 125, 126
queer studies 217, 219 Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) 75, 99
queer theory 213, 218, 219, 223, 237 The Republic (Plato) 13, 14
and environmental studies 304 response-ability, in relations between humans and
Quintilian 22 animals 332–333
reterritorialization 133
Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 94 rheme 49
race 247 rhetoric 17–24, 380
and justice 239–260 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 16
pseudo-science theories of 240 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth) 68
and racism 239 rhetorician 24
as socially constructed 245 rhizomes 134–135
racial discrimination 240 Richards, I. A. 34, 37, 41–42, 341
racialism 243 Richardson, Alan 338
racism 239, 240 Richardson, Dorothy 191
covert 241–242 Ricoeur, Paul 29, 71
environmental 242 Ritzer, George 284
extrinsic 243 Rivière, Joan 214–215
institutional/structural 242 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 57
interest convergence/material determinism Roberts, Callum 319
245 Roiphe, Katie 192–193
intrinsic 243 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) 182
as ordinary behavior 244 Rorty, Richard 20
overt 241–242 Rose, Jacqueline 122
overt institutional 242 Roth, Michael 364
unintentional 242 Rothberg, Michael 367
radical aesthetics 407, 417 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 149, 180–181, 251
Radicalesbians, The Woman[-]Identified Woman Rubin, Gayle 229
manifesto 220–221 Ruddiman, William 314
radicalism, and materialism 353 Rueckert, William 303–304, 308, 309
rape 192–193 Ruskin, John 30, 31
rationalism 13 Russian Formalism 41–42, 50–55, 94
Readerly text 59 Ryan, Marie-Laure 71
reader-response criticism 38
reading 415 Said, Edward 288, 304
Readings and Feelings (Bleich) 7 same-sex desire 229
Reagan, Ronald 293 same-sex love 215
Real, the 120–121, 363 Sappho, poetry of 179
Real Order, the 98, 101 Sartre, Jean-Paul 56
INDEX 457
Saussure, Ferdinand de 25, 41, 43–45 signification

“tree” 123 primary signification (denotation) 57
Scene of Instruction, the 126 secondary signification (connotation) 57
Schiller, Friedrich 33 signified (thought image) 44
schizoanalysis 111, 131, 135 signifier (sound image) 44, 122
schizophrenia, time and affect 349 signs
Schlegel, August Wilhelm 163 classes of 49–50
Schlegel, Friedrich 163 definition of, Peirce 47–49
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 24, 26, 27 definition of, Saussure 44–45
Schmitt, Carl 268–269 language and 25
school of reminiscence 29 Signifier–Referent 164
school of suspicion 29 Simulacra and Simulations (Baudrillard) 166, 167
science, and science studies 349 simulacrum (appearance), orders of 165
sea writing 321 simulation 389
The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 184 Simulations (Baudrillard) 146
Second Skins (Prosser) 237 Singer, Peter 331
The Second Stage (Friedan) 185 Sinn (sense), of a sign 49
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 223, 229–235, 350, 351–352 sinsign 49
seduction 165–166 sky-high theory 406
Seduction (Baudrillard) 165 Slaughter, Joseph 253
seduction theory 110 slavery 252
Seigworth, Gregory 347 slow violence 320
Seligman, Martin 111 Snyder, R. Claire 196
semanalysis 156, 349 social agents 225
semantics 47 social communication, modes of 61
semiology 44, 50, 58, 60 social contexts 256
semiotic reduction see structural semantics social contract theory, animals and 331–332
semiotics 153, 371, 384 social control 263
structuralism and 41–71 social formation 97
semiotic square 107f, 108 social inequality 256
Sengupta, Mahasweta 296 social justice 256
sense memory 366 social sciences, media studies in 382
sequences, types of 70 Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism),
serving two masters 246 159
Sewanee Review 38 Société Francaise de Psychanalyse (SFP) 118
sex 225 society
and sexuality 210–211, 213 base of 78
sex discrimination 187, 241 civil society 80
sex/gender system 229 history of 76
sexism 241 political 80
everyday 197 Socrates 11, 13, 17, 21, 147, 148
sexual boundaries 210 Sollers, Philippe 146
sexual difference 205 Sommers, Christina Hoff 193
sexual harassment 194 Soper, Kate 307
Sexual Politics (Millett) 176 sophist 24
sexual revolution 176, 210 Sophist (Plato) 22
Sexual/Textual Politics (Moi) 183 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 286
Shakespeare, William, tragedies of 36 sound pattern 44
Shklovsky, Viktor 53–54, 55, 68, 109 sound studies 385–388
Showalter, Elaine 183, 191–192 audiovisual litany 387–388
Shumway, David 399 characteristics of 386–387
significance, of text 27 critical 387
458 INDEX
hearing versus vision 387 Sullivan, Nikki 220

non-critical 387 superego, the 117
sound technology 385 super-sensory world (world of “Ideas”) 13
sovereign power 265, 268 surveillance studies 275–278
sovereignty surveillance theory, modern and postmodern 277
concept of multitude that opposes imperial 274 Sussman, Henry 310, 311, 334, 335
definition of 269 syllogisms 23
space 318 symbol 49
Spanos, William 270, 300 Symbolic Exchange and Death (Baudrillard) 165
speciesism 330 Symbolic Order, the 98, 101, 119–120
speculative grammar 47 Symposium (Plato) 215
speculative realism 326, 341–346, 406 syntactics 47
speculative rhetoric 47 syntagyms 69
Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray) 203, 205, The System of Objects (Baudrillard) 163
207 systems theory 326, 334–338
speech, primacy over writing 149 connection between narrative and 335
Speech and Phenomena (Derrida) 147 S/Z (Barthes) 59
speeches, tasks orator must attend to when
preparing 25 Tally, Robert 316–317, 401
Spinoza, Baruch 274, 347, 354 technology-based surveillance 278
theory of affects 354–355 Tel Quel (journal) 146
Spinozistic affect studies 348 telemorphosis 311–312
spirituality, literature as a source of 17 teleology 335
Spivak, Gayatri 254, 283, 288, 296, 312 tense 70–71
on subaltern groups 260 territorialization 133
state of exception 270 The Terror of Neoliberalism (Giroux) 294
State of Exception (Agamben) 270 Tessera 126
Stefancic, Jean 243 texts 60
Steinem, Gloria 182, 187 autonomy of 416
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) 334, 335 Bakhtin’s views on 94
Sterne, Jonathan 386, 387–388 classical depiction of 42
Sterne, Laurence 54–55 contemporary depiction of 42
Stoermer, Eugene 313–314 historicity of 171
Stokes, Eric 258 identity of 416
Stoppani, Antonio 313 as productivity 154
storytelling and narrative analysis 247 thanatopolitics 262
structural determinism 246 That the World May Know (Dawes) 254
structural semantics 69 Thatcher, Margaret 293
Structural Semantics (Greimas) 69 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 184
“The Structural Study of Myth” (Lévi-Strauss) 63 The Woman[-]Identified Woman manifesto 220–221
structuralism 61, 143 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
and semiotics 41–71 Reproduction” (Benjamin) 85
structuralist narrative see narratology theoretical recipes 7–8, 406
The Structure of the Artistic Text (Lotman) 43 theoreticism 406
Studies in Hysteria (Freud and Breuer) 112 theory
subaltern studies 243, 258–260, 286 approaching the study of 5–6
subalternity 260 case against 401–407
The Subjection of Women (Mill) 182 as a community 4–5, 8
Subjective Criticism (Bleich) 7 as cross- and multidisciplinary 4, 8
sublimation 125 definition of 2
sublime, difference between modern and feminism associated with 177
postmodern 162 as high theory 3, 8
INDEX 459
how to use 6–9 traumatic dissociation theories 366

as methodology 3 traumatic dreams 363
as professional common sense 2–3, 8 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
rejection of 404 Knowledge (Berkeley) 342
as a set of movements/schools 3, 8 triangular desire, theory of infantile sexuality 229
shift to studies 372 truth, literature as a source of 16
strong 234 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 26
suspicion of 176 Turner, Graeme 396
as a toolbox 4 Turner, J. M. W. 30, 132
as a way of life 4
ways of viewing 8 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 215
weak 234 Unclaimed Experience (Bloom) 361
Theory of Literature (Wellek and Warren) 53 Understanding Media (McLuhan) 393
Theses on Feuerbach (Marx) 78 unhappiness 352
“Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin) United Nations 271
84 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights 251
Thomas, Clarence 194 United States
Thompson, E. P. 258 civil rights movement in the 241
Thomsen, Mads Rosendhal 325 racism in 240
A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 135, universal grammar 69
334, 348 universal surveillance 278
Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 71 universe, as simulation 168
Timotheus 21, 23 Unpacking Queer Politics (Jeffreys) 222
To Be Real (Walker) 195 untranslatability 297–298
Todorov, Tzvetan 28, 69–70 Urban, William Marshall 409
Tolstoy, Leo 31–32, 54, 55 The Use of Pleasure (Foucault) 210
Tomkins, Silvan 234, 351 The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart) 375
Tool-Being (Harman) 406
topography 319 Validity in Interpretation (Hirsch) 27, 152
Touching Feeling (Sedgwick) 351 value 82
trace, the 151, 200, 337 Vaughan-Williams, Nick 291
Tracks from the Crypt (Mowitt) 395 Veeser, H. Aram 173
tragedy 15–16 Vico, Giambattista 19
trans theory 238 video games 391
Trans* (Halberstam) 237 Vienna Circle 88
trans* bodies 238 A Vindication of the Rights of Women
trans* theory 235–238 (Wollstonecraft) 181, 182
transcultural memory 367 vinyl records 386
transhumanism 326 Vinyl Theory (Di Leo) 386
translatability 297 virtuality 337
translation 295–298 virtues 181
images of 296 visual communication 380, 384
impact of globalization on 284 vitalism 261
postcolonial approach to 297 voice 71
proper (interlingual translation) 297 voices-of-color 245
rewording (intralingual translation) 297 Vološinov, Valentin 75, 95–96
source text and target text 296 vulgar Marxism 74, 97
transmutation (intersemiotic translation) 297 vulnerability 252
transsexuals 235
transvestites, gender of 227 Walker, Alice 195
trauma, definition of 362 Walker, Rebecca 194–195
trauma theory 349, 360–364 Wallerstein, Immanuel 283
460 INDEX
Wamberg, Jacob 325 feminist phase, of the female tradition in English

Warner, Michael 212 literature 191
Warren, Austin 53 homosexual and bisexual development in
Warren, Karen 307 214
Weisberg, Richard 250 Lacan and the role of women 122
The Well Wrought Urn (Brooks) 409 ontological status of 204
Wellek, Réne 50, 53 women’s studies 218
Westphal, Bertrand 316 Wood, David Murakami 275
What is Literature? (Sartre) 56 Woolf, Virginia 182–183
What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 355 working-class culture, of the 1950s 375
What’s Wrong with Antitheory? (Di Leo) 402 works, texts and 60
When Species Meet (Haraway) 330 world literature 284, 301
White, Hayden 71, 172 conceptions of 298
White, James Boyd 248 and global babble 300
White Mythologies (Young) 259 and theory 298–301
Whitehead, Alfred North 356 see also global literature
Who Stole Feminism? (Sommers) 193 world theory 300, 301
Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Writerly text 59
(Baudrillard) 166–167 writing
Wiener, Norbert 326, 337 feminine practice of 203
Wilde, Oscar 30, 129 Plato’s critique of 147–148
Williams, Raymond 105, 170, 359–360, 369, primacy of speech over 149
375–376 Writing and Difference (Derrida) 147
Wilson, Thomas M. 292 Writing Degree Zero (Barthes) 56–57
Wimsatt, W. K. 38 written cultures, written records as hindrance
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 160, 394–395 to structural amnesia 381
Wolbring, Gregor 279 Wuebben, Daniel 321
Wollstonecraft, Mary 179, 181–182 Wundt, Wilhelm 110
women
education and place of 179–181 Young, Allen 212
female phase, of the female tradition in English Young, Robert 259
literature 191
feminine phase, of the female tradition in Žižek, Slavoj 110, 136–142
English literature 191 Zola, Émile 67
461
462

Jeffrey R. Di Leo - Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory - An Overview-Bloomsbury Academic (2023)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jeffrey R. Di Leo - Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory - An Overview-Bloomsbury Academic (2023)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

CONTEMPORARY LITERARY AND

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks

First published in Great Britain 2023

Copyright © Jeffrey R. Di Leo, 2023

Cover design by Annabel Hewitson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-6616-9

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

2 Structuralism and Semiotics 41

4 Psychoanalytic Theory 109

4.4 Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze 130

6 Feminist Theory 175

7 LGBTQ+ Theory 209

8 Race and Justice 239

13 Affect Studies 347

14 Pop Culture 369

15 Against Theory 401

15.2 Posttheory 405

THE CITY OF THEORY

EIGHT WAYS OF LOOKING AT THEORY

HOW TO APPROACH THE STUDY OF THEORY

HOW TO USE THEORY

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Literature as a Source of Morality

Literature as a Source of Truth

Literature and the Emotions

Literature as a Source of Pleasure

Literature as a Source of Spirituality

1.2 RHETORIC (OR, THE QUARREL BETWEEN

The Citizen Orator (Isocrates)

The Philosopher-Orator-Statesmen (Cicero)

Christian Rhetoric (Augustine of Hippo)

Topical Philosophy (Giambattista Vico)

University Press, 1990).

Press, 1980), 171.

To be sure, the highest criticism is itself autonomous art. For Wilde, as

1.5 NEW CRITICISM

Structuralism and Semiotics

2.1 STRUCTURE OF THE SIGN (OR, SAUSSURE AND PEIRCE)

Language, on the other hand, is

2.2 RUSSIAN FORMALISM

2.3 ROLAND BARTHES

2.4 CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS

i. Cadmos seeks his sister Europa, ravished by Zeus.

Fx(a) : Fy(b) ⯝ Fx(b) : Fa – 1(y)

Press, 1980), 27.

3.1 KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Marx, Grundrisse, 111.

Dragstedt (London: New Park Publications, 1976), 214.

3.2 THE ADORNO–BENJAMIN DEBATE

3.3 MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

3.4 LOUIS ALTHUSSER

3.5 FREDRIC JAMESON

In authentic historical analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex

Jameson, Postmodernism, 25.

FIGURE 3: Greimas’s Semiotic Square.

Jameson, Postmodernism, 51.

University Press, 2018), 18.

4.1 SIGMUND FREUD

4.2 JACQUES LACAN

Lacan’s commentary on feminine sexuality is intended to be a contribution to a field ignored by

In addition, he provides another diagram of his formula:

4.3 HAROLD BLOOM