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TriQuarterly

Acting Editor

Jonathan Brent

Managing Editor Michael McDonnell

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Coordinator Anne-Marie Zwierzyna

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Contributing Editors

Susan Hahn, Margaret H. O'Dell, Fred Shafer

Gini Kondziolka

Elliott Anderson, Charles Newman

Sandy Moltz

Denise Smith, Carol Summerfield, Lenore Zelony

Michael Anania, Gerald Graff, John Hawkes, David Hayman, Bill Henderson, Joseph McElroy, Robert Onopa

TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ART, WRITING, AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED IN THE FALL. WINTER. AND SPRING AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY. EVANSTON. ILLINOIS 60201. ISSN 0041-3097.

Subscription rates: one year 514-1)0; two years 525.00; three years 535_00. Foreign subscriptions 5),00 per year additional. Single copies usually 55.95. Back issue prices on request. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to TriQgarterty, 1735 Benson Avenue. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. The editors invite submissions of fiction, poetry, and literary essays. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright e 1981 by TriQuarterly. All rights reserved. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States of America.

This publication is made possible in part by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

National distributor to retail trade: B. DeBoer, 113 E. Central Street-Rear, Nutley, New Jersey 07110. Distributor for West Coast trade: Book People, 2940 7th Street, Berkeley, California 94710. Midwest: Bookslinger, 330 East Ninth Street, SI. Paul, Minnesota 55101.

Reprints of back issues of TriQuarterly are now available in full format from Kraus Reprint Company, Route 100, Millwood, New York 10546, and in microfilm from UMI, a Xerox company, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106.

A Doppler effed: response to Chicago artists' round table

Peter Schjeldahl

Round-table participants: Maryrose Carroll. Ed Paschke. Vera Klement. Dennis Adrian. Robert Lostutter

Freedom in experimental music: the New York revolution

Peter Gena

Freedom and control in twentiethcentury music

M. William Karlins

Including letters on contemporary music from: John Cage. Karlheinz Stockhausen. Bertram Turetzky, Paul Zonn. Barney Childs. Ben Johnston

Marvin Bell. John Cage. Arturo Vivante. Richard Stem. Nikki Giovanni. Ed Paschke. J. V. Cunningham. Robert Creeley. Paul Bowles. Ed Hoag14nd. Nicholas F. Delbanco, Denise Levertov .David Ignatow. [)Qvid ShtIpiro

In the collection of Mark McCormick.

Ed Paschke In the collection of Robin Glauber. Photo credit: William H. Bengston

Freedom in American art and culture

The subject of freedom is one on which debate is endless and disagreement inevitable. It is central both to what the arts produce and how we live our lives. Spinoza thought that freedom consists in obeying one's own reason. A recent television advertisement described the automobile as "the freedom machine," implying that freedom consists in being able to go wherever you want, whenever you want. In this, the advertisement has only slightly embellished the popular belief that freedom is "doing as one likes," a belief that is not to be dismissed out of hand as one cherished merely by the unenlightened "boobs" whom Mencken so often took to task. On the contrary, it is a belief with considerable historical grounding and vast political and social force, and no doubt it has also been an agent in the latest changes in our government and social policy.

The extent to which doing as one likes in our public life takes precedence over obeying one's own reason gives testimony to the persistence of peculiarly American traits in our national characterthe "freshness" and quickness of thought noted by Henry James, the odd perplexing dynamism in our approach to experience. But there are consequences of doing as one likes that lead to a world troubled by contradiction and violence, by the reckless aggressiveness of American ambition, and the most vivid displays of American selfdestructiveness.

Balancing what we want with what reason demands has become a central requirement of our times, and it is not clear how this balance will be achieved. Obeying one's reason demands consistency and coherence of principle; doing what one likes demands the subordination of principles to means of gratification. Our government and

people have traditionally demonstrated the willingness to sacrifice ideas to the necessities of getting a job done. And this flexibility has often been rightly portrayed as one of our peculiar strengths.

Today, however, it is difficult not to wonder whether some of the jobs we are doing are in themselves worth the effort, or whether they are worth the continual sacrifice of reason and principle. In considering the nature of American freedom and some of the projects carried out in its name, we cannot help but ask whether our wondrous energy and practically limitless activity have not also entailed a paralyzing moral or intellectual passiveness that threatens our well-being as surely as our pragmatism improves it.

The drama of American freedom has been enacted throughout our history and art. It has given rise to some of our most characteristic imaginative works, from The Scarlet Letter to Mr. Sammler's Planet. It has provided the inspiration to Whitman's celebration of himself, but it has also been associated with the most morbid features of the American temperament: its loneliness, violence, and sense of being outcast from the larger human community. Melville's scrivener, Bartleby, provides perhaps the blackest vision of this freedom as he categorically asserts an imperturbable, nihilistic resistance to the flow of ordinary American life with the simple phrase, "I'd prefer not to." In the 1960s, Bartleby's gesture of refusal, at once both heroic and pathetic, became the gesture of nearly an entire generation of American youth. It is an impulse both menancing to our reason and alluring to our imagination, and represents that point of inner contradiction where our art and politics most profoundly meet.

The nature of our freedom today and its expression in contemporary art, literature, and music is the subject of the present collection of essays. By bringing together so great a number of different perspectives and kinds of articles, we have hoped that the distinctive qualities of our freedom could be considered in ways that satisfy at least some of the demands of both the intellect and the imagination.

Jonathan Brent

To carve a space out of chaos

Theodore Lidz, M.D.

At the end of Aeschylus's Oresteia, Athena releases Orestes from the pursuit of the Furies, from the insanity that besets a man who moves beyond the limits set by the two ultimate infractions, matricide and maternal incest, between which he must conduct his life. She settles the rending bind of persons' dual loyalties to their mothers and fathers by balancingfather-right with mother-right, and then she symbolically marks the start of democratic civilization by proclaiming her immortal edict, "Let no man live uncurbed by law or curbed by tyranny. "I

Athena's edict provided a fundamental directive but did not define when, or how greatly, individual freedom must be curbed by law or when law becomes tyrannical. Efforts to establish proper and essential boundaries between freedom and delimitation have been and always will be a conscious and unconscious task of mankind. Herein I shall seek to clarify some of the problems involved and that require consideration as the balance shifts, as it must shift, as societies change.

Marx observed that laws deemed fair and essential by the bourgeoisie could virtually enslave the proletariat. Now the laws imposed by his followers in the Soviet Union are oppressive and stultifying to intellectuals, creative artists, and scientists. The problem, though, does not concern simply principles of government but also the intraindividual or intrapsychic conflict between freedom of self-expression and the need for self-restraint. Freud taught that because existence in a society requires the repression of libidinal pleasure, social living inevitably frustrates happiness. However, as we can observe currently, whereas repression may cause neuroses, the lack of repression can produce intrapsychic as well as societal chaos.

The striving for a suitable balance between freedom of self-expression and the need for delimitation is as old as the human species, and probably an essential aspect of human existence. Our remaining stone-age contemporaries in Papua New Guinea believe that their ancestors in mythic time lived

without rules, free of repression or inhibition of their lust, aggression, and acquisitiveness. The Karavar people, for example, believe that even just before the arrival of the first missionary on their island in 1876, their ancestors lived an asocial existence they term mombutol Mombuto means "the failure to see clearly," and refers to the ancestors' inability to see the way to proper and necessary behavior, which left them caught up in a chaos of conflicting desires and activities. They lived like "wild pigs," ate their kinsmen, had intercourse with their sisters and sisters' daughters, and fought one another for women. Many tribes in the New Guinea Highlands have similar concepts. They believe that humans are innately lustful and greedy, wishing to be unrestrained in their sexual and aggressive impulses and desires. Human nature has not changed, but each tribe believes that a culture hero or heroes, usually its mythic primal ancestors, established a social way of life which the tribe continues to follow. People such as the Gururumba recognize that men, like wild pigs, "grow tired of the fence and the rope" and would like to express their basic impulses.'

Although peoples like the Gururumba have a fascination with, and even some envy of, their mythical ancestors who lived unfettered by social restrictions, they have no desire to live as they did. Until recently they found outlets for their innate but repressed drives by fighting neighboring clans, raping their women, and in some cases eating their enemies; but they were relieved when truces were declared in their interminable warfare, and even more relieved when Australian patrols came into the Highlands and forbade any further warfare, homicide, or cannibalism.

These people, then, have a view of human nature that is very much like Freud's. Repression is necessary for societal existence. However, they do not consider that such delimitation and repression are antagonistic to happiness. Indeed, they are well aware that unlimited freedom would not bring happiness and that they need the restraints set by their ancestors. They seem to recognize that, to quote B. Cowan in another context, it was necessary "to clear a space in chaos within which civilized life can operate. "4 People require a culture-their culture. It forms the heart of their social existence and they will give their lives to preserve it, for without it they are rootless and lost. Everywhere culture heroes performed what Cowan defined as the hero's task-"to carve a space out of chaos within which meaning can exist. "

Traditionally, the hero has defended his people's territory or conquered new land for them, but, in general, the essence of his task has been to preserve the cultural ways that permit life to be meaningful to his group-to protect the place where it is lived or provide room into which the people can expand and still preserve their traditions. In recent times the struggle has been increasingly within the gates, though all too often the internal danger is projected outward.

Wherein lies the danger? What is it that we so fear and that, because it is so diaphanous, we must transform into a tangible enemy?

The problem arises from the nature of the human species, which despite women's liberation is still termed Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens differs radically from all other living organisms. The evolution of the species rested primarily on the selection from the pool of genetic mutations of those that increased capacities for tool bearing and its necessary concomitant, symbolic functioning. Through the ability to utilize extensions-termed "tools"-of its natural physique, but even more by its ability to use symbols to think and conceptualize a future and be motivated by future goals, and to use language to cooperate with others and transmit what was learned across generations, the species spread out over the earth and became master of it. In contrast to all other species, it could live in new and very different environments and change its ways of adaptation without any further changes in its genetic makeup. All humans are, of course, genetically endowed with very similar physiques and physiologies that help assure the survival of the individual and the species, impose attention to basic needs through drives, alert to danger and prepare to counter it, impel to propagation and to develop families to provide for their young, require means of obtaining food, and so forth. However, the actual adaptive techniques including the ways of acquiring food, for living together, for communicating linguistically with others, for gaining supernatural aid, are not part of the human's physical endowment. The brain permits and enables the acquisition of language, skills, and knowledge, but these things must be learned. Because people could transmit what they learned to subsequent generations, knowledge became cumulative and people developed cultures: differing ways of thinking about and adapting to their worlds and mastering their environments. Human infants can survive and become functioning adults only ifthey are enculturated; that is, if raised in a manner that permits and fosters the assimilation of the essential adaptive techniques that a culture has developed. The basic techniques are transmitted primarily from parents to children, and are largely suited to the physical and social environments in which the people live. The beliefs that sustain in the face of the human's helplessness to control nature and contingencies and which often direct perception and understanding are essential for providing a sense of meaning, purpose, and direction to life. The culture's ways are inculcated from early childhood and become the way of understanding, the only known way in many societies, and an entire pattern of life takes shape around them. To the man in the moon looking down at the many divergent ways in which people live, the different ways in which they divide experiences by the words they use and the opposing belief systems through which they seek to control what is beyond their control, are, in many respects, arbitrary. Anthropologists realize that much of each culture's ways of living is relative but more or less

suited to the environment in which the people live; but they also know that all cultures must have some things in common and they study the range of ways in which the same basic human needs can be met. To the member of a given society, however, little in the culture seems arbitrary, and the need to live in a society in which the ways and values of one's own culture are meaningless, or even despised, is likely to cause despair and anomie. To the ancient Greeks, exile was the ultimate punishment.

Each society sets limits upon what behavior and beliefs are acceptable for its members; all societies have members who conform rigidly, others who press against the limits, and those who find ways of living within the rules, spoken and unspoken, bending them to enable their needs to be requited or simply to have their desires met. Tolerance to nonconformity varies from society to society and is also likely to change from time to time within a particular society. Those who deviate from the conventions are deemed heretics, radicals, criminals, or insane depending on whether the deviance springs from conviction, rebelliousness, lack of concern, or inability to control the self; and the differentiations are often arbitrary or nebulous.

Tensions inevitably arise between individual desires and societal constraints. The individuals are impelled to remain within permissible bounds by restraints inculcated within them as they grow up, that is, because of their consciences or superego directives-or because of fear of parental, societal, or supernatural punishment. The balance between permissiveness and constraint swings from side to side, but the weight of tradition usually modifies the amplitude of the swings, and change properly occurs at a pace that does not leave the members of the society perplexed, confused, or alienated. When the conditions of a society'S existence change, however, the mores must also change, and the tension between individual desires for change and societal constraints heightens and may even, as at present, lead to fears of societal disintegration.

Marx considered that the advent of a single invention-the steam engine-radically changed European society by introducing the industrialization that suppressed the new proletariat, and by bringing about the urbanization that caused their alienation by depriving them of their traditional rural or communal way of life. Marx hoped that by bringing to light the economic source of alienation, a new balance between individuals and society could be achieved. If the profit motive could be eliminated by having the workers own the sources of industrial production, the factories and farms could then supply the needs of everyone. The theory has failed, perhaps because, as Bakunin predicted, workers who became rulers ceased to be workers and began to pursue little other than their right to govern;' or because the theory failed to take man's innate aggressiveness into account, which led Freud to dismiss Marx with contempt; or because the theory did not consider that new inventions would give rise to more and more "needs"

beyond the necessities for an adequate existence of which the proletariat of Marx's day were deprived. Nevertheless, Marx drew attention to the discomfort with society and the alienation from its ways that could arise from changing methods of production and because the bourgeoisie-or, as we might say now, the "establishment"-upheld mores and laws that preserved its own advantages, even though it sometimes did so unknowingly rather than maliciously.

Our current dilemma derives from the same pursuit of discovery, invention, and innovation-the quintessence of modern Western civilizationthat led to the problem Marx confronted. The scientific age has brought about several interrelated changes that have undermined the traditional standards that enabled individuals to believe that the existing mores and laws provided reasonable guides for living and for raising the next generation. A new generation, caught between the Holocaust and the hydrogen bomb, has reason enough to doubt the worth of either Christianity or science for providing guidelines into the future. However, quite aside from moral issues, scientific advance has, in less than a century, required that we reorient our ways of thinking as well as our ways of living. The atom, the minute building block of matter since the time of Democritus, has become relatively large and totally insubstantial, and our solar system is merely an infinitesimal part of an unknowable number of universes.

Let us consider briefly the profound problems concerning individual freedom that have arisen from advances in medical science just in the area of population control. Medical science has greatly increased the survival of infants and children, and their longevity. Such advances have led to overpopulation and the specter of a world devoid of living space and stripped of essential natural resources. But medical science has also provided almost foolproof contraception and abortions virtually free of danger. The women's liberation movement has been feasible largely because it is possible to regulate the size of families and because women can now have sexual relations with almost as little concern over having a child as men. Birth control has had a profound effect upon the reasons for marriage, the permanence of marriage, and the nature of family life.

I shall not elaborate further on how matters of population control permeate the entire structure of our society but turn to consider the conflicts it has produced between the individual and society. In China, where overpopulation has become a clear and tangible menace, sexual repression is virtually dictated by the ban on youthful marriage and the penalties imposed on families with more than one or two children. In the United States many women insist that whether they have premarital intercourse, use contraception, have an abortion, or live with a man unmarried is a matter for their personal decision. All of these matters for personal decision were, of course, until quite recently against the law in many states and remain counter to

fundamental tenets of Roman Catholicism. Many Catholics, at least in the United States, not only disagree with such doctrines but disregard them, and thus have lost a major source of security and comfort and their faith in the wisdom, not to speak of the infallibility, of the Pope and many of his bishops. A major benefit of Catholicism to most of its adherents, the provision of a way of life that is accepted as the true way, has been lost. The continuing belief of the Catholic church that life on this earth matters little except as a prologue to eternal beatitude or damnation has become a major block to the desire for a satisfactory life on earth. In purely secular life, our nation has become sharply and even bitterly divided over the question of whether abortion is the right of an individual or as much a matter for governmental control as homicide.

Science has opened the way for another major source of individual discontent with the guidance and controls provided by society. It has made the world smaller. Cultures that have arisen in dissimilar environments and from differing origins have different and even contrasting adaptive techniques, different ways of perceiving and understanding their environments and themselves, and different customs and belief systems, but are now proximate and even interpenetrate. Persons no longer need be ethnologists to become aware of the relativism of mores and morals; other very different cultures have moved onto one's street with non-European immigration and have entered the living room with television. If the standards imposed by society and expected of the self are merely relative, how can they be correct and necessary? The authority of tradition, of the government that upholds the tradition, and of the parents who inculcate the accepted ways are doubted, and then challenged. Indeed, in our society, which depends for survival upon innovation and invention as well as upon the ability of persons with different beliefs to interrelate, individuality and the individual's own assessment ofthe value and ethics of normative cultural beliefs are emphasized.s Kohlberg states that some persons move beyond conventional morality and define right and wrong in terms of the well-being of all members of society, and that others even move beyond such considerations and seek to judge for themselves whether laws conform to higher principles such as the "golden rule."? Relativism of this degree carries danger not just for the social system but for the individual as well, for persons who make their own standards can regress by losing essential guidelines.

It is apparent that many of the limits society sets on individual freedom of expression and behavior are relative. However, not all such limitations are arbitrary; some are essential to the very existence of humans, and it is no simple matter to determine which are which. Further, whether arbitrary or not, the human requires delimiting rules to guide and integrate his potential. The conflict between the individual and his society that can lead to alienation and anomie is not, as Marx believed, simply a matter of eco-

nomics. The human condition contains other potential sources of grievous discontent because of man's reliance on cultural directives and on interaction with others to develop into persons and be capable of surviving.

Freud emphasized another source of conflict between the individual and society that has, like Marx's beliefs, in itself fostered further discontent and given rise to rebelliousness-one might say to revolution, albeit a revolution in mores and morals rather than against governments. Freud believed that an unbreachable dichotomy existed between the individual and civilized societies. Well aware that society could not exist without repression, he considered it the major source of the discomfort or discontent that was the price to be paid for living in societies.! However, he helped foster the illusory idea that if there were no need for repression of the drive for pleasure-the pleasure instinct-people could be happy. The impossibility of resolving the problem seems to have been one of the roots of Freud's basically pessimistic outlook. He equated pleasure with happiness, arguing "that man's discovery that sexual [genital] love afforded him the strongest experiences of satisfaction, and in fact provided him with the prototype of all happiness, must have suggested to him that he should continue to seek the satisfaction in happiness in his life along the path of sexual relations and that he shall make genital erotism the central point in his life. "9 He considered that "the development of the individual seems to us to be a product of the interaction between two urges, the urge toward happiness, which we usually call 'egoistic,' and the urge toward union with others in the community, which we call 'altruistic" and that "the two urges, one toward personal happiness, and the other toward union with other human beings must struggle with each other in every individual and so, also the two processes of individual and collective development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground. "10 As far as individual fulfillment was concerned, Freud considered the contributions of society to be minimal, and emphasized its restrictive rather than its enabling and fulfilling aspects.

Much as Marx sought to save the proletariat by drawing attention to the economic sources of urbanization that led to alienation, Freud sought to relieve emotional suffering by undoing repression and bringing the unconscious to consciousness-or to enable a person's ego to exert greater control of his or her life than blind id impulsions. However, when we distance ourselves a bit from Freud's persuasive writing, we note several flaws in his ideas concerning the conflict between society and individual happinessideas that have exerted an unfortunate influence on our culture and many of its members. Let us examine them briefly.

It seems strange indeed to equate happiness with pleasure, especially with sensuous pleasure. A convincing argument might be made that sexual pleasure in conjunction with a mutual love relationship is a major source of happiness or can greatly enhance a person's happiness. But a true love

relationship is scarcely egoistic, and always contains an altruistic quality. Further, a love relationship, except in moments of passion, also involves the couple's relationship to society. Then, too, what of the happiness of childhood-the loss of which is so often bemoaned-a happiness that has to do with protection and guidance by loving and beloved parents, and may be thought to include an innocence concerning sexual passion that brings so many trials and decisions in its wake.

Most educated Germanic persons have been greatly influenced by Goethe. Although it is something of a digression, I wish to comment on the antithesis between Freud's and Goethe's ideas about happiness. Faust, it will be recalled, makes a pact with Mephistopheles in order to gain some of the pleasure and happiness he had forfeited in his vain scholarly pursuit of the fundamental force that guides the course of the world but which has left him essentially no wiser than before he started.'! He will surrender his soul to Mephistopheles when the moment comes when he is so happy that he wishes time would stand still. The moment does not come, as happy as he is, in his sexual liaison with Margaretha or in his greatly desired liaison with the immortal Helen. The time of transcendent happiness comes after he has given up his strivings for narcissistic or egoistic pleasure and has by building dikes reclaimed land from the sea on which millions can live prosperously but for which they must continue to fight the sea by repairing the dikes. Faust has achieved the wisdom to know that people cannot remain happy simply by being prosperous, but need a challenge to their security that requires them to keep striving to retain it. Faust thus finds happiness and salvation when he has improved the lives of his fellowmen, and not through erotic pleasure.

The idea that the achievement of orgasm is the capstone of happiness could occur only to a person living in a state of severe sexual repression, much as a thirsty man may believe that water, or the freezing man that warmth, would bring the ultimate happiness. It has become apparent that while the sexual freedom of the past decades may have enabled people to experience more pleasure, there is little evidence that it has increased their happiness.

The basic source of Freud's dichotomy between individual needs and goals and those of society arises from Freud's failure to achieve a proper understanding of the pervasive influence of culture in the development of humans and in their integration and functioning. Like many other psychiatrists, Freud's psychodynamic concepts are based essentially upon a biological rather than a psychobiological orientation, a foundation that tended to influence all of his theories. He believed, in essence, that if infants are properly constituted and undamaged at birth, and do not suffer any serious trauma, they will develop into integrated, reasonably well-functioning adults if properly nurtured during infancy and childhood in ways that do not cause

notable fixations at one or the other erogenous zones, He did not clearly make the essential distinction between physical and personality development: how greatly personality development depends upon the child's assimilation of the instrumentalities of the culture, including the opportunities provided by the culture as well as the delimitation it sets.

It is insufficient to consider, as Freud did, repression as primarily an imposition that enables individuals to live in families and larger social groupings. The repressions are not simply required for society, culture, or civilization. They are essential for the integrated development of every person. Let us consider as one example the taboo on intrafamilial incest, particularly the ban on mother-son incest, including the repression of a son's sexual attraction to his mother. The taboo is critical not just for genetic reasons and to control intrafamilial conflict, but also to assure a constant mixing of family customs and child-rearing patterns lest interbreeding gives rise to families that become increasingly deviant and no longer capable of transmitting the culture to their offspring. However, the incest taboo is also of utmost importance to children's personality development. A primary developmental task for the boy is to separate and individuate from the mother, to overcome the childhood erogenous bonds that are an essential part of maternal nurturance and to establish firm "self-boundaries," and then to gain a firm male identity by identifying with paternal figures and moving beyond the family into peer groups at play and in school. All of these, and still other, important developmental tasks are impeded, if not blocked, if the boy remains erotically attached to his mother, and particularly if his sexual needs are satisfied by her and he displaces his father as her major source of erotic gratification. Further, parent-child incest disrupts the family organization that plays a major role in structuring the child's personality by breaching the family's generation boundaries; and it introduces major semantic confusions through blurring the differentiation between self and nonself that is basic to all category formation, as well as through distorting the meanings of such cardinal terms as mother, father, child, family, and love.

The dependency of personality development and functioning on societal and cultural ways is so complex that it defies description and definition. Whoever does not perceive it everywhere cannot see it properly anywhere. It influences what persons learn to perceive and to what they remain oblivious, what they permit themselves and what they repress, how they divide the continuity of their experience into categories they can talk and think about, the beliefs they consider axiomatic, what they consider edible and how they obtain it, the roles and activities appropriate to males and females, who can be considered as potential spouses and sexual partners, and many other such fundamental matters-not to consider the cultural contributions that enhance the lives of the members of the society such as the type of ritual, literature, drama, music, sculpture, and painting.

Although many cultural ways are relativistic and differ from society to society, not all cultural phenomena are relativistic. The human condition sets requirements that all societies must meet or perish. Thus, families exist everywhere, in part because children require prolonged nurturance and guidance in a limited, protected interpersonal environment; and in part because of the sexual, emotional, and security needs of adults; and everywhere families are limited by incest taboos, and by the differing roles and functions for parents and children; all societies must have a language and ways of inculcating it in their children; everywhere societies must develop and teach ways of acquiring food; and people everywhere are limited in their abilities to control nature; and every culture, though not all of its members, depends on supernatural means to diminish the sense of helplessness. Religion may be "the opiate of the people," and belief in a God "an illusion, but for much of humankind life is difficult enough, or tragic enough, to require some opiate and some illusions if not delusions.

Homo sapiens has been defined in various ways-as the tool-bearing animal, the talking, thinking, or foresighted animal, or even, by Carlyle, as the clothed animal. The human is all of these, but quintessentially Homo sapiens is the organism that requires a culture to assimilate in order to become a person, and indeed, even to survive.

The maintenance of a culture requires fostering certain behaviors, ways of thinking, and belief systems, and inhibiting and repressing others that would be disruptive of the culture's ways. The society must have the right to preserve its way of life, and curtailment of individual expression is, paradoxically, both an infringement of the rights and freedom of individuals and essential for their freedom and even for their survival. Goethe summed up the situation with the phrase, "the law alone can give us freedom." Without delimitation there can be no integration of either the individual or society. It is sheer fantasy to believe that so-called primitive peoples live without restraining rules. Even without any chief or governing body, as in New Guinea villages, the people adhere to traditions and taboos, in part simply because they constitute the proper way of life, in part because of fear of displeasing ancestors, and in part because some person whom they might hurt by a breach of custom will injure them by sorcery.

The coherence of a society requires and depends upon the self-restraint of its members. No government can force all of its members to adhere to all of its laws and customs. The task of gaining compliance and thereby ofachieving cohesion is simplest if the society'S members accept its ways as the only acceptable way of living-a situation once possible in isolated societies with virtually no news of the rest of the world, as in the Highlands of New Guinea and other remote parts of Melanesia. Such societies afford their people the security of knowing how lives should be led, but tend to be static and relatively devoid of creativity. Heartlands are conservative and preserve the

continuity of the culture, whereas "culture" in the sense of creative innovation arises most rapidly where interchange with other societies takes place, just the opposite of what Julius Langbehn, that precursor whose ideas the Nazis adopted, taught.t-

A major factor in the anti-Semitism that has occurred in nearly all Near Eastern and Western nations for millennia may well be the uneasiness produced in societies by the presence of a people with divergent mores and ways of thinking within a society. The Jews have been known to disagree with and refuse to accept the religious beliefs of the various nations among whom they have lived-the deification of the pharaoh or emperor, the belief in the Great Goddess, the worship of Jesus and Mary, and perhaps even more significantly, because they adhere to an ethic that emphasizes freedom. Thus, the Jews have been a source of uneasiness about the guiding belief systems of the various peoples among whom they have dwelt, even though they have not sought converts to their beliefs; and the discomfort has been expressed in a desire to be rid of the Jews. On the other hand, they have often provided the divergent orientation within a country needed to foster creativity as well as the transcultural experience and differing perspective that has helped rulers and nations meet crises, as was the case with Joseph and a pharaoh, Mordecai and Xerxes, Daniel and Darius, Disraeli and Queen Victoria, and, I hesitate to say, Kissinger and Nixon.

A people's sense of well-being and self-esteem relates to their sense of worth if not the superiority of their traditional way of life. These are the ways in which they have been brought up and which have the the approval of parents and ancestors. Attempts to introduce or enforce radical change, even if considered in the interest of the people, usually lead to counterrevolution or to anomie. The Shah of Iran had sought to improve the lot of his impoverished people by the introduction of Western technologies, but the attempt also brought a sense of inferiority to much of the indigenous population as well as a devaluation of the mores that had guided their lives; and the people soon chose self-esteem and stability of tradition over future prosperity. A large proportion of American Indians whose way of life no longer provided either a livelihood or a sense of worth sank into a state of anomie when rebellion became futile.

A society, like an individual, requires boundaries and a set of mores to guide its members and prevent them from becoming aimless and lost. Yet curtailment of expression inhibits the change of ways required in a modern scientific industrial society and also infringes on the freedom of the individual. In a democratic, pluralistic society a proper balance between societal needs and individual rights is difficult to find and maintain. An expansion of individual freedom will often encroach upon the freedom of individuals. Currently, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union-that vital defender of the First Amendment-is defending the rights of merchants to

keep their stores open on Sundays. It seeks to set aside "blue laws" as an encroachment of religion on government. In so doing is the ACLU defending the rights of the individual? Which individual? The right of a merchant or corporation to do business on Sundays to make more money? The action involves more than the merchant and a group of acquiescent employees, for it almost forces competitors to work on Sundays. It does not consider the implication for the family and children. The one day each week on which all members can be together, a very important element in the social fabric of the community, will be eliminated. In defending against "blue laws," has the ACLU overlooked an important, cohesive societal influence? When do the rights of a society to preserve its ethics take precedence over the rights of the individual?

The conflict between individual freedom and society, then, is not readily resolved, or as attributable to economics as Marx believed or to sexual repression as Freud believed. Indeed, a society and its culture are not only essential to the development and integration of individual personalities, but people can only achieve and maintain freedom through the customs and laws of a society. Moreover, people require an unspecified and probably unspecifiable degree of stability in their society lest they become confused and lost. Our own predicament is heightened because we live in a scientifically oriented society that seeks and inevitably produces changes in our way of life that concomitantly often require changes in our culture's ethos.

Discoveries and inventions provide us with the opportunity for new freedoms: freedom to escape limitations of the culture in which we are raised; freedom to travel around the world; freedom from poverty; freedom from diseases; freedom from previously unrecognized societal repressions; and freedom to explore and utilize our unconscious minds. But scientific progress also confines and can even enslave. As Samuel Butler warned in Erewhon over one hundred years ago, the machines we invented to serve us are becoming our masters. We are so dependent upon machines that we are forced to bend our efforts to secure the oil they need for food, to tax everyone and use our resources to build machines to parry machines poised some five thousand miles away, to train a sizable segment of our youth to serve machines that may protect us from catastrophe. And in order to live with any degree of equanimity, we must acquire the capacity to repress awareness that one political misstep can eradicate our civilization and perhaps all of mankind. It is unlikely that we shall ever follow the example of the people of Erewhon and destroy our machines; it is barely possible that we shall achieve the wisdom to control them. The consequences are farreaching, for if people cease to believe that they have a future, a worthwhile future or any future at all, for themselves and their children, they will tend to find solace, if not pleasure, in egoistic pursuits, which will in turn threaten the integrity of the society and culture we need.

In considering problems of personal freedom and societal restraints and of the rights of the individual and the integrity of the social system, I have sought to clarify the issues involved by explicating the paradox that humans can only achieve freedom through delimitation. The restriction and repression of drives and desires required to make social living possible commonly causes discomfort and dissatisfaction, as Freud discussed; but individuals cannot become persons or even survive without assimilating a culture and thereby becoming capable of living and sharing with others. It is part of the human condition for man to struggle against what he requires. In order to exist the human must assimilate a culture, which means clearing a space in chaos within which meaning and society can exist. Clearing such space requires creating boundaries within which individual desires are restrained and from which other ways of understanding existence and other ways of regulating human relationships are excluded.

People living in a society in which the culture's ways are believed to be the only proper way of life are spared considerable unhappiness and conflict, for they know the path to follow, even ifthey stray from it. As Marx contended, marked changes in societal ways can cause its members to become alienated and even to suffer from anomie; and such changes encompass more than the economic forces on which Marx focused his attention. We live in a society that purposefully seeks to produce change through scientific discovery and invention, and has succeeded to an extent that has precluded establishing a new equilibrium between the individual and his society. In contrast to the past, when children were raised to assimilate the culture's mores and instrumentalities, it has become necessary to raise children to become adaptable to rapidly changing ways-a difficult task that inevitably gives rise to uncertainty and indecision as well as to conflict with tradition.

Those charged with guiding the society are also caught up in the uncertainty and indecision and are bound to make errors in their efforts to cope with new conditions and new problems. Those leaders who seek to guide by adherence to tradition or by regression to ways that had worked in the past are almost certain to mislead. The absence of certainty and security in leaders evokes disagreement and even rebelliousness. When the leaders can no longer carry out plans and can no longer govern because of the pervasiveness of disagreement, then oppression and tyranny are likely to follow. It is a danger to which even a strongly democratic and pluralistic society can succumb if dissension becomes too chaotic.

I. Aeschylus, The Eumenides, in The Complete Greek Drama, vol. I, trans. E. D. A. Morshead, ed. W. J. Oates and E. O'Neill, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938).

2. F. Errington, Karavar (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974).

3. P. L. Newman, Knowing the Gururumba (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965).

4. B. Cowan, "The Serpent's Coils: How to Read Caroline Gordon's Later Fiction," Southern Review, vol. 16, no. 2 (April 1980).

5. K. Marx, Selected Writings, ed. D. McClellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

6. V. Lidz, "Socialization," in Explorations in General Theory in Social Science, vol. I, ed. J. J. Loubser et al. (New York: Free Press, 1976), p. 312.

7. L. Kohlberg, "Development of Moral Character and Moral Ideology," in Review of Child Development Research, ed. M. L. Hoffman and L. W. Hoffman (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1963).

8. S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).

9. Ibid., p. 101.

10. Ibid., pp. 96, 141.

II. Goethe, Faust (act I, sc. I).

12. J. Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher (Weimar: Alexander Duncker Verlag, 1922).

Freedom and its discontents

Robert Coles

The man who published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, just in time to welcome a new century, was no ambitious theorist anxious to show an academic audience how clever his mind was, even at the risk of a moment or two of excessive abstraction. Sigmund Freud was a physician, a neurologist, a psychiatrist; he drew constantly on his own experiences and those of his patients as he developed his notions of how the mind works. As a clinician he had to take notice of the unpredictability of things-the astonishing variations in the way particular patients go through one or another illness. He had to pay heed, as all doctors ought, to the defiant mystery of life. He had to settle for the constant tension, in medicine, between ideas about disease "processes" and the concreteness of a given individual's situation.

It was his genius to connect his own dreams and idle or not-so-idle fantasies, and those of his patients, to all of us. He realized that so-called neurotics are men and women not greatly different from others, but caught in one difficulty or another with emotions the rest of us also have within us and contend with, day in and day out-not to mention during the long nights when the mind has a chance to "let loose," so to speak. Freud revealed, in fact, just how much we all have in common with those who are in mental trouble for one or another reason. Lusts of various kinds, rivalries, envies and jealousies, angers and resentments-these are the stuff of everyday psychological life. To tell someone that he or she is struggling with an aspect of an Oedipus complex; is plagued by a mixture of love and hate toward someone in the family; is awakened sometimes by strange, perplexing, even frightening dreams; or is bothered in the middle of apparently important and interesting work by utterly bizarre and embarrassing daydreams is to say, yes, you are a human being, and so subject to those quite ordinary psychological events.

Put differently, the id is a universal-built into our very nature. Helpless and dependent as infants, we are fed, weaned, and taught gradually how to

manage for ourselves. Freud knew that no childhood, however protected, however graced by knowing and sensitive and compassionate parents, will be without trials, upsets, psychological defeats as well as victories. Anxiety is not something one "resolves"-banishes with a few interpretations or dispels by figuring out all there is to figure out so far as child rearing is concerned. Built into child development-built into all life-are conflicts, moments and longer of fear, melancholy, doubt, confusion.

In a sense, the psychoanalytic view of our human fate was a statement by a doctor, rendered in the language of theory, which any number of good novelists would find thoroughly congenial. Pushing matters even further, one might even wonder-as my father and mother and brother, long-time enthusiasts of the nineteenth-century novel (English, French, Russian) have often done-whether Freud said much of anything that George Eliot, Dostoyevsky, or Flaubert didn't portray. He put into a series of abstractions, embedded in marvelously direct and strong narrative prose, a statement about the mind's structure and function not unlike the observations we have been given over the centuries by talented storytellers (or indeed, by those who have written good religious essays, such as Pascal and Kierkegaard), But he had a special obligation: he had to do something, hour after hourthe doctor'sjob; do something, in fact, as a person who was listening to other persons, and who had to know in his own mind what he thought was happening in the minds of those he was "treating," and further, what he believed ought to be happening in their minds.

There is no way, really, that a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, can altogether avoid a moral and philosophical response to his or her patients. True, some of us claim to aim for a "value-free" kind of work. We alertly receive all those "transference" responses, take careful note ofthem, and do so with our "counter-transference"-that is, the inclination to engage with a patient in ways once quite habitual, a repeat of the old parent-child imbroglio. Eventually, we offer our guarded interpretations-"insights." But we are not only "objects" for "transference," or responsive through "counter-transference reactions," or utterly neutral donors of various "clarifications." We are human beings. We practice here and not there. We may strip our walls, our bookshelves; we may say little for a long time. Nevertheless, we are doctors, we are particular individuals, we are listening, not (one assumes) hectoring, seducing, assaulting-all the parental postures that prompt even children to come see us sometimes. That difference has to do with our values-an obvious moral act on our part. No wonder many of us gladly embrace "disciplined subjectivity" and talk of a "corrective emotional experience." The "new" person, the psychiatrist, provides-through his or her daily, quiet, undramatic, persistent, and consistent self-a chance for the man, woman, or child called a "patient" to get a certain kind of education: people can behave this way, and not as they have hitherto shown themselves.

But despite our proud effort at "neutrality," or our realization that "involvement" is both necessary and desirable, we are educators of sorts in those offices, and so we must have an idea of what we want to teach, of what we want to discourage, and why. Again, there is at least an implicit, and often a decidedly explicit, agenda in our heads, and it has to do, finally, with more than our view of psychiatric conflict; we have some notion in the front or back of our minds about the nature of a reasonably valuable and contented life as opposed to a wretched, wasted, hurtful one. The adjectives become slippery at this point, obviously. Who is to judge the worth of others, and on what basis? All the time, I hear individuals described in clinical conferences as "self-destructive," as "depressed," and so on, but then I remember Gauguin, Faulkner, Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence. What are we to say about them, about their wild or extravagantly irregular or alcoholic or frenzied states of mind-more, about their exceedingly troubled lives, however fortunate we are for them? Are we to wave such people aside, as of no moral and psychological (as opposed to literary and artistic) significance to us? Are they exceptions-the extremely gifted ones, the geniuses? What of some of our finest lawyers and doctors, not to mention political and business leaders? Are we to overlook their driven qualities, their broken marriages, their heavy drinking, their bouts of work, work, work, and the devil with the pain suffered by their family and friends? Those are questions which will never be answered by a yes or no, and which remind us how complex a matter it is to start sorting out the good and the bad in human affairs.

I once treated a surgeon who only consented to see me because his wife felt sad and at loose ends. The longer I talked with him the more I saw him as the problem, if not as the "sick" one. He was, I suppose, to use a common contemporary expression, a workaholic. He was in the hospital every morning by six, and he came home well after eight or nine o'clock at night. He saw his family for any length of time on Sundays only. He was, however, an eminently productive, useful member of society and also a man who described himself as happy, pleased with his work and home life, a "loving" husband, a "proud" father. His wife's story-the effect his kind of life had on her-was, of course, quite another matter. Yet even she understood the medical and ethical complexities at work. She insisted repeatedly that she was her husband's chief problem. Was she a "masochist," or were we, the doctors, in a hopeless muddle, as we tried to comprehend not only her and her husband, but ourselves-our own values and assumptions?

I kept wanting, for example, to have a long and careful talk with the husband, to get him to look a bit more closely at his life and, by God, slow down. His wife declared that she had no such wish, nor did she want any of my help in that regard. Why? Here are her reasons, and they were for me unforgettably, hauntingly, ever so provocatively stated.

I don't want to use my troubles now, my mental troubles, to blame my husband or change him. When I married him, I knew what he was like. He never tried to deceive me. He practically lived in the hospital. He wore those green scrub uniforms all day and half the night. He was a dedicated young surgeon then, and he's a dedicated older surgeon now. He saves lives every day. He doesn't see any reason to stop. I suppose a psychiatrist would say that he ought to stop. But is that for a psychiatrist to say? I know, I know; it's for me to say! Well, 111 have to see how I think on that score. But I suspect my conclusion will be that my husband is my husband, and whatever a psychiatrist thinks of him, he's a good, decent, hardworking man, and he doesn't want to talk about his problems; he doesn't see things that way-a question of "problems." He's a "strong, silent type," people would say, and I knew that when I married him, too! People I know say I have a problem alright, and it's him. I say, I have a problem alright, and it's me! Then, people say: go to a psychiatrist, and he'll tell you that it is you, and you're a "masochist." I don't know what that word means, but I know that when I find out, I'm not going to be traveling on some royal road to happiness!

Sometimes I wonder: if I had been one generation older, I'd never be thinking of trying to take our whole family into therapy! I'd not be trying to change my husband, or myself. Sure, we'd both have our low moments, but we'd accept them as part of "life." Now, my sister keeps telling me that her psychiatrist thinks there's something wrong with my marriage, with me and with my husband, with our "relationship," and that if we both don't talk about it, we're going to get into worse "trouble," and our children will "suffer." So, I find myself contemplating what happens in "therapy"-instead of writing poetry! My sister says I've been using writing as a "defense." Maybe she's right! My problem is my defense isn't better; I wish I could fashion better lines!

No one would want to deny her husband his conflicts, and her a few, too. Yet, she has, for these days, a strange view of this life: a wry acceptance of the strangeness of things; a willingness to accept suffering as part of life; a notion that the world does not revolve around her, that she ought not press herself upon others with any great insistence. She got "better" in a fairly short time. She was, though, left with one problem no one could solve for her-the dissatisfaction she felt with her own poetry. It was fairly good and had been published in serious quarterlies, but she took no great pleasure in that accomplishment. She also refused to see her particular response as a psychiatric issue. Poetry, like her husband's work habits, has to do with the vicissitudes of the intellect, the demands the mind makes on our time and energy, and even the possible pleasures this life has to offer. And if there are moments of despair, then one struggles hard and hopes to persist. Why do I mention her and her husband, both of whom confused me and several other psychiatrists who knew them? The doctor who tried to treat this woman's "depression" found her puzzling and vexing: she seemed to "cure" herself rapidly. (Needless to say, there are ex post facto psychiatric explanations to account for that-maybe to account for all too much.) I was never able to persuade the surgeon-husband to enter therapy. But he did pick up on that verb I've just used: "You keep asking whether I'm ready to 'enter'

psychotherapy. I'm reminded of the people who try to make converts-as in 'entering' the church." I was not amused.

He and his wife were trying to educate me. They were letting me know that even a couple in distress need not be a couple ready to undo a given life, through words and more words, but, much more importantly, through an entrance of sorts: one assumes an altogether new idea of what matters in this world. As that poet, that particular woman, that wife of a surgeon, more than implied in her various remarks, it really does make a difference in how you live a life if you regard obstacles, including the emotional kind, as occasions for "guidance," for "treatment," rather than as difficulties posed by the accidents, the incidents, the circumstances that, inevitably, come along no matter who we are and how well our heads have been analyzed.

The issue is not one of right against wrong. It is a question of a point of view, a matter of sensibility. That particular couple was an anachronism of sorts: upper-middle-class American liberal agnostic intellectuals, living in the second half of the twentieth century, yet seemingly uninterested, even disinterested in a psychiatric approach to life. The two of them were puritan survivors of sorts, remnant members of an earlier American culture, which placed strong emphasis on work, on obligations, and, yes, on pain and suffering. I did not choose this pair of individuals because they lent themselves to a diatribe against psychoanalysis and psychiatry, surely not the real target of their animus. Moreover, the woman was, indeed, in some psychological trouble for a while-and with her, the man. It was reasonable to press at least a consideration of psychotherapy on both of them. What interested me about them was their personal independence, their stubborn, proud insistence that they had an obligation to manage on their own, use their own particular personal resources to make do. And their shared sense that the more they poked about their minds, the more they dredged things up and put them into words, the worse it would go for them.

At the time I thought such assumptions both quaint and wrong-headed. I was blind to my own ideological pretensions, not to mention a self-serving circularity of reasoning convenient to a certain mode of interpreting both social and psychological reality. That is, I had mastered not only a technical or a scholarly language, but a polemical one; agreement with it earns one set of phrases, disagreement another. There is an arrogant, if not imperious, side to a supposed field of psychological inquiry and healing if criticisms sent its way are dismissed out of hand as evidence of "resistance," of one or another problem or neurotic difficulty, rather than as matter to be discussed on its merits. Robert J. Lifton, in his important book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Toto/ism (1963), shows certain embarrassing and sad parallels between totalitarian indoctrination and some of the ideological constructs pushed hard and long upon young psychiatrists-in-training, who learn to think very carefully, alas, before they disagree with some of the more

fundamental assumptions or proclaimed theoretical truths of the discipline they are attempting to master. Nor is smugness and a self-justifying orthodoxy a problem only for a relatively small number of professional men and women. There is a broader social issue at stake, the manner in which psychological terms have become an important part of our culture's normative language. Not rarely, those who sign up, who yield to the trend, are apt to get a preferential kind of labeling ("ego syntonic behavior"), whereas those who hesitate or refuse get on the spot quite another kind: "primitive defenses," "acting out behavior," and so on. A measure of repression is used, alas, in the old-fashioned political sense of the word: one tries to banish, push down or away, whatever crosses one.

There was a time, of course, when the psychoanalytic use of the word "repression" had nothing to do with a social and psychological ideology, and certainly was not pejorative. There was something wrong, badly wrong, Freud knew, with a person if he or she wasn't adept at repression. We are what we are, reasonably coherent and sensible and effective human beings, only if we repress adequately. If not, to be quite blunt, we are either crazy outright or well on the way to that destination-so any number of psychoanalysts would say without too many reservations. Contrary to the reputation Freud had all during his life as a writing doctor, the entire thrust of his work was appreciative of, and respectful toward, the mental requirement of control. Psychoanalysis was never meant to be an apologia for hedonism, for permissiveness. The gradual, extended nature of the clinical process is a measure of how gingerly Freud and his followers felt inclined to regard the various desires of their patients. As young psychiatrists must learn, psychotherapy and, even more, psychoanalysis are not procedures that aim at thunder and lightning, muscles flexed, cries of freedom, and a new life of radical adventurism. The patient inches along toward some different ideas about the world, but is still the person Freud felt us all by nature to be, caught between forces that are inevitably there: the body's urges and vicissitudes; the demands of the outside world; the negotiating presence of our intellects, our eyes and ears, and, not least, our emotional intelligencenamely, the sense we have that conflict is something given, that a series of compromises are the best we can ever obtain in this life.

A constant worry in analytic work is speed-too much happening too soon. Why? A danger that "repression" will yield to "expression"-and far too much of it. Such a development, confronted in hundreds of psychiatric offices all the time, has an extraordinary symbolic significance as well as specific and terribly serious consequences. That is to say, there is the jeopardy of a so-called transference psychosis, a fairly serious deterioration of behavior-what in lay language would be called frank madness. Nor is such a phenomenon a measure of progress. R. D. Laing, so influential in our recent past, has helped give insanity a bit of a halo as a path to a deeper and

more profound kind of self-knowledge. Not that the inclination to romanticize madness began with him. Names such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud remind us that social and literary and even political movements are perfectly capable of moving from intense cultural criticism to a breed of relativism that embraces psychology: the world is mad, and what is called normal is, in fact, manipulatively greedy, murderous, obscene; therefore, one says no, and does so with one's head as well as one's vote, or reading tastes, or style of dress, not to mention way of living a life. A name such as Burroughs also comes to mind: as is schizophrenia, drugs are regarded as agents of a kind of revelation, a forceful and continuing rebuke to the conformist bourgeois world, so often the announced enemy of those unapologetically deviant. Freud, in contrast, took for granted what many today would refer to as middle-class morality. True, he wanted for his patients some of the "liberation" we hear so much of these days. But it was a carefully qualified, guarded, and by no means polemical liberation that he had in mind-a little more leeway, somewhat less pain. The phrase "civilization and its discontents" was more than an appealing title for a book. Freud knew that if he was to be a doctor, a writer, a thoughtful and caring family man, a responsible member of a particular society, he would have to experience some of the "discontent" that goes with curbing various appetites, restricting the domain of the id. It is one ofthose mythological constructs he gave us not in order to indulge himself in a series of overwrought generalizations, if not reifications, but as a means of helping us step back from ourselves enough to understand some of the day-to-day victories and defeats we continually experience as we go about trying to live with each other in homes, in neighborhoods, in communities large and small. The universality of neurosis for him was a statement in the tradition of the Western intellectual and moral tradition: one has an animal side, but one is possessed of an inquiring, observing mind, blessed fatefully with a capacity for language, and able to exert itself in all sorts of important, rational, instructive ways-as in writing books such as Civilization and Its Discontents or The Interpretation of Dreams, not to mention doing the clinical work that preceded them and enabled them to appear.

Furthermore, we have consciences. At no point did Freud think of banishing them. The superego may have borne down hard on some of his patients, but it did on him, too. He was brilliant, capable of perceptions, of Rimbaud's "illuminations," but he was a constant worker and he wrote steadily, over the days, months, years-often in the evenings, like another writing doctor, William Carlos Williams, after a full roster of patients had been seen. To live such a life requires control, discipline, a sense of orderliness, a willingness to heed the clock, a capacity to organize oneself fairly tightly and methodically. What has happened to us that individuals such as Dr. Freud and Dr. Williams could unselfconsciously respond to such imper-

atives of civilization, whereas all too many of us throw around labels such as "uptight" or "obsessive-compulsive" (or worse) upon those trying to manage a halfway useful and productive life, one that responds to the requirements of others, be they patients or readers?

It is something of an irony-and a major historical development in the West-that psychoanalysis has been spuriously and romantically used (by Laing and others) to discredit hardworking, law-abiding men and women on the one hand and to proclaim as prophets, savants, the "liberated," those who experience hallucinations and delusions, those who have made (for one reason or another) a mental break with the concrete realities of psychological life, as experienced by millions and millions of others, or those who through drugs or through their life-styles live at insistent variance with the ways of life of the large majority of their fellow citizens. The issue, one ought to be very clear, is not narrow-mindedness, intolerance, or denial of libertyspeaking of "repression." The issue-in the writing of Laing or Burroughs, for example-is celebration, and a constant, caustic assault on social constraint as the enemy, as the true madness. The issue is losing a perspective on what, precisely, someone such as Sigmund Freud was trying to do-extend the domain of rationality a bit further, aware of the press of the irrational upon us all. For Freud both social and personal constraints were obvious aspects of ordinary, civilized life. We ask and are asked to limit ourselves in various respects, or we run amok.

Schizophrenia, Laing notwithstanding, is the result (for whatever reason, be it biology or prior emotional experience) of a collapse of "repression," a deterioration of terribly necessary restraint, that of the ego. Anyone who has worked with schizophrenics knows the pain, the terrible agony they go through, as they struggle long and hard with the psychologically demonic: spells of confusion, extravagant suspicion, incomprehensible fears, and an anxiety so commanding and paralyzing as to prompt, often enough, a mute, trembling, withdrawal from anyone and everyone. Nor are such "moments" (they can, alas, be virtually lifelong) a "stage" on life's way; they amount to a descent, a hellish experience indeed for those afflicted. In working with schizophrenics or drug addicts I have met bright and honorable people, but also decidedly unpleasant and mean-spirited and thoroughly dishonorable people, in sum, the range of humanity one finds on this earth, with this proviso: that there is plenty of quite special apprehension and mental paralysis to be observed. I could provide all too much testimony to that effect-every psychiatrist'S daily accumulation of stories reminds us of what a wonderful gift a reasonably intact ("repressed'') mental life is. To extoll the disintegration of that life is to be cruelly thoughtless, even frivolous with the suffering of others-the hurt and sadness they live out every day. To become out of one's own experience a spokesperson for others, similarly embattled, is understandable. To offer the world information, drawn from one's clinical

work, is to do us all a service. But R. D. Laing does not explain schizophrenia; he virtually advocates it. Why ought the rest of us eagerly, gullibly rush to embrace the argument-and it is by no means one person's-that a mind at the mercy of madness, of heroin, that the anguish of one or another "slough of despond" is a manifestation of transcendence? With God dead and the flag a joke for so many of the West's haute bourgeoisie, the mind's various twists and turns seem to be our last objects of devotion.

Among our "liberated" one finds-after the rush of new words and phrases, after the demonstration of this or that collection of interests, habits, involvements-what? Have we witnessed in these recent years-after all the widely proclaimed changes in the sexual customs of some of us, in the educational techniques of some schools, in the interpersonal lives of some men and women-a number of New Jerusalems? Have our communes, our Esalens, our open classrooms, our Laingian halfway houses, our endless proliferation of encounter groups, with the dreary jargon-riddled self-consciousness they have foisted on us, spared us the risks and hazards of our humanity? Have they eased the ironies,. ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions of nature and desire and motive to which each of us is heir: the vulnerability and susceptibility to fate, to circumstance, to luck, to accidents, to countless unpredictable incidents-in short, to this life's puzzling character, to the sometimes good and sometimes bad times, personal as well as social and economic, we all experience?

To his great credit, and despite considerable temptation to do otherwisethe almost desperate desire of a hungry, secular world for answers, at any cost, for authoritative solutions to anything and everything-Freud remained to the end of a long life tentative, stoic, little inclined to issue sweeping promissory notes to the constantly increasing audience that attended his writings, his new mode of psychological inquiry. He never wanted to tear down the edifice of Western civilization (the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance) to which he was truly devoted. He took for granted the right, the obligation of a society to exert a wide range ofdemands on its individual members. And he also took for granted, one has to keep stressing, conscience, a definite and persisting notion of right and wrong. But what if children are not brought up to hear no, to learn that this or that is not right, is not to be done-and, by God, will not be done? What if they are brought up by parents who are interested in trying anything they happen to want to try; by parents who say that what is "right" is what "feels good"; by parents who have no evident interest in teaching restraint, limitation-yes, the virtues of repression?

Arguably, try as some parents (incredibly) do to become psychologically cool, to become morally neutral, to throw things back at their children, as if a family is a group meeting (what do you think?); and try as some parents do to let their children "express" themselves, say what comes to their mind, do

as they please, experiment all they will, it is harder for many of them to put such an attitude into actual everyday practice. I remember (when working in New Mexico with Indian and Chicano parents and the teachers who taught their children) visiting a commune located near a Pueblo reservation and hearing a mother confess that she sometimes couldn't stop herself from violating her rule of never speaking harshly to her daughter. Through such small failures of intention a child's psychological future may well be secured. Craziness happens when a mind is overwhelmed by what the rest of us perceive in dreams, in passing thoughts or reveries, in those free associations we offer psychiatrists. Carl Binger, a psychoanalyst-teacher of mine, said this in a staff conference at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1956:

As children we desperately need discipline-given with conviction. As adults, we need from ourselves and one another the very same thing. What Bruno Bettelheim meant when he said "love is not enough" would go like this: it isn't "love" at all to fail to teach children the importance of self-control in the sense Freud meant it. Our defenses are our bulwark against psychological chaos. Repression works in the service of the ego. True, in psychoanalysis, we struggle for a lifting of repression-but, of course, only a selective one. When I hear young psychiatrists trying to uncover, uncover, I say stop. In a way we are our defenses; they provide exactly what the word implies. an obstacle to "the call of the wild" in us.

He was saying something I hope never to forget-that it is enough if we remember what matters, what is useful and sensible and helpful to the world, and that it is good we've been taught to make choices, to have priorities, to weigh things, and, yes, to repress: stop ourselves, take hold of our appetites, keep our tongues, put a leash on our petulant, mean-spirited, wildly lustful side. Freud's repression gives us the freedom to become particular, reflective, competent people. To lose that repressive aspect of ourselves is not to become liberated, but to be at the mercy of drives given undeterred authority-to be a psychological slave. We have recently in this country been doing away with (enacting laws to forbid) the last vestiges of a former (racial) slavery. Are there other forms of indenture now at hand, people liberated to the point of being possessed, defenseless because so much has been allowed, so little has been disallowed? Discrimination need not be a pejorative word. It may even be what enables us to "liberate" ourselves enough to know what is right, and live true to it most of the time.

Contemporary American liberalism

Leonard Krieger

There can be little doubt that liberalism is in trouble. On the level of high culture, recent titles signal the demise or at least the definite decay of the liberal impulse-whether it is Philip Abbott's Furious Fancies (1980), to which he has affixed the subtitle American Political Thought in the Postliberal Era (to allay all doubts about the subject matter), or Theodore J. Lowi's The End ofLiberalism (1969), or Robert Paul Wolff's The Poverty of Liberalism (1968), or even R. Alan Lawson's monograph The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930-1941. Lawson's preface provides the simplest and best definition of contemporary generic Western liberalism, which is that it is distinguished by its open-mindedness without resort to "inflexible dogma" and by its consequent "bias toward progressive reform." In addition, he notes its current (1971) "malaise."

In popular or mass culture, signs of liberalism's decay are evident in the programs of the political parties and the unmistakable lessons of the November 1980 electoral returns. According to these analyses, liberalism has always been incurably individualistic-nay, egoistic=-and has become indecisive and inefficient in its social programs. On the level of high culture, we know at least what liberalism now is; on the level of popular or mass culture, we are not so sure, except that we know we do not like it. Liberalism is blamed for all the past ills of the welfare system as well as the prospective ills of the expensive national health plan to be modeled on Great Britain's.

The problem in all this is that we do not know whether liberalism has been defeated by its age-old enemies, conservatism and socialism (the latter is itself in trouble now), or whether it lives on and has entered a new stage. Here is the problem to which this essay is addressed: have the liberals been defeated or have they simply outlived their most recent stage? That is the question, and current ideas on freedom by liberals furnish the materials for the answer.

Two distinctions already implied in our prefatory discussion of the liberal

crisis should be made explicit. These are the distinctions between high and low culture and between America and Europe. The distinction between high and low culture-or, to use the preferred jargon of the times, between elitist and popular or mass culture-has been judged to have disappeared before the equalization of all culture. The distinction between the United States and Europe has become operationally rigid, with the contemporary analysis of American democracy as sui generis. Actually, however,liberalism cannot be understood unless the relationship between high and low culture is seen as convergent but not yet converged, and the relations between Europe and America are seen, analogously, as unified in general and as distinct in particular.

The convergence of elitist and popular culture has occurred since the beginning of social and political democratization at the start of our own century. Both the elitist and the popular sides of the culture have converged, from the elitist side in the emphasis that the arts were for everybody and from the popular side in the equalization of culture through the union of the New Left and the counterculture during the 1960s and in the cultural pretensions of the media. And yet the convergence is not complete. Elitist culture is represented by academicians who are still not read by the general literate public, whereas popular culture is represented by those who read the general periodicals and nonfictional best-sellers, and who vote. The European and American bond is represented by an Atlantic culture and society that knows only a generic Western civilization, yet within this common civilization the American-or, more precisely, the United States's-component is one that is distinguished by its greater demand for individual liberty and its older institutionalization of mass consent (i.e., of democracy) as its guarantee. About expressions of liberalism we therefore must always ask: on what level and by whom were they said?

On both levels generic liberalism has gone through two distinct stages, and the question now is whether we have entered a third. The term "liberalism" was of early nineteenth-century European vintage, but as an idea it goes back much further, at least to John Locke and probably to the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. Whether in its original seventeenthcentury dress of individual natural rights or in its eighteenth and early nineteenth-century appearance as utilitarianism, the early phase celebrated individualism in its laissez-faire form, that is, the inviolability of the individual and his property guaranteed by the so-called night-watchman state. If the patron saint of the individualist natural-rights school was John Locke, then the intellectual authority for the individualistic utilitarian dogma was Jeremy Bentham. In either case let us call this the classical phase of liberalism, contrasting it with the modern, second phase, and let us agree that the pre-Lockean phase of natural rights, which pertained to man as a member of a social group, was not liberalism at all and that the ancient Greek and

Roman, and the medieval ideas of natural rights, which Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt defined as the classical school, do not fit into the liberal scheme of development.

According to this scheme, Locke at the end of the seventeenth century (and the Levellers in the English Civil War during the middle of the same century) argued for the right of the single family head in the state of nature to participate in a political society by his individual consent and to enjoy his natural rights independently of the government. The fundamental tenet that constituted the basis of liberalism during its first phase was that individuals concluded a political contract with their fellows and established a fiduciary arrangement with their government for the very limited purposes of securing life and property. All else was left to the individual for his own discretionary action. Governments that did more had to be torn down until they approximated those that did less. From this point of view, there was no distinction between revolutionary liberals who insisted on changing the structure of governments to allow for a representation that would guarantee the lesser functions of the state, and the reformist liberals who simply desired a change of governmental policy in the direction of laissez-faire. Nor was there an essential distinction between the natural-rights school and early utilitarianism since the early utilitarians also exalted the role of the individual, arguing that the natural or artificial harmony of individual and social interests led from the individual to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which was thus deemed to be composed by its constituent individual happinesses and to count for no more than the sum of individual interests. Moreover, this utilitarian doctrine acquired an international flavor when it was taken up by the French and Scottish utilitarians during the eighteenth century.

The radical French dimension of individualistic utilitarianism obviously internationalized the movement and performed three other functions for liberalism as well: first, it forged a link between the utilitarian and the natural-rights schools by insisting that individuals had a right, guaranteed by nature, to have their individual pleasures respected by others; second, the connection between the French intellectuals and the French revolution led to the convergence of the elitist and popular cultures of liberalism; and, finally, the French merger with utilitarianism confirmed the development of the natural-rights school toward democracy. In this respect Bentham's principle that every individual counted as one man and none more than one led to his endorsement of equal or democratic consent. The political equality of democracy thus announced by the father of utilitarianism was buttressed in France when the revolutionaries adopted such natural-rights theorists as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The classical school of laissez-faire liberalism turned into the modern school of social liberalism on both elitist and popular levels and in both

Europe and America around the tum of our century. Anticipated by the social liberalism of the exiled politician Giuseppe Mazzini and the theorist John Stuart Mill in Great Britain; pioneered by the philosopher Charles Renouvier and associated, in the movement toward "solidarity," with the politician Leon Bourgeois in France; characterized as "the new liberalism" in Germany where it was connected with the scholars Max Weber, Hugo Preuss, and Lujo Brentano as well as with intellectual politicians like Friedrich Naumann; entitled contemporaneously "the new freedom" in America where it was joined to the name of the scholarly president, Woodrow Wilson: this pan-Western movement toward social liberalism was led by the English, who spawned theorists like Leonard Hobhouse and practical politicians like David Lloyd-George, and who were entirely conscious of the shift from the aversion to the endorsement of governmental intervention in the economy on behalf of the individual.

The shift from laissez-faire to social liberalism in Britain, Europe's leader in the matter of liberal political culture, made abundantly clear what was covert in other parts of the continent, that the difference in politics between an elitist and a popular liberalism was a difference of time alone and that what was accepted by the cultural elite today was acceptable by the masses tomorrow. The so-called second industrial revolution, which expanded the size of enterprises and witnessed the social consequences of economic and political collectivization in the form of new, mass organizations of humanity, had just struck, making for the convergence ofelitist and popular culture. In this apparently stable period around 1900, theorists justified the position of liberalism as intermediate between old-fashioned authoritarianism and the new challenge of a popular socialism. The elitist liberals argued (and ultimately the representatives of the popular culture did also) for the appropriateness of the blend of government intervention on behalf of the society and the continued defense of private property on behalf of the individual.

In the United States, conformity to the general trend of liberal development existed together with a departure from the European pattern in details. The Progressive movement expressed this relationship with Europe precisely, for it associated individual freedom with social liberalism while it stressed distinctively both trustbusting and the democratic political concomitant of liberalism in a way that merged elitist and popular liberalism in prewar America. The European liberal parties, in contrast, were not trustbusters, and they were reluctant in their acceptance of political democracy. The American nativist tradition resulted in a consensus upon the social and political middle way that was associated with liberalism. Liberalism in America also featured a conflict between radicals and moderates on which path to follow toward this middle way. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson exemplified the consensus on the popular level of presidential politics, while Herbert Croly and John Dewey exemplified the conflict on the

elitist level. From this generic point of view, the earlier stress on the donothing state, which was classified as a species of liberalism in Europe-an anachronistic species. it is true-was viewed in this country as a species of conservatism.

In brief, the constriction of the American political spectrum to two kinds of liberalism branded the anachronistic reference to the earlier, or egoistic, stage of liberalism with the conservative political label, while the liberal label was limited to the later, or social, stage of liberal doctrine. The cultural elite, moreover, aped this division. Thus Andrew Mellon and his Gospel of Wealth represented the same species of conservatism on the popular level as William Graham Sumner did on the level of elitist culture. Moreover, whereas the British leadership of the liberal cause in Europe caused the triumph of the utilitarian strand of liberalism as the movement most congenial to the British, in America the natural-rights tradition, so strongly represented in the Declaration of Independence, continued to be represented, through the Supreme Court, on the authoritative popular level of American culture. Even the limits on liberalism were foreshadowed in both Europe and America. In Europe the utilitarian John Stuart Mill espoused measures to check the dangers from the tyranny of the majority in 1859, whereas in America the same warning was pioneered by James Madison on the basis of the founding fathers' traditional distrust of equality and democracy. Here it was broadcast by the French observer of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville, as early as 1835. According to some historians, the distinctive American emphasis on early political democracy and on the individual liberty of trustbusting was the product of typical American conditions: the American tendency toward practicality, the absence of the social extremes of aristocracy and proletariat in the American social structure, and the constitutional arrangement of federalism whereby the national power and state powers were so divided that at least into our own century the individual was the beneficiary of this division.

The early phase of social liberalism was accompanied by the vogue of ideological issues, a vogue confirmed by the drift of the liberal intellectual elite in Europe to the extremes in the period between the two world wars. At that time intellectuals were choosing between conservatism and socialism, while liberalism remained a middle position in the definite minority. Members of both the extreme right, like Giovanni Gentile, and the extreme left, like Bertolt Brecht, justified their positions in the name of democracy and liberty, declaring that such extreme movements were appropriate to the values of freedom in an industrial age. During this long period which lasted through the post-World War II era ofthe forties, liberalism in Europe began to lose its mass support, as it had already lost its elitist support, and the current problem of the liberal dispensation-whether it was dying of its own success or of its failures-was adumbrated on the popular, party level.

The difference in emphasis between American and European liberalism was especially clear on the popular level, for between the world wars liberal political parties in Europe, including England, lost their following and therefore their power, whereas in the United States both major parties continued to lay claim to the liberal heritage. In Europe the liberal parties lost their mission to the socialists, who now defended personal and civil liberties. For the socialists there was a confrontation, which the European liberals never recognized, between the economic freedom associated with private property, on the one side, and intellectual freedom, including the right to communicate as well as to think freely, on the other. In Britain, the Labour Party assumed the mantle of the prewar Liberals. On the continent, analogously, socialist and social democratic parties won the allegiance of most voters. The middle classes remained the chief supporters of the liberal parties, which became also-rans to the conservatives when they did not disappear entirely. All Europeans now spoke of the crisis of the democratic state, whose hallmarks were the rise of totalitarian regimes of the right and left and their infiltration of the native elites. For every Alain or Benda or Thomas Mann there were a dozen Laskis, Bretons, Aragons, Benns, and Brechts, who pioneered the move to the extremes in Europe.

The publicistic branch of European parties sought to explain the popular demise of liberalism. Whether it was Hubert Phillips or Sir Henry Slesser in Britain, Alain (Emile Chartier) in France, or Thomas Mann in Germany, popular spokesmen of liberal democracy defended the threatened heritage of individual freedom, while their more elitist confreres like Harold Laski in Britain, Andre Gide and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France, Friedrich Meinecke and Martin Heidegger in Germany, Benedetto Croce and Gaetano Mosca in Italy-professors, philosophers, and representatives of an avantgarde that was by definition beyond the popular taste-felt the pull of extreme positions. The publicists of liberty, who registered its popular demise, accepted the possibility that liberalism was dying of its own success-that is, of the general acceptance of its libertarian ideals by those in nominal and partisan opposition to it-but the elitists recognized the possibility that the community had replaced the individual as the center of concern, and that communitarian ideologies replaced liberalism as the focus of men's loyalties.

In the United States during the interwar period, not only were the parties fighting for the mantle of liberalism, but the New Deal was capturing the bulk of men's theoretical and popular loyalties for the existing liberal system. The recent reinterpretation of Herbert Hoover's role in meeting the Great Depression and the revisionist condemnation can both be explained by the liberal consensus. The Republicans have sought to combine a social tinge with their laissez-faire emphasis, while the New Dealers led by Franklin D. Roosevelt have sought to retain the initial liberal doctrine of private

property while emphasizing the social meaning of contemporary liberalism. The famed Rooseveltian practicality thus had its roots both in the generally undogmatic cast of the liberal traditions and in the particular insight into the collective requirements of the situation that favored a change in American liberalism toward social values. From this point of view, Truman's Fair Deal, Johnson's Great Society, and Senator Edward Kennedy's current social emphasis have all been attempts to apply the insights of the New Deal to the present situation. To this extent they are anachronisms, and only the elder Kennedys had a glimpse of something new in the dawning that might call for a thorough reorientation of policy by those in the liberal tradition, including now in that tradition its later social emphasis. Whether the popular level of American culture is identified with the attitudes of the political parties and with the election returns, or with the daily and periodical press and its typical readers, there is little doubt that liberalism is in trouble on this level in both its individual and the social stages. The latest election returns show a nonliberal distrust of the political process. The defeat of liberals on the senatorial and presidential levels has taken place in an atmosphere that has identified individual rights with a farreaching privatization and a suspicion of governmental action. This attitude spells the end of social liberalism as a consensual stage of American politics. The public press, meanwhile, expresses a general mistrust of liberalism. There is, then, in America both a distinction between the popular and the elitist cultures and a subdistinction within the popular culture. On the popular level, the party that speaks for the democratic masses is distinct from the group that speaks for the mass readership of the educated middle class. In both subtypes there is a distrust of liberalism. For our purpose, elitist culture is represented today by the professors in our colleges, a distinct social group whose constituents are identifiable as individuals. This elitist culture extends rather than opposes the popular culture in America, whichever of the subtypes of popular culture is espoused. Thus, several of the journalists of the popular culture also write the books and inhabit the academic positions that make them elitist. The liberal tradition, although especially influential upon American intellectuals, who have always been sensitive to liberalism as the conjuncture of the European ideas upon which they battened and the American experience, which they shared, has also been the cornerstone of the American popular culture. Both the consensus and the traditions that make up the American character have been built upon this tradition. Since the elitist exponents of the high culture take their bearings from the democratic level of the mass culture, their political point of view is not essentially different from that of the masses. Daniel Bell is a case in point. The elitist position articulates the principle, where the masses' position is inchoate, but the essential line of division between liberal and illiberal postures goes through the middle of the popular or mass culture in

both its subtypes, rather than between mass culture and high culture in America.

The liberal sector of the popular or mass culture is now the sector composed of women and minorities, but the majoritarian sector of the mass culture falls entirely outside the liberal dispensation. Proof of this is evident not only in the small vote garnered by liberals in contrast to the massive number of votes piled up by those liberal anathemas, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but in the principled opposition of the majority and its publicistic representatives to favored liberal positions such as the legal rights of the accused and the welfare system for the poor.

Among the representatives of the high culture who formally argue the liberal side of the problems that come from the liberal past of the United States are three professors of philosophy, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Robert Paul Wolff, and three professors of political science, Robert Dahl, Theodore Lowi, and Philip Abbott. Abbott, who analyzes this whole group, inter alia, calls them "post-liberals" because of their concern only with the liberal tradition of America. But since they all seek to elaborate upon a liberal position, we can best call them liberal theorists, and from their theories try to judge their opinion about the contemporary state of liberalism.

Rawls, whose Theory of Justice is a classic statement, made in 1971, of a position that he had been developing since 1958, presents a contemporary liberal theory. Logically enough, it is an extension of the latest, communitarian stage of liberalism. Although the Theory ofJustice would have been more accurately entitled "a theory of social justice," Rawls has a dual preoccupation: to argue the natural-rights position of the individual against utilitarianism and to integrate the liberty with the equality of individuals. He affirms the indefeasible rights of the individual, and identifies the liberty of individuals with the equality of individuals. Rawls's position may be defined as the state of nature plus his principle of fairjustice. Because of the principle of fair justice, individuals may opt out of any social contract. Like most hypothetical situations, this state of nature is at least as valid as situations that are actual. His new principle grounds "equal liberty" in "justice as fairness." While he maintains that this principle validates the contract theory, which gives "a certain priority, if not absolute weight," to the claims of each member of the society to liberty over the desirability of increasing social welfare, he also maintains that this principle corrects the original inequality of men by nature, by making for a "social cooperation" that guarantees a satisfactory share of benefits to the least advantaged member of the community. He thus merges the principle of fair equality of opportunity with the difference principle, which "expresses its fundamental meaning from the standpoint of social justice." Refusing to choose between the priority that he vouchsafes to individual liberty and the communal goal of

this theoretical reform, "the social union of social unions," Rawls concludes that for men to see justice as fairness-that is, for men to proceed from the individual to the social character ofjustice-is to see our place in society sub specie aeternitatis, to regard the human situation not only from all social but from all temporal points of view. The "perspective of eternity" is to "bring together in one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint." And thus Rawlsjustifies individualism while arguing for social welfare on a nonutilitarian (i.e., noncollective) basis.

It was precisely this argument, and with it the entire later stage of liberalism, that Robert Nozick, Rawls's colleague in the Harvard philosophy department, has rejected. Nozick has affirmed, instead, the natural rights of individuals and morally justified only "the minimal state," or "the nightwatchman state," which legitimates the protection of the individual's rights against violation by another through a monopoly of coercive power and by enforcing protection upon individuals who do not opt for it. Starting frankly from a Lockean state of nature, Nozick postulates that the right to defend oneself against the aggression of another is a right that is different in kind from the social rights in the community that disadvantaged individuals claim, and he therefore rejects Rawls's principle of fair justice as well as utilitarianism in its collective formulation. Nozick is very amiable to Rawls, not only because Rawls is a colleague and because they both oppose utilitarianism-which for both takes the characteristic form of seeking the greatest good of the greatest number without assigning these social benefits to the inviolable rights of individuals-but mainly because they share a belief in individual rights and take off in different directions only on the basis of them. Thus, Nozick's argument amounts to a reaffirmation of the indefeasible right of separate individuals to enter into whatever arrangements they wish, including their option to accept or reject the protection of their rights by the coercive sanctions of the minimal state.

Nozick's argument brings him close, as he ruefully recognizes, to the libertarians, who were an elitist intellectual group (as they still are) before they were a popular political party. In short, they were part of the elite culture even prior to their membership in the popular or mass level of the culture. In persons like Milton Friedman they are united on both levels. To be sure, even though the elitist level of libertarianism antedated the emphases and the program of the party on the popular or mass level, elitist and popular libertarianism now stand for similar things. On the elitist level, which is connected with the name of Murray Rothbard, the assumptions beyond the popular program of the Libertarian Party are explicated. The libertarians' general reputation for conservatism has to do with their rejection of the latest stage of liberalism, and their very name affirms the individual liberty that is their starting point. The libertarians, in their elitist

and undoubtedly at least some of their popular supporters, divide into two camps. One is similar to the original liberal position, while the other is virtually indistinguishable from individualistic anarchism, insofar as they have doubts about the protective coercion associated with the first liberals. Thus some libertarians affirm the minimal or night-watchman state, whereas others assert the protective function associated with the original liberal state and deny any further functions to it. The latter group is associated with the later stage of liberalism.

This brand of anarchism, linked to libertarianism, is not to be confused with the anarchism popularly associated with the youth movement of the 1960s. Sixties anarchism is connected in the popular culture with the New Left. Although the association of the New Left with the counterculture has made it one of the chief agents of the convergence of high and mass culture, there has not been an absolute congruence, as the role of the older generation in the popular culture since the sixties makes clear. Robert Paul Wolff, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has written an essay, "In Defence of Anarchism," that clarifies some of the assumptions of the New Left in America and that may stand as its representative in the high or elite culture.

If this radical anarchism shares with one kind of libertarianism the emphasis on the voluntary principle as opposed to political coercion, the individualist and collective brands of anarchism differ in their conceptions of the identity of the subject who is to volunteer in economic, social, and cultural enterprises without any political coercion. For the libertarians and the individualistic anarchists, the individual is at the center of their concern, and organization of any kind is a quality of a horrendous society. The radical anarchists are concerned with the community. For them, not only is the freedom of the individual illusory because of capitalistic pressures, but the community is positively stressed as the appropriate forum for the individual in the postindustrial stage of social development. In other words, whereas both brands of anarchism highlight the individual and his liberty, foci that were equally highlighted in both stages of liberalism, and whereas both do without the guarantee of the legal security of individual rights, which was an essential part of the distinctive liberal emphasis in both stages of its development, anarchism of the libertarian stamp comes out of the first stage of liberalism, while the radical anarchism associated with the mass movement of the New Left and the elite doctrines of Robert Paul Wolff tends to take off from the latest stage of liberalism.

The combination of welfare liberalism and its continued emphasis on the legal security of private property has led in the United States to the condemnation of the traditional liberal focus on pluralism as an appropriate form of what Theodore Lowi has called "interest-group liberalism," with its inevitable effect of corrupting the bureaucracy and the society as well. The

degeneration of liberalism has led political scientists like Lowi, Dahl, and Abbott to propose solutions that would save both the individual and the community. According to Abbott, who has classified the "post-liberal" attempts of his colleagues and of the philosophers as so many efforts to eliminate "appetitive individualism," which he sees as the most obvious characteristic of generic liberal society, both Lowi and Dahl are trying to reform the pluralism that has accompanied the liberal vision of society in America. Lowi does it by proposing reliance on dynamic social movements instead of static social institutions as the basis for emphasizing the rule of the law in a liberated society. Dahl's approach is to propose reliance on consensual associations. Abbott himself proposes the model of friendship as the cement of a post-liberal society.

The answer to our initial question, then, is that liberalism, with its reliance upon the autonomous individual, is the distinguishing characteristic of Western society, and that it has entered upon a new, third period of its existence, having outlived its two earlier stages in which it enthroned the night-watchman state in the service of the egoistic individual and then exalted the welfare state in the service of the poorer or the more disadvantaged individuals in the society. The signal for this graduation to a new stage has been the popular defeat of liberalism by its long-time opponents, conservatism and socialism. The anachronism that has befallen the most obvious forms of liberalism has been signaled on both cultural levels in the United States. On the level of mass culture it has been marked by the liberal defeat in the recent elections, and by analogous articles in the Sunday New York Times and other similar periodicals-and by the vogue of privatization. On the level of elite culture it has been indicated by criticism of liberal society both for its selfishness and for its compromise mentality, and by the onset of the self-proclaimed post-liberal era. The two cultural levels are related in that the turn in the popular level is a change that the elite level takes into account.

Thus the proposals for the new stage of liberalism come, as they have always come, from the elite sector of the culture. These proposals, geared to a situation in which, among other things, the populace denies the appropriateness of the second stage of traditional liberalism, are of two kinds. First, there are attempts, like those of Nozick, Rawls, and the libertarians, to recapture the earlier stages of liberalism by founding them on novel principles-to wit, on the principle of individual sovereignty taken seriously, and on the principle of social justice. Second, there are the attempts, represented by those of Lowi, Dahl, Wolff, and Abbott, to make the democratic principles of consent and voluntary community replace the stress upon "contestation" and "liberalization," to use Dahl's terminology, as the basis of a persistent individualism. Liberalism was associated with democracy by radicals during the nineteenth century and by every man since around 1900.

When reference is now made to liberal states or to democracies, it is liberal democracy that is meant. The term "liberal" in this commonplace expression refers to the policy of the state-whatever it mayor may not do in terms of the individuals whom it serves. The term "democracy" refers to the age-old form of the state. In traditional liberal parlance the "democratic state" is a state based upon consent, and the American liberal version of this generic liberal position is the democratic state that admits a certain degree of political pluralism to satisfy man's multiple requirements and to avoid tyranny of the majority. Political scientists-and some philosophers-now use the analysis of democratic principle as the means to arrive at a new stage of liberalism. It was not by chance that Lowi called his proposal of the rule of law for the new salvation of a decaying liberalism "juridical democracy." In any case, the assumption is that liberalism in its wonted forms may be dead, but the individualism that is the common denominator of its various stages and that has continued to be its general inspiration lives on and should live on in the postindustrial era. By common consent these beliefs make up the distinguishing features of all stages of Western culture.

Power, repression, progress: Foucault, Lukes, and the Frankfurt School

David Couzens Hoy

Power always has been and probably always will be contested. But it is less certain that the concept of power will always be contested by social scientists and philosophers. Although social philosophers may be fated to perpetual quarrelling, social scientists should be able either to define univocally central theoretical concepts like power or dismiss such concepts if they continue to elude quantifiable refinement. I Power appears to be a concept that if not understood, would also make it impossible to understand what a society is. Conflicting political views of what society is and ought to be could not even be compared and disputed if they involved different and incommensurable understandings of the meaning of central terms like society and power. However, debates in current social theory about what social forms of power are legitimate appear to involve different conceptions of what legitimation and power mean. The problematic character of these concepts has been increased by Michel Foucault's recent efforts to rethink the concept of power, especially in terms of its connection with the social forms that knowledge takes. In this paper I situate Foucault's conception of "power/ knowledge" (pouvoir/savoir) in relation to other attempts to clarify the nature of power, particularly by comparing it with the procedure of "ideology criticism" as developed by the Frankfurt School and more recently by the Oxford social theorist, Steven Lukes. I will show that although Foucault's notion of power is nontraditional, it is not incommensurable with more traditional social theory (of both the Marxian and liberal types). Seeing power from another perspective and modifying the concept accordingly allows Foucault to reassess our understanding of power, repression, and progress in modern society.

1 Power

If social scientific models use different conceptions of power, their findings are likely to diverge and there may be no neutral way to assess which model is correct. In Power: A Radical View Steven Lukes attempts to show that the

o 1981 by David Couzens Hoy. 43

social sciences are in fact relativistic in this respect, and to identify the conflicting models of power currently in use. He assumes that Talcott Parsons was justified in lamenting that "unfortunately the concept of power is not a settled one in the social sciences.'? In order to evaluate the debate between Parsons and C. Wright Mills, the elite theorist, about the question, "which kind of conception of power offers a superior basis for theorizing about American society?"3 Lukes argues that power is a concept that is "ineradically value-dependent" and "essentially contested."4 To say that basic scientific concepts are essentially contested is to say, with the philosopher W. B. Gallie, that they "inevitably involve endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users.t" As Lukes states (more strongly), their very definition and any given use are "inextricably tied to a given set of (probably unacknowledged) value-assumptions which predetermine the range of [their] empirical application."!

If Lukes were right about the use of the concept of power in the social sciences, his point would illustrate the general thesis of other philosophers of science who believe the sciences do not conform to the traditional empiricist conception of scientific method. Mary Hesse is one of these, and she maintains that theory choice in the social sciences is even more relativistic than in the natural sciences, since the principles used to select social theories would be guided by a variety of values. Unlike a natural scientist's explanation, which relies on the pragmatic criterion of predictive success, a social scientist's evaluation of the data in terms of a commitment to a social theory would be more like taking a political stand.'

Lukes similarly holds that to engage in disputes about social scientific concepts like power "is itself to engage in politics."! It is not surprising, then, that he labels his own model for the study of power "a radical view." Lukes does not mention the perhaps too obvious fact that his model differs from the other two models he identifies by incorporating what the Frankfurt School came to call "ideology criticism." The distinguishing feature of the radical view of power is that it insists on a distinction between subjective and real interests, as well as a related difference between observable (whether overt or covert) and latent conflicts of interests. Observable conflicts would be acknowledged by those involved in the conflict, but latent ones would not be readily admitted due to ideological distortion of the agents'perception of their real self-interest.

To explain how this difference arises in the study of power, we must begin with a definition of power. To Lukes, power is essentially "power over," which is to say that power is exercised by A over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B's interests. The social scientific question is, then, how to study the exercise of power-over when so defined. The first model Lukes identifies relies on an obvious answer: identify a conflict of interest between A and B, and study the decision-making process involved in A's success in

getting B to do something B would not do otherwise. However, a second model recognizes that power is exercised, not only in making a decision that goes against B, but in the "nondecision" or "nonevent" that keeps the questions that are in B's interests, but not in A's, from even arising. So conflicts of interest can be not only overt but covert, and both can be studied.

These two models are overly "behaviorist" from Lukes's point of view insofar as they restrict their observations to actual behavior and conscious decisions. More significantly, they assume that B's interests are what B takes them to be. Lukes believes the behaviorist models are inevitably inadequate because, although "A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, he also exercises power over him by influencing, shaping or determining his very wants. "9

Lukes's view is thus similar to the Frankfurt School's notion of domination, since Critical Theory also assumes that what B's interests really are may be different from what B consciously takes them to be. The concept of ideology relies on the assumption that if socially oppressive conditions had not forced B to have certain interests, B would see that its real interests were different from the interests it appears to have as a result of oppression. The effects of power are often repressed: both the dominating group and the dominated may be unconscious of the exercise of power. Therefore, the study of power must also identify what Lukes calls latent conflicts of interest, which are presumably the result of ideological distortion of real interests.

Lukes and the Critical Theorists are fully aware of the central difficulty with the radical model. What the model postulates as the real interests are not readily identifiable or justifiable as such, especially since B is not likely to assent to them. Lukes follows Antonio Gramsci in thinking that some evidence can be obtained through the contrast between what an oppressed social group does in normal times, when it is submissive, and what it does in abnormal times of social unrest and upheaval. Lukes goes further, though, and maintains that evidence can be found even in normal times:

We are concerned to find out what the exercise of power prevents people from doing, and sometimes even thinking. Hence we should examine how people react to opportunities-or, more precisely, perceived opportunities-when these occur, to escape from subordinate positions in hierarchical systems. In this connection data about rates of social mobility can acquire a new and striking theoretical significance.w

The neo-Marxian justification of the counterfactually postulated "real" interests tends to be a priori, or at least not simply an empirically verifiable matter from within a given ideology. In contrast, Lukes suggests that such justification can appeal to evidence, and is an empirical as well as a philosophical matter. Given this insistence on verifiability, however, his central

thesis that power is an essentially contested concept, and his related contention that the social sciences are relativistic, can be misleading. His presentation indicates that the third model is not a more encompassing model that could incorporate the other models as special cases. The models are incompatible. Given this incompatibility and the relativistic appeal to the inability to resolve the contest between the various conceptions, one might assume that Lukes believes there are no grounds for deciding between the apparently incommensurable theories. Lukes himself would then appear to be making his own radical model an exception. He would be committing what Maurice Mandelbaum aptly dubs the self-excepting fallacy,'! since Lukes could not believe both in the truth of the results of his model and in relativism. Lukes clearly believes, however, in the inadequacy of the behaviorist models and the superiority of the radical model. Reasons can be given, he thinks, "for one view rather than another, and in particular, for the claim that one view enables one to see further and deeper than another. Such a claim can only be made by bringing out both the implications of alternative views and their unacceptability. That they are unacceptable can always be denied: hence essential contestability. But the contending positions are not incommensurable: the contests are real ones. "12

So the radical theorist can argue that limiting the conception of power as the behaviorist theorists do is unacceptable, and that the radical view is in fact acceptable, at least in part because it is not empirically vacuous. Thus, the radical theorist can claim to be discovering truths missed by the other theorists while recognizing that they will read the data differently, perhaps even "misconstruing" it altogether. He is thus not claiming the essential uncontestability of theories in the manner that Paul Feyerabend does in Against Method or that Foucault seems to in his earlier works.'?

Whether Lukes's response is satisfactory, however, depends on another feature of the problem and of his theory. When Bertrand Russell defines power as "the production of intended effects," he fails to capture Marx's thought that power is not reducible to individuals' intentions.t- The familiar point is that although history happens as a result of individuals' wills, it does not happen as they will it. The debate in the social sciences is thus between those who see power as exercised by (individual or institutional) agents and those who see it as a result of structural factors within systems. This debate is not between methodological individualists and methodological holists, but between voluntarist and structuralist theories. For Marx the economic structure of society is independent of and not reducible to agents' willed intentions. Subsequent theorists, from Weber to Parsons and from Levi-Strauss to Althusser, stress structure rather than agency. Lukes includes Foucault with the structuralists in contrast to Lukes's own emphasis on agency,'! and we shall see shortly whether that assessment is correct.

The larger question is, then, whether the historical, human subject still has

an explanatory role-"an issue," says Lukes, "very much alive within contemporary Marxism, dividing so-called Hegelian 'historicists' and 'humanists' from their structuralist adversaries. "16 Lukes sides with those who link power to human agency. His reason is that to talk about an exercise of power is necessarily "to assume that it is in the exerciser's or exercisers' power to act differently. "17 Structuralists, he thinks, are necessarily determinists and could not allow this counterfactual. They would thereby lose the ability to attribute responsibility for certain consequences to identifiable agents. Since in Lukes's view an attribution of power is at the same time an attribution of (partial or total) responsibility for certain consequences, he believes the emphasis on structure to the exclusion of subjects and agents fails to capture the meaning of "power," or at least of the locution "power over" (as opposed to "power to'').

The question he does not address is why a theory rejecting the concept of the subject and the voluntarist view Lukes prefers must be so strictly deterministic. While, in fact, the structuralists Lukes is opposing (Althusser, Balibar, and Poulantzas) do seem to be determinists, the controversy about free will and determinism is different from the question whether structural systems or human agents are to be used as the basic explanatory units in the social sciences. The claim that a structural system restricts what an agent can do does not entail the claim that such a system determines what an agent will do. Correlatively, the system itself need not remain unaffected by what agents in fact do. Furthermore, the sense of "power over" is not stretched by attributing responsibility to a system (and to the individuals who perform strategic functions within it). The social scientist or historian could still ask, what if the system were different in this or that respect? This counterfactual would appear to satisfy Lukes's requirements.

In fact, whatever the merits of the historiographical studies themselves, Michel Foucault's books on power are interesting precisely for the reason that he appears to be working out a method for the historical study of power (what he calls an "analytics of power") without relying either on the concept of the subject or on the assumption that the structural relations he is identifying are not subject to change. Foucault thinks of power as intentionality without a subject, such that power relations are intentional and can be described without being attributed to particular subjects as their conscious intentions. Power is for him an explanatory concept, but not all explanations are causal. So without attributing power either to conscious agency or to underlying forces like the modes of production, Foucault thinks he can explain contemporary society by mapping the network of power relations that have evolved historically. Before evaluating Foucault's projected model in contrast to the other models, we must ask whether his view can be stated without paradox and with sufficient detail to satisfy Lukes's demands on a model of power.

Fouealt's critique of the repreuive hypothesis "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx" is not only the title of an essay by Foucault, but also an indication of the intersection at which his own conception of power can be located. Nietzsche is particularly important, for the uniqueness of Foucault's work is that it develops and applies Nietzsche's method of genealogy. A central hypothesis of the genealogical explanation of phenomena in terms of will to power is that "knowledge is power." Of course, Bacon had asserted this before Nietzsche, but he meant something different. For Nietzsche and Foucault the "is" connecting knowledge and power does not indicate that the relation of knowledge and power is one of predication such that knowledge leads to power. Rather, the relation is one of identification. In other words, knowledge is not gained prior to and independently of the use to which it will be put in order to achieve power (whether over nature or over other people), but is already a function of human interests and power relations.

Nietzsche indicates this stronger claim by identifying the will to knowledge with the will to power, and Foucault accordingly labels what he is studying "power/ knowledge." The slash suggests that for his purposes power and knowledge are not to be studied separately. From his perspective there is little point in speaking even about the relation between knowledge and power, since these are not so readily distinguishable.

A certain caution is in order here, however. Just as Nietzsche claims that the will to power is only a hypothesis or an interpretation and not a fact, Foucault's power/knowledge should be regarded as a heuristic device, a pragmatic construction to be tested in terms of its value in reconstructing the history of the sciences of man and of society. Foucault's enterprise is neither epistemological nor ontological, for he is not making claims about what knowledge and power are ultimately. Rather, his project is historical, and his construction of the concept of power/knowledge is a device for studying the social and scientific practices that underlie and condition the formation of beliefs. He is offering an interpretation of how what counts as knowledge and power has historically come to be so counted. His question is not the epistemological one: whether given pieces of what is taken as knowledge are, in fact, true. If his historical account is illuminating, however, it would indicate that there would be no context-free, unhistorical way to decide that epistemological question.

The hint of relativism in this last point indicates a certain affinity with Lukes's position. Foucault's history of the prison, translated as Discipline and Punish, illustrates Lukes's point that historians and social scientists using similar data but relying on different conceptions of power will arrive at different and perhaps even competing understandings and explanations. In fact, Foucault himself suggests in Discipline and Punish that his major competitor is Kirschheimer and Rusche's Punishment and Social Structure,

published in 1939 through the exiled Frankfurt School.'! His attitude toward that book is echoed in his attempt, during an interview, to distance his own thinking from that of another member of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse:

I would also distinguish myself from para-Marxists like Marcuse who give the notion of repression an exaggerated role-because power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only through the mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage and repression, in the manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in a negative way Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it

The fact that power is so deeply rooted and the difficulty of eluding its embrace are effects of all these connections. That is why the notion of repression which mechanisms of power are generally reduced to strikes me as very inadequate and possibly dangerous.'?

Whereas Marxians think of power negatively-as domination, coercion, manipulation, authority, or, in short, repression-Nietzscheans think of power as producing positive as well as negative effects. Nietzsche does not completely condemn the ascetic will to truth and knowledge that is the other side of the will to power, for instance, but on the contrary commends the self-discipline that leads to the great variety of its achievements. Foucault's need to rewrite Kirschheimer and Rusche's book is prompted, then, by the inadequacy of their conception of power and their one-sided focus on repression. They use the infrastructure-superstructure model of materialist explanations, and see the change from one system of punishment to another as being correlated with and required by the change from one system of production to another. Foucault challenges their historiography by suggesting, first, that they achieve these correlations only by failing to explain the persistence of an extreme degree of torture and thus of the earlier style of punishment, and, second, that they omit altogether an account of how it is possible for the human body even to be constituted as labor power.20

Concerning the first point, Foucault thinks that accounts like Kirschheimer's and Rusche's are correct to see torture as an effect of a system of production in which labor power has a low utility and commercial value. He also thinks that torture is more likely in a society with a more casual attitude toward death than in subsequent times as a result of superstructural factors like Christian values, but also of factors like frequent plagues, famines, and high child mortality rates. The inadequacy of base-superstructure explanations is that they explain neither how the older forms of punishment can persist so long after the older order is gone nor why there is such a variety of practices of punishment.

This criticism leads Foucault to the second point: explanations based on the merely negative conception of power as repression will fail to see that what also needs to be explained is how the kinds of knowledge necessary for controlling the human body and labor power have emerged. His history is

intended to show that the human body could have been constituted as labor power only if there were a technology or a "knowledge" of the body that made it possible to organize and subjugate bodies into docile, useful roles. Furthermore, this subjugation is not something imposed on one class (the oppressed workers) by another (the dominant class); it increasingly permeates and characterizes all aspects of society. Foucault is concerned to chart what he calls the process of "normalization"-the increasing rationalization, organization, and homogenization of society in modern times.

Foucault's own conception of the importance of his studies of power configurations is, then, that they show the inadequacy of and provide an alternative to the Frankfurt School's still too traditional conception of the relation of power and knowledge. The very ideas of false consciousness and of the critique of ideology imply the possibility of nonideological thinking or of true consciousness. Ideology is the result of distortion introduced by the oppressive exercise of power by the dominant class. Only if such distortions were seen through and the repression dispelled would true consciousness be possible.

The concept of ideology, Foucault thinks, thus implies the traditional view that knowledge must be disinterested, that truth can be ascertained only in the absence of distorting power relations. Of course, he may be wrong in ascribing this view of the independence of power and knowledge to all Critical Theorists. Adorno calls his project negative dialectics, and refrains from making positive claims about what ought to be. More recently, Jurgen Habermas began a defense of the procedure of ideology criticism with an explicit rejection of the traditional view that "the only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests. "21 Habermas goes on to develop an account of knowledge as not disinterested, as always conditioned by human interests. A closer inspection of Habermas's conclusions, however, may well vindicate Foucault's thesis, for finally Habermas thinks that emancipation from power is a fundamental interest of knowledge-acquisition.P This freedom would be gained when knowledge reflects back on itself and sees through false authority to the true consensus that could be achieved only in a totally emancipated society of autonomous, responsible persons.P Foucault may also be right, to some extent, even about the earlier Critical Theorists. Adorno and Horkheimer do say in their introduction to the Dialectic of Enlightenment that their "critique of enlightenment is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination. "24 They thereby hold out the traditional hope for progress away from coercive social power by freeing knowledge and reason from ideologically coerced distortion.

The notion of real interests Lukes and other social scientists appeal to is different from what Habermas has constructed. For Lukes, as for the early

Frankfurt School, the question is, how to determine that A is affecting B contrary to B's real interests if, as a result of ideological coercion, B is not actually aware of these interests. Furthermore, except when there is a conspiracy, the critique of ideology could show that if B is affected contrary to B's real interests, then it is also contrary to A's real interests for A to coerce B. So A acts against both A's and B's real interests when exercising power over B. Given knowledge of the real interests, the exercise of coercion would be counterproductive, and perhaps even self-contradictory, so power ought to disappear.

Lukes does not explicitly link his model to this conception of Ideologiekritik. Nevertheless, his model requires that the investigator be able to reason counterfactually that, being rational agents, the exercisers of power would have acted differently knowing the real interests of all concerned. While structuralist determinists are committed to the assumption that agents are not true causes of events, and therefore cannot say the agent could have acted differently, Foucault is not similarly restricted. The technology of power does not causally determine particular actions; it only makes them probable. So A could have options open, and, similarly, both A and B would have different interests if they were not caught up in this net of ideological coercion. As Foucault says, "Another power, another knowledge."25

This close a connection between power and knowledge challenges, however, the appeal to real interests-if by real interests one means a set of interests existing independently of some social organization or set of purposes. Like Nietzsche, Foucault does not think there are any givens that remain constant. Even the human body, the lowest common denominator throughout all historical change, is transformed over time by various technologies of power. In The History of Sexuality, for instance, Foucault suggests that sex is not a biological given, but a complex construct resulting from a certain way of conceiving human beings, namely, as personalities totally permeated by one of several modes of sexuality.P His playful suggestion that there has been "sex" only since the nineteenth century (and that we would be better off not wanting to "have sex'') probably comes down to the claim that physical acts are always construed under a particular mode of description, and over a period of time these modes of description (or forms of knowledge) come into and go out of cultural and even scientific fashion.

For Foucault, then, the project of Ideologiekritik deludes itself if it posits the possibility of knowledge emancipated from power relations, or if it thinks that it could decide what our interests would necessarily be in the absence of any social coercion. Consider the only case Lukes supplies of what he calls a "clear-cut" instance where real interests can be specified using the counterfactual reasoning his radical model requires. He cites Matthew Crenson's study of the factory town of Gary, Indiana, whose citizens did not lobby against severe air pollution until 1962.2' Their sociologically similar

neighbors in East Chicago had taken action against comparable air pollution in 1949. Lukes comments, "The empirical hypothesis that those citizens, if they had the choice and fuller information, would prefer not to be poisoned is more than plausible (on the assumption that such an alternative did not entail increased unemployment)."28 While of course it seems to be in everyone's real interest not to be poisoned, assumptions like that in parentheses work toward vitiating the empirical character of the hypothesis. Adding ceteris paribus clauses empties the counterfactual hypothesis about the real interests people would have had. Many workers would probably choose to risk an unhealthy environment (which is not exactly equivalent to being poisoned) if the rewards were sufficient. Furthermore, Gary was a onecompany town, so any individual who actively worked against pollution was working against the company, and would have risked being fired (although unemployment might not have increased, since someone could have been hired to replace him).

Foucault's approach has an advantage if, in making knowledge relative to interests or power configurations, it also can criticize without assuming an external standpoint outside the power configuration in order to specify the real interests of the parties involved. In order to accomplish this, he must revise the concept of power. He takes an initial step by revaluing power, insisting that power is positive and productive, not simply repressive; it is, he reminds us, not always suffered but sometimes enjoyed. We cannot understand this revaluation, however, without recognizing the other conceptual revisions he introduces. Like Lukes, Foucault wants to describe how power is exercised, and he sees that there would be no power if it were not exercised by agents. Foucault even uses the phrase "exercise of power" frequently, as in the title of his essay, "Power, How Is It Exercised?"29 There he says explicitly that power is exercised by individuals or groups of individuals. This statement should show that he is neither arguing against methodological individualism nor attributing ontological status and causal efficacy to historical forces or to institutions or ideologies as opposed to individuals. He denies that power is a mysterious substance with a nature, essence, and origin. By his own admission Foucault is nominalistic about power, even willing to say that "power" does not exist (only local exercises of power are real)-thereby affirming that he is not offering a metaphysics of power.

Unlike Lukes and the Frankfurt School, however, Foucault does not think of power as something possessed by those who exercise it. In Discipline and Punish he remarks that he wants to describe how "power is exercised rather than possessed. "30 This implies that power is not a property, possession, or privilege. Power is not simply what the dominant class has and the oppressed lack. Power, Foucault prefers to say, is a strategy, and the dominated are as much a part of the network of power relations and the particular social matrix as the dominating. As a complex strategy spread

throughout the social system in a capillary fashion, power is never manifested globally, but only at local points as "micro-powers." Power is not something located in and symbolized by the sovereign, but permeates society in such a way that taking over the state apparatus (through a political revolution or coup) does not in itself change the power network."

Including the background network of social practices in the definition of power in this way may appear to be simply stipulative. Lukes, for instance, wants to locate power more specifically so that empirical inquiry can determine the answer to the question, who exercises power over whom? Foucault, given his pragmatic nominalism, could admit that his definition is stipulative, but he would also have to show that it is informative. His analytics of power is not intended to tell us what power really is, but only where to look. He is interested in a slightly different question from Lukes's. He wants to explain how it is possible for A to affect B when who A happens to be is arbitrary (the "subject" being itself an effect of the historical transformations of power/knowledge),32

Foucault hears the question about how power is exercised (in his essay with that title) as what he calls the "flat and empirical"question, "How does it occur?" This asks both where power actually has been exercised (an empirical question for historians and social scientists) and how individuals can have power over others. This latter question does involve matters of social theory that are not strictly empirical, and it also points to a further difference between Foucault and Lukes. Whereas for Lukes power is exercised by one agent over another, Foucault, who wishes to avoid suggesting that power is possessed by subjects, sees power exercised in the effect of one action on another action. As the effect of "une action sur des actions," power can be explained only by understanding the "field of possible actions" in which the action occurs. The description of this field would presumably include an account, not only of the way that action inhibits some other possible actions, but also of the manner in which that action increases the probability of other actions. Power is not, Foucault says, like two adversaries confronting each other; it is comparable to "government" in a broad sense, where to govern means "to structure the field of the eventual actions of others."

To offer an analogy, to which Foucault does not appeal explicitly (although his explanation of what strategy means in "Power, How Is It Exercised?" approaches it), consider a game of chess. Power in a game of chess is paradigmatically exercised, according to Lukes's model, by one piece over another at the moment of capture. On Foucault's model, the capture is indeed a "micro-power," but it is also the effect of the overall arrangement of the pieces at the time as well as of the strategy leading up to and including the capture.

Two of Foucault's points are illustrated here. First, power is not a func-

tion only of the capturing set of pieces, but is a result also of the possible resistance by the opposed set. To program a computer for chess, presumably one must include some considerations about counterattacks. Second, notice that the strategy explains why the one piece can or ought to capture the other, but it does not determine that the piece must capture the other (unless the game is at a point where no other move is possible without, for instance, checkmate). Opportunities are sometimes deliberately delayed for larger future gains, as well as simply overlooked. In fact, the notion of a real interest could be introduced here as an interest relative to a strategy: B might believe it is in B's interest to sacrifice a piece but, given B's strategy, the sacrifice would be a mistake.

There is nothing a priori, metaphysical, or reductive about "real" as opposed to "apparent" interest here, but the distinction can still be used to point out the difference between what people think about what they are doing and what might actually be occurring. Thus, just as the Frankfurt School criticizes the belief in Enlightenment-that is, the belief in the possibility of the acquisition of knowledge and self-understanding undistorted by coercion-and argues that the desire for Enlightenment conceals a desire for control, Foucault maintains that modem "humane" punishment is not what it seems. The shift from "atrocious" torture to humane "correction" may look like increased humanitarianism and progressive recognition of the autonomy of the individual. However, Foucault argues that what looks like a new respect for humanity is, rather, a more finely tuned mechanism of control of the social body, a more effective spinning of the web of power over everyday life. Whereas reformists thought the objective of the juridical and penal systems was to punish less atrociously, Foucault thinks that the real point of the penal system is "not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body. "33

While Foucault might think that models based on a conception of power as repression do not explain enough about power, by expanding his own notion of power to include the background network of social practices he opens himself up to the charge that his notion of power is so broad as to be indeterminate and empty. This charge against Foucault is frequently heard, but it is often advanced for two quite different reasons. Some readers think Foucault's approach to power is too philosophical, or even metaphysical, and not empirical enough. Others find Foucault's studies too empirical and historiographical, and not sufficiently theoretical. These stylistic objections are connected with two conceptual problems. First, one might think that since Foucault does not view power as something that some possess and others lack, there is no contrast class for his concept of power-a concept without a contrast class being vacuous. However, Fou-

cault could reply to this charge through his pragmatic nominalism. He could maintain he is not claiming that power is everything, as Nietzsche, for instance, sometimes implies that everything, including the material universe, is will to power. Foucault's indication that his concept of power is not metaphysical suggests that he is looking at social relations with the purpose of studying power/knowledge configurations, without claiming that social relations could not be studied under different descriptions for different purposes (although his position would imply that there is no such thing as a purposeless social description). Furthermore, the concept of power as he uses it is necessarily differential. Just as for Nietzsche there is no one thing that will to power is, and thus different will formations require different genealogical analyses, for Foucault the contrast class for one power/ knowledge configuration is another such configuration (for instance, an earlier one, like the model of punishment before the French Revolution in comparison with the one after it).

A second problem about the potential vacuity of power concerns Foucault's apparent inability to think beyond the present and to speculate about whether future power configurations might be better or worse than the present one. Foucault holds the quite plausible view that to live socially is to be involved in power relations, and that the notion of society without power relations is only an abstraction. Beyond power there is only more power, so one could easily slip into fatalism and accept the injustices of the present in favor of possibly greater injustice in an unknown, future power configuration. Foucault can argue against this fatalism, but his view does risk being interpreted that way, just as Nietzsche's attempt to overcome nihilism is often interpreted as another version of nihilism. Because he combines power and knowledge, Foucault also must abstain from the traditional tendency to think of the overcoming of repression as progress. The antithesis to power is usually thought to be freedom. Progress thus occurs when power gives way to freedom, with uncoerced knowledge being a crucial instrument in this transition. Recognizing Foucault's reasons for breaking with the traditional identification of power and repression, we must now examine the consequences of also abandoning the notion of progress.

3 Progress

Foucault's histories are not only histories of the past, but also critical analyses of power configurations persisting in the present. He is writing, he says in Discipline and Punish, a "history of the present."> The historiographical knowledge presented in his studies is not assumed to be untouched by power relations. He does not exempt his own knowledge from the claim that knowledge is always produced by power configurations and is tied to interests and purposes (and not necessarily those one explicitly acknowledges). Yet Foucault criticizes the present without suggesting how the future

could be better. He maintains, for instance, that the technology of power used in prisons has spread to all aspects of society. The problem is not the prison per se, but the increasing normalization of modern culture. The whole society has become "carceral," and there is no outside)' Are we then irrevocably trapped in the prison of the present? Can we even dream of escape if there is no outside?

The language of liberation usually implies that criticism of a society involving repression is possible only from the envisioned liberated standpoint transcending that society. According to the traditional liberal theory, criticism would have no point unless progress were possible, and progress means liberation. Marxian theories speak similarly. Ideology, for instance, is frequently construed as thought distorted by oppressive power relations, such that genuine, nonideological knowledge could be attained only in a nonoppressive society. Thus, the early Lukacs infers that in a society characterized by the class struggle, all thinking would be ideological. Even the proletariat could not claim to have "true consciousness," since its outlook would be coerced by the circumstances.e Power thus produces false consciousness-what Foucault would call a "regime of falsity"-and true consciousness would occur only in a classless society, liberated from repressive power.

For Foucault, the repressive hypothesis overlooks the Nietzschean hypothesis that power makes possible not only falsity but also truth. Since there is no knowledge that is not also describable as part of a power network, the concept of ideology is misleading in hypothesizing progress toward a nonideological knowledge freed from power struggles.

Foucault's critique of the identification of power and repression may be put as the inverse of the charge that his conception of power is vacuous because it lacks a contrast. Foucault could counter that both liberal and Marxian theories tend to use an empty and abstract notion of freedom. From his claim that a society without power relations would be an abstraction, it follows that freedom in the absence of power would be equally abstract. Construing progress as liberation from repression and positing a completely liberated, unrepressed society leaves freedom without a genuine contrast.

Whether this countercharge is, in fact, valid, there is no doubt that it is mistaken to think Foucault's notion of power is idiosyncratic because it is not contrasted in the traditional way with liberty. Foucault makes clear in "Power, How Is It Exercised?" that he does continue to think of liberty as the opposite of power. Rather than think of the logical, conceptual opposition between power and freedom when concretely instantiated in social relations as an antagonism, however, Foucault prefers to think of it as an "agonism"-a reciprocal contest, where each incites and struggles with the other in a "permanent provocation."

Freedom is both the condition and the effect of power. It is a condition because power is only exercised on free beings, and it is an effect since the exercise of power will invariably meet with resistance, which is the manifestation of freedom. He illustrates this point by suggesting, contrary to ordinary parlance perhaps, that because a slave in chains has no real options of alternative action or escape, such a degree of slavery could not be called a power relation, especially since it would not make sense to think of anyone desiring to be a slave in this sense. While this claim about slavery is not convincing, it does emphasize that power for Foucault requires the deployment of a field of possible actions, such that why one particular action occurs rather than another becomes the focus of empirical investigation.

This last point brings out again that Foucault's interest in power is really not that of a metaphysician who wants to believe freedom is progressively replacing power. Rather, his perspective is that of the historian or social scientist who wants to understand why one action rather than others occurred, so that a series or set of actions can be described without imposing on it a teleological evaluation about whether or not it was essentially for the better. Foucault's abjuration of the rhetoric of progress must be understood, then, as a methodological consequence of his pragmatic nominalism. If power is to be taken nominalistically-not as a real substance or as a property, but simply as a name for a complex strategy or grid of intelligibility-then, admittedly, this grid could be mapped in different ways, and there is no final, privileged, or foundational mapping. Foucault's own work takes place in the indeterminate boundary between general history and the history of science, and his theory is sketched only insofar as it provides a useful recommendation to historians about how to write histories, and how to look at both the past and the present. Thus, when Foucault was asked in an interview about his claim in an earlier book that we must "free historical chronologies and successive orderings from all forms of progressivist perspective," he responded,

This is something lowe to the historians of science. I adopt the methodical precaution and the radical but unaggressive scepticism which makes it a principle not to regard the point in time where we are now standing as the outcome of a teleological progression which it would be one's business to reconstruct historically: that scepticism regarding ourselves and what we are, our here and now, which prevents one from assuming that what we have is better than-or more than-in the past."

When the interviewer then suggested to him that science has always postulated that man progresses, Foucault insisted, "It isn't science that says that, but rather the history of science. And I don't say that humanity doesn't progress. I say that it is a bad method to pose the problem as: 'How is it that we have progressed?' The problem is: how do things happen? And what

happens now is not necessarily better or more advanced, or better understood, than what happened in the past. "38

This exchange shows that Foucault is not giving up all hope for emancipation, but only the belief that emancipation necessarily results from the growth of knowledge. His philosophical stance is not that of the epistemologist who, like Kant, models progress on the development of modern science. Even if science is still our best example of knowledge, scientific knowledge also has a history. Whereas the Kantian epistemologist assumes that the growth of knowledge is progress toward the goal of unified science, the historian has another option. Rather than simply assuming we now understand better what our predecessors were trying to do (as Kant claims about his relation to Plato)», the historian may have to hypothesize that we do not understand better, only differently. Another historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, also operates on the principle that "there are many ways to read a text, and the ones most accessible to a modern are often inappropriate when applied to the past"; he therefore offers his students the following hermeneutical maxim: "When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning."40 French historians such as Canguilhem made similar points, and thus Foucault is not being original when he tries to write history without imposing a "progressivist perspective." Rather, he is following a sensible procedure in demurring from the "Whiggish" assumption that we know better now, for otherwise we could not have gotten as far as we are.

Where Foucault's histories get their radical effect is precisely through their ironic reversal of the common Whiggish outlook. In Discipline and Punish, for instance, we read a story of progress, but it is the progress of the spread of the discipline of the prison throughout the whole society. Reading such a history of supposed progress is not, then, as the Whig would expect, reassuring and edifying, but frightening and disturbing. Progress is not necessarily for the better, Foucault intends us to realize, and, indeed, no one welcomes news about the progress of a cancer.

Thus, Foucault's writings do not eliminate the use of teleological narrative in historiography, but, like Nietzsche's genealogies, his histories question the tendency of the present to evaluate its own progressiveness positively. In contrast to standard Marxian Ideologiekrttik, Foucault can challenge the supposed superiority of the present without postulating an ideology-free understanding that transcends current power relations. While believing in the inevitability of free resistance to the imposition of power, and thus while not despairing about the possibility of some successful emancipation, Fou-

cault can avoid the illusion that his own thinking is itself necessarily progressive and free of desires constituted by power relations.

While Foucault's view may be free of paradox, it is still subject to other objections. Social criticism is also empty if it is not efficacious. A postMarxian conception of power must nevertheless remember that the goal is not only to comprehend the world, but to change it. In the absence of some standard (such as universal freedom) by which to measure social progress, is Foucault's shrill attack on the increasingly carceral society only ressentiment, a bitter but ineffectual rage? Nietzsche's analyses of other cultural forms of ressentiment, such as the priestly or the scholarly asceticism, show that ressentiment quickly leads to resignation, fatalism, and nihilism. In fact, Nietzsche's lack of a plausible social theory is often taken as a sign that his own thinking is bourgeois, and that theoretical denunciation lacking practical goals is ineffectual.

Foucault's probable response to this objection must be constructed without obscuring the difference between his notion of power and the "paraMarxist" notion of domination he rejects. He accepts the Marxian critique of the theory that power is held by the sovereign, or a political elite, and then forced on the rest of society from above. He agrees that power does not spread from the top down, but rather rises from the bottom. Thus, the study of the modes of production will be more revealing than a history that is merely political. His critique of Kirschheimer and Rusche shows, however, that the modes of production constitute only one factor, and that there are others that are consubstantial." In fact, the top-bottom metaphor is unusable, for there is no absolute top or bottom, but rather a grid or network. A linguistic model comes closer to capturing Foucault's conception than a causal, materialist model. Foucault tends to think of the network as being like a grammar, which conditions what can be uttered in a language but does not determine which actual utterances emerge (and when).

Both the sovereignty and the materialist conceptions of power are akin in thinking of change and progress as taking place totally. Foucault resists this totalizing or, as he sometimes says, "totalitarian" thinking, maintaining that there is no such thing as power as a whole, and no standpoint from which the totality can be viewed or evaluated. In "Power, How Is It Exercised?" he asserts that "there is no first and fundamental principle of Power which dominates society down to the least detail." We experience power only in diverse and multiple ways at the "micro-level" when we find ourselves subjected to particular exercises of power (or more rarely, and perhaps without understanding our own facility or authority, when we exercise power over others).

For Foucault, then, neither comprehending the world nor changing it depends on grasping (in either the theoretical or the practical sense) the totality, since the concept oftotality is not applicable to his understanding of

power as an open-ended network or grid. Rather, his "micro-physics" of power depends upon comprehending power by first studying the everyday practices where individuals continually experience micro-powers, the particular confrontations with and resistances to impositions of power. Charting these micro-powers will then reveal the more general terrain of the larger social battles taking place. Change does not occur, however, by transforming the whole at once but only by resisting injustices at the particular points where they manifest themselves. To continue the military metaphor, which Foucault uses frequently, the battle can be won only by the continued efforts of the individual combatants.

This response is consistent with Foucault's desire to develop a notion of power that avoids political theory, but it is not sufficient to rebut the charge of vacuity entirely. Calling for change for its own sake, without specifying the appeal of one direction of change over others, is not genuinely efficacious. This point has been made before, but its importance is far from clear. As a criticism of Foucault it may well be off target. Foucault may be able to write his histories in such a way that the question of determining the ultimate basis of social progress does not even arise. A historian who is interested only in showing that change occurs and what the changes involved actually are (how, for instance, a discipline spread itself throughout society so quickly) need not invoke the progressivist perspective. The problem of explaining progress may also drop away for a historian who does not think the question why change occurred could ever be answered sufficiently. It may not be Foucault but his readers who are inconsistent when they want him to avoid causal and teleological explanations of historical changes and then expect him to appeal to causal or teleological principles for progressive social change. His project is probably too limited to justify the strident polemical tone of his criticism of the carceral society. His polemics have led perceptive reviewers like Clifford Geertz to speculate that in Discipline and Punish Foucault has abandoned the Whiggish or progressivist perspective only to take up a reverse Whiggism: "We seemed to be faced," says Geertz, "with a kind of Whig history in reverse-a history, in spite of itself, of The Rise of Unfreedom.t'<

There is no doubt that Foucault's negative assessment of normalization and his hasty elevation of Bentham's Panopticon to the predominant social paradigm of our society warrant this reading. His conception of power, however, is as incompatible with the reversed Whiggish stance as with the traditional Whiggish one. Foucault's voice may sound like that of the prisoner who wants out and cannot get out, but since Foucault is talking about our inability to get out of our own place in history, he is surely correct in this regard. Although his history may sound like a Rousseauean story of the rise of unfreedom, it could not be, for there is in Foucault no hint of an age of innocence. The contrast between earlier and later ages can only show

them to be different in detailed respects, not better or worse on the whole. We can also certainly regret what is bad for us now without knowing either that things were better before or that proposed ways to mend things will not actually produce other injustices.

Foucault's notion of power does not necessarily entail the fatalism that his critics perceive. The historical subjugations that Foucault portrays are real enough, and will be resisted even as they are experienced. Foucault's genuine contributions to social praxis, like anyone else's, can therefore only be at the micro-level. But he can also make a contribution at the philosophical or ideological level by calling into question the belief in progress and the complacent Whiggish insistence on the necessary superiority of the present.

Foucault's own denial in "Power, How Is It Exercised?" that his conception entails fatalism emphasizes the "agonism" between freedom and power, the contest between them being an "incessant political task" that is "inherent in all social existence." In other words, he, like Lukes, is probably suggesting that it is part of the power struggle in society to decide how power itself should be conceived (in order to achieve the best outcome in this struggle). Power will thus be an essentially contested concept because it will rely on political judgments; but this fact should not obscure the agonistic contest that makes it important to challenge alternative models of power. Fatalism will result only if one believes dogmatically that one's knowledge of the nature of social power is itself not conditioned by power relations.

Both Lukes's and Foucault's models of power have an advantage over their rivals in being self-reflective and thus capable of not exempting themselves from their own claims. But Foucault's model differs from nee-Marxian models in his insistence that the network of practices makes particular actions possible and significant, but not dialectically necessary. Rejecting the dialectic of contradiction, Foucault insists that saying there is no social existence without power relations does not entail that particular, oppressive power relations are necessary. The field of possibilities that gave rise to such current injustices as Foucault perceives in the carceral society also contained, historical analysis brings out, alternatives that were not acted upon. Whether these alternatives, if pursued, would have been better or worse, the historian cannot say. All the historian can point out is that the landscape of action is littered with many events that do not fit into the materialistic account of the necessary progression of history.

Foucault's critique of progress cuts against dialectical notions as well as liberal ones. The Whiggish or even Pragmatist belief that things are, on the whole, getting better all the time is also too general to be confirmed empirically, and is therefore not part of Foucault's concern. Although he gives up the notion of universal progress, his program need not abandon the hope for emancipation, if by that one means the resistance at particular points to local exercises of power.

This reply will not satisfy those who want global solutions to injustice, but it still represents a plausible critique of the rhetoric of progress, and of the traditional intellectual's desire to have a total understanding before engaging in concrete action. Foucault's theory, then, is a form of critical theory, since it does not construct a new, systematic set of principles, including a "primary and fundamental principle of Power," but settles for counterattacking the remnants of holistic, metaphysical assumptions in other social theories. Foucault's praxis is essentially that of the historian, but not the disengaged historian. Showing historically that the belief in progress has actually had the effect of increasing repression would itself be a concrete and productive achievement. Whether Foucault has, in fact, succeeded in either of these respects is still an open question, but we can at least avoid confusing his social vision with those it contests.

I. Rom Harre, for instance, argues that what sociologists call power is reducible to other factors and is thus simply a dramatic fiction. See Social Being: A Theoryfor Social Psychology (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield. Adams & Co., 1980), pp. 233-235.

2. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan Co., 1974).

3. Steven Lukes. "On the Relativity of Power," in Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, ed. S. C. Brown (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), p.272.

4. Lukes, Power, p. 26.

5. W. B. Gallie; cited by Lukes, Power, p. 26.

6. Lukes, Power, p. 26.

7. Mary Hesse, "Theory and Value in the Social Sciences," in Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Christopher Hookway and Philip Pettit (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 1-16. Further, see D. C. Hoy, "Hermeneutics," Social Research 47, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 649-71.

8. Lukes, Power, p. 26.

9. Ibid., p. 23.

10. Ibid., p. 48.

11. Maurice Mandelbaum, "Subjective, Objective, and Conceptual Relativisms," Monist 62, no. 4 (October 1979): 405; see his earlier essay, "Some Instances of the Self-excepting Fallacy," Psychologische Beitroge 6 (1962): 383-86.

12. Lukes, in Brown, p. 272.

13. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: NLB, 1975).

14. See Lukes, Power, p. 22.

15. Lukes, "Power and Structure," in his Essays in Social Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 8 and 199, n. 30.

16. Ibid., p. 3. I would argue that Hegel himself is not a "Hegelian" in this controversy if Geist can be interpreted as the name for a structural system and not a particular subject.

17. Lukes, Power, p. 55 (italics added).

18. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 24. See Colin Gordon's "Afterword"

in Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. 1971-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books. 1980). pp. 234 ff.

19. Foucault. Power/Knowledge. p. 59.

20. See Foucault. Discipline and Punish. pp. 24-30 and 54 f.

21. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press. 1971). p. 301.

22. Ibid .• p. 287.

23. Ibid .• p. 314.

24. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press. 1972). p. xvi.

25. See Foucault. Discipline and Punish. pp. 27-30.

26. Michel Foucault. History ofSexuality, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books. 1978).

27. Matthew A. Crenson, The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of NonDecisionmaking in the Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971). Cited by Lukes, Power. pp. 42-46.

28. Lukes. Power, p. 46.

29. Unpublished at the time of the writing of the present essay, Foucault's "Power, How Is It Exercised?" will appear in translation as the postface to the forthcoming book, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structure and Hermeneutics, by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. (University of Chicago Press, 1982).

30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 26.

31. Ibid., p. 27.

32. Ibid., p. 28.

33. Ibid., p. 82.

34. Ibid., p. 31.

35. Ibid., pp. 228, 301.

36. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), p. 228.

37. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 49.

38. Ibid., p. 50.

39. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A314/B370.

40. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. xii.

41. See Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 159-60.

42. Clifford Geertz, review of Discipline and Punish. New York Review ofBooks (26 January 1978), p. 6. Compare Richard Rorty, "Beyond Nietzsche and Marx," London Review of Books (vol. III, no. 3); and Ian Hacking, "The Archaeology of Foucault," New York Review of Books (14 May 1981).

The new "family romance"

Jon R. Schiller

1 Both defenders and critics of American culture are writing voluminously about the family, and the last several presidential administrations have devoted substantial quantities of ideological energy proving their commitment to the salvation of family life. The shared perception of these various factions is the common understanding that our kinship arrangements have become the singular agent of socialization; more precisely, that the great cultural institutions-the state, the economy, and the social order itselfrely upon the family to instill a sense of the authoritative into its burgeoning citizenry. In previous times this function was shared with church, extended family, and community, but now the burden seems to fall completely on the original biological unit: father, mother, and children.

In recent times a pair of contradictory forces has beset the family: on the one hand, the family has been subject to increasing isolation as the traditional forms of quasi-familial association wither away altogether; on the other, it finds itself intruded upon and invaded by a host of insidious influences-the media, the helping professions, the juvenile justice system, and experts in various aspects of the science of living. The family, once a "haven in a heartless world," is now reproduced in the image of that same fragmented reality.

It has become commonplace for critical thought to lament these developments, seeing in them the specter of infinite socialization. Twenty-five years ago, Marcuse wrote of the revolutionary potential in the tension between "eros and civilization," between the eroticized experience of the oedipal

This paper summarizes several years of clinical and intellectual work, and it is difficult at this point to clearly specify the various sources influencing the ideas expressed here. Among the current literature, which my work both incorporates and criticizes, is that of Mitchell, Dinnerstein, and Chodorow on femininity; Lasch, Donzelot, and Slater on the social forces affecting the family; Lasch, Mitscherlich, and Rieff on the question of authority; Lacan on psychic development; and Foucault on power.

64 ClI981 by Jon R. Schiller.

child, and the demands that would later be imposed upon him by rationalized culture. That tension, we are now told, has been dissolved. Civilization has become impatient, no longer willing to wait for the postoedipal years before countering the sensuous experience of the infant with its own claims. From the first moments of infancy, the mother-child relationship is already mediated by various agents of social reality, wittingly or unwittingly striving to create an ideological subject before the oedipal phantasies of love and rebellion can be formed.

There can be no doubt that the family has been invaded from without, but the consequences following this invasion are more opaque than the logical predictions put forward by social theory. Adolescents seen in the clinic are hardly passive consumers of the latest developments in capitalist social organization. According to the terminology of the juvenile courts, they are "incorrigible" and "out of control," and sometimes, I must add, even beyond therapeutic help.

Many parents at least dimly perceive the ideological double-bind in which they now find themselves: they sense that institutions relied upon by their parents-police, schools, juvenile justice systems-have themselves become helpless and apathetic; and yet, they are also constantly receiving the message that their child's behavior is their responsibility and fault. Social apparatuses, having systematically invaded the family through various means, now abandon it and remind parents that they, after all, are still responsible for socializing their children. If parents wish to throw up their hands in despair, sensing that they have been placed in an impossible situation, these same agencies are not beneath an appeal to the intense emotional bonds that the mother and father are struggling to deny ("Have you hugged your kid today?"). Underminded by the same forces that encourage their guilt, constantly reminded of the emotional bonds that have become so painful, it is not surprising that parents yield to the path of least resistance, imploring therapists to somehow fix their errant offspring.

The most immediate clinical symptom of the general cultural process of de-authorization in families takes the form of an "incorrigible child," which is the expressed focus of the parents' concern in their initial attempt to obtain therapeutic help. To an experienced family clinician, however, the situation appears more complicated than the parents' initial presentation suggests. Although the child's misbehavior may in fact be undeniable in most cases, one senses that the symptoms both represent and mask unacknowledged parental conflict. In other words, the child gives expression, in a highly disguised form, to the silent and often unconscious warfare raging between the parents, who compensate for their silence on this issue by effusive, minutely detailed verbalizations ofthe "patient's" (child's) wayward behavior.

A call I received several months ago from a Mr. Adams," informing me that he and his wife were having some problems with his stepson, illustrates the typical use of the "problem child" as the parents' initial reason for seeking family therapy. I arranged to meet with Mr. Adams and his family, and during the first few minutes of the session, both Mr. and Mrs. Adams complained about the boy's school work. Soon, however, the stepfather allowed that there might be other problems as well: "My wife and I seem to be growing apart, though I am not sure this is so bad. We are, after all, individuals." I replied that perhaps that was the problem, a statement that evoked an immediate defensive reaction: "We think it's fine for each of us to be individuals."

Despite the disclaimer, this couple was already unusual in one respect: they were able, however tentatively, to acknowledge that there might be something askew in their relationship. Still, this same acknowledgment also underscored the deployment of the child as agent provocateur since the apparent impetus for seeking therapy was the child's problem. Normally, it is an epic struggle to bring a couple to the small admission arrived at by the Adams's, and often the parents would rather leave therapy than allow access to their marital problems. A common refrain with such couples is "We are here to talk about the family, not our marriage"-a motto that may elude common sense but discloses an essential truth about the psychology of the couple's defenses.

There is little wonder that married couples, like most individuals, would prefer to blame their own problems on others and project conflict onto another party. Still, it is surprising how intensely couples will resist selfexamination, and the Herculean efforts they will make to refocus therapeutic attention onto the child. When faced with a resistance of this type, the clinician can only conclude that the couple is defending itself against some grave psychological danger.

This scenario is so typical that the term used to describe it holds pride of place in the diagnosis of families: the individual who is initially presented as the reason for therapy is the "identified patient," that is, the family member-almost always a child-who is chosen as the displacement point where the couple's conflicts will be diverted.

Family therapists take this phenomenon for granted; in fact, it is an altogether common occurrence for individuals and groups alike to use scapegoats-or, in psychological terms, to project conflict onto another party as a means of avoiding self-examination. Nevertheless, I am led to the conclusion that the particular deployment of this mechanism as it now

• In all discussions of actual clinical material, I have, of course, changed the individuals' names to protect confidentiality. I have also altered certain facts that are irrelevant to the family dynamics under consideration.

appears in the psychiatric setting carries a specific historical meaning, indicating profound shifts in the psychology of the nuclear family, and therefore in the attendant processes of socialization.

1 Freud deciphered these processes as they appeared in the early twentieth century: the child's desire for the mother in violation of the incest taboo; the son's rivalry with the father and the subsequent identification with him, or the daughter's desire to have someone like her father; the concomitant internalization of his authority; and finally, the substitution of cultural ideals for the idealized paternal imago. The illnesses Freud treated were pathologies of authority, experienced by the patient as a sense of guilt: overidealization of the parent and the incapacity to live up to such ideals; and the struggles between forbidden desire (incest) and equally powerful internalized prohibitions. Psychoanalytic therapy was directed toward the dissolution of such parental imagoes, placing in their stead a psychical structure relatively free from the encumbrances of the past.

It is a matter of some irony that the cunning of history has transformed Freud from an archeologist of the psychic past into a prophet of the present. By this I mean that the traditional goal of analysis has been achieved, albeit in a perverted form, by the cultural conditions of our time. Parents do not seek treatment for their children because they have symptoms in the classic sense, a fa Little Hans or Dora. Symptoms such as phobias, anxiety, hysterical paralysis are understood psychodynamically as the result of repression, referring us to the process whereby authority is internalized in the manner described above. Now, however, the forces of repression appear nonexistent or in a highly atrophied condition, and it oftentimes seems as if the proper goal of therapists these days is to enlarge the same forces we were once called upon to delimit.

Instead of the old symptoms, parents presently complain of behavior that we categorize as "acting-out"; simply stated, the child refuses to obey in one form or the other: he lies, smokes dope, cuts classes or fails in school, engages in sexual promiscuity, befriends the wrong crowd, drinks, talks back, runs away, and is indifferent to punishment. It is no exaggeration to say that every parent who walks into a family therapy clinic charges the child with the same crime: "He will not obey and does not respect me. I don't understand. When I was a child, I obeyed, respected, or at least feared my parents."

The parents are rarely wrong in their assessment. Far from the guiltridden, inhibited child of several generations ago-who suffered the conflict between a parental ideal and forbidden impulses-we observe instead behaviors and attitudes that mark the child as enraged, blase, sarcastic, distant, depressed, and provocative. The secret pathologies of authority

uncovered by the work of analysis have yielded to open conflicts of power and thinly veiled intimations of incestuous desires or violent phantasies. Freud's patients suffered from repression that gave rise to inhibitions; today, patients suffer from anger and overstimulation, giving rise to action.

Herein lies the historically determined distinction between a symptom in its technical sense and the type of behavior termed acting-out. The former consists of a heavily disguised symbol of the prohibition and its violation. For example, the hysteric's sexual repression would express itself as a paralysis of the lower limbs, or (as in the case of Dora) a mysterious cough. All traces of sexuality are thus hidden from view until they are deciphered in the work of analysis. Acting-out, however, is the more direct expression of an impulse, usually accompanied by slight modifications. The progressive desymbolization of pathology-the historical shift from distortion to similitude-marks a dramatic shift in social forces influencing psychic development. It seems as if the psyche studied by Freud has undergone a process of deconstruction, where the same unconscious impulses previously accessible only by the painstaking process of analysis, are routinely enacted. Where superego was, id now appears.

This new situation can only reflect the insinuation of social transformations into the drama of family life. The history of clinical psychology has attached itself to this process in a particular way, signified by the meteoric growth of family therapy as an alternative to the treatment of the sick individual. We may infer that the psychoanalytic patient was subject to his own unresolved desire; family therapy, on the other hand, follows a historical evolution to a point where the family system itself has become the patient.

In every culture the process of socialization occurs by way of a transference similar to that described by Freud in his remarks on the relationship of the analysand to the analyst. Simply stated, parental values are internalized and in this way become authoritative. As the child matures, this internalized sense is assimilated into (transferred onto) cultural forms, which thus acquire their special status. The precondition for this assimilation resides in a complementarity between familial and social structures. In tribal societies, for instance, the two are identical since the familial is coexistent with the social, whereas in Western culture the complement has long been achieved through the homology of patriarchal-oedipal forms: the organization of polity, economy, and society recapitulates lines of authority established in the household as the original hegemony attributed to the father repeats itself in attitudes toward sovereign, boss, and sexual differentiation.

Freud detailed a portion of the psychic development: the moment of

oedipalization when the little engine of incestuous lust renounces desire for the mother and accepts (in Jacques Lacan's phrase) "the Law of the Father." Several decades after Freud had laid out the main lines of the oedipal process, Melanie Klein and her followers began studying the mother-infant dyad, which precedes the intercession of the paternal imago. The blissful state of affairs in this pre-oedipal period portrayed by Freud was radically modified by Klein's research. The infantile psyche, she discovered, was characterized by phases of depression, paranoia, and schizophrenia during which the maternal imago is split between ideas of the all-good, loving, protective mother and the all-bad, devouring one. The drama of these alternating imagoes is framed by the helpless dependence on the maternal figure who, in light of the dependence and insatiable cravings of the infant, is experienced as omnipotent and capricious.

The interpolation of the father into the dyad comes to take on a very different meaning as a result of Klein's work; his appearance in the psychic consciousness of the child must be a blessing no less than an intrusion. For if the child must renounce incestuous desires, he is then also free of the vagina dentata phantasies associated with them. Fear of the father's power takes on the character of a secondary acquisition, partly defensive in its nature. Freud's original thesis must be revised: the father's rude and dangerous intrusion, in effect, protects the child from the more awesome maternal imago. Stated differently, the initial discovery in the unconscious of good mother/powerful father ideation only unearthed a reaction-formation against deeper and more primitive strata of unconscious memory.

Patriarchal cultural formations reflected the psychic structures thus established. Their oedipal character, marked by clear lines of authority and presided over by a leader, complemented the individual's development with which the formations were homologous. This much is well-known and follows directly from the implications of the original Freudian texts. The new element, regarding pre-oedipal foundations, directs our attention to the regulation of the relation between the sexes secretly maintained within the homology. Both the ascension and acquiescence to male authority in adulthood represents more than a simple derivative of the father's power, since our theory must now reckon with the fear of the mother that partially motivates patriarchal relations. Cultural patriarchy, like the process of oedipalization, confined women to a safe place.

But even this addendum does not accurately capture the contemporary state of affairs. As is typically the case in matters of social theory, Freud's discoveries were only made possible when, in Hegel's phrase, "a shape of life [had] grown old"-when the structures subjected to analysis were in a state of disintegration, and on the verge of disappearing altogether. Even while Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego (1921) was being sent to the

printer, Max Weber was describing the new form of institutional organization embodied in bureaucracies. These forms do not reflect the clear oedipal structures employed as exemplars in Group Psychology, i.e., army, church, and school. Instead this organization began to approximate the world portrayed by Kafka: mysterious, omniscient and omnipotent, capricious, pervasive, and seemingly beyond the control of any single individual or group. One's experience of such institutions simultaneously feels like an event in nature and a force that is insanely human in its rationality. Unlike the choice of acquiescence or rebellion confronting one in patriarchal institutions, the individual now finds himself reduced to adaptation or anomie. It is not surprising that the typical attitudes in relation to bureaucracy repeat those of the pre-oedipal period: helpless dependence and rage; schizoid splits between normal affective experience and the routinization demanded by a peculiar rationality; and paranoid ideation that one is under constant surveillance and control.

We can infer from both Freud's clinical and theoretical papers that his patients were caught in the transition between private oedipal structures and a res publica now in a stage of radical change; in other words, there were no familiar external analogues to internal oedipal experience. The early twentieth-century ego was thus ensnared in the historical condition of its development-the superego raged within because there no longer were cultural loci where projections and displacements might be secured.

The rise of pre-oedipal pathologies, such as borderline and narcissistic conditions, as well as the family scenarios with which I am greeted on a typical day at the clinic, indicate that the disjunction between the private and social realities has since undergone a perverse reunion-that the infant's early development is again complemented by subsequent social relations. The senses erected in infancy against maternal power seem well-suited to serve one in the world of bureaucratic process. I cannot hope to offer here an explanation that would, in effect, explain how social formations insinuate themselves into the intimacies of child rearing. I do know from clinical data that the psychodynamics of the contemporary family has as little in common with the oedipal structures of Freud's time as contemporary bureaucracy has with nineteenth-century capitalist institutions.

In drawing an analogy between pre-oedipal experience and contemporary cultural types, one is necessarily drawn to the dissolution of paternal authority in both the home and the work place. How are we to account for the father's diminished psychological status? Although I must restrain myself from entering into that complicated question here, a simple answer does present itself when contemplating the interaction between the household and the work site: as the father's sense of the authoritative shrivels in public life, he is unable to transmit authority to his spouse and children. The proletariat of Marx's time certainly had no authority, but they were everywhere sub-

jected to an experience of the authoritative that was in turn wielded against wife and children. The bourgeois of our time, no less than the present-day proletariat, know only the monotonous power of process rather than the authority of the master.

It is difficult, when sketching these broad historical changes, to avoid implicitly or explicitly mourning the past-in this case, the age of oedipal structures when psyche and society reflected each other. A critique of capitalist development must constantly remind itself that each stage breeds its own forms of pathological normality, false consciousness, and psychic wounds. I hardly wish to recommend a time marked by the dread of women and their consequent oppression, the misery of the proletariat, and the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie. Whether the collapse of the temporary and uneasy truce between mind and culture in the nineteenth century brings forth the Orwellian or Marxist vision is beside the point; that truce was destined to fall in any case under the weight of its own inequities and distorted human relations.

3 I wish to partially exemplify the altered psychical condition of the contemporary family by reference to the Davidsons who were in treatment with me intermittently over a period of one year. Although this family does not perfectly illustrate my earlier discussion, their example is illustrative because they stand astride the historical transformations undergone by recent generations. The Davidsons are living out that transformation and are not simply the product of it. The parents are absorbed by their anachronistic oedipal longings with a child who is compelled, by forces beyond her consciousness or control, to sacrifice herself in the service of unmasking that anachronism.

The family was referred to me for treatment last year when Connie, the sixteen-year-old daughter, ran away from home. Mr. and Mrs. Davidson (Robert and Kathleen) told me that until Connie was fourteen she had been a "perfect" daughter. Suddenly, however, the situation changed radically. According to her parents, the trouble began when Connie renounced her former friends and replaced them with the dope-smoking child of an alcoholic mother. From that point on, everything went downhill: Connie's grades deteriorated and now she rarely attends school at all; she began coming home long after her curfew, usually intoxicated or drugged; and her behavior at home radically changed-she began to sulk, scream, and withdraw into her room. Several months before therapy began, Connie started dating a nineteen-year-old Latino low-rider whom the police suspected as a drug dealer. She ran off with him for several months, became pregnant, miscarried, and was abandoned by the young man. Connie persisted in her affections and was beaten by him on several occasions. After several stormy

reunions with her parents, she finally moved out of their home permanently and now maintains only occasional telephone contact with them.

Although Robert and Kathleen have their own problems, both as individuals and as a couple, there is nothing obviously pathogenic about them. Robert is in his mid-thirties, a successful businessman who has worked hard to attain that position, a leader in his church, and devoted to his family. He holds a tight rein on his emotions, easily becomes defensive, and tends to moralize. But these characteristics are, I believe, within the norm as described by the Protestant ethic and would of themselves not have brought him into therapy were it not for the conjunction of other factors. Kathleen is demure and rather distant, though there can be no doubt that she cares about her marriage and family. Even Connie, despite the recent developments in her life, appeared, on those occasions when she showed up for therapy, to be a typical adolescent; during the sessions, she seemed neither spiteful nor particularly agitated. In short, there is apparently nothing unusual about the Davidsons and, if one does not know the actual circumstances, the impression they give is that of a normal family with average day-to-day problems; in fact, one might even imagine that this family provides a refuge from many of these problems.

It is often the case in clinical work that families, like individuals, will appear entirely normal, but this appearance, besides hiding serious pathological elements, is itself a cause of the illness. This is not true of the Davidson family, however. I will, in what follows, isolate those elements of Robert and Connie's relationship that explain Connie's self-destructive behavior, but this causal account needs to be sharply distinguished from those schizogenic or borderline families of which a complete analysis can be made on the basis of morbific communication patterns alone. The Davidsons, in other words, are in some sense normal and do not merely appear so. Their troubles disclose the psychologic of social reality as it routinely intrudes itself on the unconscious register of family life.

In the course of therapy, I learned that Robert's relationship with his daughter had been unusually close. He nostalgically described scenes of them shopping hand in hand, and of times, only two years past, when she would fix him snacks and then sit on his lap to watch TV together. Far from exhibiting feelings of jealousy or exclusion, Kathleen encouraged these interactions, later explaining to me that it was "natural" for pubescent girls to seek paternal affection. Upon further inquiry, Kathleen stated, "I was relieved to see 'Connie pay so much attention to Rob. It took some of the pressure off of me." This statement, when deciphered and interpreted, reveals a hidden nodal point in the family's dynamics, one that is equally unconscious to each of the family members. From other material presented by the Davidsons, I learned that Kathleen's explanation of Connie's and Robert's affectionate behavior toward each other represents, as in a dream

or slip of the tongue, a distorted form of her true feelings. Reversing the names of Connie and Rob brings us to her actual meaning: "I am relieved to see Rob pay so much attention to Connie." Kathleen's comment impressed me and I was eventually able to deduce that the daughter had been deployed as a kind of partition between Robert and his wife, which protected each of them from an intimacy they did not want. Connie was thus inserted to provide for Robert's emotional needs-needs that Kathleen was glad to deflect and that Robert was happy to visit upon his daughter rather than his spouse.

Connie's unusual behavior followed in the wake of this deployment. The libidinal enmeshment with her father was such that it could only be broken by means of a radical separation. The choice of a Latino boyfriend (Robert: "I'm not prejudiced. Some of my best workers are Mexican. And they know a spic when they see one as well as I do.'') and the open flaunting of their sexual escapades make obvious sense within this context, for what better way to renounce her father than for Connie to locate her desire at a point where he would most disapprove? Nor was Robert totally blind to this meaning, though of course he had no more awareness of its repressed implications than Connie did. On several occasions, he expressed the wish to castrate Connie's lover, thus providing a clue to both the motive and meaning of his daughter's behavior.

Prior to the outbreak of Connie's symptoms, Kathleen had become frustrated in her role as housewife and started to fashion a career for herself. From Robert's comments when the couple described that period, and from his reactions to Kathleen's more trivial efforts at independence (e.g., asking him to wash his work clothes), I assume that he was threatened by his wife's career, and his emotional demands on Connie increased accordingly. Connie now found herself subject to contradictory feelings and unconscious phantasies: her father's demands, the experience of maternal abandonment, and her own incestuous impulses, which could only be exaggerated by the change. It is easy to understand why Connie's new behavior made its appearance at this time-though the dynamics of the family are such that the acting-out would have soon begun in any case. In the meantime, Robert's insinuations evoked a sense of guilt in Kathleen. She consulted a family doctor because of anxiety attacks, and he confirmed Robert's opinion that she was anxious because she had chosen a vocation over her proper duties as a mother and wife. With her guilt verified by a professional, she returned to the fold, but only to find that the situation was now beyond her act of contrition.

It has been necessary to emphasize the underlying dynamic elements that are of clinical and theoretical importance. As a result, the reader may gain the impression of an immoral family in which incestuous wishes have run

amok." On the contrary, Mr. and Mrs. Davidson cling to the traditional values of their own parents and have endeavored to protect their family from the hot tub intimacy that marks the way of life of many middle-class families in urban California. Nor is there anything shocking about the incestuous phantasies underlying the former closeness between Connie and her father. Analysts and anthropologists have known for many years that such phantasies are universal. Finally, it must be said that although Robert's affection for Connie bordered on the inappropriate, his behavior becomes pathogenic only in the context of multiple social and psychological determinations, in which the affection itself participates as one among many factors. At the nucleus of these various determinations is the fate of the authorization processes as they affect the shared psychic reality of the family system.

Robert was raised "in the old school" and does not share in the contemporary guilt over his patriarchal ambitions-but his authoritative stance has become a mere posture. During one session he announced, "This family is no longer a democracy. I am president and chairman of the board"-at a time when his daughter was totally beyond his control. Kathleen colluded in the phantom coup, secretly winking at me and smiling sheepishly. Clinically, such a statement might be designated as an instance of denial, but that categorization would only serve to obscure the pathos being conveyed. Robert's delusion unfolds in the space between the desire internalized from his parents (to live up to his mother's wishes, to become like his father) and social formations that frustrate this desire at every turn. This same contradiction determines his relations with his wife and daughter as well.

The source of Kathleen's collusion is more complicated. From subtle hints and gestures, she has let me know that she is humoring her putative patriarch and that I should do so as well. As I mentioned above, Kathleen suffered a housewife's crisis several years ago and decided to take up a career. Nevertheless, she now faithfully supports Robert and her marriage and, like her husband, resists all efforts on my part to examine their relationship.

I should add here a comment on the character of incest in a family like the Davidsons' by explaining the psychoanalytic comprehension of the relation between manifest behavior and latent psychic meaning. Mr. Davidson's behavior toward his daughter was, for the most part, intrusive, demanding, and needy rather than blatantly sexual. (I was, however, told of incidents that struck me as bordering on the sexual, e.g., the times when Connie would sit on her father's lap. In one therapy session, when Robert and Connie had apparently patched up their differences, the two sat close together on the couch, the former's arm around his daughter, while Kathleen sat in a chair on the other side of the room. It is also the case that Robert does not strike me as a particularly affectionate person. so his physical gestures toward Connie take on added significance.) The disparity between his behavior with Connie and Kathleen, the abstract and overzealous moral preaching, his constant references to working in the church, the steadfast refusal to broach the topic of life in the conjugal bed-all these conjoin in the observer's mind and suggest an unconscious sexual motivation. Nor can 1 ignore my sense of a sexual tension in the consulting room when Robert and Connie were together: Connie somehow managed to flaunt her sexuality in subtle ways, and Robert would appear to be just keeping the lid on his

The lived, but not conscious, experience of Kathleen is ambivalence. By this I mean that she does not seem aware of her divided feelings, but instead enacts them via dichotomous presentations: her words express commitment and marital harmony; her composure and affect give evidence of distance and defense. She succumbs, through her utterances, to her husband's wordthe Law of the Father-but in all other ways keeps herself at a safe distance.

I infer that Kathleen's ambivalence toward Robert derives from feelings toward her own father, now being repeated at the scene of her marriage. This, of course, is a psychoanalytic truism and would hardly be worth mentioning were it not for a punctuation of this repetition by the altered social reality of contemporary capitalist culture. Her father was an authority; Robert can only pose as one. She, after all, could never have even conceived of doing what Connie has willfully taken it upon herself to do.

Vaguely conscious of this new state of affairs, Kathleen can hardly rebel against Robert or carve out a life in opposition to his, because there is nothing there to rebel against. On the contrary, if she is to follow the psychic law of the compulsion to repeat, she must support her husband in creating and maintaining the illusion of his authority. The situation is ironic but hardly unusual. She can only live out the wish for a patriarch by first constituting one. Having accomplished that task, she now defends herself against her resentment by the maintenance of a cool distance. Note also that her resentment is twofold: an original version typically felt by women in the face of patriarchal authority; and one evoked by the realization that Robert is not her father but a diminished surrogate. She maintains her position by employing forms of behavior that mask ambivalent feelings: she simultaneously acts as if Robert is an authority and distantiates herself from him, and in this way satisfies both spouse and self. This compromise-formation partly resolves the historical double bind in which she finds herself: the wish for a father and the resentment against him; some relief that Robert is not the authoritarian patriarch of her childhood, and a vaguely conscious notion of

seething anger. On many occasions I found myself wondering: MWhy is this man so intent on hiding his anger? What danger is there in acknowledging his feelings about Connie's sexual escapades?"

Analytic training directs one's inferences toward the unconscious meaning of such relatively innocent patterns-in the same way that one deciphers the meaning implicit in a seemingly innocent dream or slip of the tongue. Robert's behavior was in no manifest way incestuous-but it seems highly probable that both its unconscious source and subsequent unconscious effects derive from and intensify repressed phantasies with incest at their nucleus. Finally, it should be recalled that I characterized the Davidsons as historically transitional. Now I can elaborate on this description by placing them between the period when the incestwish was successfully repressed and the contemporary scene where child pornography and molestation abounds, and where there is an alarming increase in the number of actual incest cases. (Of course, American psychology, showing its usual and depressing proclivity to magically transform the real into the ideal, now assures us that incest might be beneficial to all concerned.)

devaluation because her husband does not measure up to that imago. Connie, however, is not similarly motivated to maintain the distortions, and she reacts to them as if she had been lied to.

It thus falls upon Connie to reveal, through her symptoms, family dynamics that cannot be spoken about directly. As mentioned earlier, her behavior is a reaction against the crypto-incestuous relationship that had obtained between herself and Robert. But it is also the case that a good portion of her rage is directed toward her mother for living a lie and subjecting her to it. It is hardly reasonable to assume that Connie had not learned from a lifetime what a therapist observed after a few sessions; but since that knowledge was dangerous to her, it was acted-out rather than brought into conscious awareness. When asked why she had engaged in this or that specific behavior, her invariable reply was "I don't know," and there is no reason to mistrust her answer.

Robert's and Kathleen's childhoods determined that they should construct a myth drawn from the past. Connie was under no such psychical obligation. The parents are constrained to live as though the myth corresponded to reality; Connie is compelled to expose the contradiction. Far from respecting her father's authority, she is made painfully aware that it does not exist, and has no stake in pretending otherwise. The illusion of authority Robert has managed to construct at work, in his church, and with his wife, is negated by his daughter's symptoms. Or so it would appear to the therapist. In fact, the symptoms themselves are woven into the fabric of denial. As far as Robert and Kathleen are concerned, Connie's condition is a disease she has mysteriously picked up elsewhere despite their efforts to inoculate her.

The illusion is recodified by two additional non sequiturs: "We will not let this ruin our family," as if the family had not been subject to a continual trauma over that past year and one-half; and the aforementioned "We are here to talk about our family, not our marriage," as if the two categories could be so easily separated.

4 As a clinical matter, the steadfast refusal of the Davidson family to examine the feelings, ideas, and events leading to Connie's transgressive behavior, signifies that the motivating factors are repressed, i.e., that they are too dangerous to bring into consciousness. I have suggested that the central factor being defended against concerns incest. There is nothing remarkable about this from the psychoanalytic point of view, which posits the incest taboo as the constitutive element in the socialization of the psyche. But when the Davidson family is analyzed, the mental map sketched by Freud in the early part of this century no longer seems to fit the terrain. In this regard, it may be useful to consider two further points of reference: first, that the difference is historically determined; and second, that examining this transformation amounts to explicating the de-authorization process as it now appears in the

private recesses of family life. It may even be that this explication is an initial entree into the long sought after collaboration between the discourses of critical social theory, on the one hand, and of psychoanalysis, on the other.

In classic psychoanalytic theory, acculturation was achieved when the child renounced his incestuous wishes and murderous phantasies and put in their place the Law of the Father. There is an additional theme hinted at by Freud in describing this process but never further developed: the regulation of relations between the sexes. Both feminist thought and anthropology have elaborated this idea, arguing that predominant cultural arrangements are derivatives of the forms of sexual regulation. A type of sexual Marxism has thus developed where the unconscious relations of power between the sexes is the hidden meaning of all social domination. I concur with the general thesis contained in these analyses, but find the specifics either static or superficial; anthropologists search for universal structures, while feminists focus on the manifest reminders of a dying patriarchy.

Freud's account, despite its emphasis on the sexual origins of socialization, obscured the sexual consequences of this process. He disclosed that the identification of the young son with his father, and the subsequent renunciation of libidinal interest in his mother was determined by a castration danger emanating from the former. I reported earlier on Melanie Klein's discovery of the pre-oedipal mother/child dyad and the conclusion that a significant substratum of the infantile unconscious refers to a dread of the maternal figure as a result of several factors: the terrifying dependence on the mother in infancy, the phantasies of destruction attendant to this dependence, and the misrecognition of female anatomy as a sign of castration. Identification with the father-the acknowledgment of his authority and the wish to eventually be like him--entails less of a sacrifice for the little boy than Freud thought, since, as I noted, the acknowledgment represents a defense against the terrors of the feminine. In effect, the father now becomes the boy's protector. More importantly for the present discussion, the acknowledgment promises a significant reversal of the pre-oedipal situation and a guarantee against it: by participating in his father's paternal authority, the son will be able to defend himself from women. A transvaluation of psychical values has thus been effected: the unconscious dread of women has given way to the conscious domination of them.

The chain of psychic events follows a different course in young girls. They, too, experience the initial dread/dependence on the mother, which, however, dissolves with the appreciation of sexual differentiation. Far from being a danger, the mother is now misrecognized as inferior, and by identification, the same subordinate status awaits the girl. For this reason and at this moment, her affections are displaced onto the father who is idealized and perceived as a powerful figure. In contrast to the boy's development, the

father's status is not internalized, or at least not in the same way. Subsequently, the dynamic possibility arises of tension between the early idealization of the paternal imago and later perceptions. If the contradiction becomes too great, as may be the case during adolescence, the conflict transforms itself into a rage that can be seen to oscillate between self-hate and the hatred of men, between a feeling of inferiority unjustified by reality and anger at those who are the putative cause of that feeling. In extreme cases, such as Connie's, a sadomasochistic compromise is struck between the two states: self-destructive behavior meant to simultaneously injure the father.

The enactment of such psychological conflicts depends on historical factors. The rise of the nuclear family, attended by a quantum intensification of the emotional bond between mother and infant, served to exacerbate every latent tension in the relations between the sexes. The resultant damage was superficially repaired, as previously described, by complementary social arrangements that maintained the sexual defenses erected in childhood. Men could protect themselves from women by their authority and superior status, and the female sense of inferiority was partially compensated for by an attachment to this same authority. When, however, the social formations came to contradict these defenses-for example, in the replacement of authoritative hierarchies by bureaucratic organization or the supercession of paternal functions by the state, experts, and the media-then different prophylactic measures had to be found.

It is no simple matter to privately repair such contradictions, and the casualty rate, as reflected in divorce statistics, is tremendous. Couples no longer break up because of mere "differences"-the legal term "irreconcilable differences" more closely portrays the psychological forces at work. Individuals who have such experiences often feel that it is not this particular man or woman who made living together impossible, but the unmediated differences between the sexes.

For a couple to remain together, an auxiliary defensive apparatus must be contrived. Robert and Kathleen Davidson typify one such contrivance, which, for purposes of analysis, I want to break down into two parts: the implicit understanding reached between the couple, and the subsequent deployment of Connie as a scaffolding to keep the marital structure in place.

As I described above, the Davidsons presented themselves to me and each other as if the traditional sexual boundaries were still in place. This distortion was maintained by various maneuvers designed to keep the partners at a distance from each other, both physically and emotionally. In other words, the failure of traditional internal boundaries (Robert's sense of himself as an authority and thus superior to Kathleen; Kathleen's conscious acceptance of this) was repaired through external substitutes. This ersatz resolution showed itself to be extremely fragile, however: they treated each other with great care and absolutely resisted any efforts on my part to examine even the

most superficial aspects of their marriage or to suggest that there might be some connection between their relationship and the problems with their daughter.

When a child is conceived in such circumstances, she is inevitably incorporated into this system of boundary defenses. This is often achieved either by the couple's fighting over the child or, jointly, by directing anger toward her. In these ways, the couple displaces its own conflict onto the child. In the case of the Davidsons, however, a different strategy was used to maintain distance: a libidinal alliance was formed between father and daughter, which had the effect of excluding Kathleen. As I mentioned earlier, Kathleen was hardly bothered by this. Her attitude puzzled me until I came to understand that the alliance between Robert and Connie was a further guarantee that Kathleen and her husband would not be threatened by intimacy. The relative absence of boundaries between Robert and his daughter constituted a new boundary between Robert and Kathleen and strengthened the illusion of his paternal power.

I described the affection between Robert and his daughter as incestuous, and from a purely intrapsychic perspective this is doubtlessly the case. As a matter of causal determination, however, we must look somewhere other than the individual psyches of the family members. In Freud's time, incestuous libido was distributed among family members in a much different fashion. Children directed phantasies toward their parents who rebuffed them in one form or another, resulting in the eventual repression of the phantasies, i.e., the incest taboo. The parents' own repressed desires were put in the service of the marital bond. As long as the father's paternal authority was socially guaranteed, he could psychically afford to desire his wife: as I said, the terrifying side of his heterosexual desire was guarded against by the idea of sexual superiority.

Now a very different social situation exists, and psychic consequences are following in its wake. Robert cannot depend on his sexual status as a protection from the imagined danger he would experience should he allow himself to become intimate with Kathleen. In effect, he splits his unconscious attitude toward femininity: the positive, incestuous side is directed toward Connie; while the negative, dangerous segment is defended against by keeping Kathleen away. This division is made possible because Connie is still a girl and therefore does not evoke phantasies of vagina dentata. When the child acts-out, it is usually as a reaction against the incestuous proximity of the parent. Running away is obviously the most efficient means of establishing boundaries that the parents have systematically violated, but simply keeping the parents angry or engaging in emotional withdrawal can have the same effect. What is often most striking is that the adolescent seems indifferent to the parents' anger; in fact, however, the indifference disguises a difficult unconscious decision-that the only alternative to dangerous love is

parental anger. Children, as in Connie's case, typically do not know why they have "chosen" to misbehave in a particular way, precisely because their motivation is beyond conscious recognition.

There is a common joke these days (attested to by bumper stickers and New Yorker cartoons) that children raise their parents. The material I have referred to may verify this piece of common wisdom for it presently seems to be the case that the child is faced with the necessity of executing the hallmark of authority; that is, by acting-out the child imposes the incest taboo. And now we come to understand, as well, the shift in the nature of symptoms referred to earlier: it is as if the adolescent has no superego and must substitute external action in the absence of internal controls. Since the parents have not transmitted the prohibition that would create psychological distance, the child must impose this distance on her own through misbehavior.

But if the child has not been subject to the incest taboo in the first place, for what reason would she now want to impose it? The taboo, after all, is not a natural developmental acquisition: it is forced on the psyche by the parental disapprobation the child senses in relation to her own desires. When such disapprobation is lacking, as is partially the case with the Davidsons, why then would Connie be motivated to enforce it herself?

This is an extremely complicated matter, touching as it does on the theory of feminine development, which to this day is still relatively obscure. I can only offer a sketchy explanation of the clinical material by reference to the psychoanalytic account of sexual identity-amended by my own understanding of historical factors that have intruded upon the classic model.

In Connie's case, I believe, the taboo comes into effect as a result of the original identification with her mother, which includes, as in all instances of identification, the assimilation of the mother's attitude toward the father, as well as a primordial loyalty to the former. In traditional patriarchal families, the father's authority sufficed to weaken that identification by drawing much of its strength to the paternal imago. With Connie, no such definitive shift occurs and she remains psychically attached to her mother. As long as she was prepubescent, however, there was no reason why the close relationship to Robert would become implicated in psychic conflict. But with the onset of puberty she was forced to choose between loyalty to her mother and an incestuous relationship to her father. The strength of the original attachment, as well as the identification with her mother's resentment, tipped the scales against the father.

Connie thus achieved the normal effect of the oedipal complex: the discovery of her own desire as distinct from that of her parents, and the location of it outside the home. It is ironic that her accomplishment made use of pre-oedipal material (i.e., the early relation to her mother) to gain a

forced oedipalization-from the outside, as it were-not only for herself but for Robert as well, who responded to Connie's efforts with stern warnings of her moral degradation. Unfortunately, the conditions of her triumph, determined by the necessity of acting-out, involved her in great physical and emotional danger and caused her parents considerable suffering.

There is one final stage in this process, and it is the most obvious element in a family situation by the time they enter the clinic. The child had previously been deployed as an intermediary between the parents, providing the father with a love-object and the mother with a refuge. By her symptoms, the child endeavors to extricate herself from this triangle, only to discover that she is subject to a new mode of deployment-or rather, her symptoms are. The parents focus all their attention onto the identified patient's problems, as distinct from the child herself: "She can do no good," "The other kids are perfect," and so on. With the Davidsons, the child's behavior was quite serious, but in other families, though the parents complain continuously, the therapist is hard-pressed to discover anything untoward in the identified patient's activities. Until recently I was perplexed by this phenomenon, but now the explanation lies close at hand: by concentrating their attention on the child's symptoms, either real or imputed, the parents have found yet another way of avoiding each other. The effect is not unlike those couples who engage themselves in constant and frenetic activity as a means of circumventing intimacy.

5 From psychoanalysis we have learned that moral categories and constraints are, in the last instance, internal states indicating the relative strengths of the several psychic structures. If, owing to either individual or cultural factors, these structures and the relations between them are fixated at an early stage (e.g., an ego too weak to exercise freedom or an attenuated superego without the power to impose responsibility), then it makes little sense to eloquently preach in behalf of a new moral regime. Amending an analogy once used by Freud, the sermon would have as much influence on the morally needy as the distribution of menus during a famine would have on the starving masses. Still, some benefit may be gained by continuing the brief exploration of historical circumstances that have brought us up to the current level of moral malaise, if for no other reason than to correct the impression that the present situation is an aberration, or mistaken detour in an otherwise salutary ethical venture. I will, in these concluding remarks, remain focused on the family but only for the purpose of reaching a further understanding of that specific domain. I do not mean to imply that the structure and psychodynamics of the family explain the particular character of American political consciousness; rather, the family is the locus where that consciousness is reproduced as a result of determinations outside its boundaries. For purposes of isolating and examining contemporary family life, it was

necessary to emphasize the historical disjuncture influencing authority relations in the home and in the culture at large. Were we to step back, however, and survey the broader considerations implied in the notions of freedom and responsibility, that disjuncture would appear as a developmental sequence in harmony with the logic of American ideological history. In brief, our attention is now attracted to continuities rather than disjunctures. By this I mean that the problematic of authority has been present since the Founding, but it is only recently-in the latest phase of capitalist development-that the inherent pathology contained within the problematic makes its appearance.

The pathology has been subjected to a thorough process of mystification by a kind of ideological reaction-formation known as individuahsm. Since authority was conceived of in America as external constraints rather than internal structures, the only serious political question concerned the precise delimitation of such constraints so that the individual was free enough to pursue his own interests, but not so unbridled as to ignore his responsibility in respect to his neighbor's freedom.

The capitalist ideal of the individual could not, however, be reproduced through constitutional guarantees, or moral exhortations; the ideal required deeper foundations, which the burgeoning nuclear family was admirably suited to provide. The form of the nuclear family, and a contradiction induced by that form, came to guarantee the reproduction of subjects who experienced themselves as individuals and behaved in accordance with that experience. As will now be shown, they had little choice but to accept this version of the free individual.

The nuclear family is defined by the following attributes: its relative isolation from other social formations; the restriction to two, or at most three, generations of the minimal biological unit; and the expectation that children are raised to depart from the unit and establish their own social and geographical space. These are social facts, but from the first two follow the psychic consequences known to us as the Oedipus complex. The form and situation of the nuclear family determined that the emotional bonds holding it together would be extremely intense and marked by dependency, since all libidinal needs were concentrated within its parameters. But the psychologic of this phenomenon established a dialectic that contradicted the dependency relations that were thus formed: for, owing to this same dependency, offspring were impelled to "individuate" themselves by eventually breaking with the family and recreating their own desire at a different locale.

Michel Foucault has recently pointed out that the scientific obsession with the incest taboo only arose in the late nineteenth century, coinciding with the moment that the family was assuming its most restricted and isolated form. I infer from this finding that the concern with incest intensified as the family shrank and the infant's earliest object-relations became wholly concentrated

on the mother. Recalling my earlier descriptions of the infant's psychic attitude toward the maternal imago, we are led to believe that the father's intervention into the dyad became more urgent while his influence was becoming more superficial. Stated in a spatial metaphor, the psychic area occupied by unconscious maternal representations had expanded and the domain of the internalized paternal authority correspondingly diminished.

The resultant product was the "individual"-a subject who found it psychically necessary to carve out his own separate space, suspicious of maternal figures, and never quite trusting the power ofauthority to protect him. To be truly safe, he pursued a private place of his own where he could implement an individual status, and thus reproduce with his wife and children the conditions of his own upbringing.

The idea of freedom developed out of this compelling need to establish boundaries in one's external relations, as partial compensation for the weakness of the internal ones. We are now in a position to understand the psychic foundations of a political consciousness that misrecognizes freedom and authority as adversarial qualities. The mistrust of authority traditionally attributed to the American character is the product of early experience: the phantasies of the mother's destructive potential, and the fear that the father's authority could not provide sufficient protection. Still, the mistrust does not tell the whole story. As Tocqueville first noted, Americans also evince a no less powerful yearning for boundaries that would hopefully limit the range of interpersonal experience: rules, regulations, roles, structures, laws, procedures, and the like. This curious split again owes its psychic origins to the family situation: the mistrust represents a defense against maternal power and the inadequacy of patriarchal protection; the yearning is compensatory to that early experience, seeking to create in reality a security that is psychologically lacking.

As for responsibility, my sense is that it has never occupied a moral status where social relations are bound to ethical considerations. It seems rather that the concept was understood in utilitarian terms, employing the calculus of a revised version of the "Golden Rule": "I will not do to you what I do not want done to me." As with freedom, the American expression of responsibility occurred in the negative-passive mode, demarcating restrictions on social intercourse, lest its dangers threaten the isolated safety of the individual. By way of contrast I should note that the positive-active version of these categories refers to communal action bound to the presiding authoritative presence of a leader, ideal, vision, or memory. As Hannah Arendt describes its history, freedom has been an enacted quality, through which the groupbound by the responsibility of its members to each other and the futureengages in a praxis aimed at altering the course of otherwise ineluctable events. In America, this version has shriveled to the activity of a single voter pulling levers behind a screen in a voting booth.

If in our own time freedom appears in the guise of license, and responsibility is an issue most appropriately handled by lawyers, it is not because our moral virtues have suddenly collapsed. When we consider Connie, we see that the motive behind her behavior is no different than the springs of freedom in bygone times: the creation of a space for herself in opposition to the dangerous bond between her and her parents. What distinguishes her freedom from Horatio Alger's is quantitative: the veneer of internalized authority, permitting the nineteenth-century individualist to safely conform to social ideals, is gone. Now the individual reappears as the narcissist-or, in Connie's case, as one who can only defend herself through radical and self-destructive means. Unfortunately, the psychology ofthis rebellious practice seems to preclude any active political significance. As the course of events in the sixties indicates (but does not prove), the impulse toward group action is diluted by the defensive need to free oneself from any constraint whatsoever-including that of a vision, ideal, or group. The often bizarre expression of the self during that period only carried the ideology of individualism to its absurd extreme and did nothing to alter its course.

I want to have dispelled any notion of the good old days, and the good old boys who ran them-and to warn against the danger of nostalgic memories at the moment when patriarchy may finally have reached its final stage. Attention should instead be turned to altering the social conditions of psychic matriarchy, now that it can no longer be defended against by the authorization of the father.

The crash of performative circumstances: a modernist discourse on postmodernism

Richard Schechner

1 The Mother of Pondicherry, India, was felt by her followers to be immortal. This very old French woman-wife of Sri Aurobindo-was said to be rebuilding her body cell by cell. "Come back in ten years and you will see a young woman." That was in 1972. A few years later The Mother was dead. On the walls of her ashram south of Madras hung exhortations. One of them has stuck with me: "The future of the earth depends on a change of consciousness. The only hope for the future is in a change of man's consciousness and the change is bound to come. But it is left to men to decide if they will collaborate for this change or it will have to be enforced on them by the power of crashing circumstances." I wondered what it meant to "collaborate for this change," and what the "crashing circumstances" might be. To collaborate "for"-if it's not just a grammatical mistake-implies that people must collaborate with each other in order to bring about change. And if they don't, the change will come anyway: some kind of nuclear or ecosystem apocalypse. I thought of Artaud's short definition of his theatre of cruelty: "We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all." All this seems to be saying that the Age of Humanism is finished. Man is no longer the measure of all things. The cosmos is multicentered, which means it is centered nowhere, or everywhere: everything from holism to narcissism is sanctioned.

At The Mother's ashram I lay my head on that old lady's knee, as was the custom in having darshan (literally, a vision) of her. Upon leaving her I wrote in my notebook: "She looked at me. I left trembling. I am confused, unknowing. Her look penetrated. She did not know, she saw." Saw what? I ask now ten years later. My notes from that day continue: "Doubtsfundamental denials, remain, but something has happened, is happening."

01981 by Richard Schechner. 8S

And I hear now an old Buffalo Springfield lyric: "Something's happening here / what it is ain't exactly clear."

Yes. We've been told by our visionaries, our demographers, our artists, and our ideologues. Change is upon us.

Our Mothers, Malthuses, Artauds, and Marxes agree on that. Our only liberty in the matter is whether we shall collaborate in effecting this change or be its passive victims/ beneficiaries.

Beneficiaries of nuclear holocaust? Of ecological catastrophe?

And will the change be from consciousness or from circumstances?

And what kind of change are these dreamers dreaming of? Does anyone believe in the stateless society of Marx? Or any other paradise?

The Mother tried to demonstrate in her own body how consciousness can triumph over circumstances. She failed. Is her failure definitive?

Marx, the perfect modernist, saw history as man-made, and within our control. Brecht tried to push this idea of humanist responsibility in his plays. But Brecht couldn't even control Mother Courage: she turned tragic right on the Berliner Ensemble stage. And our species collectively-as communities, nations, or associations of nations-has not succeeded in reconstructing human history any more than The Mother succeeded in her own single body.

This kind of thing is giving the future a bad smell.

2 I am a person a mask, a multiplicity, a process to sound through. I live on and in the limen separating and joining the modern from and to the postmodern. All those linked prepositions seem necessary. Pre/positions: the places I'm in before I'm in place-places that are not simply defined but lead in at least two directions. The attention given by so many to Zen and its insistence on "present consciousness," the center, the now, is partly explained by the terrible drag of both past and future. What I mean by "modern" and "postrnodern" I've tried to explain in another writing, "The End of Humanism"(Peiforming Arts Journal, no. 10/11 [1979]). But 111 add some more here.

My furious obsession with writing-I've filled sixty-five notebooks with more than 20,000 pages over the past twenty-six years-is a modern obsession with "getting it all down," of catching the flopping fish of experience. Yet my very existence as a "theatre person"who "makes plays"--experiences that can't be kept, that disappear with each performance, not with each production but with each repetition of the actions I so carefully plan with my colleagues, each repetition that is never an exact duplication no matter how closely scored, how frozen by disciplined rehearsals-this very existence in/ as theatre is postmodern. For the theatre is a paradigm of "restored behavior"-behavior twice behaved, behavior never-for-the-first-time-ritualized gestures. And if experience is always in flow, theatre attempts, in Conrad's words, to wrest "from the remorseless rush of time" precise mo-

ments of experience. And the domain of theatre is not, as Stanislavski thought, psychology, but behavior. Writing, of course, also tries to immobilize experience-but writing translates experience into this system of graphemes you are now reading. And film, a trickster, is another system of writing: a behavior agreeably locked into a mechanical process where it can be edited on a table. Only theatre-live performance, from dance to circus to rituals to plays to sports-works directly with living persons. In theatre the flux and decay of ongoing living is asked to halt, become conscious of itself, and repeat. A paradox Heraclitus already knew about, and the author(s) of the Sanskrit treatise on performance, Natyasastra.

The postmodern is possibly a liminal bridge in history, a period conscious of itself, its past, and its multiple potentials as future. By postmodern I mean: ritualized holistic organic ahistoric reflexive multicentered multichanneled indeterminate

oral environmental nonhumanist

Postmodern consciousness

These tendencies are not "resolvable" into a noncontradictory whole. Postmodern holism more than tolerates contradictions. In some of its tendencies we have the hilarious and scary monologues of Spalding Gray and the incredibly energetic performative outflowings of Jeff Weiss, both superbly narcissistic, truly looking deeply into the waters and seeing only themselves worthy of the fullest love. In other manifestations the postmodern births collective works like the Mabou Mines Dead End Kids whose range extends from Faustus to J. Robert Oppenheimer, from alchemy to nuclear apocalypse. The postmodern includes both environmentalists helping people gain the consciousness of global ecosystems necessary for survival and one logical outflow of that consciousness in action, an Orwellian world of total information/action control.

Why, you ask, must knowledge of systems lead to tyranny? Scientia est potentia is an old saying, still true.

Or to put it another way: Why, I ask, must knowledge of systems lead to paradise?

3 I keep a file of clippings called "Doomsday." It's my common book of despair.

Some of the titles: "Causes of Cancer Called Numerous," "32 Nations Close to Starvation," "Toxic Trace Elements: Preferential Concentration in Respirable Particles," "House Report Fears World Starvation," "Help Is Urged for 36,000 Homeless in [New York] City'S Streets," "Stratospheric Pollution: Multiple Threats to Earth's Ozone."

The gloomiest of all is the Global 2000 Report issued by the Carter Administration in July 1980 and summarized in Science (I August 1980): "If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now

Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today." The Global 2000 Report confirms what we already know, but infrequently stare in the eyeball: that $450 billion a year is spent on arms, against $20 billion on economic aid; that the gap between rich and poor is increasing; that resources are being depleted; that the global environment is losing life-support capabilities. "By 2000, 40 percent of the forests still remaining in the less developed countries in 1978 will have been razed. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will be nearly one-third higher than preindustrial levels Desertification (including salinization) may have claimed a significant fraction of the world's rangeland and cropland. Over little more than two decades, 15-20 percent of the earth's total species of plants and animals will have become extinct-a loss of at least 500,000 species."

If true, this is a prediction of more than genocide-but of some mean neologism like "globacide."

Yet the ecology movement can't get many people out into the streets. There simply isn't any disarmament movement to speak of.

Is it that people don't believe the predictions? That they are too gross to be incorporated into consciousness? That people, fearful, are trying to take care of Number One and letting the rest go rot?

All of the above.

Already in Tristes Tropiques, published in 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss saw what still only a few, relatively speaking, accept:

Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty-towns are spreading across Africa, when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of

the American or Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history? Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind. [New York: Atheneum, 1974, p. 38]

Travel around the world? Try any New York street. And yet the rage to clean it all up has fascist harmonies: Mussolini making the trains run on time; Reagan eliminating social programs and preaching that everyone must sacrifice: as if asking the executive to do with only two cars is equivalent to asking the unemployed to do with only two meals.

Levi-Strauss's India is not that of Baba Ram Dass, or any of the others who have returned to America saffroned with holiness. No, the French anthropologist looks with earlier, modern, rational eyes, and feels with a heart pumping material blood as he describes conditions in Calcutta:

at Narryanganj, the jute workers earn their living inside a gigantic spider's web formed by whitish fibres hanging from the walls and floating in the air. They then go home to the "coolie lines," brick troughs with neither light nor flooring, and each occupied by six or eight individuals; they are arranged in rows of little streets with surface drains running down the middle, which are flooded thrice daily to clear away the dirt. Social progress is now tending to replace this kind of dwelling by "workers quarters," prisons in which two or three workers share a cell three metres by four. There are walls all around, and the entrance gates are guarded by armed policemen. The communal kitchens and eatingquarters are bare cement rooms, which can be swilled out and where each individual lights his fire and squats on the ground to eat in the dark.

Once, during my first teaching post in the Landes area, I had visited poultry yards specially adapted for the cramming of geese: each bird was confined to a narrow box and reduced to the status of a mere digestive tube. In this Indian setting, the situation was the same, apart from two differences: instead of geese, it was men and women I was looking at, and instead of being fattened up, they were, if anything, being slimmed down. But in both instances, the breeder only allowed his charges one form of activity, which was desirable in the case of the geese, and inevitable in the case of the Indians. The dark and airless cubicles were suited neither for rest, leisure nor love. They were mere points of connection with the communal sewer, and they corresponded to a conception of human life as being reducible to the pure exercise of the excretory functions

Nowhere, perhaps, except in concentration camps, have human beings been so completely identified with butcher's meat. [ibid., pp. 128-9]

Nowhere? Try the toilets at Penn Station, Manhattan, two blocks from where I live and write this. Here's a little description from the Sunday New York TImes, 8 March 1981, describing the nightly rituals of some homeless "bag ladies":

At 11 p.m. the attendant goes off duty and women rise from separate niches and head for the bathroom. There they disrobe and wash their clothes and bodies. Depending on the length of the line at the hand dryers, they wait to dry their clothes, put them in their bags or wear them wet. One woman cleans and wraps her ulcerated legs with paper towels every night.

The most assertive claim toilet cubicles, line them with newspapers for privacy and warmth and sleep curled round the basin. Once they are taken, the rest sleep along the walls, one on a box directly beneath the hand dryer which she pushed for warm air. One of the women regularly cleans the floors, sinks and toilets so that no traces of their uncustomary use remain.

Maybe you're thinking poverty has always been with us-Dickens described scenes that, subtracting their sentimentality, were every bit as dehumanizing and brutish. I look at this same New York Times issue and find numerous advertisements on page 2 for diamonds. In fact, newspapers-like TV-are our best evidence ofthe gap between the experience ofthe poor, the rich, and the middle classes. The stories focus on what it's like to be poor-to suffer urban life with its violence, filth, insensitivity-while the ads abound with luxury items: furs, perfumes, lingerie, cars, vacations; or with remedies that drug the middle class: sleeping pills, nasal sprays, stomach soothers, bowel movers.

I know I'm "oversimplifying, to but I need to do it. Why? Because a good part of my daily life is spent attempting to negotiate among these "simple" experiential contradictions.

Not yet have I found the way to include-not negotiate around-these contradictions in my work, in my theatre, my writings, my teaching.

None of the political menus-the Marxists, the capitalists, the democratic socialists, the terrorists, the dropout communalists-is right for me. That is, I don't believe in their programs, promises, outlooks. And I don't like the people who run their organizations. Ditto for the religious solutions and the solutions of "consciousness, to wherein I get my act together, and you get yours, and yours, and yours until history turns around. I don't buy that approach either.

4 Frederick Turner, coeditor of the Kenyon Review, a poet and author of the science fiction novel about the theatricalized future, A Double Shadow (New York: Berkeley Publishing Corporation, 1978), has communicated to me, in a letter, a more hopeful future:

We are capable of accurate prophecy, subject only to the co-prophecy of other minds and other organized realities; and that prophecy is the same as action. To put it all more simply, it's up to us which alternative will come about. There is no such thing as the future yet and this realization makes us public men, and forces a kind of civic piety upon us. Because if things do go wrong, we are to blame. The plea of powerlessness is no excuse: the power of others is created by our own opinions of it, and nothing more. We can change our opinion, and we do it by making one alternative more beautiful than another.

If we destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust or eco-catastrophe, it won't be because of some kind of technological determinism, or innate drive or conspiracy of the powerful or economic forces of history; it will be because we chose to, collectively, and we chose to because we considered that future to be the most beautiful, and we considered it to be the most beautiful because we imaginatively constructed it to be so. Art has the exalted function, the world-saving function, of imaginatively constructing other futures which do not involve the goiterdammerung of mass suicide. I don't mean namby-pamby assertions of moral principle or nonviolence. They only increase the desirability of what is forbidden (Blake). Most ecology freaks are imaginatively mass-murderers. They would like to cleanse the filthy, desirous, complicated, upsetting, demanding, loving vermin of humanity from the face of the earth. They're the obverse of the Strangeloves, and less attractive because less straightforward.

The appeal of nuclear holocaust is that it upstages history. Without the expense of imaginative effort it instantly makes our generation more important than Homer's, or Christ's, or Shakespeare's. It's the ultimate oedipal put-down, the final punk concert. If you want my opinion about what I think will happen if we (I mean the artists and imaginative creators in all the fields) do nothing, then I think we will destroy ourselves because we dearly, pruriently want to. It's such a cheap rush.

Feeling is so hard to construct that instead of doing the work of construction we've spent a couple of centuries cracking out the feelings stored in the old sociocultural structures like oilmen pumping steam into old domes to get out the last trickles We've not much left, we fear. Our image ofthe universe has been of entropic systems that radiate crude energy by destroying themselves and others. The nuclear holocaust is a perfect picture of our self-excusing version of the universe. If the universe is running down, if there's only so much energy and value to go around, let's use it all up in one go, go out with a bang not a whimper. Better that than have to invent, think, love, work, take risks. Nuclear holocaust is dead safe. You know exactly where you are with it. It's a future with no variables: the Marxist/Capitalist ideal.

Of course the universe isn't running down, if we realize that it's made of information not of energy. Energy is simply information divided by an unreal measure, space. The world is growing and learning to speak, like a baby, and its information is increasing all the time. We are the chief agents of that increase: in terms of information rather than space, we are the biggest objects in the universe and the galaxies are little specks upon our skins. But the risk is, we could choose to deny our opportunity.

So it's up to us. I predict that we will create subjunctive worlds, not the deathbang. The fact that that prediction is a resolve, an intention, doesn't make it any less of a prediction, but more of one. The road to heaven is paved with good intentions.

Yes, it's the old Protestant Ethic standing on its head. But Turner understands The Mother's "change of consciousness," and Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End too. Turner comprehends that the postmodem epoch is one of information. But, as anthropologist Roy Rappaport reminded me, information and meaning are not the same. An abundance of information uncomprehended, or transformed into ritual formulae, is not meant, but either ignored or felt. I agree with Turner that over the past 200 or so years

Western thought has been unbalanced in the direction of rationality: of meaning. The rest of the world is helping us redress that unbalance.

An excess of uncomprehended information over the past 200 years has bred a prodigious science without a comparatively robust religion-or morality, if you will. So here we are, armed to our nuclei, and just about permitted to throw radioactive pies in each other's faces. For farce is what it is: an excess of violence that no one really believes is real. But wait till it explodes. And is Turner right in prescribing "subjunctive worlds"-a heavy dose of theatre? Is our moral balance to be found among the clowns and acrobats?

Before taking up that one, a caveat about the "cheap rush" of nuclear holocaust. It won't be so cheap. It won't be a big death bang but a series of painful whimpers. There are films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-and a little booklet, printed in Japan, entitled Give Me Water- Testimonies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

What I saw under the bridge was shocking: Hundreds of people were squirming in the stream. I couldn't tell if they were men or women. They looked all alike. Their faces were swollen and gray, their hair was standing up. Holding their hands high, groaning, people were rushing to the river. I felt the same because the pain was all over the body I was about to jump into the river only to remember that I could not swim.

When I was about to get to our home. a middle-school student in our neighborhood told me that my son Shiro had been spared. It was almost unbelievable I examined him and found that his left hand from the elbow to the finger and upper half of his head above his nose were burnt. I too felt that he would be all right soon. I thanked her and carried him on my back to the hospital. My son was only given ointment for his burns. And he started a high fever in the morning of August 9 At about 4 in the afternoon, Shiro threw up some stuff which was as dark as coffee several times and passed away in two minutes.

Then I realized for the first time how my mother looked. She had been hit by the blast as she was picking eggplants to feed us at lunch. She was almost naked. Her coat and trousers were burnt and torn to pieces. Her hair had turned to reddish-brown, and was shrunken and torn as if she had had too strong a permanent. She got burnt all over the body. Her skin was red and greasy. The skin of her right shoulder, the portion which bore and lifted the beam, was gone, revealing bare flesh, and scarlet blood which was constantly oozing out. Mother fell exhausted on the ground Mother began to feel pain. After groaning and struggling, she passed away that night.

On the day of August 6 I was 3 months pregnant. Since I was carrying a baby, my chore was to take care of lunch some distance away from where the bomb hit. That's why I was spared A week later the often-mentioned atomic disease hit me. All my hair was gone, and I had a rash all over my body. My teeth were shaken up as bloody pus kept coming out from the gums. Because of vomiting blood and bloody excrement I felt so weak that I almost gave up I may have been lucky. I survived and made a steady recovery. I delivered Yuriko on February 24 next year without much trouble. She was small indeed and the

midwife told me, "You really have to take care of this baby." She was brought up mostly on milk. When her first birthday came, she could not say a word. At the second birthday it was the same except that she could barely manage to crawl. When she was four or five years old I tried hard to teach her to walk and she started walking, but she was lame She came to school age. But I thought she could not keep up even in kindergarten We kept our hope every year to no avail. The sixth year came and Yuriko was exempted from schooling. Around that time doctors of the Hiroshima University Medical School came to survey the survivors in the Ohtake area. They examined her and took her picture. She was found to have the small-head syndrome caused by the atomic bombing. Up until recently I thought Yuriko was the only example Having had no pleasure in her life, she became very fond of movies She must look strange-standing lame, muttering something to herself in front of a movie poster. People look back at her from curiosity. School-children play lame before her or try to drive her away as if she were a dog. Yuriko herself seems embarrassed to be stared at or have somebody around. Nowadays she tends to stay all day at home and spends the time with TV and radio. That makes her physically weak; she gets easily tired even byjust taking a short walk She is so occupied with movies, TV, and radio all day, from morning till she goes to bed, that she can't make it to the bathroom on time I have a grandchild who is 3 years old. I think Yuriko is a little bit more immature than him. She is now 20 years old.

Well, there are as many testimonies as casualties, multiplied by the number of people who knew persons who were there. Millions. Thus the inheritance of the twentieth century: the concentration camps of Europe, the atomic bombs of Asia. "Of" Asia? No, in Asia, but of Euro-America. So, though Turner almost convinces me with his optimism, these daymares return. For the horrors of war are not nighttime things but the outcomes of our most scrupulously rational thinkings, of our most highly exercised cerebral cortexes. More nightmares might be among the remedies recommended for the generals, the Haigs, Weinbergers, and Reagans. I don't exempt the warriors of other nations; I just don't know their names.

The final scene of Dead End Kids-the Mabou Mines performance piece that's all about nuclear energy, experimentation, and holocaust-is a parody of a sleazy nightclub act. The comic invites a young woman (a plant) from the audience onto the stage. He makes sex jokes with/against her. He uses as a prop a dead plucked chicken-the kind you get at the supermarket. This prop is naked flesh, dead yet vulnerable, not being used to feed anyone but to stand for the penis, the vagina, the insides of the body, the victims of atomic bombs, the raw meat we are when we are nothing else. And have you ever noticed how chicken skin is the color of Asians? The audience reacts strongly to this scene. Some offended, some amused, some sickened. This scene-which people advised director JoAnn Akalaitis to drop-is a scary commentary on the current level of consciousness not only about things nuclear but the whole drift of our species toward globacide.

Having lost a sense of the sacred, we also lose awareness of the terrible. So

what's so bad about atomic warfare, lead in the air, ozone depletion, extermination of nonhuman species? Everything can be talked about, understood, dealt with, defended against.

I'm not talking about the technological imperative: our almost automatic belief that for every problem there's a solution.

I'm talking about something happening to language, including the languages of art. To "look something in the face"-to end taboos, to be able to discuss it openly-is believed somehow to be equivalent to solving the problem. But really this openness is a way of deadening.

Again it's an invasion of the rational into spheres of nonrational-what word can I use? certainly not thought-process. The deep process of imagination has been contaminated.

5 Now back to Turner's future of subjunctive worlds, which is a call to reimagine. Can it be done as efficiently as scarred landscape is reforested, or depleted fisheries farmed? Are we arriving at the paradox in human selfdirected evolution when the unconscious, the primary process, is to be directly fertilized? Having spent so much energy in training the cortex to control the rest of the brain, are we now to seek out a limbic resurgence?

There's no way back to a genuine premodernism. Who wants it anyway? Human life then was threatened by the environment. Today human life threatens the environment. What we need is a balance.

In the sixteenth century, after some bloody battles using rifles and cannons, the shogunate in Japan decided that this method of warfare was costing too much. Too many lives were being lost, brute firepower was replacing the more elegant earlier ways of warring. So firearms were banned, and for nearly 300 years Japan went back to its former ways ofdoing battle.

In today's Papua New Guinea, warriors arrive by motorbike at the battle grounds. They park their vehicles and fight with bows, arrows, and spears. They know about guns, but know too that their small populations would soon be decimated if guns were used.

Peace loving? No. But there are limits to war. These are very low. War needs to be made a handcraft again.

How can performance art assist in this? And in the other transformations necessary for human social survival.

If you're waiting for an answer that will reveal to you the meaning of life, go on to the next essay.

Experimental theatre in America-and in Europe, too, from what I can gather-is in a bad way. Experiment means, literally, to "go beyond the boundaries." There's not much of that going on these days. As things have gotten desperate outside of theatre, they've become more conservative within. The great period of experimentation that began in the fifties ended by the

mid-seventies. In my essay "Decline and Fall of the (American) Avantgarden (Performing Arts Journal, nos. 14 and 15 [1981]) I discuss the history of this period and the reasons for the decline in detail. No need to belabor the story here. What I want to focus on is the phoenix aspect: what's rising from the ashes. For the experimental period has given us the foundation in practice for what Turner calls for in his letter.

This foundation is a performance art based on postmodern consciousness. A consciousness that relies on bundles and networks, on spheres, modes, and relations. It is a performance world reminiscent of medieval totalism, where actions are instantly transformed into relations. This performance world is the source of renewals of religion-and by religion I don't mean only the known creeds, most of which are frozen, nor do I mean theology. I mean sacralizing the relations among people: creating special, sacred, nonordinary-you pick your descriptive adjective-space and time. And enacting within, or in relation to, such space/time events that resonate significance not only to the audience but also to the performers.

Ironically, the modem period, which made "man the measure of all things," proposed an idea that could not yet operate openly. Forget for now whether this program was projecting a social order dominated by males at the expense of females, and whether there is enough innate difference in aggressive potential to make the male-female argument worthwhile at the level of "who rules." The modernist program was humanist-extraordinarily noble and optimistic. But it didn't work out so well for whales, forests, and billions of human beings born outside of Europe, North America, Japan, and a few other domiciles of superiority, economically/militarily speaking.

Maybe, if you like Turner's scheme of reality, the humanist world was a subjunctive possibility dreamt in the fifteenth century a few epochs before its time.

The posthumanist, postmodern subjunctivity we are in the first moments of dreaming these days may be better suited to our capabilities. I see ten qualities of this postmodern subjunctively projected future.

1. It is multicentric. Everything, or nothing, is at the center. Experiences exist without frames, giving time/ space a sense of "insideness," of being-init. Experience-flow alternating with reflexivity, an awareness offlow even while not stopping flow-replaces analysis. This multicentricity demands the construction of holistic, global systems. Because there is no center there must instead be an order of relations, not a hierarchy or a pyramid or a circle with a center point, but more like what the earth's atmosphere looks like from close space: whorls, and constantly shifting but totally interrelated patterns of movements. Socially, such comprehension of a global ecosystem leads to a feeling of limitedness, of feedback, recycling, inner-focusing. It's not too big a leap from there to ideas of reincarnation, which is a way of saying there

is feedback of personal-being-soul-stuff as well as of the more obvious material stuff.

But.

Actually, the concept of multicentricity and holism do not contradict but need each other. Both indicate fully significant worlds, and both indicate the dominance of rhythmicity over all other kinds of space/time orderings. Not lines, which mean single-point perspective, but rhythmical relations, which mean dance.

This danced universe is opposed to the modernist ideal of an ever-expanding-that is, receding-point of origin or frame of reality, and an equally expanding human consciousness that regularly "breaks through," leading to "new fields" that sooner or later are "known." Clearly, that world is the one from the age of great discoveries by Euro-American navigators and astronomers, the line from da Gama and Galileo to Glenn and Voyager. This line need not end for multicentricity to take over. Multicentricity is just that, multiple.

2. The ability to support, even delight in, contradictory or radically paradoxical propositions simultaneously. From the sound of one hand clapping to a frameless yet limited cosmos. Here's where clowns and shamans come in. And theatricalism as the realm of reality founded on projecting experiences that are true/ not-true.

3. The process of knowing that the "thing" is part of the "thing and the experiencer of the thing." All observations are participations. And all participations are creations. The modern ideal:

eye - instrument -this reality out here becomes the postmodern:

sensorium � participates � the global reality ..-J constructs-e-e--'

Also reflexivity develops as each global reality is experienced both from within and from without simultaneously. The experiencer is also that which experiences herself experiencing. Dizzying, fun, subjunctive (as if, would, could, should); terrifying, hard to hold onto, uncertain, relative.

4. In the modern period people could correctly speak of absolutes. In the postmodern each set of relationships generates transformations that hold true for this or that operation. As modern seeing becomes postmodem experiencing, postmodem performance leaves the proscenium theatre and takes place in a multiplicity of spaces. The proscenium theatre is known for

two qualities: there is a best seat in the house; there are clearly defined areas for different activities-stage, backstage, house, lobby. Half the structure belongs to the performers, half to the spectators. The postmodern performance space is strictly relational: you don't know what it is until you use it for whatever you are doing. Although it seems that now we're in a reactionary period where the proscenium theatre appears to be making a comeback, this is only an illusion. Of course orthodox spaces are being used, but so are countless new spaces that twenty-five years ago weren't. Like galleries, lofts, clubs, courtyards, beaches, roofs, streets. The environmental possibilities of performance have expanded to include dozens of new territories.

Not only space, but time too. I mean time as a when and time as an experience of. Again this emergence of rhythmicity.

5. The use of multiple channels of communication. This goes beyond the human. Everything from genetic codes to lasers to body language to pulsars seems to be "saying" something. An aspect of the totality of significance. And in performance it is no longer necessary to put forward the linguistic channel as the dominant one. There is multicentricity of communication as well as of experience and cosmic construction.

This is the operational feature of Turner's subjunctive worlds. As many worlds as can be imagined can be communicated. Or maybe it's more interesting the other way: as many worlds as can be communicated can be imagined.

The artistic mind-the mind that specializes in inventing possible worlds-is emergently important.

How does this jibe with Levi-Strauss's painful witnessing of humans reduced to meat and excretion? The horrors he writes of are the products of humanism. The delights of the connoisseur and the luxuries of the rich are resting on the backs of the poor. These horrors will not just go away. But I doubt whether revolution as conceived of from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries is the answer either.

How to eliminate or at least reduce these horrors until they are a fraction of the many, is the main thing this writing is playing with.

Playfulness may be part of the answer.

6. The alternation of flow and reflexivity. Sometimes we're in it, sometimes we're out of it. Even when we're out of it, we're in it; and even when we're in it, we're out of it watching ourselves in it.

A very theatrical way of doing things. Rehearsing, stopping, repeating, taking the action up in the middle, playing around with it, making it "better.

Also a way of theatre-going, wherein spectators do not agree to disbelieve in what's going on. This disagreement to disbelieve preserves individual experience in a collective act.

The alternation of flow and reflexivity leads to fragmentation as well as holism.

The postmodern transmutation is not of gold but of experiences, not to perfect heavy metals but to offer new ways of being, which are ways of doing, ways of performing.

7. Dreams are not considered only secondary reflections of hidden primary processes. Dreams are not automatically in need of interpretations that strip them of their imagery.

In 1977 I ran a dream workshop at American University. During two hot weeks about a dozen of us shared sleeping space and performance workshop space. We observed each other sleep and dream, and experimented with controlling our dreams and performing dreams immediately upon being awakened from them. Systematically some of the differences between waking and dreaming consciousness were elided. Persons experienced mutual dreaming (where two or more dream the same dreams, or elements of the same dream) and lucid dreaming (a dream where you know you are dreaming-an ultimate in reflexivity). Finally we staged for ourselves a sequence of dreams, and acted out within the Washington area aspects of our dreamlives.

The workshop was scary. But I'd like to resume its experiments. Also to look more to dreams as Aborigines experience them. As gateways to the first time, as a way of making present that first time.

Interestingly, dreams in several cultures are the sources of dances. Dreamers learn dances while dreaming, and bring the dances back.

Dreams, vision quests, trance.

The nightlife of the brain. What worlds are there waiting to be staged. But not dreams in their mystical sense. Dreams, rather, as a continuation and elaboration of day-brain activities. In other words, along with the expansion of brain activity to include both noncortical and cortical languages-body languages as well as verbal languages-a parallel integration of the night brain and the day brain. This has been going on a long time. The theories of Freud are based largely on his investigations of dreams. But he attempted to interpret dreams rationally, to see them as texts presented by the unconscious to be sorted out, understood, by the conscious. Such interpretation needed the assistance of another, the analyst. So that, in fact, there were three or four interactants in Freud's scheme: the conscious and unconscious of dreamer and analyst. I don't want to abandon Freud's process, but add to it the ability to apprehend the dreaming directly, without translating it or reducing it.

To a degree, this is what Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman have been doing. Wilson in regard to time, the showing in space ofdifferent rhythms of time, different ways of thinking-doing, including the ways of dreaming. And Foreman by his insistence on trying to represent in the theatre as clearly as

possible the primary process of his own thinking, unedited. And, as it is becoming increasingly clear, day thinking is like night thinking, if we let it come through unedited. Writers have known this, but it is taking longer to get through to the theatre. Cultures other than Euro-American have also known, and practiced, performances based directly on primary process activity.

8. This relates to accepting body thought alongside cerebral cortex thinking. As the concept of body thought is unpacked, people will discover how many different modes of thought our species can do. We already know that learning and artistic expression can occur autonomously, like dreaming. Again dance is a good model, for much dance learning is at the neuromuscular and subcortical brainstem levels. The development of body thinking is not threatening to cortical thinking, anymore than the discovery of left-brain, right-brain tendencies threatens word language. What I am arguing for is the coexistence of many different kinds of thought, and a discriminating use of different kinds of thinking for different kinds of tasks. This means, for me at least, that cortical-rational-thinking is, and remains, very very important. It is the kind of thinking used in making the discriminations necessary to use other kinds of thinking; it is the kind of thinking used in writings like the one you're reading; and it is the kind of thinking used in doing the reading.

It's the same in making theatre. I don' want to throwaway words, text, dialogue, narrative, character relationships. I want to use them in a fuller range of theatrical expressions. Certainly, the finest works of postmodern theatre show this wish to include, not exclude, to expand the range of thinking, theatrical technique, language-all kinds of languages.

9. Process itself is performance. Rehearsals can be more informative/ performative than finished work. The whole structure of finished ness is called into question. If the world is unfinished, by what process are the works of people finished? Why should these works be finished? The world is a process we are making and changing as we go along. This is the nub of Turner's optimism. The virtual futures we construct are predictions, some of which are being translated into actualities. And this is what a rehearsal does, how it works.

It is not an excuse for sloppiness, lack of discipline, self-indulgenceany of the errors so often associated with process work. It is not a mask for mysticisim or self-serving obscurantism. It is more like the scientific method, through which every assertion is the basis for further investigation, counterassertion, more experimentation, and/ or observation, further work.

Kaprow's pieces and Grotowski's series of explorations-Holiday, the "active culture" phase, Theatre of Sources-are examples of process performance. This work is always prey to preciousness, indulgence, exploita-

tion. Nothing stinks worse than rancid sincerity. But still, it is worth the mess. Because process work is the true leading edge of knowledge. Not the historical avant-garde, which is an art movement along with all the rest, but a way of approaching experience, a method of seeing and dealing with the world.

10. Interculturalism is replacing-ever so tenderly, but not so slowlyinternationalism. The nation is the force of modernism; and the cultures-I emphasize the plural-are the force (what word can replace force?) of postmodernism. As a world information order comes into being, human action can be mapped as a relationship among three levels:

PAN-HUMAN, EVEN SUPRA-HUMAN, COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS. information from/ to anywhere, anyone

CULTURES.

CULTURES OF CHOICE. ethnic, individualistic, local behaviors people selecting cultures of choice people performing various subjunctive actualities

PAN-HUMAN BODY BEHAVIORS/ DREAMARCHETYPE NETWORKS unconscious & ethological basis of behavior & cultures

This map may scare you. It sometimes scares me. It can be of a totalitarian society, an Orwellian world. But it can also-depending on what people "predict" from it-liberate. It depicts three spheres, or levels, or actualities; but the dotted lines say that a lot of sponging up and down-transfers, transformations, links, leaks-joins these realms, making of them one very complicated system. Yes, that's what's most interesting to me: the whole thing is one system. I mean, without the overarching and the underpinning universals there is little chance for the middle-the multiplicity of culturesever achieving harmony, ever combining stability with continuously shifting relations among and in the midst of many different items.

Maybe the most exciting aspect of this map is the possibility for people to have "cultures of choice."

People are born into a culture. They get that culture, maybe some of it before they are even born. Each culture has its distinct ways of doing things; and these ways as much as anything, from the experience of birth on, form individual human beings. Are infants swathed or allowed to run free? Are they nursed on demand or according to a schedule? Are they born into large

families, even extended families, where many different people care for them directly, or into small families, even families of one person only, where there is a single caretaker? And so on, through what kinds of food are eaten, who the playmates are, what are the toys, etc. On through all the experiences of living. I don't think this culturing will change. But I do think that very early on-I mean after two or three years-children can be given the experience of different cultures. Again, like second languages, there can be second cultures. And surely, as children grow to an age where they make choices for themselves-and I don't know how my own sense of what this age is is actually determined by my own cultural habits, is not something absolute and fixed-as kids become people capable of making choices, one of the things they must be encouraged to do is to go into several cultures other than the one they were born in. This will be the groundwork for cultures of choice.

Our current view, I think, is soaked with a kind of belief in genetic racism, the assumption that only blacks can be African (in the full black African sense) or that kids from Brooklyn can't be AmerIndians. But as cultures more and more come to be performative actions, and information links among them emerge into view, people will choose cultures the way many of us now choose what foods to eat. I'm aware of the cruel irony here: altogether too many of the world's people not only can't choose what foods to eat, but even whether they can eat or not.

There is some actual culture choosing going on right now. Some of it forced on people. In New York City, at the McBurney Y on 23rd Streetabout six blocks from where I live-the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers run powwows on a monthly basis. Powwow is itself a form of panIndian gathering that developed in the nineteenth century as the EuroAmericans annihilated the Indians and drove them to reservations where they were regarded not as Sioux or Kiowa or Cherokee but as Indian. As it exists in New York-and I think parallels can be found elsewhere-the powwow combines social dancing, ceremonial dancing, socializing, and the display and auctioning of artifacts. Ann Marie Shea and Atay Citron have been studying the McBurney powwow. They find that it has at its core the question of identity. Who is an Indian, how is this identity discovered, displayed, reinforced? There is a lot of debate among Indians about this. But at McBurney actual Indians, genetically speaking, dance side-by-side with many who are only part Indian and many others-enthusiasts and hobbyists, they are called-who are not Indian at all, but who participate very fully in the Thunderbird's activities. Ann Shea and Citron, in a yet to be published study of the McBurney powwow, write, "Some organizers and board members are not Indian Yet Marvin ('Standing Bear' according to his Sioux name) is unofficial sergeant at arms for nearly every event; Charlotte appeared in both the January stage show and the fashion show; Arnie is a

regular drummer and auctioneer; Matt is a fixture of the Fancy Dance competitions.

It can get complicated. At one McBurney powwow some enthusiasts showed up for the dancing with top hats and tuxedo elements as part of their dancing costumes. These people had carefully researched what Indians wore to the powwows of the 1880s. The attire that included, eclectically, elements of Western clothing were more authentic historically than the "all natural" feather works worn by many contemporary Indians. But what does authenticity mean? By the 1880s Indians had included in their ceremonial dress many things that weren't originally Indian. People are always doing that. What's different these days-with our ability to preserve on film and in photographs much direct evidence of "how it was"-is also the ability to ransack different periods and select authenticity according to how the evidence is assembled and performed. The enthusiasts at the McBurney powwow were both more and less authentic than the "actual" Indians. My point is that this kind of actuality will increasingly become a matter of choice for all of us-and not simply an unhappy residue of genocide.

To a degree I'm taking up Turner's challenge in this writing. I do not endorse in any sense what people have done to people, or what we as a species are doing to the biosphere. But I do think we have to incorporate our histories, our collective experiences, into our ways of being. That is, because genocide was practiced against the American Indians is no reason to reject the McBurney powwow. Or even to reject its means of culture of choice. That descendants of the ones who committed the genocide are dancing sideby-side with descendants of the victims well, make of it what you will, I refuse to reject this kind of behavior out of hand.

I think that the possibilities for the world are actually very grim. The future proposed by Global 2000 Report seems to be what most people are dreaming these days. But, Turner says, if we imagine, and work toward incarnating, embodying, making real what we imagine-and this is close to a working definition of what artists do-then we can bring into existence another future, not the one envisioned by GlobaI2000. And that is what I am doing at this moment.

There is a politics of the imagination, as well as a politics of direct action. The politics of direct action is aimed at the injustices of the world. We need that kind of politics. The politics of the imagination is aimed at describing virtual or subjunctive futures, so that these can be steered toward or avoided. The politics of the imagination is real. That is why so much effort is spent by totalitarian regimes, fascist regimes, capitalist industry, and others, to gain thought control and control over human expression. You could almost say these people attempt to control dreaming, the primary process itself. They aim at depriving the people-masses and artists alike-of having imaginative alternatives. Imaginative? Actual alternatives.

6

For imagination, Turner is saying and I'm agreeing, is an actual alternative: it is the opening to any number of alternatives. Not the idle dreams that go up in smoke, that don't get translated into action, that are cheapened by interpretation after interpretation. But the kind of things I've been talking about: performative acts of great power.

Crashing performative circumstances emergence of subjunctive processual worlds = changing human consciousness = the inevitable and reflexive awareness of psychophysical evolution the ability to restore behavior cultures of choice = free dreaming ????

The alternative?

There are billions of alternatives.

The gory pen: reflections on creativity and violence

Erazim Kohdk

Contemporary researchers cite a rather obvious reason why violence figures so prominently in the prime reading time of American literature: violence sells. Even a public jaded by massive doses of the most depraved and exotic sexuality still responds with hard cash at the newsstand to the gory page. All the news not fit to print and not worth printing sells copy: a plane crash in some tedious backwater of the globe will still make headlines in Hometown, Indiana. If, in addition, there is a hint of cannibalism among the survivors, it will even provide a welcome topic for a series of fictional replays.

I have also heard a justification of literary violence more genteel than its crass commercial appeal. Life is violent and literature, after all, should be true to life, shouldn't it? Letting it all hang out may be less than artistic, but it can claim the effortless virtue of "honesty." Violence has even been acclaimed as American as apple pie, at least by people who, in all likelihood, have never heard of John Hersey's long forgotten classic of the Pacific war, Into the Valley, which elevated the apple pie into a national symbol. Literature is violent because violence is the truth of life. It seems so obvious that it even sounds true.

Yet there is something disturbing about such obvious truth. Not that it is not true: in its way, it can even be that. It may, however, be just a bit too true, true too easily, too soon-and so, paradoxically, more deceptive than a blatant lie. A lie does not coincide with the truth. It may distract, but it hides nothing. The question remains uncovered, inviting inquiry. More treacherous is the obvious truth that will fit a thirty-second news spot. It is, after all, "true": that is how it is, and that is that. The topic has been covered, the camera shifts to a commercial message [sic]. Only it shifts too quickly, cutting off thought at the level of the obvious truth, before the full richness, depth, and complexity of truth can unfold, forcing experience into a preformed mold. Anyone who ever tried to speak of the complexity of the truth in the face of the aggressive questioning of a secret police interrogator, an

inquiring reporter, or an eager graduate student armed with a questionnaire knows the frustration of the thirty-second truth. It is not false: the questioner will read back your very words, insisting "but you did say that, didn't you?" It is frustration's labor lost to seek to explain that a metaphor which points to the truth becomes false when it is substituted for it.

That is why it seems idle to belabor the thirty-second truths about violence in literature, providing elaborate statistical support or refutation of their pat assertions. All such inquiry, no matter how statistically sophisticated, inevitably remains superficial until we have raised the deep questions of the meaning of the lived reality that can be coded so easily under the arbitrary constructs of "creativity" or "violence. Is violence in truth the truth of life? What is the sense, what is the meaning of violence? What is its relationship, obscure yet deeply felt, to creativity? In the beginning, there was naught. Then God willed, and there was the whole profusion of being. The wandering Aramaean who, at the dawn of history, sought to express the wonder of creation saw it as an act of infinite love. On a thirty-second news spot, it would appear as the act of supreme violence, even if God were to employ soft nebular technology rather than a hard big bang. But if we conceive of creation as violent, can a writer who in turn conceives of himself as "creative" be other than violent? Though to the empirically-minded it might appear as an unconscionable detour, I cannot approach a reflection on the literature of violence without first raising the question of literary "creativity."

The very designation of literary activity as "creative" seems to me deeply problematic. We seldom pause over it: over the last hundred years, the word has become a fixture of our thirty-second vocabulary, buttressed by NASAfunded statistical research instruments. Yet it is anything but intrinsic to human thought as such. In truth, the term and the concept of "creativity" in its literary application did not enter our speech and thought until quite recently, with the rise of romanticism in the early years of the nineteenth century. Was there no need for it through all the millennia of Western culture? Can we really claim, with the Enlightenment, that the entire history of human culture until its most recent Western manifestations had been an age of darkness that had no need for a conception of creativity simply because there was nothing it could describe?

That, to me, appears a preposterous suggestion. Surely, throughout the history of the West, there have been writers and thinkers whom today we would describe as "creative," opening new horizons, raising the sight of humans to new levels. In the shadows of prehistory, the anonymous author of the biblical account of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac must rank as such. It was an awesome step for humankind, the recognition that it is possible to render homage to God by a vicarious sacrifice. The infant skeletons that archaeologists uncover beneath the thresholds of ancient dwellings testify to lOS

the hold that the belief in infant sacrifice once held over humans. The Abraham/ Isaac story, in which God holds back Abraham's hand and provides a substitute, opened a new horizon. Yet until very recent times no one would have thought of describing its author as "creative."

Along more conventional lines, it would be hard to deny that, say, his Oedipus cycle would qualify Sophocles as a "creative" writer by present-day standards. Yet it is difficult to find even a verbal equivalent of that description in Attic Greek and impossible to find it applied to Sophocles. Neither does such a concept appear in classic Latin, until much later, applied to God, even though Latin was the language of Cicero, Seneca, Ovidius, and so many others whom we would describe as "creative" writers. Ancient Irish, the third of the languages of classic European culture, has no such term either, though it would be hard to gainsay its literary achievements.

Finally, in recent times, Shakespeare's eighteenth-century admirers surely spared no praise in lauding the Bard, yet it was not until many generations later that anyone thought of calling him "creative"-divine, yes, "creative," no. Antiquity-and for that matter the Middle Ages and even modernity until less than two centuries ago-knew very well, perhaps better than we ourselves, the phenomenon that we describe as "creativity," yet it experienced no need for the term. Humans were not blind to the reality, but they had other ways of conceptualizing it, of describing it, and of integrating it into their conceptual horizon. The phenomenon itself has not changed in our time. What has changed is the perspective within which it is experienced and so our modes of interpreting it. Whether that change was for good or for ill may well provide a clue for answering our basic question about the literature of violence.

Yet more of that anon. For now, there still is an unanswered question: if we were to refrain from using the neologism, "creativity," for describing those works of the spirit that open new horizons for humankind, how else should we conceive of them? Plato's Ion provides one suggestion. The operative concept that Plato offers here is inspiration. As Plato-and, for that matter, Saint Augustine and a host of others after him-sees it, it is God (or the gods) who breathes a spirit into the human whom He (they) set aside for a special task. It is now the holy that speaks through him. In a later, Hebrew-Christian metaphor, it is God's wisdom, the Holy Spirit, which speaks through the inspired individual. He himself creates nothing, since creation is God's prerogative, but he opens the eyes of humans to what God has created-or, more precisely, the Spirit of God reveals it through him. Hence the persistent image of the divine madness: the personality of the human set apart breaks down-he "goes mad"-so that it may become transparent to what God works through him.

The metaphor of inspiration served Western culture well through the centuries down to our own times. In an age conditioned to thinking in terms

of mechanistic physics and psychology, however, it lends itself to misinterpretation. To us, at least, inspiration suggests an involuntary behavior, something like automatic writing. We take a hopelessly mechanical view of Saint Paul's assertion that "it is no longer I but the Christ who liveth in me," generating thirty-second takes of a force moving a lever-and then protesting their obvious inadequacy. It never occurs to us to ask why Saint Paul, presumably a reasonably intelligent man, found the metaphor satisfying. There is, as we shall see, a reason for our inability to understand what he understood. Yet, though the metaphor of inspiration may have become defective due to our own failure, we still must admit that it is, today, effectively unavailable to most readers.

Hence Martin Heidegger may have been well advised when, discarding both the pretentious claim of"creativity" and the obscure notion of"inspiration," he chose another metaphor, derived once again from Plato, that of aletheia, un-forgetting or un-covering. For what, in truth, takes place in the mode of being human that, glibly and pretentiously, we have become accustomed to calling "creative"? Terms like "heightened sensitivity" or "peak experience," though perhaps not explicitly false, belong too integrally to the thirty-second truth of research questionnaires to lead to understanding. Their common glimpse of truth consists of the recognition that we are dealing with a moment of insight, not idle invention, but much more needs to be said.

Following Heidegger's suggestion, we could speak of a double uncovering. On the one hand, the subject must unfold, uncover himself, drawing back the protective cloak of habitual, deeply ingrained modes of being and perceiving, rendering himself receptive to whatever confronts him. That is not merely a matter of paying attention. Quite the contrary, a person can actually blind himself by staring too intently, by questioning too insistently. I know of nothing that will block all genuine communication as effectively as a rigid set of questions, the "interview schedule" considered de rigueur by some practitioners of what is commonly called "creativity research. Insight is far more a matter of lettingoneselfsee than of imposing our vision. It is, metaphorically, a matter of strolling softly through the autumn woods, open to the color of the leaves, rather than of striding purposefully, calipers in hand, immersed in preoccupation and bristling with questions. Understanding is a moment of yielding, of letting whatever there may be speak to us.

There is a second uncovering as well, that of the world uncovering itself to us, be it the world of nature, of society, or simply of the Other, opening itself before the subject, letting itself be seen, as the filigree of the silvery beech twigs, blurred in daylight, which stands out of the darkness on the nights of the full moon, overwhelming the winter traveler with its fragile beauty. For it is not only we who close ourselves to vision. For the most part, the world of

our experience is also deeply covered. Docilely, it wears the mask of familiarity, reflecting back at us our own expectations and projections. The forest lets itself be cast in the role of thousands of board feet of lumber, the world lets itself be cast in the role of dead matter, a reservoir of the raw materials of our doing. So do the persons about us: it is a commonplace that we can live with a person for many years, convinced we know him, while seeing in him no more than a reflection of ourselves, until, in a moment of trust, he lets us see and we let ourselves see his innermost self. But the same is true of all the contents of our experience, the others, animal beings, things of nature and of artifice, even our own selves. The realities of our world cover themselves with a mask of familiarity. Insight takes place in the privileged moments of communion when the openness of the Other matches our own receptivity. Those are the moments that open horizons and transform human awareness. To speak of them as "creative" in the incredibly trite sense of "producing novelty" is both hybris and a sacrilege. They are, far more, the privileged moments of insight and revelation, when the mask of familiarity is drawn back and humans are permitted to see, as when a light is kindled behind a one-way glass, rendering it transparent. Great art is the record of such moments, which, in turn, can become their occasion. That is why the term "creativity" is so inappropriate. The crucial element in art is not an assertive, positing will but the cherishing love that makes radical openness possible. That moment of openness may be, as in Heidegger's example, van Gogh's encounter with a pair of peasant's shoes; Rilke's communion with his shadowy forebear, Cornet Rilke; Kafka's confrontation with the Castle; or Dostoyevsky's encounter with the depth of his own being in The Possessed. But it is always a confrontation and a communion in depth, the radical receptivity of the I to the deep meaning of the Other.

The core of kitsch, by contrast, is precisely the absence of communion, of receptivity and openness in a loving encounter. Kitsch can be artistic, literally "creative," seeing nothing but inventing, from the depth of the artist's openness, a trivial novelty that means nothing and gives nothing because its maker, intent on being "creative," sees nothing. With consummate art he articulates our most superficial pretensions and preoccupations. Such art can, for instance, produce novels of great beauty, dealing with the most platitudinous truisms, as was the case in much of the literary productivity of America's Camelot years. There is also craftsman's kitsch: an uncomprehending, overbearing, superficial recording of the radical openness of human heart and destiny. Newsstand best-sellers about the holocaust can serve as an instance. The consummate in kitsch, however, is the confrontation of an uncomprehending, preoccupied I with the superficial mask of the Other. That, then, is such stuff as soap-operatic dreams are made on. The moment of genuine art, by contrast, is always one of openness, in love and

pain, in the communion that love makes possible in the confrontation of the radical openness of the I and an Other wherein the deep truth of being stands forth.

Familiar though such usage is, to describe that moment as "creative" does violence to ordinary English usage. To create, as we have come to use and misuse that word, means to posit something upon nothing, to impose being on nothing. Thus, in our strange modem conception, God amid the vast cosmic nothing posits the miracle of a world, of the good, the true, the beautiful. Extending such usage to an act of art or wisdom, we interpret that act as one of positing somethingentirely new where nothing had been before. The artist, in his putative role as a "creator," becomes the sole and sovereign master of all he surveys, positing an arbitrary-but novel-Something in place of a reality conceived as a Nothing to make room for his act, a void of meaning with nothing to say, nothing to give.

That is an awesome and a deeply troubling conception. The millennia-old vision of the artistic act as an act of culture had pointed to a wholly different vision. The conception of culture derives not from creatio but from cultus, of paying homage, of respecting and cherishing the gods, the soul, the created world, the truth, the goodness, the beauty of being in all there is. Here the artist had appeared not as the arrogant master but as the humble servant of truth, beauty, holiness-conceiving his task as one of cultivating, as the husbandman cultivates the good earth, of cherishing, and so of bringing forth the deep meaning locked unfocused in the world. He does not see himself as "creating"-how arrogant, how boastful, and how vacuous the very notion seems! Rather, he serves, mediating between the profound meaning of being and the gaze of mortal men. In asking the artist to "be creative," we condemn him to frustrated irrelevance, seeking to draw on the emptiness of an isolated I, surrounded by nothingness, to present us with a product irrelevant by its very obligatory novelty. From a quest of deep truth, art here becomes a search for titillating innovation, which would dispel the tedium of our uncomprehending superficiality. And, unwittingly, we condemn him to violence, because, in the words of one of Jean-Paul Sartre's characters, "le Bien est deja fait." "Qui l'a fait?" "Dieu le Pere. Moi, j'invente."

But whence that strange vision of isolation, the self-corroding solipsism so common in recent writings, in a being who is born of a woman's union with a man, whose primordial experience is the encounter with the Thou, whose very tool of self-discovery, his language, is the product of a dialogue? And whence the conception of an encompassing nothingness in a being whose world, full of the profuse richness of life and meaning, the wonder of the starry heaven and the miracle of life, reaches as close to him as the very body through which he is present therein? The human is born of love into a world

rich in beauty: by what tortured paths does he come to think of himself as a stranger in an alien element, a rhinoceros crashing alone through thejungle?

The very conception of the world of kin and nature as a nothingness that the solipsistic subject must fill with his "creativity" would have been incomprehensible not only to the ancients but to the vast majority of humans over the entire globe and humankind's history therein. To the Greeks, the universe appeared as a kosmos, a meaningful, integral-or, in a defective modern metaphor, "organic"-whole. There seemed nothing "dead," "mechanical," or even "material" in the modern sense about nature. Nature presented itself as a physis. Aristotle, looking about him, saw an intricate web of purposes, of entelechai, each being charged with its task and busy about it, as Radl sensitively describes it. The psalmist, looking up at the vast sky over the glowing embers on a desert night, saw the heavens declaring the glory of God-a sentiment echoed at the other end of history by Immanuel Kant on a starry night amid the sparse, sandy pine forests of Moditten, der gestirnte Himmel tiber mir und das morales Gesetz in mir. The forest about me at dusk, when the darkness gathers beneath the hemlocks and seeps slowly over the ground while the treetops glow in the receding sun, its creatures busy at their tasks, even the hoary boulders of the tumbled dam, all speak of the richness of life whose respectful witness and participant I am. There is so much awaiting me, the trillium on a pad of moss waiting to be seen, the rhythm of the moon to be honored-that is not emptiness to be filled with a violent act pretending to "creativity." Whence the sense ofdead emptiness, of meaninglessness?

Philosophers-the servants of truth, not the apostles of violence, men like Emanuel Radl, Jan Patocka, Edmund Husserl-see a crucial break in the development of Western thought in Galileo and the quantification of nature he initiated-though Galileo and the age that followed him do but articulate one intrinsic possibility, given by the willingness of the things of our world to retreat before our insistence and hide, reflecting back to us our vain projections. On that reading, the essence of that shift was conceptual, a radical shift in our conception of knowing from a sensitive openness to the truth that speaks to us to an impatient insistence that imposes its own forms upon what is.

Galileo figures here as the progenitor of what the disciples of the thirtysecond truth today would describe as the "hypothetico-deductive method." Essentially it is the positing of ideal objects and the subsumption of all natural objects under them. The idea of a frictionless movement, paradigmatic for mechanics, can serve as a prime instance. There is no frictionless movement in nature or experience. Each actual movement takes place in a context of friction and thus is unique, not uniform. Galileo's proposal, brilliant in its simplicity and powerful in its effect, was to describe each such natural movement as a specific variation upon the paradigmatic frictionless,

uniform movement-which itself exists nowhere in the world, which itself is no more than a construct imposed upon the world, but which is capable of subsuming all actual movement under itself.

The inversion that this represents-from knowledge as listening to the truth of being, to knowledge as the imposition of ordering schemata on experience-proved an immensely powerful tool for the prediction and manipulation of the natural world for human purposes. Our entire natural science, a science for rather than of nature, and our awesome technology with its capacity for transforming and destroying the world, are based upon the Galilean inversion of assertion in place of receptivity.

That inversion, however, though powerful as a tool of manipulation for those who know their purpose, is deeply problematic as an instrument of understanding for those who seek to grasp it. Here let the Galilean conception of time as a uniform, endless sequence of discrete, identical moments serve as an instance. Such a time is not the time of our lived experience. The time of experience is the rhythm of the seasons, of the waning and waxing of the moon, the going forth of daylight and the deep healing of darkness. It is the rhythm of human life, a time to be born, a time to rejoice, and a time to grieve, a time to die. For the purposes of manipulating nature and ordering humans within the matrix of technology, it is surely a brilliant move to reduce each such discordinate time to a variation upon a uniform clock time. But our very technology points out the limits of such a reduction. Every hospital today copes with the frightening reality of "life-support" technology, incapable of sustaining life, only of prolonging the agony of dying almost indefinitely. Yet death is not harder than life; it is the dying we prolong that is so desperately difficult. When is the time to disconnect the machine, to let death come? We are at a loss for an answer-and the prolonged agony of countless patients is a product of our inability to recognize the right time to die. In our Galilean world, such a recognition is impossible: there can be no "right" time in a uniform sequence of moments. There can be only a moment after a moment. There is neither rhyme nor reason, there is no rightness, there is only I" In.

On Edmund Husserl's reading, the basic transformation of Western consciousness in the last three centuries has been precisely a matter of a gradual substitution of a formal nature construct for the meaningful world of actual human life. It has been, in effect, a devaluation of the world of our actual lives to nothingness, replaced by an artificial reality of our own making. The "creation" and imposition of constructs is in fact the opposite of openness and communion. It is a process of imposition that blinds us to what the cosmos can say to us. No wonder then that it comes to seem absurd. The reconstructed image of nature is no longer one of a rich and meaningful nature about us: it is, rather, an image of a dead mechanism, inert until a violent impetus impells it into motion.

Nature, so mechanistically conceived, would have neither life nor motion. It would be as meaningless to speak of a spontaneous, natural movement as it would be to speak of the rightness of time. To Aristotle, the distinction between a natural and a violent movement seemed as obvious as it in truth appears in lived experience. There is violent movement: the force of the bowstring drives the arrow high into the sky, against its natural tendency to fall to the ground. But the violent movement, because it is violent, is superficial and short-lived: the force spends itself and the arrow returns to its natural movement, toward the ground. Watch a ball thrown up to the sky, let yourself feel the distinction. For feel it you will: the strained rise and the effortless, peaceful return. Aristotle recognizes the reality of the violent movement, but he does not consider it paradigmatic for all reality. In his natural world, all is not dead stillness without the impetus of violence. There is also the spontaneous, natural movement. The world lives: the bean sprouts, reaching toward the sun, winding up the pole; the bee searches out nectar; the animals and humans are born and die in their season. There is life in Aristotle's world: it is a natural world.

Galileo's world and ours is none of that: it is a construct devoid ofall life, of all spontaneity, dead until impelled into motion by force. Galileo recognizes no natural movement. Having eliminated natural movement, however, he recasts all movement as violent, positing violent power-his disciples introduced the wordJorza, force-as the basic reality of all life. In a cosmos reconstructed in the image of our mechanics, all movement thus becomes violent. There is neither rhyme nor reason, there is neither right movement nor right time. As Edmund Husserl or Emanuel Radl see it, in reconstructing our world as a counterpart of mechanics, we have condemned ourselves to an image of our world and our life in it for which violence becomes the rule and the truth of all life.

Husserl's and Radl's diagnosis of the crisis of our age as one of a conceptual reconstitution of reality from a living, meaningful context into one of matter in motion is deeply persuasive, but more needs to be said. Were the transformation only conceptual, it could be easily bracketed out, as Husserl proposed to do in his project of phenomenology, and it would not need to affect literature, which is a fruit of the understanding, not of techne. That it does affect it suggests that more thanjust our conceptual world has changed: the conceptual shift has provoked an experiential transformation as well. We spoke of the starry heaven above-but when, in truth, did you last look up at the starry heavens? As Milan Machovec reminds us, we walk on asphalt, not on the good earth, we look up at neon, not at the stars. The flood ofelectric light, prolonging the harried day into a restless night, has long since hidden the vastness of the sky. When, in the course of daily life, have you last encountered a natural object, in the Greek sense of "physical, a living thing which is an intrinsic part of the growing, living movement of nature? We live

our days surrounded by artifacts, deprived of communion with other living beings. That is the experiential counterpart of the conceptual change to which a Husserl or a Radl points.

It is a profound change because an artifact is something entirely different from a natural object. A growing tree has a life of its own, its purpose, its aim, its place in the economy of nature. The forest accepts me, but it does not need me: when I am gone, it will live on in its ageless rhythm. It does not depend on me, it makes no demands on me. If anything, just the opposite is the truth: the forest can sustain me with the ageless rhythm of its life. In the moments of shipwreck in my life, when all sense of purpose, of rhyme and reason, seemed drained out, the forest accepted me with the rhythm of its seasons, the phases of its moon, the daily tasks of life close to the soil, the weight of the water yoke and the keen blade biting into the white maple. I have my task here: I belong, I am at home. Nature, the livingphysis of the Greeks, sustains and renews life.

The artifacts that make up our world can do none of this. An artifact has no life, no meaning other than that with which it is endowed by its human maker and user. There is nothing more absurd, more meaningless than the abandoned artifact, the cradle lovingly crafted for a child stillborn. The tree deserted by the farmer goes on bearing fruit in its season, the abandoned tractor can only rust in vain by the roadside. Artifacts drain their makers, constantly demanding the care and attention that bring them to life. They do not sustain, they must themselves be sustained. But they do create an illusion, for, amidst the world of artifacts and constructs, the human is indeed the master and even creator of all he surveys, omnipotent in splendid isolation: the world is his to create and destroy, to bestow meaning or to reduce to meaninglessness.

Hence the image of solitude, and the image of vast absurdity: for our world is in fact a world of artifacts in which living nature intrudes only as the blade of grass springing up in the cracks of the concrete with which we have covered the good earth. The experience we take for an encounter with reality is in fact no more than an encounter with the externalizations of our own life, which can give us nothing but what we have invested in it. I have watched the reality of time at home, in the forest clearing: the coming of dusk with darkness spreading from the hemlocks, the shining maples, the glowing birches, the slow fading of the light as the day yields to the healing night. I have watched the living reality of time as the sky grows dark over the barren trees and the world retreats from its daylight insistence into the softness of the all-embracing darkness. But I work in a city. There I walk into the seminar room: it is enclosed, uniformly lit and heated. The passage of time here is reduced to the passing of uniform Galilean quanta, marked by the sweep hand of the clock. There is no settling dusk, no growing darkness to give it rhythm: the time is only four of the clock, then six, then eight.

When I walk out, the night has come, abruptly, unaccountably. Nor does the next day dawn: the room remains dark behind the heavy drapes, drawn against the restless urban night. Then, with a flick of a switch, it is daytime. I kindled no lamp, built no fire, drew no water to mark its coming. There is no rhyme or reason. Here all movement is indeed violent, there is no natural movement. All acts are equally arbitrary, violent movement in dead space.

It is no wonder that, in such a world, even God's creation can appear to our uncomprehending minds only as a violent act. We have imposed, even upon God, the sterile constructs of our method, much as Freud, instead of understanding the miracle of fatherhood in the image of God's cherishing love for His creation, sought pretentiously and in vain to "explain" God as a projection of our conception of fatherhood. The freedom of the world, capable not only of worshiping but also of crucifying God, speaks of a different meaning of creation. God does not impose his will on nothingness: He calls the world into being by an infinite cherishing love, evoking its spontaneity. God creates as nature creates, by patient respectful nurture; He creates as culture creates, by the cherishing respect of cultus, not as a mechanic shaping iron with the blows of a hammer. God's creation is an act of love, not of violence.

We have willfully forgotten all that, blotted it out of mind in our desire to be "creative," absolute masters of a meaningless universe that cannot sustain or challenge us. But can we retain even our own humanity in a world of artifacts and constructs, of Heideggerean Zeuge? The story of Western thought in the last three centuries gives pause. It is marked by a tortured conflict between the residual sense of our own humanity and the inhumanity of the world image with which we have obscured the natural world. It should not surprise us: a meaningful, purposeful, warm human cannot be at home amid a meaningless, mechanical, cold reality. The human can be at home in God's world, in the kosmos of Greek vision, ordered by Plato's Idea of the Good, in the purposefullivingphysis of Aristotle. He is jarringly out of place in the mechanical world of modem times, a stranger contingently thrown into an alien, meaningless context.

The tragic sense of life was an acknowledgment of the homelessness of the purposeful human in the purposeless world of artifacts and constructs; existentialism in literature was a promethean refusal to accept its logic. Though the literary posturing of the existentialists may have all too often degenerated into a melodrama, there was a moment of greatness in its insistence on humanity, though it be ever in the way in a mechanical world. It is the hard way, but the effortless way is destructive. That is the path of conformity, reducing the human subject to a stimulus-response mechanism compatible with a mechanical world. Having dehumanized the world, we

must defy our own creation-or give up our humanity to accommodate ourselves to it.

That, in fact, is the dominant image of our selves and of our world in our present consciousness: a human mechanism responding to the stimuli of a mechanical nature, seeing his role models in the robots of his science fiction. That is the vision that generates the sense of a vast emptiness about us: a world drained of meaning, of warmth and purpose, drained, ultimately, of all spontaneity, all goodness, beauty, and truth, a mere projection screen presenting us with an image of our own tortured thought. It is a fundamentally unreal world-and if that assertion seems overstated, I would ask you to think back just a few pages to the passage in which I spoke of the double uncovering, the a-letheia. Did it not seem to you then that I was speaking far too metaphorically when I spoke of the world presenting us with a mask, of covering itself before us or, again, of opening itself to us? Did it not seem far-fetched to attribute activity to the world? But why should it seem far-fetched? It would seem so only if you assumed that the world has no life, no reality of its own. In speaking of the world as acting, I was attributing to it a reality of its own, a life of its own-which is very much how the natural world, busy about its task, presents itself to anyone who lives close to the earth. Only the world of artifacts and constructs is inert, devoid of a life and a reality of its own. Though you may not have realized it, in reacting with tolerant incredulity to Heidegger's and my speaking of the world as living, you testified to what I sought to point out: that the world as we imagine it is not a living natural world but a world of dead, meaningless matter propelled in motion by force.

We affirm, of course, our own reality, but it is a precarious affirmation, demanding too much insistence. For to speak of being real alone is a contradiction in terms. There is reality only in dialogue, in the counterposition and communion of the I with the Other. Reality does not begin with the ego cogito: ego must be provoked to thought by the alter. Reality springs to life in the encounter of the I and the Thou, in the we speak. we love. The solipsism of the human who thinks he alone is real, the master and creator of all he surveys, undercuts the confidence of his own reality and leaves him facing the tortured self-doubt of his secret garden.

A world that is nothing, dead and meaningless, a subject who is alone, with nothing to sustain him, nothing to challenge him, doubting his own untested reality-that is the context in which the ghastly, self-degrading, and all-destroying preoccupation with violence so prominent in our letters becomes intelligible, both as necessary and as possible. The possibility of a literature of violence, from Marquis de Sade and Georges Sorel down to the sordid horror of recent filmmaking, does require an explanation. Even if we were to dismiss its writing as a pathological anomaly, its mass appeal would

remain a problem. How could humans on a mass scale actually relish horror, agony, and degradation, the pen gorier than the sword, when they cringe at the sight of an animal gored by an automobile? Yes, there has always been violence in literature, even the Old Testament and the Iliad provide some choice examples. But there is a fundamental difference between literature that, like the Book of Job, struggles with the reality of pain, seeking to integrate it in a meaningful whole to affirm the integrity of life in spite of it, and the literature o/violence which makes it its theme, relishing the vision of life's disintegration as its fulfillment. How can a human live with-and enjoy-even a fraction of the agony that is the daily fare of contemporary readers without going insane with grief and pity?

I rather suspect that it is possible because the pain and the horror we write and read about have ceased to be something real. We do not take literature seriously: it is, after all, "only fiction." We have watched actors die in film after film; live transmissions from combat seem but another episode in the serial. But to blame the medium for this is to fall victim to yet another thirtysecond truth. The media, whether books, film, or television, can have their effect only because we had lost our sense of the living reality of the world long before the printed page and the silver screen interposed themselves between us and our world. We had created a world of artifacts for our convenience, but artifacts are disposable-why should not persons be as well? Our divorce rates suggest that we see no reason. Artifacts have no intrinsic meaning, no intrinsic value beyond their use-why should humans? No human being, aware of his humanity, could watch with enjoyment the images of horror, violence, and degradation on a printed page. We can, because we have long since dehumanized our entire world, all reality, even ourselves. Perhaps we had thought once that it would enable us to "create," arrogating unto ourselves a privilege r. .erved for the almighty God who alone can love so purely. If so, it was a va'r hope. The dehumanization ofthe cosmos only enabled us to destroy, maki..g destruction as banal as we have made the world and ourselves with it.

That, I think, is one pole of the dialectic: a literature-and a life-of violence are possible only for the solipsistic writer and reader who have lost all living sense of the reality of the world, the vibrant joy of its waxing and the infinite sorrow of its waning. For such a writer, for such a reader, knowing only the reality of their own self-preoccupation, it becomes possible to relish violence. But the dialectic has another pole as well: for such a writer, for such a reader, violence also becomes necessary.

It was T. G. Masaryk, one of the most acute observers of the dynamics of modernity, who first pointed out that the solipsist must murder, either the Other or himself. A human cannot bear the burden of the immense solitude that the pretentious titans of the nineteenth century proclaimed as freedom, the solitude of a world in which God is dead, in which nature has come to

appear as an absurd mechanism and the Other only an object we manipulate with stimuli to produce appropriate responses. Unable to reach out in love, the individual in his solitude must kill in the desperate hope that at least the cry of pain will break the circle of indifference about him. It is those who cannot love who rape, those who have chosen a splendid isolation who kill in a desperate attempt to affirm their reality in the pain of the Other.

Or, unable to kill the Other, the "single one" must kill himself. For what satisfaction is there in killing the Other when we have already stripped him of all reality, or in destroying the world which we have already transformed into a set of disposable tools? We do that routinely; it is, as Hannah Arendt notes, banal. The destruction of the world becomes as absurd as we had made the world. The titans of the nineteenth century raged against God, crawling out of their caves to hurl rocks at Olympus-perhaps Sartre, with his proofs of God's irrelevance, was the last of the titans. There is not much militant atheism around these days: our God is no longer real enough that there would be much satisfaction in killing Him. But when deicide is passe, suicide alone remains. Only the "single one" is real enough to himself to be worth killing-and so we do, both in the streets and on our pages.

The phenomenon of mass violence-of which I take the literature of violence to be a manifestation rather than a cause-is the fate of a solipsistic age that has lost the ability to love. It is the fate of an age that has lost all culture, though it may go on mass-producing printed pages. Culture is cultus, an expression of a profound respect before the wonder of the Other, the goodness, the truth, the beauty, the holiness of what is. A literature of culture is one that cherishes, that loves, even when it depicts the suffering that humans must take into themselves. A literature of violence does not cherish: it bears no trace of cultus or culture. Like pornography, one of its more sordid offshoots, it seeks to find reality in destroying, having lost the ability to find it in respect and loving.

Yet even in choosing to kill, the "single one" cannot break out of the vicious isolation of solipsism: the victim's cry of anguish confirms the isolation by converting indifference to rejection. In choosing to kill, the literature and the age of solipsism condemn themselves to self-killing, suicide. Kafka's "Prison Colony" says it all: it lays out before us the logic of violence that must in the end turn upon itself. After Kafka, there is neither excuse for illusions about the fact of the literature of violence nor excuse for its perpetuation. Except, that is, for one thing. Though it does not heal, the literature of violence does sell. It is, after all, true to life Or is it? Here we return to the thirty-second truth with which we began, less likely to be deceived by it. Is violence really the truth of human life? Or is it its sickness? What is at stake here is not simply whether the novels of degradation, exploring the solipsistic fantasies of the bored and idle, are faithful empirical descriptions of life in the suburbs. They evidently are not,

any more than four-letter-word romances spawned by professors of classics describe the life of the academician. But the question is far deeper: is violence the truth, the ultimate truth, of human life?

We have sought to convince ourselves of that ever since Galileo, ever since we chose to conceive of reality in the image of the regional ontology of physics, as an inert system in which no life is spontaneous and all movement requires a propelling force. Or perhaps it is unfair to use Galileo as a metaphor: the decision of the Renaissance to take as its own the arrogant claim of the ancient Sophists, that "man" is the measure of all things, may be more symptomatic. We have sought to be the measure, the masters of all we survey, not the humble servants of the truth but its creators, the "creative" writers of our lives and books alike. The choice has led us along the path of the devastation of the world, of isolation of "the single one," to violence-to murder and, finally, to self-murder.

God, however, works in mischievous ways, and the self-destructive conclusion of the violent vision, which sought to arrogate even creation to humans, may be leading us to a new sensitivity. We do seem to be coming to the awareness of the devastation of the natural world, which we have wrought in our attempt to (re)create the world in the image of our theories. We have come to confront the emptiness of the shiny gewgaws that once charmed us with their novelty, the vanity of a life of being done for rather than doing. For all the thirty-second silliness of the cult of "Mother Nature"-"Mother, after all, also sells-there are also indications that we may be ready to see once more the living world long obscured by our constructs, the world whose vital order is continuous with the moral order of the kosmos, which God creates and the artist cherishes.

If so, we may be ready for another recognition; that nature has its own, spontaneous movement, that violence is a transient intrusion in its rhythm, not the driving force of all life. If reality is living, not mechanical, it need not be impelled. Violence is not the truth of life, only the truth of the contorted mask we have imposed upon it. It is the truth of life's surface; the truth of life's depth is love, it is communion, it is respect. Cultus, the yielding of respect, not creatio, is the truth of life and art alike.

That point needs to be stressed: violence becomes the truth of life only once we have stripped life of all spontaneity, of all natural movement. When, in order to make it serve our purposes, we deny the freedom of the world, reconstituting it as dead matter, an impelling violence may seem "natural" and as American as apple pie. But such a reconstituted world is not the world that God had made, its rule is not the reality of nature or, finally, of human life. It may be actual so that we have to integrate it into our lives as their hard and bitter part. But it is not the depth and the truth of life, only its shallowest surface.

But if violence is only the truth of the most trivial surface of life, what is

left of the sanctimonious claim of the gory pen that it is being true to life? Not much. We can, certainly, make all the usual criticisms of the literature of violence, linking it with the incidence of violence or defending it as true to that incidence, plunging into the battle of conflicting statistics that sociologists and psychologists love so dearly. But something else may be more to the point for writers and readers. Art, genuine art, is a moment of communion, it is a-lstheia, the mutual openness that permits the truth to stand forth. Literature of violence, by contrast, uncovers nothing. It remains on the surface. It requires that the subject-the reader and the writer alike-close themselves up, become insensitive, so they can stand and enjoy the pain and agony. The object must remain covered as well, showing forth not its natural movement but the violence that theory imposes upon it. As pornography describes the shallowest surface of a human relation, so the literature of violence is the insensitive description of the shallowest surface of life. It is true, thirty-second true, that literature of violence is decadent, destructive, in bad taste, and socially damaging. There is also a far more devastating truth: literature of violence is kitsch.

In place of a bibliography

In the foregoing reflections, I have not quoted sources, yet I have drawn freely on the insight of those who went before me, since I am convinced that the task of the writer's art is not to "create"-God alone does that-but to serve the truth by seeing and presenting, bringing forth the truth there is.

My conception of creativity is deeply indebted to Martin Heidegger, especially his essays "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" (in Holzwege [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1972], pp. 7-68) and "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" (in Wegmarken [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1968], pp. 175-2(0). Both are available in English, the first entitled "The Origin of the Work of Art" (trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry. Language. Thought, trans. and ed. A. Hofstadter [New York: Harper & Row, 1975], pp. 15-88), the second, "On the Essence of Truth" (trans. R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick, in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968], pp. 292-324).

My reading of Western history, especially of the crucial turning point represented by the Renaissance, similarly owes much to Edmund Husserl's brilliant analysis in Die Krisis der europdischen Wissenschaften (available in an English translation by David Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970]) and to the Czech philosopher, Emanuel Radl, whose philosophical testament, Utecha zfilozofle (Prague, 1947; an English translation entitled Consolation from Philosophy is being published by 68 Publishers, Toronto) is one of the gems of Czech thought.

Finally, the recognition of the self-destructive nature of modern solipsism I have derived from the work of another countryman of mine, the philosopher-sociologist Tomas G. Masaryk. References to it are scattered throughout his works: here I had in mind particularly his Otdzka Socidlni, volume 2 (available in English in Masaryk on Marx [Lewiston, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1972]), as most readily available in English.

My quotation from Sartre ("I shall do evil." "Why1" "Because the good has already been done." "Who did it?" "God the Father. Myself, I invent.") refers to Goetz's interchange with Catherine in I.e Diabl« et k Bon Dim (195I; English trans., The Devil and the Good Lord [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960]). Incidentally, later in the play Goetz decides to do good for the same reason, and with the same lack of success.

The quotation from Kant comes from the oft-quoted opening sentence of the conclusion of Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (available in English as Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck [New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1956], p. 166): "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

Finally, Milan Machovec is the Czech dissident philosopher whose works from a more tolerant age appeared in German translation as well as in Czech editions (T. G. MlISaryk, Jesus for Atheists), but who has been unable to publish since the Soviet invasion in 1968. The quotation comes from a personal communication.

The ghost of the matter

Michael Wood

Winnie-the-Pooh read the two notices very carefully.firstfrom left to right, and afterwards, in case he had missed some ofit, from right to left.

It can't really be the best of times or the worst of times, but current literary 'studies often make it look like both. There is a fear of theory and a fascination with theory. There are appeals to philosophy and appeals to principles. There are those who believe that criticism is mere prejudice and those who believe that criticism is answerable to texts. There are those who hold that texts are answerable to the world and those who hold that texts must disappear into their own irony, like the Cheshire cat. There are winds from France and gusts from Germany. Gloomy lectures are given, dark books are written. The word humanism flutters in the heated air like a tattered old flag. The new criticism is variously blamed for its placid metaphysics and for starting us off on the primrose path to deconstruction. Is literature an empty game or the stuff of life? Is it, perhaps, a lugubrious game, a sorry tale of unhappy non-endings? Is it a puzzle, an engine of perpetual bewilderment? There does appear to be agreement on one item: the literary profession, or at least the academic end of it, looks bad. "We have defined our enterprise," Gerald Graff says, "in ways that implicitly trivialize it." George Watson says much the same, only removing the implicitly. "We have been unable," Geoffrey Hartman agrees, "to formulate an effective defense of our profession," and Thomas McFarland can be heard beating his generous breast to a similar tune.

I can't pretend to explore this state of affairs, or even review it. The criticism of criticism of criticism seems rather remote from the daily business of teaching and reading and writing, and I must have missed all kinds of crucial episodes in this turbulent story. However, like anyone else engaged in literary work, I am aware that there is what a character in Thomas Pynchon calls a Situation. New questions are being asked, old questions are being

revived. Many feel that this agitation is fruitful, others feel that it threatens much of what we most care about. I hope I am not alone in feeling that the Situation is a challenge and a sign of life; that all the moping and groaning is thoroughly misplaced. I know I am not alone in feeling that there is a great deal of muddle in these matters. There is a vast and perhaps growing appetite for jargon that gets in everyone's way; there is a healthy resistance to jargon that erroneously assumes that only jargon stands between us and sweetness and light. There is a lot of premature seizing of positions, of freezing of notions into attitudes. And above all, there is a widespread failure to treat our words well, even when we are not quarreling about jargon. We seem to have forgotten how much precision ordinary language will afford us, if we question it severely enough, and listen to its answers.

I'm not going to try to adjudicate between the parties to the SituationI'm not even sure I see with any clarity who the parties are. I had better say at once, though, that insofar as I do perceive a faction or two through the smoke of battle, I feel much closer to the Cheshire cat than to the sturdy band of humanists, whose assertions often seem to me worthy, but tired, and thin; noises made by concerned, sensible men proclaiming only their concern and good sense. "Thus I refute him," Dr. Johnson said, kicking a stone. But a kick is not an argument, and will not settle the solipsist. At best it will make him look silly for a moment, and his question will then return. We cannot tackle the flaws of the skeptical or agitated criticism being offered to us now unless we can see its attractions: the lure of disenchantment, for example, the surprise of certain freedoms, the promise of big theoretical game. I should say, too, that there seems to be more than one battle. There are many issues in the air, and they are not all closely related. Here I want to look at one aspect of the Situation: the relation between interpretation and what used to be called, what I shall still call, the facts.

"We spend more time interpreting interpretations than interpreting things," Montaigne complained, "and there are more books on books than on any other subject. It is easy enough to see what he means, although hard to imagine quite what those plain old things could be except products of interpretation themselves. We cannot picture an uninterpreted world, an undifferentiated jungle of events and occasions. "Books are our second Fall," Geoffrey Hartman nicely says; the first, no doubt, was thought. Nevertheless, interpretation does require an object, even if that object is another interpretation, and it may help to gloss Montaigne's remark as follows: we spend all our time interpreting interpretations, but there is a difference between talk about talk and talk about the world. Or better, since talk itself is a feature of the world: there is a difference between interpretation that idles and interpretation that works.

This distinction does not correspond to the plausible-looking division between criticism (books on books) and plays, poems, and novels (inter-

pretations of life). There are books on books that offer major interpretations of life, and there are plays, poems, and novels that offer only mangled versions of their authors' recent reading. Not that there is no difference between a novel and a work of criticism. A number of contemporary scholars make very heavy weather of this question. The difference between literature and criticism, Paul de Man says, is "delusive." Hartman strenuously advances the claims of criticism as a genre, and advocates "reading even the critical work closely." The trouble is that the words literature and criticism, used in this way, institute the very difference they are supposed to deny, and also mask another, more important difference. There is surely only one way to read any text: closely. It's not that "it could be argued," as Hartman says, "that what a literary critic does is literature." It doesn't need to be argued. What else could criticism be? Yet to call criticism a genre is to miss its variety and its peculiarity, its odd dependance on a distinct, preexisting text that is not simply the diffused textuality of the world. And to see criticism, as Hartman proposes, as "a contaminated creative thinking" is to combine hubris with abjection, to allow oneself to be browbeaten, as Anglo-American critics often are, even when they are protesting most, especially when they are protesting most, by the invidious word creative. I think we can distinguish, in other ways, in criticism and in fiction, between interpretation that confronts the facts and interpretation that doesn't, but in this essay I want to look at "the facts" in their appearances and disappearances-or rather at the slippery implications of those two familiar words.

There is a good instance of the problem in the deck of assorted concepts Gerald Graff finds himself reaching for, in Literature Against Itself, in order to insist that literature is about something: mimesis. reference. relation, reflection, representation, imitation, realism, respect. Reality is "objective" and "knowable"; it is "out there," "independent of our perceptions of it." It is "how things really are," and we need to see literature as "answerable" to it, "accountable" to it, as "reality-centered," making "truth-claims," even making "propositions" and offering "arguments." "There is no way of determining the critical character of a literary work unless we know its disposition toward reality." It is possible to share Graff's impulse and yet to see that each of these words and phrases poses more problems than it solves.indeed their very proliferation creates an impression of a man waving rather than naming.

Graff is careful not to associate mimesis or reference or the rest with a narrow version of realism: "The representation of objective reality cannot be restricted to a single literary method." He also has very good things to say about a number of current red herrings:

In the rhetorical world of contemporary criticism, there seems to have arisen the understanding that once somebody has pointed out that an idea rests on an

'interpretation', any claims that idea may make to deal with the external world can henceforth be dismissed

The fact that our statements do not possess meaning apart from the codes and grammars which generate them does not mean that what these statements refer to is nothing but the codes and grammars themselves. The fact that language is always referring to itself does not mean that is all it refers to.

This is sensible and necessary. Yet those stiff old entities-"objective reality," "the external world"-still skulk about, resting on an agreement about their meaning or usefulness that is precisely what has disappeared. Graff himself says that these and similar words have been "degraded" by "false politicization," but that is only a fraction of the story. Degraded or not, these stolid terms emphatically seek to close the very debate we need to open.

The character in Lord Jim who talks most comfortably about seeing things as they are gets himself killed looking for guano on an inaccessible island. Marlow calls the man a "strange idealist," and we have learned to see professed realists in all sorts of areas as mere hard-nosed dreamers. Something of the kind happens with Graff. In spite of the urgency and sanity of many of his arguments, he seems finally to care less about the "referential powers" he exalts than, say, Paul de Man does-because Graff wants to take them for granted while de Man tries in vain to shake them off. It is not that we lack an "up-to-date jargon for talking about the referential values of literature," as Graff says. We lack a serious answer to the questions the upto-date jargon is asking.

What we need, then, is a way of talking about "how things reallyare"well, "how things are," let's drop that suspicious, bullying really-which is neither vague nor deluded, and Conrad-I have already mentioned Lord Jim-gives us a good place to start.

Lord Jim is a considerable literary fact and a powerful meditation on the persistence of material facts in what Marlow calls at one point "this concrete and perplexed world." The phrase is handsome and easy and is perhaps not meant to bear any very great weight. But it comes to seem, as the novel proceeds, a sort of diagnosis: the world is perplexed because it is concrete, stubborn, made of particulars, impervious to revision or rearrangement; because it is full of facts. Jim's incognito, as he moves from port to port in the East, is "not meant to hide a personality but a fact"-the fact of his disgraceful leap from the Patna. "He retreated in good order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably." A fact doesn't "explain anything," Jim himself feels, only to wonder almost immediately whether it might not on the contrary explain everything, if recounted with a sufficiently "meticulous precision of statement." A fact can cut you off from the rest of your kind, as Conrad says; it can hunt you down and kill you, as the conclusion of Lord Jim suggests. Marlow says facts are "often more enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words," and memorably remarks

that it is "impossible to lay the ghost of a fact." Although some people, he adds, are able to face the ghost, or shirk it, or even wink at it.

Marlow also says, elsewhere in the book, that it is impossible to lay the ghost of a doubt, and the two figments are closely connected. Jim's fact is the source of Marlow's doubt-how could such a fact appear in the life of "one of us"?-and neither can be exorcised. Jim's mind flails at the fact of his jump, as if interpretation could tum it round for him, make it correspond to the picture it so authoritatively ruins. "There was not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and wrong of this affair," he says. Marlow, more ruthless at this moment than he usually is, quietly asks, "How much more did you want?" But Jim doesn't hear him, and Marlow himself cannot resist the vain interrogation of the other specter, cannot contain his appetite for what he calls "a miracle": "some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation"; the "shadow of an excuse" to answer the shadow of a doubt.

Interpretation cannot be made to reach right up to the facts. It can only repeat them, shuffle them, gloss them, guess at their antecedents and consequences, and return them to their own empirical kingdom. This is not an epistemological problem. There is, in such instances, no difficulty in knowing the facts, or in knowing that facts are what they are. The difficulty is in finding a place for them, accommodating them to the assumptions and arguments and beliefs that constitute intelligibility for us. The fact in Lord Jim is particularly resistant-"about as naked and ugly as a fact can well be," Marlow says-and interpretation there fails at quite specific tasks. It cannot justify Jim or appease Marlow. Of course, interpretation has many other possible jobs: it may decipher, translate, imitate, prolong, perform, implement, describe, and a dozen things more. It may be seen most generally as a means of building bridges between different orders of experience, and these bridges are often admirably made and obviously functional. But I do want to suggest that Marlow is right in a sense that goes well beyond his and Conrad's contexts. It is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact, although perfectly possible to kill or smother the fact in the first place, and equally possible to ignore the ghost in the second. The fact is where interpretation begins and ends, a wall it can only circle, and inside the wall is not a lost paradise or the secret of life, but only the obstinacy of the fact, its insistence on its own survival of multiplying interpretations.

Interpretation is certain disappointment, Frank Kermode says in The Genesis ofSecrecy, a journey that must strand the traveler short of his goal. This is very much what I am proposing, although I think the grounds for our bafflement are practical rather than metaphysical, and I am not sure that disappointment is the necessary word. What foils interpretation, I think, is not an absent, ultimate truth but a familiar, daily, concrete, and perplexed world.

"The scriptures are unalterable," the prison chaplain says in The Trial, "and the comments often enough merely express the commentator's despair." Despair about that, the text says, Verzweiflung dariiber. The despair concerns the unalterability of the scriptures, not their impenetrability; the stubbornness of the verbal fact, not the darkness of the secret. The chaplain tells K a story about a man who seeks admittance to the Law. The man is informed by a doorkeeper first that he cannot be admitted at the moment and much later that this particular door was intended only for him. K is "strongly attracted by the story," which seems to speak to his own desperate situation, and concludes that the doorkeeper "deluded the man"; that he should have let him in and didn't. "You have not enough respect for the written word," the chaplain says in answer to this, "and you are altering the story." The story says only that the doorkeeper utters his two apparently conflicting statements, and we must make what we can of that. The story is the fact here, and K's conclusion, hasty, human, plausible, is the disappointed interpretation. The chaplain, on the other hand, does not interpret, he simply displays interpretative possibilities. "Don't misunderstand me," he says, "I am only showing you the various opinions concerning that point." He is showing K, and us, how little those unalterable scriptures say on their own account.

Facts, verbal and otherwise, are what make interpretation inevitable and interminable. The chaplain's story, for example, really does not say that the doorkeeper should have admitted the man to the Law. Indeed, it may well imply something like the cruel opposite of this sensible suggestion, a ghastly joke looking forward to Catch-22: it is because the door was intended only for the man that the doorkeeper cannot let him in. But this is also an interpretation, more persuasive than K's perhaps, because its tone and structure are echoed in a number of other places in Kafka's work and because the idea of a huge institutional joke makes more sense of The Trial, than the idea of individual agents of the Law not acting as they should. The story doesn't say this either, and other interpretations crowd themselves upon us. The doorkeeper cannot admit the man to the Law, for instance, but that does not mean the man cannot enter. Perhaps the Law, like the Kingdom of Heaven, suffers violence, and the man dies outside the Law because he believed he needed the permission he was denied. Perhaps. The story continues to present its deceptively scrutable face, like a person, as Kafka says in another story, who wishes to be alone with his smile.

It's not that we can't choose between interpretations, or combine several into a convincing reading. That is how we read. It'sjust that we can't choose finally, and a return to the story is always likely to shake whatever interpretation we have arrived at. A crafty arrangement of words, to borrow Marlow's formulation, is the enigmatic fact in such cases, and a simple rule suggests itself. Literary texts characteristically, all texts perhaps to some

extent, mean more than they say. Interpretation asks for patience, an avoidance of premature passage from what is said to what we think it means. This is a suggestion of Wayne Booth's impressive but slightly wishful Critical Understanding, and a further implication may be drawn from that book. Booth speaks of the "inherent richness" of an object, "its capacity to respond, as it were, to many perspectives. There is a slight, salutary shock in realizing that Booth's richness corresponds very closely to what Kermode calls the "darkness" of narrative, its refusal to settle into a single true perspective. You say darkness and I say richness. In the matter of interpretation, generally, I find I can't share the sense of frustration that Jim and Marlow and Kafka and Kermode want to urge on me, although I share it, of course, in their particular contexts. We cannot lay the ghost of a fact, but how we feel about that will depend on our ghosts. They could well be Nabokov's marvelously realized memories rather than the shadow of Jim's moment of shame. Matters of luck and temperament and personal history enter strongly here. Kerrnode sees the disappointment of interpretation as a figure for an aspect of the world: "It has sometimes been thought, and in my opinion rightly, that the world is also like that; or that we are like that in respect of the world." I admire the dignity and clarity of this, and am grateful for its challenge, for I see that my own view is not less precarious for being a different one. I tend to be elated and encouraged by the resistance of the fact to interpretation, by the sense of the world eluding the book. But then I think that in most matters the chase is more important than the catch, and I think that what holds us up is a fact, rather than a heart of darkness or a hidden God. "The largest consolation," Kerrnode says, "is that without interpretation there would be no mystery." An even larger consolation, I want to say, is that we can live with uninterpreted mysteries if we have to; and we do have to.

Of course, the facts in the sense I am proposing-and in several other senses-are just what are placed in doubt by several current theories of interpretation, and simply swept away by countless interpretative practices. Jim, on the other hand, would like to bury or sweep away his fact, but can't. Marlow wonders at one stage whether Jim should make "so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that matters." Jim has the wrong scruple, perhaps; but he has a scruple, and it is scruple that feeds the ghost of the fact.

I do not mean to imply that the facts are likely to speak up for themselves very often. If they speak at all, they usually whisper. Their very obstinacy is discreet, ghostly, invisible to the unscrupulous. Without scruple we shall not notice the fact's resistance to our interpretation, and should not care about it if we did. Interpretation under such circumstances is simply a matter of power and privilege, personal or institutional. You are right if you have the means of making yourself right. The notion of scruple is important, then, because it allows us to see that the facts are both fragile and stubborn, and

mayor may not be respected. It is a privilege to be haunted by them, we may say, and that privilege is available to us all. It's just that some of us throw it away-or perhaps all of us throw it away at some times. Further, we can acknowledge the weight of this scruple without agreeing about any particular set of facts or dreaming of any phantom consensus. It may seem that this doesn't take us very far toward agreement. But it does, I think, take us quite some distance toward understanding the way we actually manage to talk to each other.

I want to distinguish clearly between scruple and neutrality, or a hypothetical objectivity. "The historian cannot write," Kermode says, "nor can we read, without prejudice." Just so. But "without prejudice" doesn't mean abandoned to any old bigotry, and an interested view is not, as Gerald Graff suggests it is, necessarily a false one. We can be historically situated, compromised even, and still be able to judge historical situations. We do not need to be saints in order to disapprove ofslavery, and the horrible bombing of Dresden does not abolish the relative justice of the Nuremberg Trials. Edward Said cannot oppose an Orient of his own to that of the Orientalists he is attacking, without becoming an Orientalist himself. What he does, implicitly but firmly, is confront the supposedly disinterested interpretations of others with his own passionate interest in what he sees as scorned factsdiffuse, different, particular, and until recently silent. This is not a perfect arrangement, and no doubt the eye of God sees things in quite other ways. But it is what we have, and many of us will prefer a passion that respects its enemies to a sense of justice that is scarcely distinguishable from indifference. An interpretation' may be scrupulous and partisan. It is the clash between the fact and the interpretation that matters, and it is an aspect of our freedom that we can point out unscrupulous acts but cannot force others to have scruples.

But are there facts in the sense I am proposing? There are no pure, uninterpreted facts, as I have already suggested. What we call reality is always taken, as Lionel Trilling once said, rather than given. But we can see the facts as partners to a relation, as changing ingredients in a moderately stable structure. De Man remarks that Rousseau "calls natural any stage of relational integration that precedes in degree the stage presently under examination." Similarly, we may name fact any set of conditions that resists the act of interpretation currently going on. I have spoken of verbal and narrative facts, but I need to insist, perhaps, that a fact in this sense may be far less material than Jim's unfortunate leap. The facts are what Wittgenstein describes as wie es sich verhiilt-which his translators, in fact, render as "the facts." He has been puzzling, in the Philosophical Investigations, over the floating properties of names, and wonders whether he ought to say that the lack of afixedmeaning for a name turns that name into nonsense. "Say what you choose," he answers himself, "so long as it doesn't prevent you from

seeing the facts. (And when you see them there is a good deal that you will not say.)"

Wie es sich verhdlt: the facts, the way things are, what the situation is, or most literally, what relationships obtain. The English language, with its/acts and things, tugs us toward substance. Situation is less solid, but also less accurate. The facts may be a state of affairs, or the content of a proposition: what the case is. But they may also be objects, or events, or persons, or gestures. Indeed, they may be quite unfactual in the ordinary sense. A myth or a lie, for instance, that has taken hold in such a way as to have become part of the way things are, is a fact in this acceptation. Not to see how firm its hold is is not to see the facts. Racism is a fact of this kind. The virtue of Wittgenstein's apparently casual retort, however we translate it, is that it distinguishes between a perceived case and the many ways we may talk about it, and yet does not commit us to a particular doctrine about the nature of cases or about the interpretation of them. Of course, the distinction is not always available. There are times when the case is the interpretation. But it is available often enough, we regularly act on it, and it is mischievous to pretend, because we have learned to talk like reckless skeptics, that we cannot recognize it when it appears. It would be absurd to argue that the pain 1 have doesn't exist because my doctors can't agree on what to call it; still more absurd to suggest that their disagreement caused the pain. The ghost of a fact is only a ghost, but it is the ghost of a/act. When we see that, there is a great deal that we shall not say.

One of the things we may still wish to say is that this proposition can be turned around. The ghost may be the ghost of a fact, but it is only a ghost. Many contemporary critics, without denying that the facts may be available to us in some form or other, insist that texts cannot refer to them. The Russian Formalists protested against what Roman Jakobsen wittily called the "monogamous" relation of sign to thing signified, and recent criticism has not hesitated to divorce the unhappy couple.

Now the problem of reference is as old as language, and is a highly technical subject in philosophy. What's more, literary critics habitually confuse reference with meaning, and 1 can't claim to be able to sort out this tangle. The work of Paul de Man, however, and especially Allegories 0/ Reading, offers a lucid and commanding description of what this problem looks like when it surfaces in literature-and when it is not abolished by an eager literary isolationism.

Equally despairing of monogamy and divorce, de Man sees sign and referent as both miserably married and perfectly unable to talk to each other. "The notion of a language entirely freed from referential constraints," he writes, "is properly inconceivable." "It is impossible for a statement not to connote a referential meaning." A dream of "the feeling of liberation and

weightlessness that characterizes the man freed from the constraints of referential truth, to associated with the names of Nietzsche and Roland Barthes, turns out to be only a dream. "There is, it seems, an irresistible motion that forces any text beyond its limits and projects it towards an exterior referent." We may wonder why the business of reference is so persistently seen as a burden or a cage, but the point is clear enough. On the other hand, all reference is also a beating at the bars, must end in illusion and fallacy; and it is to the inevitability of the fallacy, as well as to its fallaciousness, that deconstruction points. "The deconstruction states the fallacy of reference in a necessarily referential mode." "There is no escape from this," de Man adds, because "deconstruction is co-extensive with any use of language. to" All discourse has to be referential but can never signify its actual referent.

Both never and signify are puzzling here, though. Signify seems to mean clutch and hold monogamously injust the way that Jakobson thought was in any case not desirable. Never seems to deny a million familiar acts. Signs often point badly, and even point to things that don't exist, but the restaurants of the world are full of people who get coffee when they ask for coffee. Of course, we may see this as just a bit of empirical luck, which doesn't touch the theoretical problem, and there is a considerable looseness in all signs. Otherwise they would not be signs at all but cumbersome labels, not susceptible of articulation into a language. But I cannot see how this state of affairs incites perpetual deconstruction, or the specular, interlocking absence de Man wishes to evoke.

De Man, like Michael Riffaterre, converts a theoretical question-how does language hook onto the world, as Wittgenstein once asked-into a fullblown "referential fallacy. If we are entitled to ask Graff how he knows that language refers to anything, we are equally entitled to ask de Man and Riffaterre how they know that it doesn't. Riffaterre suggests that reference is made "from words to words, not to things, to but this distinction rests on a curiously material and unquestioning idea of things and a curiously immaterial sense of words. De Man, at least in his more careful moments, says we do not know that language does not refer. He speaks eloquently of "an anxiety (or bliss, depending on one's momentary mood or individual temperament) of ignorance, not an anxiety of reference."It's not that we know what language is not doing. We don't know what it is doing, or even what we are doing when we ask. "Any question about the rhetorical mode of a literary text is always a rhetorical question which does not know whether it is really questioning."

It is easy enough to catch a skeptic in his hidden certainties, but a thoroughly vigilant skepticism is another matter, and this is what de Man offers most of the time. Rhetoric for him is language caught in the act of deconstruction. "What's the difference?"-I am using de Man's own example

here-may mean "Tell me what the difference is" or "Who cares what the difference is?" That is, it mayor may not be what we ordinarily call a rhetorical question, and it is rhetoric itself that makes this doubt available. "Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration." Doubt of this kind remains as a prospect or a threat, an instance of something fundamentally unmanageable about language, even though it is usually settled without delay in particular cases. The context will most often tell us quite clearly what "What's the difference?" means. It is the always possible separation of text from context, and its complicated play with just this possibility, that makes literature "the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself."

We need to add, though, that the "vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration" that de Man rather gleefully adduces are only possibilities. It is not that the pragmatic occasion cancels the philosophical doubt. The philosophical doubt itself relies on the equation of possibility with fact. De Man himself appears to admit that something like this is happening when he says that "it seems to be impossible to isolate the moment when the fiction stands free of any signification [he means reference]." "Yet without this moment, never allowed to exist as such, no such thing as a text is conceivable." Without this fleeting, theoretical glimpse of pure undecidability, the text cannot be seen as "unreadable" or as conflating "two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view." We may ask, grumbling, why we should want to see a text in this way, especially since thejob is so difficult. We shall certainly want to note that any structured piece of language is full of marks and clues that internalize or establish a very dense context; that may effectively suspend not reference but the problem of reference.

"What's the difference?" said the King of France in September 1939, shrugging his shoulders and scratching his bald head. Here are a king, a country, a speech act, a date, various parts of the body, and a couple of physical movements-all referred to. The sentence as a whole is perfectly intelligible yet, as a whole, it cannot refer to anything except a linguistic and historical phantom. It is not unreadable, though, in any plausible sense, and our problem is perfectly settled. The rhetorical question is a rhetorical question.

De Man raises a similar, and I think similarly exaggerated, doubt about the famous last line of "Among School Children." "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" is ordinarily taken as a rhetorical question expecting the answer "We can't." De Man suggests that a literal reading is also possible-"How can I know the dancer from the dance?"-and furthermore that these two readings do not simply "exist side by side": "the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it. De Man mentions "Vacillation," with its "crucified and castrated God Attis, of

whose body it can hardly be said that it is 'not bruised to pleasure soul. I agree that the two readings must be present in the poem. If it were not often painfully possible to know the dancer from the dance this celebration of a moment when we can't would have no meaning. But I can't see the two readings as perfectly, symmetrically balanced, staring at each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The possibility of bruising the body to pleasure the soul is raised in order to be denied; and it is denied. "The text does not simultaneously affirm and deny identity," de Man says of a passage in Nietzsche, "but it denies affirmation." Yeats's poem, it seems to me, denies denial.

It is not simply that de Man does not attend to the poem's internalized context-if he did he would have to conclude that language is always hypothetically undecided but not in any strong sense undecidable-it's that he gives equal weight to the possible and the actual, poises a potential against a practice, as if there were no difference between them. The facts, in such instances, are not what the text refers to, but what it does, and not to see this is, as Rene Girard says, a "theorisme quintessentiel." Yet the quandary is a touch too impeccable even for theory. The difference between a practice and a possibility, as Derrida might say, is not a practical one.

I have written at some length about facts and ghosts, yet many questions have not been asked, let alone answered. How do we recognize the facts? How do we distinguish between interpretation that deals with the facts and intepretation that doesn't? How do we judge between rival interpretations that both deal with the facts? Is the interpretation of a literary work continuous with the interpretation (of the world) offered by a literary work? Are there specialists in interpretation-theologians, lawyers, literary critics, political correspondents-or do we all interpret, specializing only in our particular zones of fact? Why are we suddenly so interested in theory? I can't start on these questions at this stage, and I am impatient already with the abstraction of this essay, anxious to get down from the high horse of speculation and read a good book. I want to suggest, though, that in spite of the unasked questions, we have come some way toward filling a space in contemporary critical debate that often seems eerily empty.

We hear a great deal about the poet's meaning, the critic's meaning, the text's meaning, or lack of it. There is a lot of noise about truth-claims-I always picture a literary and philosophical gold rush-and about texts being right and wrong in respect of the world. What is missing is what was buried with the sad notion of relevance: a sense that a meaning, whatever it is and whoever it belongs to, may be worth our attention or not. This is an old and simple question and I don't know how it came to disappear. It is a question of value, but not necessarily of truth, except in an awkwardly distended sense. All kinds of unmistakable untruths are unmistakably worth uttering,

and it doesn't really help to say they must be true "in their way" or "after all."

The great risk of literature (including criticism) is not that it will prove false but that it will prove trivial, that it will just not count in the life of the world. We don't need to agree about values. We need only to agree that there is a question, and to ask it. The answers will be Babel, no doubt, but the uncanny silence will have ended.

The facts, with their maddening or exhilarating resistance to what we say about them, are our defense against triviality. If we let them, they will break the terrible academic circle of interpretation for interpretation's sake, and assisted by our scruple, they will ask a question that has indeed become more and more rhetorical. Faced with your interpretation and my interpretation, the facts will say, "What's the difference?" And they will quietly tell us, and dismiss us, when there is none, and it doesn't matter.

Literature as a game

Eugene Goodheart

What seems to me to be the most hidden and yet the most powerfulfoundation of our century is its skepticism over and against all dogmatism of science. [Hans-Georg Gadamer]

Firm ground is not available ground. [A. R. Ammons ("Dunes")]

We hear much talk these days about discourse as a game of linguistic counters. Advanced theories about literature tend to be "game theories." The association of literature with play is hardly new. We need only invoke the self-delighting playfulness of Aristophanes and Shakespeare to realize that the essence of comedy has always been play. Only a puritan attitude within literature, which has affinities with a mistrust of literature itself, would want to banish self-delighting playfulness. Moreover, play, as we know, can be serious: it may be associated with pathos, with the experience of plenitude. It may be a source of "serious" personal energy against oppressive authority as, for instance, in Twelfth Night.J

With the birth and development of aesthetics as an intellectual discipline, play becomes a subject for serious, sometimes solemn, theoretical speculation. Perhaps the most extraordinary discourse on "the play impulse" in human life is Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education ofMan, published in 1795 at the time of the Reign of Terror in France. (Schiller's work lies behind the later discussions of Johann Huizinga, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown.) The date of publication is not fortuitous, for the letters are nothing less than an attempt to imagine a utopian alternative to the coercive society produced by the French Revolution. For Schiller it is in the aesthetic, not the political or moral, state that man fulfills his dream of happiness. By valorizing the instincts as well as the intellect and the will, aesthetic man achieves the spontaneity and freedom of his full nature: its sensuous and material side and its intellectual or formal side. "He had learned to desire more nobly, so that he may not need to will sublimely." The actual failure of man to achieve the fullness of his nature is the consequence of a political misconception of the nature of man.

Though Schiller does not deny the intellectual or formal side of aesthetic life, he conceives of it as a spontaneous result of the play impulse.

The formal drive must not be the result of spiritual impotence or flabbiness of thought or will; for this would only degrade man. It must, if it is to be at all praiseworthy, spring from abundance of feeling and sensation. Sense herself must, with triumphant power, remain mistress of her own domain, and resist the violence which the mind, by its usurping tactics, would fain inflict upon her. In a single word: Personality must keep the sensuous drive within its proper bounds and receptivity, or Nature, must do the same with the formal drive.

Schiller cannot entirely avoid the language of power in his conception of spontaneous play. Sense must assert itself with triumphant power, it must resist the usurping tactics of mind and the sensuous drive must be kept in bounds. But for Schiller this restraint enhances the play impulse. It is, so to speak, the guarantee of its seriousness. Play, for Schiller, is an end in itself, possessing no ulterior purposes beyond the enjoyment it offers. And the enjoyment is conveyed in the words pleasure, freedom, nobility.

The things he possesses, the things he produces, may no longer bear upon them the marks of their use Disinterested and undirected pleasure is now numbered among the necessities of existence, and what is in fact unnecessary soon becomes the best part of his delight In the Aesthetic State everything even the tool which serves-is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest, and the mind, which would force the patient mass beneath the yoke of its purposes, must here obtain its consent.

But how does man achieve the aesthetic condition? Here Schiller invokes the idea or metaphor of organic development against any revolutionary project that disrupts the living process. In Culture and the Radical Conscience, I noted that "though [Schiller's] argument seems to be an early version of the psychology of liberation fostered by Marcuse and Brown and though it has democratic ambitions, it is distinguished by its refusal to identify in a revolutionary way the need for liberation with the assertion that liberation is at hand. Liberation has to be nurtured like a plant, to use an organic simile that would have suited Schiller. "2

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussions of play are bound by organic metaphors in which plenitude, spontaneity, and unity are implicitly or explicitly expressed. A character in a dialogue of Georg Lukacs (written early in his career) gives a suggestive account of playas a fruitfully disturbing proliferation of energy within the fullness and unity of life.

To break up the unity simply so as to make it felt still more strongly-to make the unity felt at the same time as the things which are destroying it! to be able to play: that is the only true sovereignty. We play with things, but we remain the same and the things stay as they were. But both have been enhanced during the game and through the game. Laurence Sterne plays, always, all the time, with the gravest notions of man and destiny. And his characters and their destinies acquire incredible gravity through the fact that all his playing doesn't really shift

them from the spot where they stand. it just washes against them like the sea against a cliff, yet the cliff stands firm in the play of waves, and the more violently the waves break against them from all sides, the more we sense the cliff's solidity. And yet he is only playing with them. It is only his playful will that gives him this gravity.'

The adversary in the debate wonders whether the reason for play in Sterne's work is an "inability to control his exuberant strength, or a cover up for weakness. Both characters in the dialogue share an organic vision of life, so that neither of them entertains the possibility of the simultaneous existence of two kinds of play, one whose "exuberant strength" expresses the fullness of life and the other whose energy dissembles emptiness or weakness.

The habit of employing the terms play and game interchangeably conceals an important difference in the implications of the words. Games are always rule-bound, a condition that deprives the "playing" of them of a certain spontaneity. When a player has sufficiently internalized the rules, he may take them for granted and play with a freedom and abandon that seems to ignore the rules. However, so long as he plays the game he cannot violate the rules. Play, on the other hand, does not always seem to be confined to rules, filled as it is with improvisation. The distinction may be "illusory" in the sense that the abandon of the player may conceal rules that determine even the improvisations, and the rule-bound character of the game may be seen simply as the conditions for the freedom of play. But the words do stress the opposite or different sides of the playing or gaming activity-and it is important to keep the distinction in mind.

In considering what the play of language has come to mean in contemporary literary discourse, one should begin with the rule-bound character of the game. In Homo Ludens, Johann Huizinga stresses the rules of the game, which, in his view, are a stay against the chaos of "real life. Huizinga cites Paul Valery's remark: "No skepticism is possible where the rules of a game are concerned, for the principle underlying them is an unshakeable faith." Valery might have said more accurately that when skepticism appears the rules of the game are in jeopardy, for he also observes that "if the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses. The game is over. The umpire's whistle breaks the spell and sets real life going again

The introduction of the terms skepticism and faith immediately dispells any frivolous association that attaches to the idea of play. It gives support to the very high claims Huizinga makes for play (or the game). Play, in his view, is an originating energy of culture. It is the expression of a sacred ritual, having no purpose beyond itself, not because it is frivolous, but because it is a fulfillment of human life. "Play consecrated to the Deity, the highest goal of man's endeavor-such was Plato's conception of religion. "5

If we revise Valery's formulation and ask what are the conditions under which the rules of the game are immune from skepticism, the answer, I think,

is that the game is unthreatened when the player has a conviction of the fullness of life, that is, when life itself is not experienced as a mere game. An overflowing play that expresses the fullness of life is the freedom beyond the rules of the game. When that conviction disappears the game ceases to be an occasion for personal expression; it becomes instead a mechanism to be disassembled and examined with detachment. If our relation to life and the game becomes severely problematic, our focus is displaced from the playing of the game to the arbitrariness that initiates the constellation of rules that constitute the game.

Beckett's Endgame makes the displacement transparent. The play begins with Hamm's words: "Me-[he yawns]-to play." And the play is experienced without purpose and energy. Whenever Hamm and Clov verge on meaning, they recoil from it in self-irony, not because they do not wish to betray a sense of the variety and possibility of life, but because they wish to be faithful to their sense of the emptiness of things:

Hamm: We're beginning to to mean something?

Clov: Mean something. You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] Ah. That's a good one!

Hamm: I wonder. [Pause] Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be able to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.

Storytelling in Beckett's trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) is a kind of playing in order to fiU the void of the self, but it is unsuccessful playing, since the void continually exposes the fiction. A story assumes or invents a self that can never achieve being or meaning (coextensive terms in Beckett's world). Beckett gives us not so much a fiction as an ontology of fiction, voices that continually question their own existences. "Of myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others. How could I have, who never tried? To show myself now, on the point of vanishing, at the same time as the stranger, and by the same grace, that would be no ordinary last straw." The self in Beckett's world is a Cartesian machine that has either broken down or has never quite been constructed. Its indeterminacy is not to be confused with a being for whom there is always the potentiality of a fuller realization. There is an odd conjunction of creativity and impotence in Beckett's imagination with the implication that the condition of nonbeing and meaninglessness is universal and insurmountable. Beckett does not project his world as the production of a particular imagination or temperament. It is rather revealed to us as a discovery of the nature of things. Such a world can be filled only by language, which must always be suspect, since it is without conviction or reference-or it may be said to have the conviction of suspicion and the referentiality of chaos and emptiness. What remains irreducible in Beckett's work, however, is the fact that he writes plays and novels. Robbe-Grillet has remarked apropos of Beckett's

plays that the theater implies "a metaphysics of presence," presence meaning thereness (lIre-Ill) without signification. Robbe-Grillet quotes Heidegger: "The human condition is to be there." In Waiting/or Godot, Gogo and Didi are men, they are on stage, they are there. This is perhaps all that can be said about or for them. The course of the play, to be sure, is disintegration. "The hero of Beckett's narrative [Robbe-Grillet writes] deteriorates from book to book, faster and faster. Feeble, but still capable of travelling on a bicycle he rapidly loses the use of his limbs finds himself imprisoned in a room his senses gradually abandon him." Yet, as Robbe-Grillet notes, the character continues to wear garters. Robbe-Grillet formulates the paradox of his thereness. In spite of the thereness: "What little has been given to us from the start-which seemed to be nothing-is soon corrupted before our eyes to a less than nothing." (Pozzo is deprived of sight, Lucky of speech.) Thereness is compatible with nothing, because thereness is valueneutral, devoid of meaning or signification.

Thereness in Robbe-Grillet's sense (it is not Beckett's) is a negative condition that cannot be escaped; consequently, any freedom that his characters have may be illusory. "They have nothing to recite to invent they must remain because they are waiting for Godot." Robbe-Grillet never asks why they must wait for Godot, why they can't commit suicide and escape presence-or simply die." "They will be there the next day, the day after that, and so on tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow." RobbeGrillet's account of Beckett's work leads to a criticism of what he regards as Beckett's mistaken attempt to recuperate (recover) meaning through the tragic sense of the loss of meaning. Robbe-Grillet wrote his article on Beckett at a time (1957) when he was developing a phenomenology of a value-free presence, which would disable the tragic longing for significance. But Robbe-Griller's phenomenology and critique depends upon an arbitrary division between presence and meaning, which he may be imposing upon Beckett. Roland Barthes has incisively pointed out in an essay on RobbeGrillet that Robbe-Grillet's attempt to achieve a neutral (objective) whiteness of presentation is willy-nilly an expression of his own subjectivity. The act of signification, even if it is hostile to the idea of signification, is inescapable.s

If, as Raymond Federman says, Beckett's "fiction no longer relates a story (past realities reshaped by the process of imagination into an artistic form), but it simply reflects upon itself, upon its own chaotic verbal process, that is to say upon its own (defective) substance-s-language," how or why does Beckett continue to write? The question is not addressed to Beckett's biography but to the "logic" of his writing. The answer depends, I think, on a

To escape presence is to want to escape the body, an escape that resembles asceticism but that is without asceticism's promise of transcendence: hence suicide.

distinction between two senses of the defectiveness of language. Language can betray meaning (i.e., propositional sense) through sheer personal incompetence or in exploring the possible resources of language, it can reveal the intrinsic defectiveness of language in which one always glimpses meaning. It is tempting to attribute the second sense of the defectiveness of language to Beckett's work. One might say that he brings language as close as possible to propositional and referential sense, and when his language falls back into verbal chaos it is because language is intrinsically incapable of achieving the intelligibility it desires. Such a view is in keeping with an implication of his work that I noted above: that Beckett has discovered a universal condition, that he gives us a view of the nature of things. But the language after all is that of Beckett and his characters, whose deficiencies are particular, so that the element of sheer personal incompetence enters in-not so much the incompetence of language as the language of an incompetent person. This view of Beckett is confirmed I think by a hope expressed in Texts for Nothing: "And yet I have high hopes, I give you my word, high hopes, that one day I may tell a story, yet another, with men, kinds of men as in the days when I played all regardless or nearly, worked and played." The effectiveness of story and language depends on the character and quality of persons. It is not intrinsic to the machinery of language. Beckett's work equivocates, I think, between the two senses (intrinsic and personal) of the defectiveness of language.

Beckett's characters perform the act of writing under the conditions of suspicion. Like the writer, they are bemused by the activity, at once dismissive of the enterprise and protective of it as the only possible enterprise. In this spirit of self-mistrust, Donald Barthelme reflects upon the conditions of writing that no longer refer to an external reality: "Another story about writing a story? Another regressus in infinitum? Who doesn't prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn't continually proclaim 'Don't forget I'm an artifice!" Barthelme writes stories that do not forget that they are artifices, because they are the only stories that he can tell. Barthelme does not say that they are the only stories that can be told. In a similar spirit John Barth writes: "How does one write a novella? How find the channel, bewildered in these creeks and crannies? Storytelling isn't my cup of wine? isn't somebody's; my plot doesn't rise and fall in meaningful stages but digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera, collapses, dies."

Skepticism about the possibility of telling stories about the "real" world may erode the sense of reality, but it does not extinguish the vocabulary that represents it. Traces of reality survive in language itself. Reality, society, self, pleasure, pain are terms that are taken into the most skeptical kind of discourse as part of its necessity. The writer's reluctance may be registered by quotation marks or by a distancing reflectiveness that raises continuous

doubt about the adequacy of the very terms of discourse. No writer can perform this task adequately, because adequacy would produce the written equivalent of stammering and, finally, silence. The result, then, in varying degrees is a plural or even confused discourse of shifting and contending vocabularies offering multiple perspectives, an infinitely regressive and playful interrogation of the premises of discourse.

Skepticism need not be the disabling attitude that I have just described. The skeptic may take pleasure in the uncertainties of knowing reality. In a famous statement about the Negative Capability, John Keats proposed uncertainty and doubt as a capacity, indeed the greatest capacity of the literary imagination. The Negative Capability occurs in a "man capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." This negative condition is not the void, for the poet has gained a freedom to participate as variously as possible in the plenitude of being. In a letter Keats writes: "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth the imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and found it truth." Only the philosopher who has reached the still center may have a fuller experience of plenitude. Keats's Negative Capability links uncertainty and plenitude. In a Keatsian spirit, Kenneth Burke speaks of characters possessing "degrees of being in proportion to the variety of perspectives from which they can with justice be perceived. "8 "Reality," Nabokov notes in his Afterword to Lolita, "is one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes." But for Nabokov there is no reason to despair. The imaginative skeptic learns to play with his uncertainties, to tum them into endlessly amusing and deeply serious games. The imagination may grow so bold that it overcomes reality and skepticism loses its doubt. The skepticism of Keats, Nabokov, and Burke assumes a plenitude of reality accessible to the imagination absent from the contemporary version I am describing.

The conviction of plenitude is a feature of the organicist vision of life. In the organicist view, life precedes life in at least two senses. There is the obvious fact of individual life reproducing itself. There is the less obvious "fact" of what Nietzsche called "the eternity of the phenomenon": the life force without origins, which individuates itself in the moral forms that manifest themselves to us as life. Emptiness or absence, in such a perspective, is the illusion produced by the necessary mortality of individual life, which can never disturb the eternity of the phenomenon. It has always been the special gift of the romantic poet (who understood that gift as intrinsic to the poetic imagination itself) to perceive the eternal or recurrent vitality of the universe through all its changes. It is the gift of vision, for which the organ is no ordinary eye.

Plenitude assumes the possible completeness of an object or subject as a goal, since it is never the case in actual experience. Completeness is achieved

through a process that occurs in time. Beginnings, middles, and endings are essential to the organic process. Completeness may circumscribe a subject, but such completeness in the organic view tends to be provisional, for it implies the discreteness and separateness of things that contradict the organic ambition for greater and greater wholeness. In his magisterial study of the Romantic tradition, Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams claims that "what was most distinctive in Romantic thought was the normative emphasis not so much on plenitude as such, but on an organized unity in which all individuation and diversity survive, in Coleridge's terms, as distinction without division. "9 And yet Abrams's subsequent exposition of Romantic doctrine makes clear that the unity of the cosmos could not be encompassed by the finite human mind. According to Fichte, whose view is characteristic, "The ultimate goal of man is utterly unattainable his way to it must be endless. "10 The journey or the activity becomes an end in itself. If the romantics do not give up unity as a goal or ideal, it nevertheless remains an experience beyond reach. I I But plenitude is the actual experience of the imagination, and it provides the reason for the continuing pursuit of unity. The experience of plenitude promises completion.

The "logic" of organicism is the view of life as a seamless continuity. The boundaries of things, which make for parts, forms, fragments, have only provisional interest. They do not add up to life itself. The sum is always greater than the parts, an organicist fact, which makes mathematics an alien metaphorical system. Life in its fullness remains beyond the finitizing capabilities of language, which can only suggest its fullness and depth. "We murder to dissect": the metaphor of the laboratory applies to language, that is, to any finitizing or mechanistic activity that fails to respect the wholeness, the seamlessness and fullness of life itself. The despair of the romantic poet comes from his conviction of both the inadequacy and the necessity of language. The obverse of the organicist view of wholeness may be a kind of death, an unwillingness to credit the existence of the manifest forms of life. Death may be the delicious promise of release, or it may cause terror at the prospect of the abyss. Emptiness is the shadow of organic plenitude. The organicist view does not deny the existence of fragmentation, discontinuity, opposition. It knows that the transgressive and disruptive impulse is present in every strong imagination. Unity and continuity that do not overcome ruptures and transgressions are uninterestingnot the work of imagination, but neither is a disruptive impulse that remains content with itself and does not try to compel a coherence out of the fragments of experience. What the organicist view rejects is the assumption that discontinuity and opposition are prior to unity and harmony. "There can be no reconciliation [Stephen Dedalus remarks in Ulysses], if there has not been a sundering." Neither can there be a sundering where there has not been a unity. Where there has been sundering there has been

wholeness and there may be healing, reconciliation, and restoration to wholeness.

All demystifications or deconstructions of the organicist "myth" necessarily assume a mechanical model. Unities are suspect because they are mere fabrications, composed of parts (tropes in the case of literature) which add up to the whole and which in turn can be disassembled and reassembled into wholes.P Mechanism evaporates unity-or at least the unity that is greater than the sum of its parts. Where the organicist assumes the existence of the whole and the inadequacy of language to express it fully, the deconstructionist, the most provocative if not most penetrating critic of the organicist idea, begins with the fact of language and questions its relation to the organic whole. By reversing perspective, the inadequacy of language is seen as an illusion of never to be satisfied desire. It is language that posits the wholeness that it can never encompass. In his discussion of Shelley's Epipsychydion, J. Hillis Miller gives an unusually lucid example of deconstruction. If it is the aspiration of poetic language "to produce the union of love," the words of poetry paradoxically "keep [the union] from happening. "13

The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love's rare Universe Are chains of lead around its flight of fireI pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

[Lines 588-91]

What deconstruction assumes is the priority, if not authority, of language in matters of understanding and judgment.

Without a directing influence of a position beyond language, we have only what Jacques Derrida calls the open "polysemia" of a discourse that plays with language to the point of preventing any translation into terms other than those of the discourse. Discourse, particularly the discourse of writing, is the very essence of play: it is a "field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. "I" The self-referential play of language is the source of ambiguity and multiple meaning. By liberating language from the definitiveness of reference, language at any given moment can mean or be many things at once. Deconstruction did not discover self-referentiality and multiple meaning. Its distinction is that it makes of this interesting and problematic fact of language a metaphysics or an antimetaphysics. The fertility of language in generating multiple meaning establishes, in the view of deconstruction, the priority of equivocal readings over univocal readings. Having banished the constraints of voice and will, deconstruction sanctions the richest possible play of "meaning," or rather of the absence of meaning. If "we are [the] product rather than [the] agent of language" as Paul de Man says,'! we engage in an exercise in futility when trying to constrain the activity of language through voice and will. Like a game, language has its rules and mechanisms, and the game plays itself. Discourse (the text) is seen

as having an irresponsible life of its own, so full of implications that those implications detach themselves not only from the author but from the discourse itself. Reality, reference, even life (all the terms that seem to postulate a world beyond language itself) are in themselves postulates of language. The relation between word and deed, image and reality belongs to a game that is played out within language.

The game plays itself! The playing is not in any way determined by the will of the player: it is without a personal purpose or goal. Imagine a chess game in which the rules of the game are correctly followed (by whom?). Bishops move diagonally, rooks horizontally or vertically, but there is no passion to win, no economy of move governed by a purpose. An automatic or mechanical process, such a game is an analogy for the play of discourse. Revealing neither voice nor person, its ideal enactment would be the work of a computer.ts

It is paradoxical to claim for language a metaphysical status, since language in the hands of the deconstructionists is a skeptical, even nihilistic, instrument against the false securities of metaphysics. Indeed, language itself is the very emblem of skeptical uncertainty, for what the deconstructionist comes to see is, in the words of Paul de Man, "the possibility that the entire construction of drives, substitutions, and representations is the aberrant, metaphysical correlative of the absolute randomness of language, prior to any figuration of meaning."!" This view of discursive play is contrasted with a structuralist view, which has its source in a romantic belief in presence. Derrida characterizes the structuralist view in this manner: "The center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring attitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play [The] matrix [of the history of the concept of structure] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of the word. "18 The game of discourse may be threatened in a perspective of floating signifiers (the extreme reduction of the fact that "language and meaning do not coincide',), gratuitous verbal behavior that no longer wishes to enclose itself in its own coherence, though it might find itself impelled to do so by an unmastered need for order. If metaphysics cannot be ultimately purged from language (the postulation of a referent outside of language) as the deconstructionists would like to see but know cannot happen, language in its now self-knowing vulnerability and inadequacy becomes a skeptical all in all. There is no court of appeal beyond its performative activity.'?

We can judge the radical character of this skepticism by contrasting it with the limited skepticism of Heidegger, about whom the Israeli novelist Amos Oz has this to say in his novel Touch the Water Touch the Wind: "Language for Heidegger, by its very nature, is always misleading. And particularly so

in those matters which are the foundation of our existence. Hence it is our duty to purify and refine our language, to create a proper language, before we weigh anchor and set sail for unknown worlds, for the secret realms of time and Being." For the deconstructionist the very idea of a secure or proper language is a delusion.

In adjudicating the rival claims of organicists and deconstructionists, one should note that the possibility of deconstructing the "myth" of plenitude is irrelevant to the fact that the poet of Negative Capability has the conviction of plenitude. Moreover, though common sense may tell us that we need to demonstrate plenitude, not emptiness or indeterminacy, common sense may be delusive. Emptiness, absence, or nothingness are cultural categories that might require the kind of "proof" expected for the claim of plenitude. Skepticism about invisible beings and powers may be perfectly commonsensical; it is quite another thing to be skeptical about the visible world and the patterns of meaning that it contains. What is required in the second case is a general suspicion of the world, the product of either temperament or collective ideology. I don't say that an ontology of absence is simply willful. But its most persuasive versions are the work of deduction, not of intuition or the evidence of the senses. The world after all seems full to the innocent eye.

The game or play of discourse has become intimately associated with radical skepticism, even nihilism (unlike the fruitfully playful wit of Shakespeare). Deconstructive discourse is a game that undoes the game. It is engaged in the cause of "truth" (which deconstructionists acknowledge to be a problematic term), concerned to dispel "naive" illusions about plenitude. Paul de Man has expressed this game-undoing, indeed life-undoing, "truth" with startling candor:

And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat-that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our tum. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words. What would be naive is to believe that this strategy, which is not our strategy as subjects, since we are its product rather than its agent, can be a source of value and has to be celebrated or denounced accordingly.

The demystifying or deconstructive process cannot by itself undo the game of discourse, much as it tries, for, as de Man realistically notes, "No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words."20 Note how such a view inverts the normal hierarchy of reason and sanity. To live, to speak is madness; sanity is the unrelenting knowledge of our nothingness. No degree of knowledge can stop the madness, because such knowledge fully lived would be suicide.

Deconstruction sometimes presents itself in a benign aspect. Thus J. Hillis

Miller with his residual humanism values the fertility of the method: "The hypothesis of a possible heterogeneity in literary texts is more flexible, more open to a given work, than the assumption that a good work of literature is necessarily going to be 'organically unified. Good liberal that he is, Miller sees deconstruction as an attempt "to resist the totalizing and totalitarian tendencies of criticism."21 Unlike de Man, he is not so much interested in "truth" as in its pragmatic usefulness ("it works"). And again unlike de Man, he values its pluralism, not its claim to mastery over the work. Though the deconstructionist ethic is not openly liberationist (it is too skeptical not to suspect the language of liberation), it has liberationist implications. It shows sensitivity to the repressiveness of the binding, continuous element in organic form. In contrast it proposes the provisionality of the mechanical model, in which one is always free to disassemble the mechanical "unity," altering the relations of parts to one another without altering the machine. On the other hand, its rigorous dislike of unities, its mistrust of plenitude and spontaneity, justifies the repressive image that Geoffrey Hartman applies to them: "boa deconstructors." De Man, I suspect, is truer to the skeptical or nihilist spirit of deconstruction. Miller's domestication of it weakens its grip. In distinguishing between de Man and Miller, as I am doing, I am of course "listening" to the differences with which their voices banish voice. I am assuming in de Man a rigorous will to discover disorder and emptiness and in Miller a will to discover diversity and richness. I am also assuming that language does not alone decide whether meaning is stable or unstable; it is the subject or user of language who decides what he wishes to mean or do with language, according to his temperament, his talents, and the circumstances in which he finds himself, though what he means or does may have implications beyond what he intends.

The cogency of deconstruction as a philosophical and literary "method" is very much in question. I think it a mistake, however, to dismiss it as faddish or parochial to literary study. However vulnerable its "doctrines," however unsatisfying the exposition of those doctrines may be, deconstruction is a significant, late enactment of a radical skepticism, verging on nihilism, that has been a powerful theme in modern culture. Behind deconstruction is the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The implications of deconstruction extend far beyond texts.

One potential casualty of deconstruction is social criticism. Deconstruction makes social criticism, of whatever inspiration (literary, historical, philosophical), very difficult, if not impossible. The touchstone for a literaryinspired social criticism has been, of course, Matthew Arnold. Arnold had an abundant capacity for doubt, but he assumed the presence and fullness of the cultural tradition. Disinterestedness, the free play of the mind upon our "stock habits of thought and feeling," never really extended to the touchstones that formed his convictions. Arnold's particular touchstones may, of

course, be vulnerable to criticism. The Hebraistic or puritanical constraints of his thought are unnecessarily exclusionary if they disable us from fully appreciating the comic play of Chaucer's imagination or of Keats's sensuousness. But Arnold's Hellenism, like Keats's Negative Capability, represents, in principle at least, a link between imaginative and intellectual play and plenitude necessary to an evaluative social and literary criticism. It is a link that contemporary skepticism has severed at great cost. The imagination can no longer play its games with confidence, for the deepest knowledge of the critic is of the vacuity on which those games rest. Even the rules of the game are not immune to skepticism. All the traditional discriminations between the genuine and false uses of language, which have given a literaryinspired social criticism (the work of Arnold and Orwell, for instance) a certain power, is denied by deconstruction as unearned and inauthentic. Is there an alternative to the view that there are no privileged positions, that all constructions of discourse are of equal value (and therefore perhaps no value), games that threaten to lose interest for us because they are mere games? At any moment in a life one may be genuinely moved by one consideration rather than another. A need or value may become an imperative to act or speak in this way instead of that way. In moments of confusion (which may indeed be frequent) we may experience the correlative of the philosophical condition that there are no privileged positions, but such confusion could conceivably evaporate in the knowledge of our motives-of the condition in which these motives develop. What is missing from the skeptical view of privilege is an historical sense of the conditions under which certain views emerge and are felt to have authority, including the skeptical view.

History has been traditionally allied to relativism. Roland Barthes, for example, invokes history in order to relativize nature, which in modern thought has tended to perform the role of an eternal verity. But history has its own way of privileging events, of constructing patterns of significance, which exclude or dismiss other events and patterns. The authority-conferring, teleologizing tendency of history is put forcefully, if negatively, by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses: "time has branded events and fettered they are lodged in the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?" The events that occur, the pattern or patterns that they make suggest at any moment needs, desires, and values. One philosophical "metaphor" for this activity of privileging and exclusion is historical determinism. What the metaphor expresses in an unnecessarily constricted form is the truth that not everything is possible: that the very activity is part of real historical life.

We are at a moment in history when, for various reasons, the skeptical view is felt to have authority. Even writers who are committed to a view of

reality as plenitude often complain about the difficulty of achieving access to reality, because, according to one exponent of this view, reality in the modern world has been usurped by the media, a system of "manufactured illusions." And the difficulty is demonstrated by the unpersuasiveness with which the question "What is reality?" is answered.

Overexposure to manufactured illusions [writes Christopher Lasch] soon destroys their representational power. The illusion of reality dissolves, not in a heightened sense of reality as we might expect, but in a remarkable indifference to reality. Our sense of reality appears to rest, curiously enough, on our willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality. Even a rational understanding of the techniques by means of which a given illusion is produced does not necessarily destroy our capacity to experience it as a representation of reality But a complete indifference even to the mechanics of illusion announces the collapse of the very idea of reality, dependent at every point on the distinction between nature and artifice, reality and illusion.v

Lasch's argument has a curiously contradictory movement: both the capacity "to be taken in" and a demystified understanding of "the mechanics of illusion" are necessary to a sense of reality. Lasch with his appetite for reality (not the same thing as a knowledge of it) simply assumes a plenitude, which he is incapable of bodying forth-except as a term in a polemic against those who would evaporate self and society in an endlessly regressive self-reflexivity. Radical skepticism, which creates in the arts the self-reflexivity evident in the work of Beckett, Barth, and Barthelme, among others, and in the activity of deconstruction, is the product of a situation in which the mind is baffled by problems and difficulties. Evil seems beyond human responsibility, so that there are no polarizations to galvanize the intellect and the will. Not that evil has no human agents. It is simply that the alternatives no longer seem to be between good and evil. Neither liberalism nor conservatism, socialism nor capitalism (one can list other such oppositions) can galvanize intellect and will, because of a sensed inadequacy or vulnerability of all positions. All that the lucid intelligence can do is turn back upon itself and trace the lines of its activity. It is inconceivable (at least to me) that a deconstructionist attitude could exist in the time of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, or in Solzhenitsyn's Soviet Union. This is not to say that the skeptical intelligence could not direct a stream of fresh (even satiric) thought on 'the cliches that supported the Loyalist cause in Spain (see Orwell's Homage to Catalonia) or the Allied War Effort. It is simply that skepticism never fully defined such an intelligence, that it remained rooted in convictions about truth, decency and humanity, terms that it had no interest in deconstructing. Indeed, its concern is with the moments when truth, decency, and humanity are betrayed by the right side. It should be clear that I am speaking not of literary criticism or theory exclusively but of imaginative literature and politics as well.

There may be something purgative in the deconstructive process, in the endlessly regressive self-interrogation that enables us to see the difficulties in any position we might take. But it would be delusive to think that such an activity is an end in itself or that it does not risk the frivolity of a mere game or that it can satisfy needs to which a criticism of conviction and commitment is addressed. (It is a question whether it can even satisfy "the play impulse," which animates an aesthetic of plenitude.) Though one cannot simply will an "engaged" criticism into existence, a combination of will and changed historical circumstances in the future will doubtless bring it about.

1. "Serious" has no substantive counterpart. In order to make a noun of serious, one must compound the adjective with -ness. (Neither does it have a verbal counterpart.) This means that there is no particular state of being or activity which embodies seriousness, as there is a state of being which embodies playfulness, i.e., play. There are activities like work which may be "identified" as a serious activity, but work does not belong to seriousness in the way that playfulness belongs to play. It becomes possible, then, to contend that work need not be "serious" or that play can be serious, since seriousness is a "free-floating" adjectival quality of things. One could not sensibly say that seriousness is playful.

2. See Eugene Goodheart, Culture and 'he Radical Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 132.

3. Georg Lukacs, "Richness, Chaos and Form," in Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), pp. 137-38.

4. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 27.

5. Ibid., p. II.

6. See Bruce Morrissette, "Robbe-Grillet as a Critic of Samuel Beckett," in Sam�l Beckett Now, ed. Melvin Friedman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 59 ff. For Jacques Derrida the absence of meaning is a condition of play, to which the seriousness of meaning is opposed. "Only the serious has a meaning: play, which no longer has one, is serious only to the extent to which 'the absence of meaning is also a meaning' The seriousness of death and pain is the servility of thought" (Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], p. 335).

7. Friedman, ibid., p. ll2.

8. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), p. 504.

9. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton &. Co., 1971), p. 185.

10. Ibid., p. 216.

II. This is at least the case for imaginative literature. Hegel claims for philosophy (his philosophy) the ability to encompass the whole. "The truth is not rationally grasped, or 'comprehended,' however, until the final stage, the achievement of genuine philosophy, which supersedes, while preserving its substance, the imagethinking of revealed religion," and, one might add, of poetic vision (ibid., p. 233).

12. It should be noted that organicism is at an advantage in the vocabulary that both its exponents and its adversaries commonly employ. Fragments, parts, etc.,

assume wholeness. The adversaries of organicism have not yet achieved a vocabulary which would exclude organicist implications and assumptions.

13. J. Hillis Miller, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 244.

14. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's translator's preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. xix.

IS. Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured," in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Bloom et al., p. 6S.

16. A not wholly just analogy, since computers do play to win and often do win, but they cannot beat the true artists of the game, and it is the personal element in playing, which the mechanical deconstructing view banishes, that I want to emphasize.

17. De Man, p. 5.

IS. Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," in Writing and Discourse, p. 279.

19. The example of Beckett in relation to deconstruction is not fortuitous. Olga Bernal writes of Beckett as one might write of deconstruction: "This is the first time in the history of literature that language no longer situates itself opposite the world, but opposite itself" ("L'Oubl: des noms," Le Monde [January 17, 1965]). And she speaks of the keen awareness Beckett has of being captive of the language in or through which he speaks. But, as I have tried to show, Beckett preserves the speaker, the personal voice. Unlike the case of deconstruction, language for Beckett is a function of personal voice.

20. De Man, p. 6S.

21. Miller, p. 252.

22. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), p. 160.

Under our belt and off our back: Barth's Letters and postmodem fiction

Gerald Graff

I can't think of a better way to address a conference on John Barth and the postmodern novel than to consult what John Barth himself thinks about the postmodern novel. Barth has thoughtfully made that possible by writing an essay on the subject, "The Literature of Replenishment," in which he comes up with a qualified endorsement of postmodern fiction.• But what is postmodern fiction? If its program resembles the postmodern program in poetry, as it has been unsympathetically described in a recent essay by Karl Shapiro, Barth is equally unsympathetic. Shapiro sees postmodern poetry as an apology "for the personal, the narcissistic, and the solipsistic, as well as for the tribal, antifamilial, and antinational ethos, drawn from both primitive and esoteric lore-really the drop-out strategies of the fifties and sixties.'? Barth long ago expressed his wariness toward the more extreme form of literary far-outness delineated here by Shapiro. In Barth's 1967 essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," he described with wry detachment the program of "The New York Direct-Mail Advertising School of Literature" and that of other ventures in do-it-yourself randomness in the arts.' If readers of the earlier essay got the impression from its title that Barth was announcing the death or debilitation of all fiction previous to his own, Barth takes pains in his recent essay to set them straight. In his most recent novel, Leiters, among many other things a document in and critical comment on the death-of-thenovel question, the spirit of separatist postmodemism is represented in the gifted but mindless filmmaker, Reg Prinz, who regards literature as "a mildly interesting historical phenomenon of no present importance."4 Barth's treatment of Prinz may betray envy-one of his characters observes that "moviemakers have the world in their pocket in our century, as we like to imagine the 19th-Century novelists did in theirs" (381)-but his own attitude

This essay was initially presented at a conference on "John Barth and the Post-Modernist Novel," University of Florida, Gainesville, 15 April 1981.

seems to be best expressed by his Lady Germaine Pitt Amherst who, addressing Barth himself, suggests "that you do not yourself take with much seriousness those Death-of-the-Novel or End-of-Letters chaps, but that you do take seriously the climate that takes such questions seriously; you exploit that apocalyptic climate to reinspect the origins of narrative fiction in the oral tradition" (438).

Barth's aim is to synthesize earlier forms of fiction rather than toss them on the rubbish heap. He says in "The Literature of Replenishment" that a "worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or transcension of these antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. "S This last assertion takes on further interest when we near the end of Letters and find it repeated almost verbatim in a letter of Barth's Ambrose Mensch, up to that point a failed antinovelist: "last-ditch provincial Modernist wishes neither to repeat nor to repudiate career thus far; wants the century under his belt but not on his back" (767). Mensch's courtship and marriage of Lady Amherst represents among other things the "transcension" of literary opposites, a merger of the experimental novel and the Great Tradition. Though it is left unclear whether this marriage will produce any offspring-we never do find out whether Lady Amherst is pregnant or not-the implication is clear enough that literary fertility, like the biological kind, can only come about through fusion.

But what does it mean for a novelist to have the twentieth century under his belt but not on his back? Barth provides a clue in the brief outline of the last two revolutions in fiction sketched in "The Literature of Replenishment." Barth begins by agreeing with "the commonplace that the rigidities and other limitations of nineteenth-century bourgeois realism, in the light of turn-of-the-century theories and discoveries in physics, psychology, anthropology, and technology, prompted or fueled the great adversary reaction called modernist ar1."6 He goes on to observe that today, however, "in North America, in western and northern Europe, in the United Kingdom, and in some of Central and South America, at least, these nineteenth-century rigidities are virtually no more. "7 Thus the modernist aesthetic, he argues, "belongs to the first half of our century. The present reaction against it is perfectly understandable and to be sympathized with, both because the modernist coinages are by now more or less debased common currency and because we really don't need more Finnegans Wakes or Pisan Cantos, each with its staff of tenured professors to explain it to us. "8

But the fact that literary modernism may have outlived its pertinence doesn't justify trying to turn the clock back. Barth deplores "the artistic and lSI

critical cast of mind that repudiates the whole modernist enterprise as an aberration and sets to work as if it hadn't happened; that rushes back into the arms of nineteenth-century middle class realism as if the first half of the twentieth century hadn't happened."? But no sooner does Barth scold the reactionaries on one side of the arena than he silences the cheers of the revolutionaries on the other side before they can be raised. Writing of "the great premodernists," the realists, Barth says, "it is no longer necessary, if it ever was, to repudiate them either If the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism, taught us that linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naive illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote, and middle-class moral convictions are not the whole story, then from the perspective of these closing decades of our century we may appreciate that the contraries of these things are not the whole story either. Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-asmessage, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism approaching moral entropy-these are not the whole story either."IO So runs Barth's argument in brief. It's a capacious and generous argument, steering clear of the puritanical rejections, exclusions, and excommunications that have marked so many programs of literary innovation. To tell "the whole story," not merely a part of it-to get the twentieth century under his belt and off his back, Barth implies, the novelist can't afford to reject either nineteenthcentury realism or modernist antirealism. Each contains a truth he has to respect and incorporate into whatever modification of the two he chooses to make.

At this very general level it's difficult not to go along with Barth; but one evaluates all such statements of principle finally by their fruits, the novels that get written in conformity with the principles. Thus it's possible to agree with Barth in principle while wondering if a novel like Letters is the necessary consequence of the principle, or the best possible way of putting the principle into practice. Setting that question aside for the moment, I want to endorse unqualifiedly at least one implication of Barth's argument, that changes in the form of fiction follow changes in the social-historical world: what we take the postmodern novel to be and how we assess its merits depend heavily on what we make of that extraliterary entity, the twentieth century. That is, our view of the postmodern novel-right down to whether we believe there even is such a thing or not-is going to be shaped by whatever sense we may be able to make of recent history and culture independent of literature, for our concept of history and culture, our concept of what our century is and is not, determines our expectations of what a writer can and should do. Barth, of course, frequently comes across in his fiction as a radical SUbjective idealist, often suggesting there that "history" and "reality" have no existence until prefigured by acts of the literary imagination. They are like the objects mentioned by Borges that materialize

only after being dreamed on the planet Tlon, itself dreamed by Borges's characters who are in tum dreamed by Borges himself. But whatever he may be in his novels, Barth is a materialist in his criticism, as I think we pretty much have to be to give an adequate account of why the forms of literature change from one era to the next.

To put it another way, the life cycles of literary forms do not run their course within a closed aesthetic space, independent of what goes on in the world outside literature. Literary forms are not like tires or razor blades, things that possess a fixed and predictable period of life that is a function of normal use, i.e., a certain number of miles or number of shaves. Literary forms have no such predictable life span, and mere frequency of use has nothing to do with their durability or obsolescence. Literary forms become obsolete when they no longer tell, or are thought to tell, the truth about the world, and there is no predicting how long it may take for this perceived failing to overtake a particular form. Epic poetry ceased to be composed, as Karl Marx observed in a famous passage, when the forces of nature were understood to have passed from the control of gods to that of men. Rhymed, metrically regular verse seemed worn out only when the world had, as it were, ceased to look as if it either rhymed or scanned. However much the contemporary novel may have departed from old-fashioned representational realism, it remains true that the novel's very departures from realism register a material history and culture antecedent to the novel itself.

Of course, this material determination is no simple one-way street. If writers revise their forms on the basis of what they see as changes in the social world, they and the rest of us come to be aware of those changes through the agency of writers and through new ways of seeing designed by writers. Some enthusiasts go so far as to propose that literature dictates and prefigures what we choose to regard as reality more than reality dictates literature. The literary imagination dreams a new configuration, and this configuration then colors the way we see. Oscar Wilde provocatively stated the point when he proposed that the fogs of London had been invented by nineteenth-century painters. According to this view, our beliefs about the world are not transparent renderings of things as they are, but are functions of the story or stories we learn to tell ourselves. We now tend to add that these stories are preencoded in our languages and institutions and, for that reason, are seemingly part of the nature of things; but they are actually contingent, and alter as our languages and institutions alter. Today, of course, the structuralists and poststructuralists bring such insights most pointedly home to us, assigning priority not to consciousness but to the materiality of language, which determines both reality and consciousness of reality. Since history and society exist for us only insofar as they are interpreted or "read, to that is only insofar as they are constituted and mediated by the ideological categories encoded in our conventional apparatus,

history and society are, in a sense, texts. Quarreling with this view is a little like hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall: the harder you smash the ball, insisting on the real existence of realities outside textuality, the more quickly it comes back to you with the words "text" or "interpretation" stamped on it.

But then, I see nothing necessarily objectionable about the premise that, in a certain sense, everything is a text, since such a premise is self-evident. Insofar as there can be nothing that isn't ultimately subject to human interpretation-and, short of a flight to theological dogma or Lockean empiricism, I see no way to deny this claim-it follows tautologically that the world is textual. Nor is this an empty or useless tautology, for recognizing the force of it has stimulated important inquiries into the way our readings of the world can be influenced, colored, and prejudiced by the a priori structures of our interpretive conventions. As Hayden White, Stanley Fish, and others have shown, how we read history, society, and literature depends a great deal on the conventions and strategies of reading-the "tropes" and metaphors built into our interpretive paradigms. These paradigms may differ from one era to another and from one culture to the next. Rather than quarrel with any of these ideas of the textual nature of reality, 111 content myself with arguing that it doesn't follow from these ideas-as writers like White, Fish, and others sometimes seem to believe-that certain traditional distinctions between fact and interpretation are no longer valid. That is, it doesn't follow that we can no longer distinguish between texts composed by John Barth and "texts" comprised of biological or historical events, even though both kinds of texts can be understood only by means of interpretation.

Wilde may be right that the painters were responsible for nineteenthcentury Londoners' recognition of fogs, but the painters no more invented these fogs than current black humorists invented urban air pollution or hydrogen bombs. Television networks may crucially influence our understanding of events such as the recent attempt to assassinate President Reagan, and it may well be, as many have speculated, that such crimes would not be attempted if there were no agencies to publicize them. But unless we are victims of a major conspiracy, the networks were not the primary perpetrators of the brute happening. This is not to dismiss the possibility that we are victims of a major conspiracy, that the would-be assassin and his victims were actors carrying out a plot designed to win sympathy for the president, say, or for gun-controllegislation. Such things are possible. But ifthis event should prove to have been staged by actors, it will merely mean that something else really happened, something different from what we initially thought. It will not mean that whatever happened is a creation of the means of presenting or interpreting it. Even if we never find out what happenedand it can be argued that no interpretation is definitive in any ultimate sense, that is, in some sense not open to challenge from the perspective of new

evidence-this will mean only that something happened about which we remained forever ignorant, and not that what happened was determined by our instruments of perception or classification. The distinction between primary and secondary "texts," or between facts and interpretations, remains indispensable, even to those advanced deconstructionists who are good at making it seem illegitimate. Max Beerbohm once parodied Joseph Conrad's fondness for dismissing the world of fact as an "illusion" by writing of a mosquito-net in a fictional African trader's hut "that was itself illusory like everything else, only more so. "II Written texts are rather like Beerbohm's mosquito net: like everything else in the world they are textual, only a little more so.

Barth's Lady Amherst states the matter reasonably when she says that "the relation betwen fact and fiction, life and art, is not imitation ofeither by the other, but a sort of reciprocity, an ongoing collaboration or reverberation" (233). If Lady Amherst speaks for the author here, as she seems to, then Barth is no SUbjective idealist, though perhaps no materialist either. Perhaps one can do no better than Engels, who dissociated himself from vulgar determinism by arguing that the priority of matter over mind (we would now need to add, over language) exerts itself only "in the last instance." But I must extricate myself-if I am going to make any headway in this paperfrom the labyrinthine problem of reality and textuality, and I shall do that by coming back to the point that Barth in his essay at least-whatever he may suggest elsewhere-assigns the final priority to history as the determinant of literary change. His statement that the writer ought to try to have the twentieth century under his belt and not on his back presupposes that something called the twentieth century, whatever that may be, precedes the writer, even though what that twentieth century seems to us to be is, no doubt, in part a function of what writers have said it is, and even though writers and writings are certainly among the many objects denoted by the phrase "twentieth century." All of which brings me, and I hope John Barth and the rest of you, too, to the question that is as necessary to pose as it may be impossible to answer: what do we mean by the twentieth century? What is this thing that the writer is to try to get under his belt and off his back? What does John Barth think it is?

If we look back over "The Literature of Replenishment" in search of a definition, we come away pretty empty-handed. Instead of a definition, Barth provides a kind of Whitmanian (or Homeric?) catalog, a random series of items that, taken together and perhaps supplemented by innumerable other items of like character, presumably add up to a characterization of the tendency of our age. Thus, in response to those who would pretend that "the first half of the twentieth century hadn't happened," Barth writes, "It did happen: Freud and Einstein and two world wars and the Russian and sexual revolutions and automobiles and airplanes and telephones and radios

and movies and urbanization, and now nuclear weaponry and television and microchip technology and the new feminism and the rest, and there's no going back to Tolstoy and Dickens & Co. except on nostalgia tripS."12 What we have here is something like what logicians call ostensive definition, wherein one defines a term not by specifying its abstract class and differentia but by pointing to examples, as one defines the term "spoon" for a child by pointing to that object. Now it can be plausibly argued that ostensive rather than abstract definition is precisely the sort of definition we receive and expect to receive from novels. Thus there is no reason to disdain it, especially if one isn't prepared to do better. Conceding all this, I nevertheless can't help wondering what Barth's catalog is supposed to mean: in a general way it pretends to tell us that something has happened, something that makes it impossible for us to think like nineteenth-century men. But what has happened?

Obviously, the question is unfair. Nobody can be expected to define something as amorphous as the twentieth century, much less in the confines of a brief literary essay. If one is brave enough to try, one resorts to abbreviations like "Freud and Einstein and two world wars and the Russian and sexual revolutions and so forth. Such itemization works as a shorthand; pressed to do so, Barth could no doubt provide an elaboration of any item on his list. He doesn't provide the elaboration here, taking for granted, as any essayist must, a certain minimal amount of cultural reference that the reader will share. The shorthand to which Barth resorts is the one we all depend on when we speculate about such things as the history and future of the novel, and we could hardly get anywhere in such speculation unless we did depend on it. Yet this itself seems only to point to a problem, not exclusively with Barth's argument but with the shorthand on which he and the rest of us collectively rely. We use the shorthand as a laborsaving device, a way of avoiding having to construct a theory of the twentieth century every time we want to say something about the twentieth-century novel and other cultural phenomena. That procedure rests on the assumption that the shorthand is at least not wholly worthless, that it provides at least a reasonable working definition of the Zeitgeist. But the question must be raised, it seems to me, whether the working definition provided by the current shorthand works at all, or indeed, whether it is even a definition.

I wouldn't put so much pressure on the shorthand (as I've been calling it), if it weren't that we've lately been asking this shorthand to carry a great deal of argumentative freight in our discussion of literature and, particularly, in our quarrels about where the contemporary arts are, or ought to be, headed. All these discussions and debates are predicated on the tacit assumption that we understand the twentieth century in at least a rudimentary way. Yet what is said about that century in these discussions and debates doesn't inspire much confidence in the assumption. The aggressiveness of pronouncements

about what the novel and other artistic forms must henceforth do and not do is frequently proportional to the dubiousness of the notions about our age that are brought in to justify these pronouncements. We are in the odd position of radical determinists without a cogent scheme of determination, predestinarian Puritans without a theology. Barth proposes imperatives about contemporary fiction on the grounds that contemporary reality is a certain sort of thing. Yet the sort of thing that that reality is is apparently formulable only as a jumble of events, items, and theories that one collects together in the hope that they may somehow cohere into a picture. Like "action painting," in which the artist discovers what he wants to paint as he paints it, this is a kind of action theorizing.

Perhaps our century's resistance to formulation is itself the nearest we can get to a formulation. At any rate, if anything seems clear about the twentieth-century outlook, it is that certain ideas about social development that worked for nineteenth-century novelists no longer compel much credence. In order for the novel to deal with history, the novelist must have a view of how, if not why, things are changing. One of the organizing ideas of the nineteenth-century novel was the idea of transition from feudal and rural to industrial and urban modes of life. Within that larger transition, if you follow Lukacs, there was also the transition from what Lukacs calls the heroic phase of bourgeois culture to a phase of cynicism and disillusion. In the classic novels, from The Red and the Black and Lost Illusions to Sister Carrie and The Great Gatsby, the progress of the young man or woman from the provinces to the metropolis provides the generative situation that not only shapes the novel's action but makes that action representative of the great historical changes. These oppositions-between feudal and modern, provincial and urban-have lost most of their meaning today. Driving across the United States, one is impressed by commercial patterns so uniform that they implant the eerie feeling that one is forever encountering ahead exactly what one just left behind. Is there a town of over two thousand without its McDonald's, its Burger King, its Sizzler, its Pizza Hut? I don't doubt that growing up in Paris, Illinois, still remains in many ways a significantly different experience from growing up in Paris, France, and it may be possible still to base a novel on someone's move from one to the other. But both the nature of the difference and the significance of such a move would be initially less clear to us today than it once would have been, and this would be partly owing to the spread of a world-wide commercial and technological culture. Stanley Elkin, in his novel The Franchiser, has made an interesting attempt to deal with the implications of this universal culture, in which the myriad reduplication of Franchise America has its counterpart in the infinite duplication of American selves, which is to say, the obliteration of the personal ego. Of course the disintegration of the personal ego has become a cliche of current fiction and of current talk about

literature; one is scarcely anybody any longer unless one's ego is disintegrated. Yet Elkin's novel, for all its admirable energy and insight, doesn't quite cohere as an understanding of American life. And the sociological rationale of our assumptions about the loss of the ego hasn't cohered either.

In short, the disappearance of the dualism of feudal and industrial and the blurring and flattening of the dualism of provincial and urban have deprived novelists-not to mention the rest of us-of two of the more useful concepts by which it was once possible to make sense of one's century, specifically to make sense of it as a drama of change. What this means is that change lent itself to dramatization in the nineteenth century in a way it no longer does in the twentieth, where nothing remains of the resisting background of a traditional order against which change can be perceived and measured. Change, in a sense, has changed: what is in the process of becoming obsolete today is not a feudal order that had existed for centuries, but only yesterday's innovation, which had only shortly before displaced the innovation of the day before yesterday. We are without a certain contrastive perspective enjoyed by societies in which the forms of life that are becoming obsolete are venerable enough to be worth memorializing, or, at least, in which they have stayed in place long enough for people to mark their passing as significant. Today, oddly, the myth of tradition is virtually kept alive by the avantgardes that assault tradition; for it is these groups that have a vested interest in the continued existence of the enemy against whom they have always defined their own enterprise. This situation, in which change is no longer foregrounded against a relatively stable past but appears only against a setting of previous change, is but one of the elements that makes it difficult to get the twentieth century into focus, much less get it into a novel. It has long been a literary commonplace that no integrated theory, no organizing mythology, can any longer hope to establish itself as an authoritative explanatory system for our culture and our literature. T. S. Eliot admired those ages in which Christianity had served as such a system, and he hoped it might do so again, but there's no evidence he really believed it ever would. And, as Eliot could have pointed out, the fact that such systems are now conceived as "organizing myths" (or, indeed, as "systems") already relativizes and historicizes them in a way that forecloses their efficacy from the start. (Like our neologism "lifestyle," terms like "system" already imply impermanence.) Not that we suffer from any shortage of candidates for the title of Supreme Fiction. Borges informs us that on the planet of Tlon, where history is a fiction each individual reinvents from moment to moment, "the fact no one believes in the reality of nouns paradoxically causes their number to be unending. "13 Were anyone of the competing systems ofexplanation to win out over or subsume the others-psychology, Marxism, structuralism, behaviorism, Christianity-the fact that it continued to be regarded as a myth would be enough to deprive it of credence.

All this has bearing on the form of the novel. Since Joyce hit on the "mythical method" in Ulysses, as a means of ordering what Eliot called "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,"14 this mythical method has progressively displaced linear narrative method as the primary strategy for getting the twentieth century under the novelist's belt. But it's important to note that the term "myth," as Eliot employed it in his review of Joyce's novel, didn't mean anything like "explanatory theory," not even the kind of theory one claims merely to "use" while no longer believing it to be true. Myth in Eliot's usage-and in the usage of much subsequent criticism-means not an explanation or understanding but a principle of structure, an architecture one resorts to when one no longer believes that history can be explained or even described. If history is anarchy and futility, then it follows that the best one can hope to do is "order" it according to principles that come from literature, not from history itself. Is it unfair to argue that our widely held view of art as a means of ordering reality provides us a way of getting on with thejob after it has been decided that reality is no longer comprehensible? Or that Eliot's praise of Joyce was for finding something one could do with history after it had ceased to make any sense? What one does with it, in brief, is to undo its intractable historicity by "manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,"IS that is, by subsuming temporality under the timeless recurrence of myth. Perhaps Eliot exaggerated the importance of the Homeric parallel in Ulysses. It is, after all, only one of the patterns that organize the novel. Yet I think Eliot was right in thinking Joyce's structure mythical in the larger sense rather than linear.

Of course Eliot was peculiar in that he didn't necessarily doubt that the Victorian novelists had, in a certain sense, understood history. But with his religious sense of history, Eliot didn't find that low kind of understanding sufficient. He says that "the novel is a form which will no longer serve" because "the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. "16 This is a curious statement, if one reflects that most readers would find New Grub Street, say, a good deal less elusive formally than The Waste Land. The statement makes sense, however, on the assumption that Eliot was demanding a principle of form that transcended history and time altogether. The form of the novel, insofar as it is based on schemes of historical transition of the kind I've previously described, was for Eliot practically no form at all, since it failed to give history the sort of horizontal "meaning" he was looking for. Since not all critics are encumbered by the rather special spiritual demands which Eliot placed on literary forms, one is impressed at the large number of them who have acceded to his conclusion that only by means of the mythical method can the twentieth century be made "possible for art."

Which brings me finally back to utters. At first sight, utters seems to mark a return to earlier methods: from myth back to linearity, from spatial form back to storytelling, from Ulysses back to the "old time epistolary novel" it purports on the title page to be. Certainly, story is something Letters has in abundance, as one is grateful to discover, for its 772 large pages would make a long pull indeed were it not for Barth's exuberant invention, his ability to draw the reader into the world of his yarn-and not just one yarn but at least six or seven, with several subnarratives branching off from the central ones. The very multiplication of these narratives, however, calls for a principle of cohesion other than narrative. And that is where Barth-true to his programmatic call for a synthesis of forms-comes back around to Ulysses after all. Barth's narratives, unlike Joyce's, are not broken by disjunction or dissolved into the flow of consciousness. There is no problem figuring out what is going on. But what makes Barth's narratives hang together, even more than in Joyce, is not a vision of historical change but a structure of repeating motifs. For a novel with so much history in it, utters is oddly unhistorical.

Barth's characters, however, possess a major advantage over Joyce's: they have all read about their adventures in Barth's earlier novels. It's as if Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses were presented as having read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both Joyce's and Barth's characters reenact mythological prototypes, but Barth's do so with full awareness that that is what they are doing, and full awareness that they are doing it in a novel. Lady Amherst, halfway through the book, describes what is going on as "an epidemic rage for reenactment" (367). In her case, this refers to her lover Ambrose (from Lost in the Funhouse) insisting on charting their affair by stages that correspond not only to his earlier affairs but also to the virtues listed in The New England Primer, and also the seven principal letter-writers in utters, who in turn correspond to the seven letters of the word "letters." Lady Amherst's own life reenacts events in the life of her ancestor, Madame de Stael (who appears, along with numerous other world-historical figures, in several of the subnarratives), and the record of her affairs with literary men, ranging from Mann and Hesse to Waugh and Huxley, further implicates her life in the history of modern letters. Todd Andrews, some thirty years older than when we last saw him deciding not to commit suicide at the end of The Floating Opera, finds his life "recycling" the events of that novel, as he replays his affair with his former mistress, Jane Mack, and then parodically replays it with the suppositional product of that earlier union, Jeannine. Jacob Horner, still an inmate of the Remobilization Farm to which he was committed at the end of The End ofthe Road, recapitulates the "one hundred days" of his cuckholding of Joe Morgan, the one character who manages to escape the cycle of repetition by the expedient of blowing his brains out. Various Cooks and Burlingames, descendants of seventeenth-

century originals in The Sot- Weed Factor, reenact throughout three centuries of American history the tragedy of filial rejection of the father and husbandly betrayal of the wife.

And so on. As if these primary reenactments did not produce enough doubling and redoubling, a level of secondary reenactment is effected by the bringing into the foreground of various modes of representation. The novel's chief action is being filmed by Reg Prinz, the aforementioned postmodern prodigy-history thus repeating itself as bad cinema-while much of it is novelized by two others, besides "the Author," not to mention recorded in diaries and hornbooks, programmed by Harold Bray's computer, and of course recounted in the letters that make up the book. Adding yet another element of convolution, the letters tend to be addressed not to other characters but to "the Author" or the letter-writer himself. Nor is this the limit of the novel's duplicity, which extends not only horizontally in the multiple reenactments and doublings but vertically in the persistent doubts cast on the authenticity of several characters and their motives. As in Borges's story, "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," ostensibly real historical agents may be actors performing a preestablished script in order to put one over on posterity. Several of Barth's characters are conjectured to be double or triple agents in various revolutionary and counterrevolutionary plots, and there is no way finally of ascertaining their actual allegiances. For example, A. B. Cook IV, who mayor may not be Andre Castine, who mayor may not be "Monsieur Casteen," is either a pompous superpatriot or is pretending to be one in order to promote something called the Second Revolution. This revolution mayor may not be a strategem orchestrated by the Right.

At times, this convolution of reality and deception goes so far that cancellation itself is cancelled and a kind of second naivete is restored. For example, the late Harrison Mack, we are told, before his death came to believe himself King George III and accordingly forced his household to dress in Regency getup; but Mack at times fancied himself "not George III sane but George III mad; a George who in his madness believed himself to be Harrison Mack sane. Thus in the end he pretended to think everyone in the house crazy for wearing 1815 costume" (13). In other words, Mack was so mad that he behaved exactly as if he were sane! As in Borges, where "the contact and the habit of Tlon have disintegrated this world, ".7 history is no match for such myriad duplications, counterfeits, and false bottoms, such contaminations of reality by madness and myth.

In short-though it's of course easy enough to say so with hindsightLetters is the kind of novel one might expect to come out of the view of twentieth-century history presented in "The Literature of Replenishment," history seen as an inventory of events without coherent tendency. Such a history, which has become unhistorical, can only be "ordered" by repetition, recurrence, and reenactment. In a sense, Barth is Jacob Horner, it being

Horner who employs the ultimate mythic scheme, which he calls "the Anniversary View of History"-in the absence of any other principle for relating events. Horner's letters begin like this: "Cyrano de Bergerac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ring Lardner, Michelangelo: happy birthday. The Alamo has fallen to Santa Anna; its garrison is massacred. FDR has closed the banks. Franco's cruiser Baleares has been sunk off Cartagena. Napoleon's back from Elba (18). What these occurrences have in common is simply that they all took place on March 6, the date of the letter's composition. To Joyce's Odyssey and Eliot's The Golden Bough, Barth has added The Information Please Almanac to the stock of sources for shoring up the otherwise disconnected ruins of the past.

This is not to say that Letters is formless or disorganized. It teems, in fact, with symmetries. But these symmetries are all pointless-or rather their point is precisely in their pointlessness. To put it more charitably, their point is not in any ultimate synthesis that we can make out of history, but in the process of trying, even of trying and failing. But it can still be argued that Barth hasn't tried as hard as he might. For me, Barth's labyrinths compare unfavorably with those of Borges, who is one of Barth's principal models. I'm not thinking of the obvious difference between the two writers, the fact that whereas Borges is content to sketch his labyrinths briefly-the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlon, for instance, are only mentioned-Barth insists on fleshing out the whole imagined world. It's as if one were to reproduce the whole Don Quixote as "rewritten" by Pierre Menard instead of the one brief passage Borges actually renders in that story. The difference is more than one of proportion. The pointless symmetries of the First Encyclopedia subserve a commentary on the destruction of history by real historical agents. Borges actually names them: "dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism. "18 In other words, Borges presents the mythicization of history as a historical event. Borges has something to say about twentiethcentury history, whereas I'm not sure the same claim can be made for Barth, for whom the best we can do is construct myths which we know to be myths and therefore can't believe. Although Barth has revived the art of storytelling, he's neglected the point of the story. And the point of the story is surely crucial if a writer seriously hopes to get the twentieth century under his belt and off his back.

POSTSCRIPT: When this lecture was delivered, John Barth, present at the occasion, responded by conceding that he had no particular "theory of history," but disputing whether it was obligatory for him or any novelist to have such a theory. "Theory" may be too portentous a term for what I am talking about ("presuppositions," or some term like that, would sound less schematic), but I think Barth's response puts the issue fairly. Myassumptions are that (1)to produce significant work, any writer needs to have some

understanding of the twentieth century (this, in turn, calls for a "theory" of history); of course what counts as an adequate "understanding" is the next question that would have to be explored; (2)writers today, for the most part, doubt that the twentieth century is comprehensible; (3)the reasons for this attitude are various, among them being the possibility that the twentieth century is incomprehensible, at least in terms of inherited categories of understanding; but there are also certain culture-ideologies (see my remarks above about what I call "the shorthand") which rule in advance that the twentieth century is incomprehensible; insofar as these ideologies are accepted, discussion of the question is rendered irrelevant at the outset; (4)if the twentieth century (history) is ruled incomprehensible in advance, then the arts, including literature, are necessarily restricted in scope; insofar as they are assigned a cognitive function at all, that function becomes an affair of unsettling old, conventional perceptions (as if there were still old, conventional perceptions around that hadn't already been unsettled) or of trying out new myths and fictions in order, finally, to discover that they don't work; (5)an antidote to this culture-ideology would be to regard literary composition as a form of social thought, or at least as an activity that has something to learn from social thought; and (6)a practical correlative of these last propositions might be to encourage students of "creative writing" to study cultural and intellectual history; the specialization of creativity in the university mirrors the ghettoization of literature throughout our culture, and reinforces all the more the view that literary art has nothing to do with understanding how society works.

1. John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment," Atlantic, 245, (January, 1980), pp. 65-71.

2. Karl Shapiro, "The Critic Outside," American Scholar, 50, no. 2 (Spring, 1981), p. 209.

3. Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic, 220, (August, 1967), p. 29.

4. Barth, Letters: A Novel (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979), p. 217. Page references hereafter will be to this edition and cited in the text.

5. Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment," p. 70.

6. Ibid., p. 69.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. 70.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

II. Max Beerbohm, "The Feast," And Even Now and A Christmas Garland (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1960), p. 242.

12. Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment," p. 70.

13. Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," LAbyrinths, ed. and tr. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 9.

14. T. S. Eliot, '''Ulysses,' Order, and Myth," Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 177.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 18.

18. Ibid., p. 17.

Leaving the Atocha Station: contemporary poetry and technology

Daniel L. Guillory

Poetry and technology: it is hard to imagine a more uncongenial pair of terms in the lexicon of modern life. In fact, these terms may have degenerated to the status of mere "buzz words"-one suggesting all that is uplifting, creative, and sensitive in the human spirit, the other all that is alien, uninspired, or destructive. Yet poetry and technology share a common cultural ancestry, and in the past hundred years or so the marriage of art and technology has produced the most characteristic icons of our civilization. Modernism, the international style that issued from the marriage of art and technology, nearly dominated the worlds of art, architecture, music, and literature. And among the most important modernists were the American writers who surfaced during the 1920s, especially Marianne Moore, editor of The Dial, and the poet-painter-iconoclast, e. e. cummings.

In one of her earliest collections, Marianne Moore juxtaposes two short poems that dramatize one of the unsolved problems of literary modernism, namely, the assimilation of technology. "To a Steam Roller" and "To a Snail" are intended as companion poems, a diptych in which the halves comment upon each other as the reader shifts attention from one to the other.' At first glance, Miss Moore seems to be urging the reader into some kind of evaluative judgment, a clear-cut choice between the organic world (snail) and the implacable march of technology (steamroller). She remarks to the metallic road builder, "As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive / of one's attending upon you," suggesting the absolute discontinuity between the realm of nature and the realm of the machine. Yet the poet's eye, supremely sensitive to every nuance of analogy, fixes upon the essential congruence of the two phenomena: both snail and steamroller are self-propelled, armored vehicles of notable curvilinear style; and both move upon a roadway oftheir own instantaneous creation. If one must choose in this pitched battle between the earliest and latest of earthly artifacts, the poet is reluctant to reduce that choice to simplistic terms. The more one reads this diptych, in fact, the more obvious it becomes that neither snail nor steamroller emerges

as a clear favorite and that both possess severe drawbacks. To the steamroller Miss Moore complains:

The illustration is nothing to you without the application. You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.

As for the snail, its chief points of attraction for Miss Moore are "the absence of feet" and "the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn." As an artistic statement, the diptych seems to proclaim the right of both these objects to survive in a complex world of mechanical and biological coexistence; and this statement is enunciated on several levels. The individual lines of the two poems are constructed, in part, from Miss Moore's voluminous files of newspaper clippings. She inserts a quotation into her poems in much the same way that Pablo Picasso pasted the masthead of Le Journal into his paintings, a gesture that deliberately blurs the distinction between art and the real world while simultaneously asserting their interdependence. In form, also, the two poems are revealing: "To a Snail" is composed in one continuous sweep, a self-contained stanza of vers fibre that seems to move with the same kind of silky self-propulsion as its namesake, the snail; "To a Steam Roller," on the other hand, appears to have been designed on totally alien principles of poetic form. It follows no traditional pattern-sonnet, ballad stanza, etc.-yet it is arranged in precise and discrete units that must be considered stanzas of some sort.

In fact, these stanzas are famous examples of Miss Moore's syllabic verse, a metrical solution that depends upon syllabic count (arbitrarily chosen) rather than upon line length, breath, or traditional patterns of accentuation (iambic pentameter, say). So each of the three stanzas of "To a Steam Roller" contains four analogous lines, each line containing five, twelve, twelve, and fifteen syllables, respectively. That Miss Moore hit upon this scheme suggests she had assimilated, consciously or unconsciously, the root metaphor of the machine age: modules, multiples-the endless progression of identical units streaming along the production line. "To a Steam Roller" belongs to the same order of things as skyscrapers, jazz, and Model Ts. All of these productions depend upon an infinitely repeatable process in which one part, unit, or section is added, welded, or played on a previous one. All parts interlock, and the series thus created is open-ended, if not infinite.! The poem, like the steamroller it celebrates, might go on forever-and, in fact, that is precisely what happens in later long poems, such as Louis Zukofsky's A and Charles Olson's Maximus. This artistic flirtation with multiples is repeated in the history of the graphic and plastic arts as well, especially in the early work of Andy Warhol whose endless icons of Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe visages are both satirical comments upon-and logical extensions of-the vast production line of America, Inc.

166 Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1962, acrylic and silkscreen enamel on canvas, 81 x 66 2/3 in. Photo courtesy of Leo Castelli GaDery, New York.

Miss Moore's scientific and technological training accounts for her lifelong fascination with technological process and nomenclature: after all, she was a trained biologist, a fact sometimes overlooked by readers who dismiss her as a kind of poetic naturalist. Again and again she demonstrates that the precision and exactitude ofscience are the preconditions of art as well, as she does in this later poem, "Four Quartz Crystal Clocks":

There are four vibrators, the world's exactest clocks; and these quartz time-pieces that tell time intervals to other clocks, these worksless clocks work well; independently the same, kept in the 41° Bell Laboratory time vault.'

A more playful and decidedly less philosophical use of technology occurs in e. e. cummings' "XIX" from the is 5 volume (1926), a poem from the same period that gave birth to Miss Moore's snails and steamrollers. Cummings' subject here, as elsewhere, is sexual exuberance, and the Tin Lizzy offers an immediate metaphor, an elaborate conceit for the mechanics of sexuality: she being Brand -new; and you know consequently a little stiff i was careful of her and (having thoroughly oiled the universal joint tested my gas felt of her radiator made sure her springs were O.

K.) i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her up 4

Cummings' typographical capers-his toying with upper- and lower-case fonts-begin the minor tradition of concrete poetry, influenced, no doubt, by the ubiquitous poster art, advertising art, and electrified marquees of the twenties. In this respect, cummings may have been seduced by the same distinctive lettering, trademarks, and logos that figured so prominently in the painting of Stuart Davis (at first) and Andy Warhol (later). It is not necessary to probe the recent historical past, what Marshall McLuhan glibly called "the Gutenberg Galaxy," for the printing technology that provided the enabling conditions for cummings' work. Nor do we need to know, as James Burke has pointed out recently, that printing technology itself depended on the older technology of the wine press (so that the first books were really ersatz wine).' What matters here is that cummings, like Marianne Moore

Andy Warhol, 200 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962, oil on canvas, 72 x 100 in. Private Collection/ Photo courtesy of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1962, acrylic and silkscreen enamel on canvas, 81 x 66 2/3 in. Photo courtesy of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.

On or off Either darkness unlocked again or feigned daylight perhaps graded only by stepped intensities fifty watts apart In any event no continuities like those of flickering no nor even of fading Flick Click and there it is suddenly Oh yes I see Indeed A mind hung brilliantly upon filaments stung by some untongued brightness opening up also encloses and the dark unbounded room lit by bare bulbs collapses into an unhurting box occupied by furniture now avoidable The dot of closure menaces the attention which in the flutter of eyelids can only tremble like a nervous child lying awake lest he be aware of the moment a closing shutter of sleep claps to But a snapped-off dream disperses into darkness like gold becoming mere motes becoming light If the eye lies open to such dust as sunlight brings it will never burn But that creation make a visible big difference in the way minds look a shaper will burn outwardly first and thus once there was light

before him, failed to assimilate technology in any substantial way. Cummings and Moore are essentially nineteenth-century poets trying to grapple with twentieth-century technology. Their appropriation of technology remains external, affecting formal (stanzas, typography) and thematic (clocks, cars) decisions. A more internalized technology appears in John Hollander's Types of Shape (1969), a delightful collection of concrete poems made possible, in part, by the pioneering efforts of cummings and Moore. In Hollander's "Idea: Old Mazda Lamp, 50-100-150 W," the electrified, binary world of on/ off switching becomes a subject matter, a syntax, and an epistemology: in physical arrangement on the page, in phrasing, and in ultimate meaning, Hollander's poem is a species of technological thinking impossible to find in the work of cummings or Moore.

Even if one did not know that Hollander was a formidable literary critic who may have been influenced as much by seventeenth-century emblem poems as by pop art and concrete poetry, the poem remains a graphic example of a literary conceit on a piece of technology.6 Verbal cues ("watts," "flickering," "click," "filaments," "snapped-off") accrete line after line to form an elaborate and extended series of metaphors whose components are light, light bulbs, and various kinds of seeing and understanding.

At this juncture one might ask, reasonably enough, why should poets, especially those like cummings and Moore in the first generation of literary modernists, concern themselves with technology in the first place? Superficially, the answer to this question lies in the technological wizardry of, to borrow Eliot's phrase, the modern Unreal Cities: subways, skyscrapers, and what Hart Crane called the "fiery parcels" of the electrified streets and buildings. But the deeper reason for poetic involvement with technology lies in the very nature of modernism, that international, multimedia style that dominated cultural life in Europe and, later, in America from the tum of the century to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Modernism was a response to wave after wave of technological change that occurred during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Some of the more notable changes were the recoil-operated machine gun (1882), the Parsons steam turbine (1884), coated photographic paper (1885), the Kodak box camera and the Dunlop pneumatic tire (1888), the Diesel engine (1892), the Ford car (1893), the phonograph disc (1894), X rays and radio (1895), and the airplane (1903).7 Two of the earliest groups of modernists, the Italian futurists and the Russian constructivists, saw machines and technological change as avenues to a new world order. The First Futurist Manifesto (1909) proclaims that "the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned by great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath-a roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel-is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."8 Of all the American poets writing in the twenties,

John Hollander, "Idea: Old Mazda Lamp, 50-100-1SO W."

From Types ofShape, II 1969 by John Hollander and reprinted with permission of Atheneum Publishers.

Hart Crane alone seems to understand the profoundly aesthetic implications of technology. Modern poetry must absorb the machine, he argues, and "acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles, and all other human associations of the past In the end, he believes, machinery will tend to lose its sensational glamour and appear in its true and subsidiary order in human life as use and continual poetic allusion subdue its novelty. For, contrary to general prejudice, the wonderment experienced in watching nose dives is of less immediate creative promise to poetry than the familiar gesture of a motorist in the modest act of shifting gears. I mean to say that mere romantic speculation on the power and beauty of machinery keeps it at a continual remove; it can not act creatively in our lives until, like the unconscious nervous responses of our bodies, its connotations emanate from within-forming as spontaneous a terminology of poetic reference as the bucolic world of pasture, plow, and barn.?

Of course, Crane is writing at a time when the romance of the machine was still vivid, and, like the futurists, he singles out the automobile as the basic metaphor for the age. Two generations later, after Hiroshima and global pollution have taken their toll, such optimism about technology is no longer possible. But Crane's enthusiasm is entirely typical of early pronouncements on technology that, as Hans Jonas recently pointed out, are invariably optimistic and future-directed.J? This desire to assimilate technology completely, to internalize it and make its "connotations emanate from within" means that Crane contemplates a new use for technology, not as mere decorative surface but as structure and substance of an entirely new kind of poetry. Thus, he settles on the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan as the ideal examples of technology, and he attempts to recreate the urban experience of Technological Man as he rides the Twentieth Century Limited:

Stick your patent name on a signboard brother-all over-going west-young man

Tintex-Japalac-Certain-teed Overalls ads and lands sakes! under the new playbill ripped in the guaranteed corner-see Bert Williams what? Minstrels when you steal a chicken just save me the wing for if it isn't Erie it ain't for miles around a Mazda-and the telegraphic night coming on Thomas a Ediford-and whistling down the tracks a headlight rushing with the sound-can you imagine-while an EXpress makes time like SCIENCE-COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME WE HAVE THE NORTHPOLE WALLSTREET AND VIRGINBIRTH WITHOUT STONES OR WIRES OR EVEN RUNning brooks connecting ears and no more sermons windows flashing roar breathtaking-as you like it eh?1I

The effect of these lines is potent and immediate, a kind of kinetic, staccato, cinematic "action poetry" that would not find an equivalent in the visual arts until twenty years later when Jackson Pollock spattered paint on huge canvases to create his action paintings. Crane's poetry isn't about technology as such; he is aiming for a dramatic recreation, a replication of city life as a technological experience: sounds, jolts, signboards, headlines, radio broadcasts, and brand names. Crane's own background as an advertising man and his connection with American business through his father (inventor of Life Saver roll candies) help to explain his appropriation of American commercialese. Tintex, Japalac, and Mazda were the end products of technology and were tendered in screaming lights and radio "messages." Bert Williams owed much of his success to the phonograph disc, and so forth. Crane could have written a kind of technological hymn to these products and people, but he chose instead to present them in their own medium. Hence, we have the crazy quilt, the photomontage of life in the modern city, the splicing together of endless bits and pieces-suggested eloquently by the neologism "Ediford," a running together of the two most significant inventions of the era. In Crane's poem, life becomes cinema and a delirious joy ride on the express train. The world is in motion, and culture becomes technology.

Long before Marshall McLuhan proclaimed his famous dictum that the "medium is the message" and the world has become a "global village," Crane suggested a first-hand appreciation ofthe cityscape as the ultimate communications device, a huge, moving transmitter and receiver.P This prophetic vision becomes even clearer when Crane's technocity is juxtaposed with the "ethnic city" of Carl Sandburg. In the Chicago Poems Sandburg certainly registered images and even rhythms of the new technology, but his city is rendered in the old-fashioned manner of personification. In 1916 Sandburg envisions Chicago as a kind of super-ethnic worker:

Bareheaded, Shoveling. Wrecking, Planning, Building, breaking, rebuilding.

In ten years Crane made this kind of city poetry obsolete forever, but this fascination with the city became a permanent focus of twentieth-century culture, probably because modernism had been a self-consciously urban movement. The Eiffel Tower, after all, had served as a kind of totem for the movement.'! Soon the combined efforts of Wright, Sullivan, Gropius, Van der Rohe, and LeCorbusier would make glass and steel skyscrapers the dominant feature of the modern city. To thread one's way through those concrete canyons with their serpentine traffic snarls, unending noise, and miles of glowing neon provided a total sensory assault, a heightening of awareness that was debilitating for some souls and inspiring for others.

In the mid-fifties Frank O'Hara, poet, art critic, and city lover, would wander around Manhattan and, according to the blurb on the jacket of Lunch Poems, would pause "at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations The cityscape and the mindscape are no longer distinguishable; an important event in the poet's life, such as the death of the blues singer Billie Holiday ("Ladyj, is expressed in terms of the city:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 19S9 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7: IS and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me.

In the middle of this precisely defined world containing the Park Lane Liquor Store, the New York Post, and the Ziegfeld Theater, the poet is stunned by a flashback of Billie Holiday, almost Proustian in its elegiac intensity and significance:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the S SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing. I.

Besides the city, literary modernism left poets with another enduring legacy, that of war, especially modern wars, which have been unusually literary and technological enterprises. IS One poet, Allen Ginsberg, was in a unique position to capitalize on all these trends: he was a cult figure of the late fifties and sixties, a key performer in the happenings and high jinks of that zany decade, an inheritor of McLuhan's global village and-most importantly-of the Vietnam War:

NBCBSUPAPINSLIFE

Time Mutual presents World's Largest Camp Comedy: Magic in Vietnamreality turned inside out

changing its sex in the Mass Media for 30 days, TV den and bedroom farce Flashing pictures Senate Foreign Relations Committee room Generals faces flashing on and off screen

Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint

Flesh soft as a K.ansas girl's ripped open by metal explosionThree five zero zero on the other side of the planet caught in barbed wire, fire ball bullet shock, bayonet electricity bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapnelled throbbing meat.16

If literary modernism provides one continuous line of development, from cummings, say, through Ginsberg, another line stretches from Einstein and his Special Theory of Relativity of 1905 through Black Mountain College in the fifties and the work of Albers, Creeley, and Olson. As rector of Black Mountain College and resident polymath, Charles Olson exerted immense influence on such writers as Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley, as well as on the readers of the Black Mountain Review. Olson is clearly no scientist, and his writings on Melville and Central American Indian mythology are sometimes amateurish and badly researched. But, drawing on the complex notion of Field Theory, a term used in disciplines as various as physics, mathematics, and linguistics, Olson creates a new definition of poetry, which he calls "Projective Verse":

First, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, overall form, what is the "old" base of the non-projective. (l)the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he wiII have some several causations), by way of the poem itselfto, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a highenergy construct, and, at all points, an energy discharge."

Although Olson appropriates the language of high-energy physics, the application of this principle in his own long poem, Maximus, is not always clear. Like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Olson tends to abandon conventional lines and even the Roman alphabet. Some of the last pages of Maximus resemble engineering charts and tables, filled as they are with Greek letters, numbers, and diagrams. (Such texts seem ripe for analysis by readers steeped in the writings of Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida.) A far simpler application of Olson's "field theory" occurs in the work of Robert Duncan, where "field" seems to suggest the topology of the poet's memory and experience, the frame that contains his innerness as man and artist. "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," says Duncan,

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.la

This "made-up" scene amounts to a personal epistemology, somewhat Platonic in coloration ("light," "shadows," and "form"), so the "meadow" or "pasture" or "field" describes a structure of knowledge rather than a physical place. Duncan's poetry relies on pure process, following Olson's belief that

"ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. "19 Duncan's poetry anticipates one branch of the idea or conceptual artists, those new breed sculptors who organize geographical places into mental spaces, artists like Christo (Running Fence) and Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty) in whose work field theory takes on a literal as well as metaphorical meaning.

Now all this organization of space (mental, verbal, and geographical) as a kind of frame for perceptions brings us to perhaps the most difficult and rewarding of practicing poets, John Ashbery, a writer usually lumped together with the New York School (Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch), although American surrealist might be a more suitable label. In his most characteristic work (The Tennis Court Oath and The Double Dream of Spring), Ashbery pushes language to its limit, straining every strut or sinew that connects one word with another to make a gestalt of syntax, logic, or meaning. In "Leaving the Atocha Station," very little besides the frame or field of meaning reveals itself: the narrator is leaving from a train station in Madrid, sees peddlers in the station, sees other scenes later on as the train moves along its predetermined route, and registers one perception after another without encoding or packaging them into neat phrases or logical formulae:

The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness And pulling us out of there experiencing it he meanwhile And the fried bats they sell there dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds

Other people flash the garden are you boning and defunct covering Blind dog expressed royalties comfort of your perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip Favorable to near the night pin loading formaldehyde. the table torn from you Suddenly and we are close Mouthing the root when you think generator homes enjoy leeredw

Although Ashbery appears to be dangerously close to automatic writing, this poem might better be described as a species of stream of consciousness since, as Paul Carroll explains, certain resonances do occur in the poem. The dog in the garden seems to echo The Waste Land; "mouthing the root" seems to be a reference to fellatio, and, generally, the poem appears to describe a kind of strained separation between two lovers. But, as he goes over the poem again, the reader "begins to question his basic preconception that words or phrases in the same line must somehow have a relationship with one another. In short, he questions again if words in a line form a unit at all. "21 Yet "Leaving the Atocha Station" has an engaging life all its own; one never tires

of reading it, even if the whole cannot be reduced to textbook statements about theme and meaning. The poem must be accepted on its own terms; like all original art, it is sui generis and to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, the first lady of modernism, it means what it means. Only two generations separate "Leaving the Atocha Station" from Hart Crane's Twentieth Century Limited in The Bridge; if poetry changes as much in the next two generations, will it be recognizable as poetry at all? Can artistic use of language be pushed any further without destroying the last vestige of semantic content? Has technology freed the poet, or has technology rendered poetry impossible? Perhaps such questions can never be answered, but here are three possible answers. First, no poet writing today can approach technology with the innocence of vision possible in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It is instructive here to recall that two poets as different in style and temperament as Dickinson and Whitman both wrote little poems about locomotives. After Hart Crane, however, one searches in vain for unmediated praises of technology and, if one finds them, they are likely to be written in prose not poetry-such as E. B. White's nostalgic essay, "Farewell, My Lovely" (a tribute to the Model T written in 1936). If it seems strange today that writers of the first rank spent their precious artistic time on pieces of technology, it is only because we are such complete victims of the Luddite mentality. The Luddites, those wild-eyed English zealots of a few centuries ago, sought to solve the dilemma posed by technology and the Industrial Revolution by wrecking all the infernal machinery they could lay hands on. lt is rare, indeed, to find a poet openly expressing admiration for machinery of any kind, and when such an act of homage does occur, we tend to see it as eccentric. How many lovers of Karl Shapiro's poetry think of his fine automobile poem, "Buick"? T. S. Eliot's waste land has become our root metaphor, although we may see that waste land as a chemical dumping ground rather than the parched ash heap that Fitzgerald envisioned in the center of The Great Gatsby. Technology is invariably featured as dehumanizing and menacing, as if writers, artists, and ecologists had learned nothing since Fritz Lang made Metropolis or George Orwell wrote 1984. Musicians and sculptors have been the true beneficiaries oftechnology, not writers and poets.

Second, literary modernism and the larger avant-garde of which it is a part are themselves in a state of confusion and decomposition, as if a cultural Tower of Babel had come tumbling down upon all the good aesthetes and literati. As Harold Rosenberg succinctly put it, "The cultural revolution of the past hundred years has petered out. "22 If the number of little magazines and writers' workshops are any kind of reliable guide, never have so many poets and writers composed poems and short stories for so few readers. To compound the difficulty, readers who do read cannot function beyond the most primitive level of expectation. How many college graduates today can

read The Waste Land or The Faerie Queene? Better still, how many have read them at all?

Third, although most academics would not believe it, the two most closely related academic departments in any modern university are English and accounting. We sometimes forget that writing is the first significant technology and that literature simply means "lettering." Those first letters, at least in the Western tradition, amounted to little chicken tracks pressed into wet clay tablets. This cuneiform writing, most plentiful around the Mesopotamian city of Ur, consisted for the most part of two kinds of documentation: copies of the myth of Gilgamesh and trade receipts of various kinds (bills for sacrificial animals, jars of oil and wine, bills of lading). The existence of these clay tablets suggests that from the outset the technology of writing was invented to improve the human requirements of documentation and record keeping. The most sophisticated poem is, finally, just a record; and the most cipher-filled page in the accountant's ledger tells an eloquent story. Perhaps Ashbery's linguistic tinkering has reached its natural limit because writing (of any kind) already constitutes a technological formulation. Perhaps no second-order technologies (a poem constructed on purely technological principles) are possible.

On the other hand, we may have hastily assumed that technology and language are utterly incompatible and that technology necessarily forces language into more and more colorless or reductionist modes of expression, like the "Newspeak" program in George Orwell's 1984. We may have fallen into this assumption rather uncritically because most computers have been relatively simplistic in their language programs. We have used them primarily for navigation, inventories, accounting, and collations of various sorts so that we might typically employ computerese in balancing checking accounts or in citing the frequency of occurrence, say, of the word democracy in eighteenth-century English pamphlets.

However, we are still living in the first or second generation of such technological languages, and we may soon discover synthetic as well as analytic applications for these recently invented tools. The poetry of Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery may suggest fresh possibilities of syntax, new ways to enrich the allusive and connotative powers, the pure semantic kernels on which any artistic use of language finally depends. If other artists have found aesthetic uses for laser beams, video terminals, and sound synthesizers, then writers may use new languages in new kinds of poems and novels-or even in genres still not invented. An unborn artist may, at some time in the near future, activate a tiny silicon chip and produce art that will enhance and revolutionize human experience. This scenario is hardly fanciful when we consider the recent examples of the printing press and motion picture camera, inventions that turned their respective worlds upside down. Perhaps writers, who of all people should be sensitive to the

appearance of new languages. could attempt to invent languages for artistic "record keeping" in the way that new languages (BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL) have been invented for business records. The technology of communication is as old as the human race and as new as the latest advance in fiber optics. Who knows what the future shall bring? Even now the train is leaving the Atocha Station.

1. Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, definitive ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1981), pp. 84-85.

2. See John A. Kouwenhoven, "Stone, Steel, and Jazz," in The Arts in Modern American Civilization (1948; reprint ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), pp. 197-224. The predictability of results, especially of individual items in a process, is at the heart of Jacques Ellul's definition of la technique; see "Translator's Introduction," The Technological Society, trans. Robert K. Merton (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), pp. x-xi,

3. Moore, Complete Poems, p. 115. See also "The Icosaphere," p. 143.

4. e. e. cummings, Complete Poems: 1913-1962, Harvest ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 248.

5. See James Burke, Connections (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 102.

6. John Hollander, Types of Shape (New York: Atheneum Press, 1969), p. 5.

7. See Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), p. 15. I am indebted to Hughes for his lucid discussion of modernism. I also found Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), extremely helpful.

8. Hughes, p. 43.

9. Hart Crane, "Modern Poetry," in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Horace Liveright, 1966), p. 262.

10. Hans Jonas, "Toward a Philosophy of Technology," Hastings Center Report (February 1979), pp. 34-35.

II. Crane, "The River," in Complete Poems, p. 62.

12. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions ofMan (New York: McGraw-Hili Book Co., 1964), pp. 7-13.

13. Hughes, pp. 10-11.

14. Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died," Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964), p. 27.

15. See the chapter entitled "Oh What a Literary War," in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

16. Allen Ginsberg, "Wichita Vortex Sutra," in Planet News (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968), p. 120.

17. Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," in The New American Poetry, ed, Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 387.

18. Robert Duncan, The Opening ofthe Field (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 7.

19. Olson, p. 387.

20. John Ashbery, "Leaving the Atocha Station," in The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), p. 33.

21. Paul Carroll, The Poem in Its Skin(Chicago: FoUett Publishing Co., 1968),p.17.

22. Harold Rosenberg, Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. ix. See also Robert Hughes, "The Decline and Fan of the Avant-Garde," in Idea Art: A Critical Anthology, ed, Gregory Battock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973).

Surface disturbances/ grave disorders

David Hayman

When he began writing Finnegans Wake early in 1923, James Joyce scrawled over two successive paragraphs of his pastiche/parody of "Tristan and Isolde" first "Hypotaxis" and then "Parataxis." In doing so, he inadvertently put his finger on a key distinction between the fictional modes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Parataxis, at its simplest, is a grammatical device that omits proper coordination and subordination. According to Erich Auerbach, it characterized the discourse of the Bible and of the Chanson de Roland, but it is generally absent from later narrative forms in the European tradition. The latter tend to be more or less rigorously hypotactic on all levels, presenting the reader with the illusion of an untroubled surface and an unimpeded development. However, since Joyce, it has become almost conventional to use formal disruptions of a paratactic order to modify or frustrate as well as fulfill expectations. Repeatedly, we discover not only microparatactics on the level of the sentence or paragraph but also macroparatactics in the relationships between larger formal units. The model for this may be the stylistically distinct and transitionless chapters of Ulysses and the intrusive elements that constellate other chapters in that novel. But Joyce's practice by no means explains or foreshadows all that followed, any more than does the poetic (and political) practice of the surrealists and their dadaist forebears.

Though it may not be the secret weapon of contemporary fiction, parataxis, when extended to embrace major as well as minor dislocations and formal shocks, can be seen as a symptom of the open combat between freedom and responsibility that characterizes so many aspects of our period. That is, on a formal level, this ancient device, rediscovered and reapplied today, provides us with an index to the degree to which contemporary forms have broken the limits set by previous narrative conventions, in the process setting new limits for themselves.

Beyond noting, describing, and perhaps understanding the expressive

function of a parataxis that seems to open the text by freeing the writer from grammatical and logical constraints and permitting heterogeneous matter to be indiscriminately joined, we can only speculate about the reasons for the rediscovery of disjunction in our century. We may say, for example, that writers are, on the fringe of social processes, continuing the antiestablishmentarianism of nineteenth-century French fiction. They seem to have realized that the mere presentation of unacceptable subject matter is no longer socially or aesthetically adequate as a mode of protest. They are desperately searching for unexpected forms, fresh delights, and new tools capable of differentiating their messages. We might accuse them, sometimes correctly, of being too blatant or of obscurantism. Or we may see them as learning to refine a new expressive weapon in the service of hitherto unexpressed subtleties or of the ultimate outrage.

With hesitancy we might suggest that these paratacticians are responding to external forces, to the increasing complexity of our age (whether we call it postindustrial, postatomic, or simply terroristic). Certainly, in doing so, they have learned to accommodate not only the license previously accorded poetry but also the social dreck spewed forth by our media and the subliterary forms previously denied aesthetic status. Their monuments to diversity and absence seem capable of subsuming both the dominant culture and the surrounding flux, of taking in and rendering strange in much the same way democratic societies have learned to co-opt and homogenize social differences. Perhaps it is the destiny of our new literature to reassert and test the limits our society so unrelentingly naturalizes. If so, the process is apt to be endless, and parataxis, which introduces possibilities for seemingly infinite changes, is the necessary defense against recuperation and of sanity.

By eliminating transitions, parataxis tends, on the one hand, to weaken or destroy the impression of a seamless surface. It underscores the absences or gaps (to use the terminology of Wolfgang Iser) that are always the condition of narrative discourse, the blanks to be filled. It obliges the reader to recognize the participatory role so often overlooked. It may be so extreme as to disorient.

On the other hand, by eliminating subordination (as it sometimes does) parataxis may serve to equalize or give the appearance of equality to disparate elements, moving the text toward the condition of a list. This is a thoroughly ambiguous function, since the list from time immemorial has been the structure of order and control, the means by which we shape our experience. One needs only to look at the catalogue of ships in the Iliad and the "begats" in the Bible to see its historical role as conveyor of tradition, tabulator of values, stabilizer, eraser of differences. In our times, we have only to refer to the telephone directory and the library card file. When the listing function is given over to a discourse that equalizes manifestly different

elements, a false list results. This is one of the typical uses to which the device has been turned in our most successful farcical narratives (e.g., Rabelais, Celine, and Joyce). The listing function can also contribute to the explosive effect characteristic of the culminating moments in Celine: creating radical overdetermination by piling up similar details, equivalent actions, accumulating too much material for the available conceptual space. Faced with more detail than can be digested, the reader may experience a frustration composed equally of delight and dismay. Under such circumstances, the reader's job is as much to separate as to join discursive elements. On the gestural level, the result is close to slapstick.

The paratactic pseudolist can also, by inhibiting development, slow down or freeze time, generating in some instances a constant present (see Gertrude Stein's Three Lives). Somewhat modified in the direction of cinematic montage, parataxis contributes to the effect of simultaneity achieved by Joyce in the "Sirens" chapter of Ulysses, where four parallel actions are made to interact. Or again, as in Eliot's Waste Land or Pound's Cantos, stylistic shifts and modal breaks, along with changes in subject matter, can impose a universalized vision.

A glance at the growing number of pun-filled texts-novels that draw upon the signifying potential of the fused word-suggests that there can even be vertical parataxis. With word play, different discourses can be superimposed on each other, reinforcing or undercutting or multiplying significance. In such instances, we are constantly reminded that the signifier is multipurposed and that meaning is unstable.

Among the most striking recent developments is an extension of the visual paratactics developed by Mallarme in his "Un coup de des." Novelists like Maurice Roche, Raymond Federman, and William Gass dramatize the "gap" by forcing their readers to rationalize the juxtaposition of a variety of semic systems, to move freely among different typefaces, to make sense of spatial arrangements that tease and tempt the eye. It is precisely through the unexpected and unexplained conjunctions of varied stimuli-the appeals to eye, ear, and intellect on a variety of levels simultaneously-that such texts mean.

Since paratactics can contribute as readily to the serious or elevated fictions as to the farcical, we may wonder why it was not more widely used in earlier fiction. Although we can cite the Bible, Le Roman de Roland, and Beowulf for their use of microparataxis (i.e., on the level of the sentence), and though perhaps we can cite macroparatactics (i.e., on the level of the segment) in Moby Dick, most of our early examples are farces like the Satiricon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, or Tristram Shandy, all of which magnify disruption in the service of their mode. That is, in narrative prose extensive use of paratactics has traditionally lent itself to a mimesis of discontinuity rather than a rendering of order. The watershed of change is

Joyce's Ulysses where the apparent goal is the maximization of difference, the delimiting of particulars on all levels in the service of a polyvalent and all-encompassing fiction. To achieve that goal, the form, in good postFlaubertian fashion, had to be adequate; so it was almost inevitable that Joyce should have put this device to a variety of positive and negative uses. Consciously or not, experimental writers following Joyce were bound to add positive paratactics to their resources. But the problem was, and remains, how much of this volatile stuffto include and where-and the solutions have been as various as their discoverers. What follows is less a survey of contemporary paratactics than an attempt to illustrate the range of its uses within contemporary American fiction, from a more or less extremely farcical instance to an essentially positive, if ironic, manifestation.

As the producer of contemporary, black humorous farce, J. P. Donleavy is a singularly good writer of discontinuous prose. His portrait of Dangerfield, the Ginger Man, engaged in one of his less outrageous sexual scamsthe attempted seduction on the hill of Howth, an act that is at once casual and dense with clownish passion-reveals Donleavy's protagonist as an unstable combination of harlequin/ trickster and pierrot/victim/ sufferer:

Little dark now. Just let me take your hands now. 0 a dangerous place, this Howth at night. Young women want protection. And I'll hold your hand Alma and it's a nice hand in spite of the work. Thelma walking ahead. Mind Alma? Thelma away in the dark. Stop here now, like this. It's better. a little arm around you. Keep you. You like that? Well, you're a fast worker. and kissing a stranger. what will my girl friend think? Tell her I'm such a lonely gent and you couldn't resist a little innocent embrace. My house in here, come in? 0 no. A drink? I'm a member of the Pioneers. Have a glass of water then. I could come next Sunday. I'll be in Africa in the middle of the Congo. You have a nice bosom. Alma. You shouldn't make me do those things. I

Along with the splintered progress ofgingerman thought, conversation, and, by implication, action, the jagged prose on Donleavy's page conveys the frantic jumble dictated by the farcical vision. Though it deals with minimal events, it is characterized by a telescoped action (conveyed through reflection rather than description and hence left mainly to the reader's imagination), and it produces and alleviates reader disorientation by means of shifting perspectives. In this brief fragment we have unattributed conversation, scene-setting reflections, strategic reflection, and even mixing of discourses, as in the following instance where what seems to be Dangerfield's dialogue could as easily be his unspoken thought: "111 hold your hand Alma and it's a nice hand in spite of the work." Close inspection shows that much of the passage is similarly undecidable. In addition, of course, there is the persistent use of the present tense and the shifts into and out of dialect. Not all of these effects are paratactic in the strict grammatical sense, but the overall effect of this passage is of multiple juxtapositions. Unmediated

verbal sherds collide to produce mildly disruptive laughter or, rather, to reinforce the overarching irreverent attitude in an action appropriate to bedroom farce, if not to slapstick.

Donleavy shows a remarkable gift for recording stroboscopically the undetectable intervals that honeycomb the smooth surface of an action to display the tension within a clownish mind. Ultimately, the various components unite to constitute a verbal landscape littered with mini-events. Significantly, the action, though slightly indecorous, is subdued; the riot is confined to the print on our page where the feverish wish becomes the largely verbal act.

Broken syntax, multiplication of sentence fragments, shifts in tense, voice, and perspective, an absence of coordinating words, and a failure to differentiate among the units of discourse, all of this helps convey the gestural climate of farce. But the resulting rhythm is perhaps best illustrated by a passage dealing directly with destruction, like the following account of Dangerfield's paranoid attack on his Howth hill house:

And straighten out the room, make the bed. And another sup of the good Cork Gin. Wallop a little freshness into this pillow. Good grief. The room filling with floating feathers. Well God damn it. For the love of Jesus, if that's the way you want it. Off with this damn mattress.

And Dangerfield lifting the axe above a wild head, driving it again and again through the pillow. Screams of money, money. Dragging the mattress out the door, along the hall to the kitchen. Up on the table with it. And the axe is right here ready to cleave the first imposter who sets foot in this room. One more good swig of this. I'm sure it's good for the bowels and at least hurry me to bye byes. Left my soul sitting on a wall and walked away, watching me and grew cold because souls are like hearts, sort of red and warm, all like a heart.!

Without attempting to show why this passage is so disturbingly funny, we can readily show how heavily it depends on paratactics for its gestural component. Clearly, part of the strategy is to rely on sentence fragments, participial phrases, and ungrammatical constructions to convey confusion and speed up the action. In fact, most of the "sentences" lack some vital component that the reader, eager to fill the voids, supplies. The concluding sentence, though hardly the most paratactic, is a case in point. Who left his soul? What is watching? Doubtless, Dangerfield and his soul are meant, but the jagged effect remains. Similarly, the commas segment the utterance and leave us with the hanging idea, "all like a heart." If we have no trouble understanding the action, if we persist in viewing it bemused, and with irony, we are nonetheless direct participants in the drunken stupor that follows the fearful rampage against the bedding, the meaningless and pathetic shoring up of ruins. To some degree, the most striking effects reside in the pauses. Like Donleavy, but in a headier experimental vein, Gilbert Sorrentino writes farcical fictions. These are fictions that frequently go beyond the

realm of narrative to become purely verbal clowning. In Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew one senses a rare conviviality. The community of artists, living and dead, high, low, and indifferent-a world of wordsmiths-contribute with varying degrees of equanimity to this Eintopf of a book. Sorrentino is dreaming once more the dream stew of Finnegans Wake, though without chopping his ingredients quite so finely and with the puckish spirit of that other Irish dreamer, Flann O'Brien, sitting on his shoulder. In short, Sorrentino's farce is drawn less from the pure stuff of psychic confusion; his voice is less fixed and personal; his protagonists are less individual and more conventional; his language and style are more intimately a function of and a reflection on the action; and his book more closely resembles a collage than does Donleavy's relatively uniform performance. The jumble we read is, for this and related reasons, paratactic in a different way. His problem is how to maximize disruption while maintaining coherence and interest, if not always suspense.

Mulligan Stew could easily be a product of Joyce's immortal Buck if it were not so obviously and so relentlessly schizophrenic, so full of twists that turn its own logic against itself. Everywhere we note a delight in mimicry, in shifting voices, in trying out new forms, in listing, in absurdity and arbitrariness. In fact, Sorrentino, adept at Joycean maneuvers, seems to have taken over the presence and amplified the role of Joyce's arranger figure from Ulysses who dictates the chapter styles by a logic that surpasses that of the narrative.!

The novel's pretext is an account of the trials and tribulations of a bad novelist writing an outrageous, experimental fiction. Its actual content is well described in Josh Rubins's recent review of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight:

But the crazed writer's brainscape ultimately became just one of the dozens of conventions to be knocked down in this literary shooting gallery: there was never any doubt that it was Sorrentino's offstage rage and mischief, rather than Lamont's pathological condition, that generated the chaos of print piled up around the writer's desk. Chapters (in assorted, lampooned styles) from lamont's hopeless manuscript. Pages from his notebooks and scrapbooks. The complaints and games and musings of Lamont's fictional characters who demanded fiercely independent, non-Lamont lives of their own. Letters. A Jonsonian masque. Wretched erotic poems (sent to Lamont by Lorna Flambeaux). Parodies of reviews, interviews, publishers' catalogues, and footnoted academic discourse. Earnestly detailed answers to rhetorical questions. Lists, of course: imaginary authors and titles (sophomoric but irresistible); fifty phrases to be used in publishers' rejection letters; thirty-one ice cream flavors at "Kreemworks."4

Though a number of his categories include instances of microparatactics, Sorrentino, like Joyce before him, relies mainly on macroparatactics as an adjunct to his clowning. After all, many of the subdivisions contain pastiche

and parody, and parataxis plays no part in most of the models. We are struck throughout by the sudden juxtapositions, the clash of styles and subject matters, rather than by the exploded surface a la Celine or even Donleavy.

It is the authorial persona (or arranger) who takes on the clownish role, introducing his work with a spate of plausible and devastating letters from publishers who turned down the book we are about to read. His tactic is, from that moment on, to elude identification by a process of donning and removing masks. The masks themselves are not so much identities as styles or literary genres, but the effect is rather like that achieved by a clever mime working with a minimum of props to keep the viewer constantly off balance. There is, however, an important distinction to be made. The mime usually does not return to his masks as systematically as does this arranger whose method obliges him to construct a cluster of highly artificial plot lines or, rather, lines of force to be followed spasmodically throughout the book. It is as though in consuming this stew we repeatedly come upon pieces of carrot or chunks of cabbage or the occasional bit of greasy meat. In this case the binder, or broth, is the predictability of change itself. The text, playing on our awareness that, to be true to itself, it must continually shift gears and introduce fresh material in different modes and styles, guarantees our interest in the form of the what-comes-next as well as our curiosity in the resolution of the individual plot lines.

The clownish nature of the narrative procedure derives in large measure from the radical juxtapositions, mediated only by titles or tone and generally unpredictable since the order seems to be random. The nature of the material itself introduces a vertical paratactics, derived from our awareness as readers that the text is full of puns of all descriptions and most particularly intertextual puns. (See the title, with its obvious reference to Joyce's Buck Mulligan, the epigraph from Flann O'Brien, and various stylistic allusions to subliterary genres.) Indeed, this novel could be read-should perhaps be read-as a complex, stylistic pun on all manner of printed texts. Thus, the reader is constantly being brought up short=-disconnected from any action by the action of the text itself, as it satisfies a need for controlled disorder.

A controlling presence dominates the novels of Kurt Vonnegut in a far less covert way. Instinctively, Vonnegut returns to the source of most contemporary American farce, the vaudeville stage and the stand-up comedian's routine. He has found congenial a form that underscores the gag as its unit of action while giving voice to a clownish persona, produced and manipulated to equate these fictions with the entertaining but essentially mindless and anodyne routines that sold Jell-O and Rinso over the radio. All of his books, but especially Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-Five, have some sort of moral bite, reflecting a central distress that communicates itself through indirection. This is serious fun, though fun it may be.

The syncopated gag structure is precisely the medium for this dual impulse toward hilarity and distress, and in Slaughterhouse-Five the dynamic of tension comes close to being perfect. There we find interruptions of two sorts: those within an episode are often no more than enlarged paragraph breaks even though they disturb the surface of the page and suggest laughter pauses; those between episodes or between narrative contexts transport us erratically through time and space. The former are more like punctuation than true parataxis and the reader has little or no difficulty following a narrative thread. Strategically, they resemble the applause breaks in politicians' speeches, but still they reinforce the farcical mode. They also establish the Vonnegut persona as a presenter with bona fide clown credentials. Yet, in a segment like the following, though the character of Billy Pilgrim is explicitly clownish, we are struck more by the unlaughable than by humor. Even the punctuation seems to violate our expectations, while the rhetoric derives its effects from an absence-from a deliberate flatness drawing on the grave, ambiguous, or ironic side of Vonnegut's essentially political discourse:

Now he was being introduced to the Marine major. The person who was performing the introduction was telling the major that Billy was a veteran, and that Billy had a son who was a sergeant in the Green Berets-in Vietnam.

The major told Billy that the Green Beret's were doing a great job, and that he should be proud of his son.

"I am. I certainly am," said Billy Pilgrim.

He went home for a nap after lunch. He was under doctor's orders to take a nap every day. The doctor hoped that this would relieve a complaint that Billy had: Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist.!

Such muted breaks are no rarer than the wry smiles they elicit, and even when the true, or truer, laughter break does occur, we are more apt to find in it less a culmination than a pause following an isolated remark:

Billy's fiancee had finished her Three Musketeers Candy Bar. Now she was eating a Milky Way.

"Forget books," said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under his bed. "The hell with 'em."

"That sounded like an interesting one," said Valencia.

"Jesus-if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.s

The point is not so much that Vonnegut is not funny. He is supremely and occasionally grotesquely so, and the abundant but gentle microparataxis on the sentence level reinforces the illusion of the discontinuous, jumpy inept-

ness of the clown. But his most apparent parataxis is more often than not a nod in the direction of a nonexistent discontinuity, a clown's gesture that deliberately short-circuits clownishness through understatement or oblique irony.

If the sequence breaks are often less paratactic than details of syntax would suggest, the larger breaks, those which send us into another temporal or spatial realm, are potentially jarring. They constitute Vonnegut's tactic for mixing the components of his narrative: Billy Pilgrim's clownish World War II experiences leading up to the bombing of Dresden, his satirically treated postwar life and his space travel exploits replete in satirical commentary. Here the procedure parallels in a less radical vein that of Sorrentino, creating a whimsical and bitterly satiric rather than a disconnected and random impact.

Ultimately, Vonnegut does not risk chaos in texts that are best seen as updated exemplary tracts. Indeed, if he can be faulted, it is primarily on the level of risk taking: for failing to stretch the decorum of his narratives enough to fully dramatize the deep, personal disturbance that generates them; for maintaining the rhythms of the comic monologue when he feels the rage of the true clown; for understating both violence and moral outrage. But such judgments are beside the point and perhaps misplaced. Blandness in the face of unacceptable violence renews farcical discourse by contravening it. The mode Vonnegut has established for himself is obviously an extreme example of the moderation of (one might say the feigningof) parataxis, if not the sublimation of disorder within a predominantly farcical discourse that is turned to serious, if entertaining, ends. It is appropriate that the whimsy of the rhetoric infects the form.

William Gass's brief novel with the onanistic title, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife, is, in terms of paratactics, the counterstatement to Vonnegut.? This prolonged meditation on frustration with its occasional pornographic passages is a manifestation of triumphant despair conveyed through the jangled improprieties of burlesque. Despite the pervasive obscenity, we may read it as a romantic performance dressed in the stylistic robes of farce, complete with formal accessories.

Gass writes against the backdrop of Molly Bloom's epic monologue, but the contrasts are as instructive as the similarities are. Joyce's Molly functions as a perspective in the context of a Dublin day, one of a spectrum of voices and styles. Further, her variously modulated presence as an ill-defined force has been with us since Ulysses' chapter 4 ("Calypso''). In a book rich in paratactic effects used for a wide range of purposes, her monologue is presented in such a way as to suppress its paratactic aspects. Her unpunctuated prose, even when grammatically paratactic, seems to flow. By contrast, Gass has chosen to isolate his material, permitting the context to seep through what appears to be the woman's utterance, providing only the title

to guide our judgment. His discourse tends to break up the flow in a variety of ways, including typographical variations, gags, radicallyjuxtaposed styles and subject matter, and all manner of visual parataxis.

Only gradually do we find (or seem to find) a setting for this wordy woman. In the meantime, the basic principle and the principal source of reader interest (besides simple prurience) are the highly visual intrusions that systematically disrupt the textual givens of the moment. This is farcical presentation raised to its nth degree, maximalized of paratactics, generated by a clownish, arranging presence of indeterminate provenance. The latter is not clarified by references like this one to the image of a brown circle on the page: "The muddy circle you see before you and below you represents the ring left on a leaf of the manuscript by my coffee cup. Represents, I say, because, as you must surely realize, this book is many removes from anything I've set pen, hand, or cup to."8

Such an explicit attribution of gesture and intent, so clear a reference to physical reproduction, tends to mystify further by turning the text in upon itself: for it cannot explain the other effects, especially when we read that the speaker has taken on theatrical identities in the past and when we recognize that the content of this extremely literary book is not within the actual (as opposed to metaphorical) range of its female protagonist. Indeed, even femininity appears to be a mask for other possibilities (e.g., male or transvestite), a projection for a situation that is sexual in its full sense of creative-the act of writing being a form of eroticism (onanistic or not), as Mallarme was the first to note in Un coup de des.9

The essential development is not so much narrative as it is emotional. That is, nothing happens to the protagonist, but the full range of moods attributable to her (his) condition are displayed through a variety of interlocking stratagems. Take, for example, the fully articulated vaudeville routine printed in dialogue form and running roughly a third of the text's length. With its monumental triviality and disturbing overtones (a man finds his penis baked in his morning bun), this skit constitutes the pretext and armature for an extravagant number of intrusive footnotes indicated by asterisks, whose number grows so large that the line of stars commences to bend of its own weight (like a limp penis). The reader is soon reduced to the stratagem of counting stars or concentrating on notes, losing control in either case of the text as a development and participating in the text as a manifestation. In addition, the notes begin to comment on themselves and even on the asterisks. Eventually, a third level oftext is generated so that the page is compartmentalized (set off by different typefaces) by three parallel developments. The result is not an unreadable page but an engrossing performance, a three-ring circus whose full possibilities are always beyond our reach.

Vying for our attention throughout the novelette are the many clever, eye-

catching typographical effects and the photographs ofthe nude "protagonist." At one point, we discover a page of pornography torn from what seems to be its printed context; at another, there is the following provocative, intrusive, and ultimately moving authorial notation:

Got to get description in. What s this girl look like. don't we know? And what s she wearing? Or if she has shed her clothes. or some of them. as has been intimated. where'd she put them? Did she throw. in passion probably. not caring hoots. eager for the hot encounter. her woolly benjamin across a chair? It s very vague. This Gelvin fellow. now. for instance-isn't it? We could use a pix or two of him. Cunnilingus or fellatio-they have a wide appeal-would do. But please. be quick. or they71 be.

"I never voyaged so far in all my life. You shall see men you never heard of before, whose names you don't know, going away down through the meadows with long ducking guns, with water-tight boots wading through the fowl-meadow grass, on bleak, wintry, distant shores, with guns at half-cock We can't make love like that anymore-make love or manuscript. Yet I have put my hand upon this body, here, as no man ever has, and I have even felt my pencil stir, grow great with blood. But never has it swollen up in love.

It moves in anger, always, against its paper.P

The penis/ pen acquired by thefemale writer assaults not only the paper but the reader as "it moves in anger." Such an utterance (writing) works to hermetically seal the text within its own matrix, sealing the reader there as well, while paradoxically making a direct appeal to the senses-if not to moral outrage. The assault on the reader is of course standard operating procedure dating back to farce's prehistory and manifested in just about any text with pretensions to clowning. The same is true for the generalized paratactics we have been describing. That is, the text conforms in many superficial ways to farce, using traditional materials while extensively modifying both the conventions and the accompanying attitudes, engaging the reader in unpredictable and often disturbing ways.

Unlike Vonnegut whose microparatactics are more apparent than real--a device for concealing serious intent beneath the essential comic gesture, Gass uses genuine and extremely innovative textural paratactics. Furthermore, his subject matter is appropriate to the reversed morality and lower bodily manifestations attributed to the "carnivalesque" (or farcial) by Michael Bakhtine in his great study Rabelais and His World:" Where Vonnegut's seeming trivialization may leave us with a profound unease in the face of human barbarity and insensitivity, turning his novels into social satire, Gass's use of farcical material induces distress and melancholy and para-

doxically turns a diverting romp into a serious novel of vocation. Far more than the random musings of the neglected mate of the self-absorbed male ego, Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife can be read as a dramatized treatise on mastering and being mastered by mankind's tortured muse.

No other writers I know of are doing precisely what Gass does with, or rather against, both farce and the farcical potential of paratactical disruption. Still, following the late chapters of Ulysses and the busy textual surface of Celine's ellipse-scarred pages, we may note the micro- and macroparatactics of writers like Arno Schmidt, whose physically spectacular Evening Edged in Gold has recently been published in Englisht>; Julian Rios, whose Wake-inspired maxitext, Larva, will soon appear in Spain; and Maurice Roche, whose death-ridden novels are closest in appearance to Gass's book. But naming such texts suggests a range of transitional paratactics -rather than a homogeneous grouping-antic novels, sliding toward gravity.

By his distinctive use of a paratactic mode, Robert Creeley puts himself in yet another (perhaps a more established) radical camp, making formal disruption serve formal continuity or, rather, obliging the reader to constitute and affirm modes of order. Though his stories are demanding, Creeley uses discontinuous rhetoric as an obstacle, not to coherence, but to the cliched response to seemingly trivial situations.

Creeley's tales and his novel are by no means uniform in style, but there is an overall tendency toward what we may call the paratactics of absence (rather than excess). That is, we experience gaps in the exposition and even in the dialogue rather than redundancy or difference. There are no style shifts in Creeley; hence there is no macroparatactics. The result is a uniform but puzzling surface, (that conceals as well as reveals "grave disorders"). Two factors contribute to this impact: first, authorial reticence that reverses the outrageous freedom imposed by farce but signals a freedom not to tell all, to hold back, and even to conceal information. This tactic is by no means rare in contemporary fiction, but it becomes a fundamental operating procedure in Creeley's narratives on the level not only of what is told but also of how it is presented. Creeley's approach to not saying is best seen as a manner of saying around, or fencing the occurrence in with intimations that leave us finally with a statement by omission. The lacunae are so pervasive that, even in very minimal instances, they foreground the reader's activity. Perhaps this results from Creeley's post-Flaubertian refusal to comment or conclude, his resolute realism, his insistence on conveying in their integrity precise slices of a life-microsegments replete in lived silences-as well as his tendency to suggest rather than state. (Only the "tropisms" of Nathalie Sarraute, the baroque obfuscations of Djuna Barnes and John Hawkes, and the unrelieved inner discourse of Virginia Woolfs The Waves approach Creeley's essentially lyrical impact. None of them do so through grammatical parataxis.) Knowing that what is presented must make sense in terms of our

experience-that is, must constitute a total, seamless human event within a recognizable context-we are obliged to naturalize Creeley's expression. Reacting to the prominence of the gaps, we strain consciously to supply whatever is missing rather than react subliminally to implicit absences, as we do in other texts. The process is rewarding but frequently arduous. Ultimately, we fail, as we must, but the residual strangeness and openness may constitute the story's chief rewards.

Creeley's adaptation of parataxis to the poetics of the unsaid, the unanswered, and the unexplained, could be called broken discourse. Take, for example, the account of an adolescent boy's infatuation with an absent friend, a sexual awakening recounted at a later date to an unmoved woman. The action takes place in a stable built for the friend's pony, and serving as a clubhouse:

And reaching under there, then, that summer, I could get hold ofthe corner of the magazine and pull it out, without tearing the page I had got hold of, slowly, dragging it, and then the book, with the back off and the pages mildewed from having been under there so long. And on the first page could see the woman under the slightness of the slip, with its fine line of cloth covering only that much of the breasts which would have been in itself enough for the hand of a fourteenyear old. And where the cloth moved down the body against the flesh, to the leg, and there stopped, to end in a kind of torn edge, against the flesh, which I knew almost by heart, and then to the face, with the look of kind, that kind of, dismay, which then explained the man with his own face, in the picture, across from her, but coming closer, with his hands stretched out and wanting, about to tear off the slip. I)

One may object that this is not, strictly speaking, syntactic parataxis. Indeed, the disruption closely resembles the sort of breath pauses dictated by Creeley's poetic line. However, these enforced, punctuated pauses, justified in part by unorthodox arrangements of language units, break not only the flow of the sentences but also the reader's mental rhythms. We might say that new, jagged rhythms are superimposed in the reader's mind on the more conventional ones built into his expectations.

The first sentence derives its tensions less from the expected emergence of the sex sheet than from the language itself. We are systematically teased by syntactical delays, inversion, unorthodox punctuation, and stumbling block phrases, like the ambiguous and unnecessary but conversationally appropriate and rhythmically intriguing "that summer," which follows the quite adequate but equally ambiguous "then." Commas like the ones after "slowly," "dragging it," and "the book," prolong the reading process and further fragment the surface. The deliberate choice to dislocate the rhythm rather than smooth out the diction creates the paratactic impact of such sentences. Of course, other effects are available even in our sample: the omitted subject in the second sentence, the slipped reference for "which," and the implied action of "hand." The mimesis of arousal in the next

sentence is also achieved through strategic omissions and unorthodox uses of commas.

Another brief sample will reinforce what we have been saying: "Somewhat colder, the wind came in at the door, and with a quick turn, shifted, and moved down the hall. There, they were sitting, waiting, at the table, backs to the fire, the shadows of them on the wall, against it, big black shapes there which, because they were talking, they didn't see. "14 More than any writer in English, Creeley's rhetoric resembles that of Mallarrne. I would suggest that beneath their differences they share effects that are best described as paratactic. Thus, the prose is syntactically deviant; the punctuation breaks the rhythms, and absence is foregrounded as content (see Mallarrne's "flower absent from all bouquets"), while language is foregrounded as experience. Add to that a tendency to equalize the textual givens that is proper to parataxis, the reduction of what is said toward the condition of the list. Here again the content strains against its presentation; the reader is put in the interesting position of the archaeologist assembling his sherds. Assembling and filling in (together with accommodating intrusive or seemingly misarranged materials) are, therefore, the functions imposed on us by Creeley's grave paratactics. Through its choice and handling of content, its generally serious tonality, Creeley's prose points toward the ordering principle and not farcical disorder, toward constructive rather than destructive behavior; yet it is precisely this suspected, intuited order that underscores the essential disorder, the instability crouching under the commonplace, the tentativeness, the inaccessability of resolutions to the perhaps unutterable Creeley/ human situation.

Though paratactics is not the sole cause of apparent disruption in contemporary fiction or the single response to the demands of our period, its popularity signals a lively reaction to the fetishization of continuity. Even in farce, which has always tolerated disorder and utilized disruption, a revolution has taken place in the wake of aline's angry irruptions and Joyce's polymorphous perversions. Donleavy and Sorrentino are clearly innovating within established subgenres, and familiarity is one source of our ready engagement with their pranks and pranksters, their verbalizations of comic chaos. So familiar is this chaos that Vonnegut's sublimation of it gives a poignant edge to the best of his novels of perturbation.

More remarkable is the discovery by writers of serious fiction that a smooth surface is no more an emblem of conviction than is elevated sentiment. Disorder is the figure; order and meaning are the ground in Creeley's (late, late gothic) tales and in Gass's burlesque extravaganza. True liberty results when order forces its way through the forms of disorder, through the hedge of paratactics. It is precisely to this inversion and the startling surface effects it produces that we owe the appeal of these demanding works which seem to add layers of awareness to the narrative universe they conceal.

It is, or should be, obvious that neither a riot in the streets nor grandma's attic is a work of art, and there is probably no such thing as a successful work of aleatory art that does not build into its absence of pattern the trace of what has been rejected. If, at the moment, paratactics is most apt to generate a fresh response, it is precisely because its current social acceptability licenses all manner of interesting variation. Yet, its greatest virtuoso is still James Joyce, and its failures are legion. Not every experimenter knows that new freedoms generate fresh responsibilities. The hope for its future lies not in the repetition of recent discoveries but in the discovery of new applications and fresh controls by individual and well-defined voices.

I. J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (New York: Berkeley Publishing Co., 1965), p.23.

2. Ibid., p. 25.

3. For a definition of this tenn in relation to Ulysses, see David Hayman, Ulysses: the Mechanics of Meaning (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), pp. 75-88.

4. Josh Rubins, review of Gilbert Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, New York Review of Books (December 18, 1980), pp. 63-64.

5. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969), pp.52-53.

6. Ibid., p. 95.

7. For another reading of the title and another view of the novel, see Charles Caramello, "Fleshing Out Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife," sub-stance (1980) 27: 56-69.

8. William H. Gass, Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1968). Pages are unnumbered.

9. Mallarme is a striking case. Not only did he produce as his central metaphors for creativity impotence, waste on a grand scale, and the sexual act, but he also edited and wrote a magazine for women called La derniere mode.

10. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, op. cit.

II. Michael Bakhtine, Rabelais and His World, trans. from the Russian by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968).

12. Arno Schmidt, Evening Edged in Gold (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

13. Robert Creeley, "In the Summer," in The Gold Diggers (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), pp. 79-80.

14. Creeley, "The Seance," in The Gold Diggers, ibid., p. 85.

Control, freedom, and the appetite for poetry

Robert Pinsky

This is a personal essay. I'd like to explore my subject by leading up to a particular time when I was brought to consider a poem of mine in a cultural setting just a little different from my accustomed one. Some of the material will be autobiographical, and 111 risk some generalities by way of introduction.

I think that I have always assumed unconsciously that people want poetry. Their desire may take astoundingly debased forms, or even be totally frustrated and quiescent, but-perhaps through complacency or egocentrism-I have never truly doubted the idea, an idea that I think I first formulated for myself when I read William Morris's moving, perhaps ludicrous words about rioters in the streets outside his house:

As I sit at my work at home, which is at Hammersmith, close to the river, I often hear some of that ruffianism go past the window of which a good deal has been said in the papers of late, and has been said before at recurring periods. As I hear the yells and shrieks and all the degradation cast on the glorious tongue of Shakespeare and Milton, as I see the brutal reckless faces and figures go past me, it rouses the recklessness and brutality in me also, and fierce wrath takes possession of me, till I remember, as I hope I mostly do, that it was my good luck only of being born respectable and rich, that has put me on this side of the window among delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the other side, in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor shops, the foul and degraded lodgings. I know by my own feelings and desires what these men want, what would have saved them from this lowest depth of savagery: employment which would foster their self-respect and win the praise and sympathy of their fellows, and dwellings which they could come to with pleasure, surroundings which would soothe and elevate them; reasonable labour, reasonable rest. There is only one thing that can give them this-art.

Engels said about Morris that his thinking was alright for a half-hour or so after he had a thing explained to him. But in this case, I think he is following his intuition to a peculiar truth.

I don't know if there are, in fact, cultures in which the appetite for poetry does not appear. If an expert told me that there were such cultures, I probably would doubt his evidence, out of the provincial need to believe that

one's particular pursuit is universal, or if not universal, then universally craved. And yet poetry is so unknown, so little theory of it satisfies as final truth, that if another expert on cultures asserted that in every culture on earth there is an appetite for poetry, there would be a temptation to doubt him, too.

The distinction between the art and the craving for the art is highly artificial. (I think it occurs to me because of Isak Dinesen's account of inventing the first rhymed phrases in a language, to the delight of the language's native speakers, who urged her to "talk like rain"; this story seems, 1 confess, like a constructed fable or a misapprehension.) Butjust the same, the artificial distinction tells me something about my own feelings toward the art of poetry: the most deep and mysterious quality of that art, for me, is the bodily role of the sounds of language; and the mystery inheres less in the actual rhythms themselves (which can sometimes, on a crude level, be analyzed in part) than in our desire for them. The desire for the essential, physical aspect of poetry, its arrangement of sounds, seems to be a desire both for art, and for the bodily. As such, my experience of the appetite for poetry is protean, mysterious (I wish 1 could vary that term), and quite resistant to even rough analysis. This is not a bardic or sentimental assertion; that is, the appetite for poetry has the same mystery as all of the cravings that could be called, old-fashionedly, the human appetites; the desire for cuisine, beyond nutrition; for eroticism, beyond sexuality.

These appetites, perhaps by definition, both challenge and invite control. It can be argued-though I reject this idea-that they are subtle forms of control. That is, by various theories the desire for cuisine, eroticism or poetry might be understood as a social harnessing (or exploitation, or perversion, depending upon the theory) of my natural appetite for food, sex or information. But the appetite for art also seems to free me from the social facts about me, that 1 was born in 1940 to Milford and Sylvia Pinsky, in Long Branch, New Jersey, and so forth. If social facts control us, control is (it is banal to say) what appetite pushes against.

Of course, appetites can be manipulated for control. And my ideas about what is delicious, poetic or erotic seem to be largely, some would say entirely, learned and cultural: study of some kind lies behind the spontaneity of a line of Stevens's pentameter, a new white dress or the dash of Worcestershire sauce. Something in me persists in thinking of such cultural pleasures as modes of freedom, rather than modes of repression or control. That something seems so crucial to me that I am shy to give it any of its possible names from the terms of political or intellectual-historical thought.

I am claiming that my idea of learned culture in general, and the rhythms of English poetry in particular, as modes of freedom, comes from inside me. I feel convinced that it is not merely or simply an ideology assimilated by the upward-striving, English-speaking descendant of ambitious steerage immi-

grants from Eastern Europe. Formulating some such crude determinism in order to spurn it, on the other hand, does make me feel a sharpened interest in the social background of my conviction about art and freedom. Though I know, for example, what is meant by "control" in a work of art, and respect that idea, my main response to the idea of control is that it is something external, from which the artist profits by resisting it. Control is not the same as form.

111 try to clarify that in personal terms. My memories of my early childhood, in a small seashore town in New Jersey, are happy. That happiness was sort of misted over, nearly forgotten, for years, because my adolescence was somewhat miserable, in familiar ways that I'd like to re-examine. I did very badly in school from about the seventh grade on. A couple of times I was "kicked out" for cutting classes, insubordination, failure to comply with rules or instructions, etc.

In fact, I always tried to be a pleasant and amusing companion to the students and teachers at school, and while in school I tried my best to do what would get one by, within the limits of my absent-minded, unsystematically anarchic nature. (I remember being particularly good at Plane Geometry, at sketching, and at translation from Latin to English, for instance, though I could never do better than a "D" in Latin overall.)

Why couldn't I get by more easily, then? Ultimately, I don't know. But in practice, my teachers were offended because all of my energy and ingenuity was invested in perfecting techniques for giving as little as possible to the official, public work of the school. I would be happy to do my best, in a sociable way, to discuss a character in Julius Caesar, when called on-why be rude? But I was bound by some unconscious code of behavior not to read Julius Caesar-as much as I might have liked to read it under other circumstances-precisely because I had been "assigned," that is, bound, to read it. Somehow, to ignore tests, homework, every mildest form of coercion, or contradiction of my will, had become a point of honor.

I hope that I am not boasting about this; something was wrong with me. (Though, to tell the truth, the school was no better than it should be, either.) Like the authorities, I thought of my iron recalcitrance as "laziness" and "rebellion," though in fact it demanded great energy, and was in essence anarchic and friendly rather than rebellious; far from wanting to overturn or even to defy authority, I was miserably eager to please it, any way I could, short of doing what it told me to do. Why I couldn't do that, I don't feel sure.

When I might have been making my family and myself happy by doing a little (even a little) assigned reading, or memorizing a conjugation, I followed instead my version of what must be a standard pattern. That is, I did a thing of my own. In my case, this involved music: trying to imitate Lester Young and Stan Getz on the saxophone; working out improvisations and tunes on the keyboard; arranging bookings for the band at high school dances, bars, 199

Elks' Clubs, weddings; doodling endless logos for the band, or heads of musicians; daydreaming about glory as a musician.

The point of this far from unique memoir may be clear already: my noodling and doodling with music expressed my craving for freedom. And in my bones I know that it was also a craving for art. In "Lester Leaps In" or Charlie Parker's choruses on "Just Friends" I found a haughty perfection and playfulness. This music made a whole inherited culture seem the instrument upon which one might play, rather than the other way around. The music of Young and Parker exploited certain historical circumstanceseconomics, Western instruments, this, that, and the other-for personal expression, through the medium of an elegant form. Without having more than a minimal aptitude for music, I found in it a repository for the Romance of art, a way to prove and maintain my freedom from the coercion of circumstance. Music, or perhaps the idea of music, slaked and so preserved my appetite for freedom. Though I didn't (of course) think of it this way, music was form, and it was my ally against control. I think that this must be a common, perhaps typical phenomenon in middle-class American teen-age life.

In contrast, when my maternal grandfather was about thirteen, he left his home town of Grodno, then in Poland and now in the Soviet Union, and made his way slowly to the German port of Lubeck, from which he sailed for America, landing in Galveston, Texas. (Apparently my father's paternal grandfather, about whom I know less, also came from Grodno, presumably leaving some years earlier.) At eleven or twelve, he had been arrested for handing out political pamphlets of an inflammatory kind, then managed to get released by pretending that he could not understand Russian, the language of the pamphlet. He was a Jew, and he hoped to find abundance and freedom in America, where he has subsequently traveled extensively (he is still alive) by car, train and motorcycle. When my mother was born, I believe he was a partner in a motorcycle-repair business in Little Rock, Arkansas. Though he never became quite prosperous by American standards, he raised his family in what must be considered abundance and freedom, compared to what he left behind. (Needless to say, had he remained in Grodno, it is very likely that he and his seed would have been brutally and thoroughly wiped out.) For him, American culture was in a practical wayan instrument of freedom.

At this point I'd like to recount the instance of cultural contrast and overlap I referred to at the outset. About seventy-five or eighty years after my grandfather left Grodno, I was sent by the cultural branch of the American Department of State on a tour of several Eastern European countries, to read from my poems and to talk informally about American poetry with writers, scholars, and students. This tour began with a week in 200

Poland, and by blind luck the time was within six months of the amazing events of August, 1980, when shipyard workers in Gdansk challenged the system, igniting a genuine proletarian revolution. Many of the writers and intellectuals I met were direct beneficiaries of this revolution, in the form of increased freedom of basic sorts: freedom to travel, to publish one's work, to form organizations openly, to speak, to sign one's real name to a piece of writing.

A bit more background is necessary. The week I arrived, the second week in March, was the anniversary of the risings of 1968, when demonstrators had been clubbed by police. Now, in 1981, exultant students of the University of Warsaw, bearing red-and-white "Solidarnosc" emblems, demonstrated by the thousands. These demonstrations took place on my second day in Warsaw. That same day, on the other side of the park (having been leveled by bombs, Warsaw is full of green space) a smaller counterdemonstration took place, led by an actor of sorts; this counter-demonstration, estimated variously as being of a few hundred people up to a thousand, was anti-Semitic in nature.

The actor and his group were taking a line based on history: if Poles were going to commemorate past brutalities, they said, then the late forties and early fifties must be remembered. Though this group's logic and motives were equally contemptible, they were referring to certain historical facts. In the Stalinist Politboro of the Polish Party were a number of people who had sat out the war in Moscow, returning after the war to take office under the aegis of Russian power. Some of these people (for still other historical reasons) were Jewish, and among those was the head of the Internal Police. During his administration, many people were tortured. The actor and his friends described those tortures as Zionist abuses, and their counter-demonstrations of March, 1981, represented a semiofficial or covertly official attempt by elements within the goverment to deflect or divide Solidarity. They called for a purging of Zionist influences from Solidarity. This attempt at dividing and confusing dissent by waving the banner of anti-Semitism appears to have failed, perhaps because, as many journalists have pointed out, the last governmental anti-Semitic campaign, in 1968 (again, more history) left Poland on the verge of becoming a country with anti-Semitism but no Jews.

As for me, my first responses to all of this history, so much of it nasty and appalling, were those of a kind of hick; it struck me that as an American I had possibly (tritely enough) underestimated history-underestimated the extent to which vile forces and dark, bitter roles might be in people's bloodeven, in a sense, in my blood. I felt childish, or perhaps childlike is the word. The torture that had most concerned me in my lifetime was the torture I knew had been learned as a technique in certain American agencies, by students who returned to their homes as military and police officials in such

countries as Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran; my imagination of my country had been affected in certain widespread, ineluctable ways by the prolonged attempt to force American will on Southeast Asia by means of decimation. My instinct for freedom, in a way, had drawn an intuitive, ahistorical, permanent line leftward from jazz to liberation. Now, I was in a country where the Ku Klux Klan cited history-and history that encompassed me, by blood.

In Poland, I was eager to take in everything I could and in relation to the counter-demonstrations and to much else, I concentrated hard on being a movie-camera. I concentrated so hard on recording mentally as much as I could of what I saw, that what I actually thought was often embarrassingly petty or trivial. In relation to the anti-Semitic demonstrations, what I thought included the fact that I had used the phrase "anti-Semitic" in one of my poems-but with a lot of spin on the phrase, so to speak. The poem was one of the ones that had been translated into Polish; I hoped that the antiSemitic demonstrations, and the background that they embodied, would not distort the poem when it was read aloud at the Writer's Union the next day.

Perhaps this farcically self-centered viewpoint, reminiscent of the Jack Benny character in To Be Or NOI To Be, is related to the feeling that one might be willing to read Julius Caesar, but not as part of a group required to read it by a certain day. Anyway, the fact of the poem, of American poetry in general, its rhythms and its language, made me feel free from Poland andas much as I liked and admired the Poles-from its stinking history.

The poem is called "Poem About People":

The jaunty, crop-haired graying Women in grocery stores, Their clothes boyish and neat, New mittens or clean sneakers,

Clean hands, hips not bad still, Buying ice cream, steaks, soda, Fresh melons and soap-or the big Balding young men in work shoes

And green work pants, beer belly And white T-shirt, the porky walk Back to the truck, polite; possible To feel briefly like Jesus,

A gust of diffuse tenderness

Crossing the dark spaces

To where the dry self burrows Or nests, something that stirs,

Watching the kinds of people

On the street for a whileBut how love falters and flags

When anyone's difficult eyes come

Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique Soul, its need unlovable: my friend In his divorced schoolteacher Apartment, his own unsuspected

Paintings hung everywhere, Which his wife kept in a closetNot, he says, that she wasn't Perfectly right; or me, mis-hearing

My rock radio sing my self-pity: "The Angels Wished Him Dead"-all The hideous, sudden stare of self, Soul showing through like the lizard

Ancestry showing in the frontal gaze Of a robin busy on the lawn. In the movies, when the sensitive Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns

Trying to rescue the thrashing Anti-semitic bully, swimming across The river raked by nazi fire, The awful part is the part truth:

Hate my whole kind, but me, Love me for myself. The weather Changes in the black of night, And the dream-wind, bowling across

The sopping open spaces Of roads, golf-courses, parking lots, Flails a commotion In the dripping treetops,

Tries a half-rotten shingle Or a down-hung branch, and we All dream it, the dark wind crossing The wide spaces between us.

I give the poem here, not in order to talk about it itself, but in order to deal with the way it incidentally provided the occasion for an instance of cultural parallax.

A young poet who was interpreting for me was about to read the Polish version of "Poem About People" (not his own translation) to a group of older writers. I felt suddenly that I wanted to say a word or two of gloss; so I said that in the few days I had been in Poland I had become aware that in Poland the expression "anti-Semitism" referred to a potentially powerful political motive force, capable of moving large numbers of people. For an American of my generation, I said, anti-Semitism could be treated as pri-

marily a matter of manners, if one so chose, rather than politics. In America, everyone was a dirty something-or-the-other, and because it was not already a powerful symbol within national life, "anti-Semitism" might even be used in a poem partly as a symbol. It might even be used partly as a comic manifestation-one might choose to treat anti-Semitism in America as a kind of bad manners, like someone chewing with his mouth open, letting gravy trickle down his chin and onto his vest. It might offend, even hurt someone's feelings, but its political impact was negligible.

I think that this was partly half-conscious bravado, a calculated counterattack. If being American made me an innocent hick or a child in relation to the anti-Semitism of Poland, then being American also entitled me to something resembling aristocratic disdain toward it. If my grandfather left the country by easing himself out from under Polish history, I was coming to it from outside and above, by TWA and embassy Plymouth. In part, I suppose, I was an American high-school wise guy, trying to needle a whole culture as if it were a group of grown-ups, some of whom had offended me. I declined to be anyone's even potential victim. The film The Young Lions, in which Montgomery Clift, sensitive, young Jewish soldier, rescues the bullies and so forth, was an absurd, rather appealing bit of my culture; the Polish actor and his sleazy, creepy counter-demonstration were not.

The writers chuckled at the table-manners trope, and the meeting with them was congenial and lively. But afterwards, the young poet who had read the Polish versions said, "They liked that poem very much, you know but about the anti-Semitism, what you said when they laughed-I think that none of them believed you."

Well, yes. In a sense, they were right to doubt my explanation, which was perhaps too rosy and patriotic. Thinking about the poem, I was glad that it was itself, for good or ill, and not its gloss or its explanation. One should confide in the poems, and abjure gloss and explanation altogether, maybe but all the same I was annoyed with them, a little: annoyed on my country's behalf, because even if I had exaggerated its generosity, perhaps, or its pure freedom from bloody European mania, in some other sense I was right: give or take a few country clubs with terrible food, or fraternity houses with boring company, my grandfather had done very handsomely by me; and even if his descendants had survived in Poland, they couldn't have begun to make even a somewhat disingenuous speech about their freedom from other people's ideas about what"Jew" would mean for them, to them, about them.

But the annoyance on my country's behalf was superficial compared with the deeper annoyance that they were telling me who I was-that I was perhaps a more historically-determined creature than I might conceivably choose to be. From that perspective, the young poet who had read out the translations may have been intuitively siding with me when he said "they"

didn't believe me. When Annie Hall was shown at the American Embassy, one Polish script writer present had enormous difficulty believing that Woody Allen was Jewish (let alone understanding why the Americans present found the idea of a non-Jewish Woody Allen funny): how could Allen feel free to make the jokes he makes in Annie Hall, how could he be bold enough to conceive its form?

Perhaps it is the exhilaration of any form to push against some confining expectation. In the America of the 1950s, Frank O'Hara (e.g., in "Ave Mariaj and Allen Ginsberg ("America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel" wrote poems of great formal invention and boldness; part ofthe formal exhilaration of those poems certainly is a sense as of the artist being himself. The control of sexual tastes and behavior implied by the mores of the Eisenhower years-Ike and Mamie listening to Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians-was something for O'Hara and Ginsberg to push against. The forms they attain (unpredictable, swift and exuberant or Whitmanian, comic and melancholy) do not express or transcend or defend "homosexuality." Rather, they seem to say, "it is my 'homosexuality,' not anyone else's, or anyone else's idea of it." They at most express "homosexuality" as another form of freedom-one person's freedom, perhaps-rather than as a category; this is analogous to the sense that one's own body is a form of freedom because it is in detail different from every other body.

I like to think that it was thrilling for the young, ambitious nobleman Philip Sidney, writing the sonnets that he circulated among an elite of family and friends, to feel that his imitations of Petrarch were something new, and English-English in a way that was his way, as his body was his. Artificial and contrived as Astrophil and Stella may be in one way, he did in another way look into his heart to write it, as he says he did. To be sweepingly optimistic about such questions, perhaps every historical circumstance, every limitation of politics or inherited identity, is something to push against, a possible control. Perhaps form, in its truest manifestations, must be an appetite, an appetite for being autonomous and oneself, more bold and naked than any external preconception of oneself. A poem may be the least confused, most free thing one says (or hears) because it is the most deliberately physical, and so the most naked. Form expresses the craving to be free of imposed, controlling abstractions. It is a made, bodily abstraction to challenge the abstractions of circumstance.

In Poland, amid a time of surprising, inspiring new freedom for the country, I was invited by chance to think of myself as more historically determined than I had before. Striving to think of that as a writer's problem, a formal problem, I felt a renewed sympathy for every sullen student doodling, on the overflowing margins of some grubby notebook, a name or face.

Art as style/style as art and the problem with that

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

The time has long since passed when one could talk of art as style in a straightforward sense. Those aging followers of Irwin Panofsky who continue, by and large, to be the most able practitioners of the discipline of art history can make sense of one another when they talk about the style of Venetian painting in the sixteenth century, but by the time one gets to the Impressionists one already finds the punctiliously-minded substituting the less precise word manner for style, because the notion of style has to do with an attitude to subject matter.

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, that is to say, by the time of the Impressionists, the possibility of an interest in the symbolic identity of a depicted subject, an interest in the relationship between that which is depicted and the way in which it is depicted, had receded in the face of other possibilities, which themselves derived from a wholly modem preoccupation with vision itself. The traditional notion of style, that which makes it possible for us to see the neo-Classical-or, say, the miniatures of the Persian court at Herat-as representing views of the world, articulated and expressed in their treatment of specific and generally known literary themes, disappears at about the same time, and for precisely the same reasons, as it becomes impossible for one to talk of any kind of art, whether it be painting or poetry or drama, as being allegorical in the sense that allegory was available to Giorgione in the Tempesta, or tragic in the sense that tragedy was a mode available to Shakespeare in, for example, Hamlet. As the French scholar Jean Paris has observed, by the time of Cezanne art had turned away from the classical notion of an interpretive, symbolic, system of communicability, in the interests of a more visually oriented and thus noninterpretive, or at least very differently interpretive, attitude to aesthetic experience. One

This paper was first delivered as a lecture presented to the Foundation for Art Resources in Los Angeles, 22 April 1981.

no longer reads pictures in the way that one reads words, as a series of signs each equipped with an arbitrarily derived capacity for signification (an arbitrariness basic to the operation of language, which is implicit in the fact that quite different sounding words can mean the same thing, can have the same signified, in different languages, as with, for example, hund, chien, dog). Similarly, a character such as a shepherd in a painting by a sixteenthcentury Venetian like Giorgione functions as a sign with a conventionally assigned meaning. In Giorgione's case, a meaning located within the terms of reference of allegorical discourse, allegory being the retelling of an already familiar story in a way which relates the story to specific contemporary events. It is as such that Giorgione analogizes the shepherd's hair to the disorder of the leaves on the tree, in that underlining the shepherd's role as a representative of Nature. In such an art as this, then, style is a matter of reconciling or approximating a series of visual preferences-always, in the visual arts, preferences for or against the sensual possibilities offered by sight itself-with or to thematics that are, in general, already redolent with ascribed meaning.

No such opportunity for speculation is offered in the case of, say, a painting by Paul cezanne of his gardener. Even allowing for Cezanne's love of Courbet and all that that implies with regard to the question of the nobility of labor and themes of that sort, only the most wildly imaginative pendant would want to suppose that Cezanne's gardener functioned in relation to a clearly and generally understood set of thematics in the manner that Giorgione's shepherd does. If we want to talk about cezanne's style, then, we have to recognize that it is a quite different kind of notion than that with which stylistics had been associated in the more distant past. Style is no longer that which reconciles the visual with a literary idea, not least because the symbolic resources of Classical tradition had, by the end of the nineteenth century, apparently become inadequate to the task of representing the world, of encompassing the actual experience of life as it is in the modem age. If one wants to talk about style in cezanne, one very quickly comes to realize that one is talking about something which might just as well be described as technique. That it is in the technique that something like a view of the world is to be found. And that the subject matter of an art such as cezanne's, which is indeed open to interpretation in a variety of ways, is so private in derivation as in fact to make the relationship between subject and pictorial technique almost describable, in terms of the way meaning is communicated by the work as a whole, as exactly the opposite in Cezanne as it is for Giorgione.

Now why have I gone to such lengths to establish such an obvious point? I'm sure everybody knows that there's a fundamental difference between Giorgione and cezanne. But I am not sure that everybody is prepared to consider the implications of that fundamental difference. I am in fact of the

opinion that much of what is problematic about the art of the immediate present is a consequence of what I can only describe as a neurotic and regressive flight from historical reality. A kind of childish willfulness which wants to behave as if, in a sense, Cezanne and all that sort of thing never existed.

Or, more precisely and also more ominously, as if it doesn't matter whether Cezanne and all that ever existed. A kind of adolescent lust for the apocalyptic which, as it were embarrassed by the complexity implicit in the modern, attempts to clear the air by squeaking energetically that painting is dead-painting being, with poetry, the form within which modernism was evolved during the last century and subsequently-or by announcing, at great and incoherent length and in atrocious prose, that a variety of younger artists manifestly fascinated with popular culture, and entirely indifferent to art or its traditions in any elaborate sense whatsoever, are in fact providing us with works of allegorical significance.

What is problematic about the art of the 1980s is problematic because it is a consequence of a kind of refusal to recognize the kinds of differences I described above. We are suffering, it seems to me, from a kind of discomfort with modernism which I suspect to be an exact parallel of the embarrassment which we feel for such mixed blessings as our imperialist past. In short, for the great triumphs of the nineteenth century, of which modernism was one. It is that discomfort which calls forth the kind of wishful thinking that is inherent in such misty and nice-sounding ideas as "postindustrialism" or "postmodernism." Along with which, as I shall now say, come a lot of other assumptions which are equally preposterous and equally popular. One of which would be that we live at a moment in which there is nothing like a dominant style or mode, in what might be called a pluralist epoch. To the contrary, I think that in regard to what is currently most popular in art we have to say that there is, notwithstanding all my reservations about using the word at aU, something like a dominant style in the art of the immediate present. And that style or mode or approach is one of conformism. Of conformity to consumerism, itself an idea lurking in the popular image of art history as a kind of supermarket of styles from which the artist selects the one most suitable to his or her special interests. A conformism wholly consumerist in its delight in the idiosyncratic, exhibiting as it does a kind of liturgical dependence on and celebration of what Freud described as the narcissism of small differences which is nowadays manipulated as an alternative to genuine individuality. This is the sense in which Clement Greenberg was I think quite right, as is very rare for him, when he said a couple of years ago that the postmodernists represent a far more serious threat to art than the old-fashioned philistines ever did. To get closer to the nature of this awful dilemma one must consider, for a moment longer, this tempting idea, or ingenuous belief, that we live at a time characterized by an apparent

plurality of styles, which plurality is supposedly reinforced or otherwise articulated by a pluralist critical method.

In regard to critical method, however, one thing that one feels obliged to say about pluralism is that there isn't really very much of it around. The idea that there should be a critical attitude which would permit one to respond to many different kinds of things, sensations, and ideas which one encounters in the real world of transitive action, tends to strike one as at once a good idea but simultaneously as a kind of utopian delusion, perhaps a hangover from the 196Os. At any rate as an idea which rarely finds a counterpart in physical or historical reality. An idea, moreover, which is too often flaunted by people who actually behave in precisely the opposite manner. Pluralism, in other words, is another one of those conditions, like democracy, which everyone would like to exist but whose existence is in fact forever in doubt, not least because of the behavior of those who are pleased to call themselves democrats.

A genuine pluralism would, to repeat myself, be one which could respond to different kinds of art in a manner appropriate to each. Meyer Schapiro might be said to represent such an aspiration. His collection of essays on modern art, published by Braziller a year or so ago, leads the reader from one artist to another in a manner which is indeed responsive to the intrinsics of each particular ambition. Whether that ambition be one in whose greatness we can readily acquiesce, Courbet's, for example, or Cezanne's or Mondrian's, or whether it be an endeavor of a lesser kind, for example, Seurat's or Chagall's. And here, by the way, is the problem with pluralismor one problem with pluralism when that pluralism is genuine. Pluralism goes against the grain. It's a good idea but there's also something vaguely incredible about being as enthusiastic about Chagall as one might be about Cezanne or Courbet. And when an authentic pluralist like Schapiro goes so far as to suggest that, in his own way, Chagall is as interesting as Cezanne, one is alarmed and incredulous. Because Chagall obviously isn't as good as Cezanne and no amount of seeing the good in everything can, ultimately, subvert our sense of the significance of this fact.

Even an authentic pluralism, then-and I think that in describing Schapiro as an authentic pluralist one also defines and describes him as the greatest living scholar of the artistic device-runs the risk of flirting with an unrealistic or utopian notion of fairness or egalitarianism. Of not being able to place ambitious works in context. Of not comparing them with one another, even by implication, when comparing things and tastes is what we actually do at every level and at every moment in art as in life.

I don't mean that when looking at a Vermeer one thinks of Rembrandt, or any such comparativist fancy as that. I do mean that one's sense of Vermeer is enhanced by realizing that he's as good as Rembrandt, or vice versa, and that that realization has significance for one's idea of what art itself might be.

Be all that as it may however, whatever problems may be said to be inherent in a genuinely pluralistic approach like Schapiro's, these are not the problems which one associates with pluralism as we most often encounter it today. Pluralism is in fashion in American art and criticism at present, and the problem with this is that the pluralism in question is not in fact very pluralistic. On the contrary it tends to be harshly prescriptive, cheerfully committing the very crimes against which it likes to warn us. The kinds of pluralism which one sees most often in art magazines, and in the policies of museums, have in common a bias against certain kinds of art, and of art criticism, so strong as to give to pluralism as we currently encounter it the air of a repressive dogma.

In part this confusion derives from what is perceived in America as the problem of Formalism, which expression is rarely used to refer to the work of actual Formalists-people like Roman Jakobsen or Viktor Schklovsky, or more recently someone like Tzvetan Todorov-but is, rather, reserved to refer exclusively to the attitude enunciated by Clement Greenberg and his circle. In this way American pluralists are able to delude themselves into believing that in demonstrating the inadequacies of Greenberg's method, or lack of method, they have somehow demonstrated the inadequacies of the formalist approach as such. This delusion would in itself be quite harmless except that, as is the case with delusions, it leads to others which are more pernicious. Here, for example, is where the prescriptiveness of most contemporary pluralism becomes apparent. Contemporary pluralism is monolithically united in its distaste for modernism, to which it has in consequence attached an extremely arguable and oversimplified identity. Pluralists seem to me to be united in a belief that modernism was or is a tendency or movement or series of movements characterized by a reductivist attitude to the art work which was or is itself occasioned by a preoccupation with a "purity" of the means of expression or communication. Anyone, however, who actually looks at any modernist work from Manet to Matisse will in fact note that the experience is an extremely complex one which might be said to concentrate on a purity of expression in order to depict and manipulate the manifest impurity of vision itself. There's nothing reductive about it, and one is therefore led to ask why anyone should think there is, or should want to think so.

One explanation, I think, is that the pluralist approach is very often one which in practice is employed to thinly disguise what is properly described as a genuine discomfort with art itself. All too frequently pluralism provides a mask for people who would rather talk about anything they can find which is about art but is not art as such. Rather than look at the American painting of the fifties, they would prefer to fulminate sanctimoniously about its alleged appropriation by the United States Information Agency, an appropriation which is, according to such historically-minded moralists, thereby

presumed to have irreversibly altered whatever meaning the work in question might have originally had. I wasn't surprised when a veritable spate of articles appeared, some years ago, on the question of whether permitting their works to be shown in American embassies during the McCarthy period made the Abstract Expressionists cold-warriors by default. I was merely surprised that the question was generally considered to be a real one. Perhaps I shouldn't have been. That kind of guilt by association has come to be characteristic of one of the most popular variants of pluralism as we know it. It is, of course, a problem also encountered in the world at large at present.

Another, related, branch of contemporary pluralism wants to believe that art itself is conveniently dead and therefore exists only as an apparatus which may make possible the defamiliarization, and thus the reconsideration, of general historical and personal-personal in the sense of psychological-themes. This variety of pluralist thought seems to derive its prejudices and methodology from Duchamp. Specifically it is an attitude indebted to the extremely old-fashioned attitude to subject matter advanced by Duchamp in his attack on retinal painting (i.e., on painting which was said to appeal to the eye rather than the mind), and to Duchamp's notion of the ready-made. From these two ideas, which themselves might be seen as manifestations of a kind of disgust with aesthetic experience as such, have come all sorts of allegedly pluralistic approaches to art which share the conceit that if one treats the space of an art gallery, or, more recently, the space of painting itself, as a kind of ready-made, one may thereby represent information from some other source-whether that source be Quine's philosophy or the world of rock and roll-and, by so doing, in some way make a comment on it and on the institution, on art and art history, at the same time.

Personally, I think such an attitude is nonsensical. As is the pervasive moralism of much that calls itself pluralist, a moralism which often overlooks the perhaps unfortunate extent to which art can in fact be made by people with extremely unpleasant ideas out of which they nonetheless make successful works, as is the case, for example, with the novels of Ferdinand Celine or Virginia Woolf.

To sum up, as I see it pluralism is a good idea which is most often encountered as an apparent permissiveness which in practice amounts to a flight from serious pleasure. Works of art provide pleasure through being involuntary experiences, in the sense that seeing, like breathing, is involuntary, into which we enter voluntarily, although not without prejudice. Pleasure, as Roland Barthes pointed out to great effect, is that which subverts the tyranny of the historical. Certainly, then, one would not expect art to conform to some historical theory. Especially not to one as crude as

Duchamp's. Art contradicts life in an elaborate sense, the sense in which Jakobson described poetic form as being that which is unlike the form of ordinary speech. And one might recall in this same connection that Walter Benjamin denounced dada and expressionism because oftheir foundation in psychologicalistic communicability rather than in that manipulation of language for itself which he identifies with the poetry of Mallarrne. It is an observation germane, it seems to me, to our own time. As, also, is Stevens's aphorism to the effect that poetry is never personal. The problems of pluralism as we most often encounter it are problems defined by an eclectic interest in everything but art, an apparent hedonism which is in fact severely repressive, and manifest in an inability to manipulate, in art or in criticism, a sufficiently delicate and complex idea of what one experiences when one actually looks at a work of art.

Indeed one might say, as I have already implied, that the problem with art and art criticism at the moment is a problem caused by, or at least apparent in, a flight from complexity which is no more or less than a flight from art as such. Or perhaps one should say from art as it has been and can be. The problem, after all, is, as we have seen, often no longer even perceived as an artistic one. Unlike, say, minimalism or postimpressionism, much recent art is said to have "little to do with nature and less with expectations of art [sic]," being rather concerned instead "to manipulate and outwit social systems." And as such it may also be said to seek an ultimate repression: the displacement by the nonartistic of artistic experience. In such a scheme art is subsumed into that which it cannot be, an unmediated extension of social life. A ritually complete subordination of pleasure to business which begins and ends with acquiescence in the dominant culture's approximation of Eros to the death instinct.

Which returns us to the question of art and style because, in the course of this general flight from the possibility of an art of high ambition one has seen the progressive development of a most pernicious confusion regarding art's relationship to life. As I've suggested, we seem to be passing through a moment when art itself has become a direct adjunct of the narcissistic consumerism which is characteristic of life as it is in the real world. We are, it seems, in danger of being inundated-or perhaps a better word would be suffocated-by an art as simple in structure as are popular music or television melodrama and as simplistic in its acquiescence in the assumptions which govern everyday life. An art of the personal, an art, that is to say, of the diaristic, of autobiography, of trinkets and scraps of soliliquy which, taken together, are supposed to reveal or communicate something generally affective. Such an art sees life as a collection of possessions, and as Walter Benjamin observed fifty years ago such an art is quintessentially bourgeois in that it encapsulates middle-class privatism and possessiveness. It's not that our civilization is capable of producing an art which is not bourgeois, why

indeed should we want to? But rather that we do expect art to provide us with some distance on ways of thinking that we otherwise take for granted. The pleasure provided by art includes the experience of being taken by surprise, most especially that experience which one associated with the greatest works of art, the recognition that there are no surprises. Instead of providing us with that kind of pleasure, too much of the art of the early 1980s offers only a dull rehearsal of popular assumptions. The narcissism of consumer society encourages a belief in the inherent worth of private experience which results in a cult of the personal which goes so far as to invent worth in the most solipsistic phenomena, to an extent which invokes Freud's comment on Surrealism, with regard to which he said that he didn't know much about art but he was quite sure it didn't have anything to do with anybody's dreams.

It is only reasonable to want to know why and how we arrived at this state of affairs in which anybody who actually likes art runs the risk of being gouged by boredom every time he or she ventures into a museum or gallery exhibiting contemporary art. I have, in what I've said so far, suggested that our current plight is a consequence of a misunderstanding which has become a repression. Actually not so much a misunderstanding, perhaps, as a misappropriation, of, as I've suggested, Duchamp's notion of the readymade and of his essentially late-symbolist attack on the notion of art as a visual rather than literary endeavor. Mattei Calinescu has described how Andy Warhol converted Duchamp's notion of the ready-made from a device which could demystify a phony reverence for art history by pointing to the way in which museums tend to convert everything they contain into art, into a device which turns that perception into an assumption, and is thus able to treat, for example, the space of painting as a repository for various droll references to the iconology of the dominant culture. Of course it's amusing to think of soup cans or the electric chair or Chairman Mao's face as all being objects of delectation eminently consumable when converted into art (I shall not comment here on the possibility that the latter two are thus ritually emptied of their more threatening implications) but it is an amusement which ultimately has very little to do with art. Instead, it's a substitute for art. Instead of a bundle of ordered sensations, mutually referential and of course also invocative of experience and sensation outside the work, one is confronted with an image familiar from another context and supposedly invested with a new significance by being relocated into a milieu for which it was not originally intended.

Such an approach has been popular with various sectors of the art community since Warhol initiated it, and he can by no means be said to be the most unrewarding practitioner of it. Indeed, until very recently with the current spate of sophomoric relocation into the space of painting of various icons of eroticism and violence drawn from the mass media, the silliest

applications of the ready-made were to be found in what was-often misleadingly-called Conceptual Art. Consider the case of the organization named Art and Language, which I've already mentioned in conjunction with the mass media trendies of the immediate present. Art and Language, a cult which was most active in the earlier years of the last decade, proceeded on the absurd assumption that by interjecting into the "art context"-by which it meant the social context, that is to say, art galleries and museums-ideas which derived from quite different spheres of human endeavor, like philosophy and anthropology, the nature of our relationship to art would somehow be demystified, which is to say, revealed for what it really is. So this strange and surly group would, in the interests of an apparent loathing for both art and language, fill the galleries and little magazines with madly irrelevant passages on meaning by philosophers of the logical-positivist persuasion, and torment the public at large with tedious disquisitions on how art is distributed within capitalism, and a number of related questions about which every single living person already knows all there is to know. It's a short step, as I've said, from treating the space of the art as a readymade in that manner to treating the space of painting itself as a ready-made. And in both cases the problematics of the endeavor are contained in that which the theory of the ready-made leaves out. Duchamp demystified the museum, perhaps even a reverence for history. But not the space of painting (or sculpture) itself. On the contrary, his work implies that there's nothing there to demystify. And of course there is.

What is missing from too much of the art of the present is a recognition of the role that artistic tradition plays in the development and determination of meaning. And it's missing because the notion of the ready-made has been turned into a cliche which permits the artist to ignore tradition by ignoring the question of the complexity of works of art. Art is about feeling, but about feeling at the level of the supra-personal, which is precisely why works of art are, as T. S. Eliot put it, meetings between tradition and the individual talent in which tradition provides talent with the means to articulate experience at a level that transcends the local or literal or merely personal. Thematics, or the selection of this or that image or this or that way of working or of presentation, are no substitute for the manipulation of the artistic device itself. Complexity, in other words, is not a matter ofthematics but of execution: one can see a play and say, "Oh God, another manipulation of the revenge theme." But that play might be Hamlet.

This argument was rehearsed at the beginning of the century and has been with us ever since. I do not propose to resolve it but only to bring it, in some respects, up to date. What I've said this evening is that we are surrounded by a great deal of art which isn't actually interested in art. And which is furthermore in a most dubious relationship to what it does seem to be interested in. Art and Language didn't demystify the gallery system, theyjust

found a new material that would, in fact, be bought instead of art. And similarly, most of the art that claims to be using material drawn from the mass media, from the shorthand eroticism of the marketplace, in order to criticize it is doing nothing of the kind. Finally, the problem of an art that is indifferent to tradition is the problem of the wunderkinder: once the wunder is gone, only the kinder is left. And art is an adult affair. Art as style, style as art? The immediate problems ofcontemporary art derive from the belief that the bundle of prejudices and preferences that determine the style in which we live can provide a substitute for art itself.

A Doppler effect: response to Chicago artists' round table

Peter Schjeldahl

The relation of "tradition" and contemporary art is a big, vague, somewhat musty question with a history of tendentious uses, both pro- and anti-avantgarde. In an era when, as several of the panelists here note, tradition smashing has long been a tradition itself-a singularly paradoxical and anxiety-provoking one when taught in art schools-the whole issue might seem hopelessly vexed. Certainly, Dennis Adrian is right in pointing out its practical irrelevance to the working artist, for whom tradition may be defined as whatever in the given language and rationale of art is accepted without much reflection. In a sense, any fully conscious tradition is a dead tradition, because to be fully conscious of something is also to be conscious of alternatives to it. And for serious artists, who instinctively loathe the arbitrary, such consciousness is a crisis requiring either retreat or drastic action. A tradition is in trouble with artists not when it feels constricting but when it appears obvious,

Through most of the 1970s we experienced an interlude of artistic "pluralism" (a political term always a bit forced in this context) following just such a reification of the "tradition of the new." It was a thousand-flowers time, inevitably rather low in both critical rigor and creative intensity. It was a time of revived hope for "regionalism," because that old bully, New York, had lost much of its power to declare benchmarks for new art. Chicago, with "Imagism," had already been going its own markedly independent way, ringing changes on European traditions, like expressionism and surrealism, that had become anathema in New York. (It seems significant that this Chicago panel refers to Europe several times, to New York only once.) So it's not surprising that Adrian, the excellent Chicago critic, should give such a cheerful and eloquent description of the pluralist situation. What he fails to take into account, from my point of view, is that this situation has come under increasingly destructive pressures.

Adrian's friendly antagonist on the panel, Vera Klement, testifies to one sentiment that has been driving pluralism down. For her, the pluralist decline of belief "in someone or something" is not a mark of "maturity," but rather signalizes a "despair" of finding "meaning." A lot of artists feel this way, and some have been doing something about it. Julian Schnabel, Susan Rothenberg, and David Salle are three New York artists whose emotional pungence, truculent ambition, and large grasp on current issues have been raising the stakes of new artistic practice. Another force against pluralism, superficial but widespread and potent, is simple boredom, a simple craving for eventfulness, even nasty and dangerous eventfulness, that can also be seen in our politics. (Recent art-funding cutbacks are one minor example of the Reagan administration's addiction to playing with matches in piles of tinder.) One can hardly welcome the demise of Adrian's decent and rational vision of our cultural life, but the demise looks irreversible. We are going to have "meaning," it seems, even if it kills us.

The "tradition" being reactivated in all this-in Germany and Italy as well as New York-is that of individualism in extremis, i.e., expressionism. (Is this development sweetly ironic to Chicagoans?) Pessimistic, perverse, and occasionally apocalyptic, this new mood (not "movement") befuddles because it stands equidistant from the conservative view of tradition as receptacle of humane values and the sublimated Utopianism of avant-garde antitradition. It is about neither conventional nor innovative results, but about authentic motives. It celebrates will, not intention or form. It goes after "meaning" in a direct rush, not much caring what gets knocked down in the process. It looks barbaric from the viewpoint of civilized reason, perhaps even more so than did the counterculture of the 60s-because its instincts are not generous.

Obviously, I am talking about more here than the art world; I'm talking about a mood that infects the culture at large, including the popular culture. But a characteristic of much new art, as I see it, is precisely to symbolically engage the whole culture, forsaking both the comfort and the depression of artistic isolation. I am ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I like rebellions against the flab and gentility of official taste, and pluralism has indeed become official taste, a taste (or lack of it) that trivializes the meanings of experience in order to make nice. On the other hand, like many people, I fear the darkening future. Perhaps the only thing to say about the traditions of our art at present is that, if they seem in disarray today, it may be nothing to what they will seem tomorrow. "With terror and delight," in Baudelaire's phrase, we seem to be entering a new period of chaotic change. Things are starting to happen fast, as I know by reflecting that the tone of this recent Chicago round table already sounds to me like something from a rapidly receding past.

Thefollowing is an edited version of a round-table discussion among Chicago artists, with the participation of Dennis Adrian, a free-lance critic, conducted on 21 December 1980 at the home of Jonathan Brent.

JONATHAN BRENT: Let's begin with the question of what kind of tradition you see yourselves working in and whether it limits what you feel you can do in your work.

MARYROSE CARROLL: A lot of young artists that I talked with in Europe, mostly in England, a few years ago, kept announcing their dream of coming to this country to escape being stifled by a burdensome sense of tradition. They envied our freedom, which, until that time, I never realized we had. I don't believe the discovery has changed my working attitude. As a contemporary artist, one expects total freedom.

ED PASCHK.E: My experience, contacts, and associations with young European artists are somewhat limited but my impression was fairly similar, in that I felt there was a strong sense of tradition on all levels. There is a kind of low-grade tendency or influence in a sense of tradition when you're there in Europe working-as opposed to this country.

VERA KLEMENT: But wasn't one of the traditions for rebellion established in Europe?

DENNIS ADRIAN: Well, that's the way the futurists talked and they're the model for all the antitraditional art and literature movements, including dadaism. And those things, the futurist points of view, were published all over Europe at the same time. Wasn't the futurist manifesto published in both the Figaro and in London in 1910? It is interesting that European artists seem to have invented that. And futurism was a movement involving literature, music, architecture, painting, and sculpture. And that is the model antitraditional statement.

BRENT: If there's no sense of tradition, can there be an avant-garde?

ADRIAN: It isn't my perception that anybody thinks about that. I'm pretty sure that none of the artists here think in the studio, "Now is this am I going to be avant-garde today? Is my new work avant-garde? Am I kicking the pins out from under tradition?"

KLEMENT: Don't you think even though the artists in the studio don't think it consciously, the heavy emphasis in art school teaching, at universities, and the art market to present avant-garde is a silent pressure?

PASCHK.E: Isn't there also very strongly in art history we're always going to evaluate about who's the most original. And so if you're always going to have that lesson taught that this person Picasso, whoever, is more important because he's more original in his statements. Innovation, or advancing thought, is the name of the game.

ADRIAN: I don't know that that's so widely held anymore, though. Because

no one can decide what is original. Or now that the critical thinking, even in teaching, that if most art is about art, then, by definition, it cannot be original, in any ultimate sense. And what's the point of worrying about that? Because it all involves subsuming other points of view and other experiences and other works. And what's taught is not so much avant-gardism, but the history of the avant-garde and it almost In American education I think it works two ways; the history of avant-gardisrn is taught as a moral lesson, which says it's O.K. to be antiestablishment because you'll end up there anyway. It's the point of teaching that.

PASCHKE: So today's revolutionary is tomorrow's establishment? Change is always met with a degree of resistance.

BRENT: Well, how can you even be revolutionary ifthere's nothing to work against?

ADRIAN: I think one thing that makes American art so great is who cares about tradition? It's not that you're against tradition, but it's not an important factor in making art.

KLEMENT: But how can you make art unless you understand tradition? Where would your ideas come from to begin with? I mean, art is a form of language; you don't invent that language, you don't invent English-it's already there.

ADRIAN: But there's a difference between self-consciously working in a tradition that you have adopted and therefore have made a definition of. Say, Lesley's figurative paintings-where he has decided that Caravaggio is it with little additions of David and that he is going to work within or perhaps extend that point of view, but I think you could also have imbibed many aspects of different traditions that would go into your own point of view, and that's what comes out. But you're not saying, "Hmmm I'm going to work within the tradition of...... Still, some artists do seem to choose that.

ROBERT LOSTUTTER: I think you get all the tradition you need in school. You're taught that that's where you are and what tradition is. And after that, you have to find your own art. You're going to have to go for your own art, and tradition doesn't have anything to do with it.

CARROLL: I don't think tradition starts or stops with school. We have all received a tradition of visual history and a tradition of how to see. Then, as you said, we "have to find our own art." But in doing so we start to select and respond personally to those traditions, sometimes without our being aware, consciously, of the reference.

PASCHKE: Maybe at a certain point you stop absorbing tradition in the same way and you begin synthesizing out of it. In many cases it becomes an unconscious part of the work process.

CARROLL: Possibly the synthesis can be aided by knowing one's grandparents, so to speak, as well as one's visual parents. For example, when I

started doing large-scale, nonobjective sculpture, I was responding immediately to work by David Smith and Mark di Suvero. Once I had read Jack Burnham's Beyond Modern Sculpture, I had a better understanding of the Russian constructivists, whose ideas, in some essential ways, di Suvero, Smith, and myself are continuing.

KLEMENT: It's interesting to look at a primary source, like if I tune into Rothko, let's say. And then I look at early Russian icons and I see what he derived from these icons. And then I, instead of looking at him, look at the icons. There's a really rich resource. But I love tying into the past and to other

PASCHK.E: See, here you're talking about two different kinds of tradition or two different meanings of it. What we started with was Europeans not wanting it-almost running from-tradition. And what you're saying is that a healthy art needs some tradition a linear progression.

BRENT: I think you'd all pretty much agree that America now is something of a center for the arts, and I'd like to talk about some specifically new things that make America the center.

ADRIAN: It isn't anyone thing. America is like Europe in the seventeenth century: there is a relatively consistent culture with very striking, local, intense peculiarities. It's like Baroque art: Caravaggio and Rembrandt are both Baroque artists but you would never have confused them. And one can say that Paschke and anybody else and Vera are both contemporary artists; you would never confuse them. Is the one more advanced than the other? That doesn't have anything to do with it. It's this acceptance that the most productive kinds of artistic cultures entertain and foster and solicit many diverse, separate, distinct, contradictory, and even mutually exclusive points of view. And everybody's very happy with all of that.

KLEMENT: But isn't there, under all this diversity, a very negative aspect that this diversity is the result of a philosophical loss? A loss of belief of some kind

ADRIAN: No, I think it's maturity. I think it's getting over the naive stage that you must believe in someone or something.

KLEMENT: Well, I'm not advocating one over the other; I'm interpreting the symptom.

ADRIAN: No, I think it's a mature phase.

KLEMENT: You mean, man has matured and, therefore, allows himself to be playful and diverse?

ADRIAN: Well, I think visual art has matured to that stage.

CARROLL: People are a little more accepting now of what Dennis just said, too. There's not one train of thought that everybody has to jump on if you want to make it in New York. That, for some reason, disappeared within the last ten years. Claes Oldenburg's advice a few years ago was that I had the

freedom to work any way that I wanted. He, in tum, must have started under the inescapable presence of abstract expressionism.

KLEMENT: I tend to see pluralism as despair­

ADRIAN: Oh, I don't.

KLEMENT: -as not knowing what art is, not knowing what life is, not knowing what the world is, and scattering in every different direction in an effort to find meaning.

CARROLL: I feel the same way you feel, personally, but only in an overview do I get very pessimistic.

ADRIAN: This, too, will pass. While it's here, I think it's real healthy. I think it's

LoSTUTTER: It's certainly good for me.

Freedom in experimental music: the New York revolution

Peter Gena

Where there is so much talk of liberation there are sure to be very disturbing reverberations within the world of established, acceptable criteria. The liberation of words, objects, sounds, etc., should be seen as different from the confusions surrounding the idea of making them free. They are already free, before anyone ever thinks of using them. The idea of them being liberated is relative to the use that they have been put to (and enslaved by) in the past. They cannot be more free than they are, but they can be liberated from their conceptual inheritance, and we from ours. That is the point at which we can realize that we are already as free as words, objects, and sounds are. Everything is then free to move in all directions to all meanings. [Earle Brown, 1965]1

There is little doubt that history will see no greater departure from tradition in the Western arts than that which took place in New York during the fifties and sixties. Manhattan enjoyed the presence of an extraordinary colony of visual artists, writers, and composers who freely supported individual ideas: artists Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns; poets John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara; composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff; and countless others. In music, radical disregard for the previous methods of control and construction distinguishes the experimental composers from the European avant-garde and the academic serialists. The philosophical leader of the experimental group was John Cage, though it would be erroneous to place him at the head of a "school" as he was more of a catalyst than an influence. His work gave the others, in all disciplines, encouragement to continue with their own experiments. The results were an exciting flow of works from these maverick composers, each unique in approach but bonded by a common goal: freeing the elements-a music whose materials and ideas were not exclusive, but allinclusive.

John Cage, Cartridge Music. e 1960 by Henmar Press.

In order to interpret properly how freedom distinguishes the new music from the old, it is necessary to begin with an historical examination of the elements (pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration) as compositional issues in the realm of process, form, time, and space. Western musical tradition has been preoccupied with construction from the medieval modes to the serialists. In the Renaissance, musical form began to shape itself around tonal aspects of line, where both the vertical and horizontal applications of pitch came into playas counterpoint, and polyphony replaced isorhythmic organization. The contrapuntal voices were often adjusted at spots to conform with what were the beginnings of harmony, which in turn gathered momentum toward short-term cadential goals. Shortly thereafter, formal unity became dependent on tonality and key relationships between major juxtapositions of surface material. Similarly in the visual arts, Renaissance painters began to organize space into two dimensions through the use of scientific perspective. Although both tonality and perspective continue to enjoy a deep-rooted tradition, they are by no means universally adopted. Each technique simply supplied a focus for unity in form, and such developments represent a small sector of world art.

One goes too far in accepting the implication that because tonality is, more or less, supported by the natural harmonic series in terms of consonance and dissonance, it is the natural musical language. Recent studies show that neurons along the basilar membrane of the cochlea are lined up to fire according to the series. Although this undoubtedly facilitates the perception of pitch and perhaps influences instrument design, it does not necessarily dictate harmonic or melodic preference, as our most rigid tonal sense was generated from an "adjusted," equal-tempered tuning system. Indeed, early tonal music indicates that there was a practice of utilizing a wide variety of tunings and interval sizes. Given this, in the presence of world music. we can understand the ear's adaptability.

In visual art the arrangement of color in a work may suggest a type of tonality, harmony-or dissonance. However, in most art before 1900 representation determined the properties of form, which depended on how realistic images were organized in space. Hence, timbre corresponds to color, whereas tonality functions like perspective. Though the nature ofall music is inherently abstract, tonal progression may have approximated the ideal of visual realism. Perhaps, as Morton Feldman suggests, composers have learned to project images in time:

We are taught to think of music as an abstract language-not realizing how functional it is, how related to that other spirit, whether it be literary or a literary metaphor of technique. Can we say that the great choral music of the Renaissance is abstract? Quite the opposite. Josquin, who had a genius for making a gorgeous musical coloration around a devotional word, uses music to convey a religious idea. Boulez uses it to impress and dazzle the intellect by representing

what seems to be the mountain peaks of human logic. One takes it for granted that Beethoven's Grand Fugue is composed of abstract components making a magnificently abstract musical whole. It was only recently that I really began to hear it for what it is: a very literary stormy hymn-a march to God. Music can't be so very abstract when it serves such different and such definite functions!'

Form in music from the Baroque period through Romanticism imposed perceptual boundaries in conjunction with the structural components of the overall tonal plan. Unity is implicit in tonality, while formal design works within the framework of an inevitable, teleological, basic harmonic and scalar progression. A limited variety of these progressions, as originally suggested by the Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), are indigenous to common practice tonal movement. All other musical parameters support this structural hierarchy, and are generated around this "Ursatz" in time.

Those whom we normally identify as the radical forces in the recent arts (e.g., Schoenberg, Debussy, Ives, Satie, Cage, Manet, Cezanne, Joyce, Stein, Duchamp, Picasso, Pollack, and Rauschenberg) did not necessarily destroy aspects of tradition single-handedly. Beethoven often misaligned tonal and formal drama in his later works-classical form was bulging at its seams. The spread of equal temperament in tuning not only crystallized a complete harmonic language for functional tonality, but it supplied the very impetus for its eventual destruction as well. Common tones separated the diatonic notes; unorthodox modulations and chromatic sequences led to atonality (or pantonality). In the visual arts, as color patches replaced chiaroscuro and Eastern influences broke down perspective, a reappraisal of realism was required for impressionism and cubism. A new awareness of the surface revitalized art as art. At the tum of the century, composers began to reevaluate the "surface" parameters of music (articulation, timbre, rhythm, pitch, and dynamics). Organization of these elements became even more crucial than before, since the focus of the work was no longer imbedded in the security of tonal progression or perspective. Gauguin often depicted depth in his paintings by careful selection of warm and cool hues. Debussy and Stravinsky often overlaid linear repetition to hold sections together temporally. Edgard Varese generated movement by stratifying sound. It is futile, if not impossible, to attempt to define a basic aesthetic or a common human criterion that all music or art must meet in order to be considered palatable, especially in the light of Satie, Duchamp, Cage, and Rauschenberg. The notion that music is a universal language is merely a naive description of common practice music, normally subscribed to and propagated by hard-core romantics and veteran conductors. We can accept basic physiological truths about the ear, brain. and perception-as well as the laws of physics and mathematics-but individual societies interpret the roles of sound determinants through time in vastly different ways. Correla-

tive to rapid changes in twentieth-century Western society and worldly cultural access through mass media and technology, the treatment of musical parameters-indeed, the interpretation of what parameters are-has undergone many radical revisions, the least of which is the dissolution of tonality. However, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical tradition, more than in the other arts, has nurtured aesthetic criteria and thought into a rather logical but resilient mold. Unfortunately, much music criticism still clings to values that, for the most part, served the concept of tonal unification: goaloriented progressions, phrasing, counterpoint, sectional form, variation, development, etc. The traditional critical assumption seemed to be that music had to go somewhere. In contrast, Jung cites Pollack's action paintings to demonstrate unity in abstraction and chaos. He asserts that such works represent the unconscious self, which is at the core of the human psyche: "The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. 'Lower down,' that is to say, as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world. "'3 Clearly Jung comes the closest in identifying a universal structural order.

Before World War I, Schoenberg saw atonality as the logical path to pursue in the aftermath of tonality. This departure was less a freeing of melody and harmony from the system than a conscious downplay of the traditional configurations of pitch, and an emphasis of the traditionally dissonant intervals. The intentional avoidance of consonance ultimately led him to systemize his selection of pitch in order to neutralize hierarchy, i.e., the twelve-tone system. In Schoenberg's case, we can perceive such "abstraction" as emanating from expressionism and, to some extent, the abstract artists. Kandinsky and Mondrian avoided concrete objects to create a "pure reality" removed from subjective conditioning; the only element of Schoenberg's music that departed radically from tradition was his treatment of pitch. Aspects of texture, form, rhythm, and duration were, for the most part, subjected to rather conventional application. Anton Webern began to extend serial principles to rhythm and dynamics. More importantly, he dealt with musical space and form as it reflected a new awareness of time, unmolded by tonal structure-somewhat closer to that inner expression, or mysticism and collective unconsciousness, sought after by the abstract artists. Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Brown, contrary to Webern's academic followers, saw virtually no importance in the rationale of his serial technique, but were taken with his timbral sound and its integration with silence. Erik Satie, on the other hand, employed tonal and modal imagery as sonic material with no implied dependency on harmonic organization, progression, antecedent/consequent phrases, development, transition, or variation.

The directionless repetition in much of his work creates a music stripped of dramatic symbolism-sound for sound's sake in a static time domain, a compilation of unconscious, noncontextual images-ultimately a music that blends casually with life (e.g., Furniture Music, 1920; Vexations, 1892-93).4 Satie's music was less related to the abstract artists of his time than to the dadaists and surrealists such as Duchamp, Dali, and Picabia. Here, noncontextual juxtapositions reached the soul of the subconscious in a region beyond the immediate visible reality. Duchamp went the furthest by attempting to demote craft and visual appeal to a status well below that of the idea, allowing the viewer to interpret and complete the aesthetic experience. In the Large Glass he allows, as Satie does, life to enter through his art (the "canvas," being glass, is transparent). Dali often strengthened the depiction of reality by mixing it with fantasy.

In the thirties and forties John Cage noticed that, although Satie and Webern approached sound in two different ways (Satie through static, nonfunctional tonality/modality, and Webern through a rational method of constructing successive sonorities), they both used duration as the guiding force of their music instead of counterpoint and structural harmony. He concluded that this was the proper approach, as duration is the only determinant of music that is expressed by either sound or silence. Cage championed the integration of silence-allowing the sounds of nature (background noise) to enter into the music. He likened this to the glass houses of Mies van der Rohe, where the surroundings can be seen through the structure, or to Richard Lippold's wire constructions, which people could see "through."! In his early pieces Cage laid out form by dividing time in rhythmic structures, simply as a measurement of quantity, such that the content (or lack of content) of these units had no influence on the outcome of the structure. In his excellent book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, Michael Nyman pinpoints the ramifications of this concept: "It may seem that by laying out and filling empty spaces of time Cage was cutting music off from its supposed natural, organic roots-its source of growth. But Cage was in effect 'freeing' music-or, as he might have put it, freeing sounds of music. For he was advocating that music should no longer be conceived as rational discourse, concerned with manipulating sounds into musical shapes or artifacts (motives, melodies, twelve-tone rows) as though they were made parts of a discursive language of argument."6

The logical end to the process of using durations as a frame to be filled with sounds and/ or silences is Cage's notorious 4' 33" (1952), a threemovement piece that contains no specified sounds-the score instructs the performer(s) to make no sounds (tacet) in each movement. The duration of the silence adds up to the length prescribed in the title. Here, the distinction between "wanted" (music) and "unwanted" (noise) sound breaks down, as the material that fills the durational grids consists of all desirable sounds: the

environmental sounds of the audience. Therefore, not only freedom, but equality of all sounds is stressed (I use the term "equality" to imply the right of presence, and not necessarily equal volume). In painting, Robert Rauschenberg dealt with the same issue in his White Paintings (1952), where the viewing public casts shadows to create images on the all-white canvases. Both works allowed life to enter into art; art and life were no longer to be separated. (As seen above, this ideal had precedence in both Satie and Duchamp.)

4' 33"gave birth to many misunderstandings about Cage, his philosophy, and the concept of indeterminacy. The type of freedom indicated in this piece may initially suggest chaos, indeed anarchy-an ideology still embraced by Cage-and the naive presupposition that "anything goes." Unfortunately, many younger composers understood this as giving them license to do anything. In fact, we must honor Cage's belief that chance processes and the use of the I Ching (the English translation was introduced to Cage by Christian Wolff) in composition imposes a greater discipline than control, in that it removes the influence of personal choice; no attempt is made to "improve" on the chance relationships of sound events in the interests of artistic taste as altered from life. Cage allows the music to pass through his process, preferring to accept rather than make sounds:

It can be seen as changing the responsibility of the composer, in making choices to asking questions. And then the questions come by means of one thing or another, that is beyond the control of the person asking the question So what I've had to do is to decide what questions to ask. Once I've decided that, I become, as it were, simply a means by which other things can happen that are outside of me, in which I don't myself change I hope in that way I become open to possibilities and events that were not in my mind to begin with.'

There is but a short step from this point of view of compositional process to the expanded role of the performer in pieces that are "indeterminant with respect to performance."* Here the composer allows the performer to make certain choices pertaining to pitch, duration, texture, or form-many of them during the performance. One can indict a composer who takes this position for shirking from his/ her responsibility, while encouraging the performer to become lax in his/ her traditional duties (as a skilled technician) of following meticulous detail. On the contrary, the artistic sensibilities of both composer and performer are intensified such that immediate demands on technique are imposed, necessitating an even greater discipline. The creative process and its realization are lifted from the page in near simultaneity. Similarly, Pollack, with his quick, bodily motions in the direct, continuous application of paint, was interested in a real-time transfer of the creative process to the canvas. Pollack's condition of"directed accident" and

• Cage credits Feldman with being the first to do this in his graph music in 1950.

Cage's "purposeful purposelessness" unmistakably shared a common philosophical base.

The acceptance of disorder appeals to the inner structure of the psyche as identified by Jung. However, the degree of disorder or entropy and the extent of its uniformity through time and space are crucial concerns in the finished work of both Pollack and Cage. A uniform distribution of random elements cannot permit totally unrestricted action unless that action is precipitated without personal or technical bias. In the case of the performer, this is quite an impossibility; so constraints are normally built into the performance instructions, ostensibly to act as a safeguard. It must be remembered that, in 4' 33", the word "tacet" specifies that the player(s) make no sounds. Hence, as Cage has often said: "Anything goes only when you have nothing to assume."

We begin to surmise that much experimental music lacks a perceptible correspondence between the microscopic level of organization, and the macrostructure. Where one may discern homogeneity in the overall form of a piece because the quantity of disorder or entropy appears to be uniform, the events in shorter temporal lengths succeed virtually unrelated to one another. This represents a marked contrast to most Western music, in which construction of the whole was dependent on the relationship of its parts, i.e., form and function cooperating to create order. The other extreme, redundancy, through its high predictability, satisfies the condition for high order but low entropy. Rudolf Arnheim, in his important essay Entropy and Art, sees the justification for both indeterminacy and minimalism in the arts: "Surely the popular use of the notion of entropy has changed. If during the last century it served to diagnose, explain, and deplore the degradation of culture, it now provides a positive rationale for 'minimal' art and the pleasures of chaoS."1

The actual measurement of sound events for their information content or redundancy level is not an issue here (I feel neither a need nor a desire to justify any music through analysis). However, the concept ofform takes on a particularly new meaning in relation to time, in recognition of entropy theory. Cage's preference for the flow of sound events without direct intervention or control, removed the directional succession of time from the boundaries of a piece, or its beginning, middle, and end. Likewise, the somewhat even concentration of energy in action paintings and much of minimal art and music eliminates a directed path during the perception of the work-it would make no sense to frame the large canvases, or place a permanent, total duration on such a composition. Lengths of pieces were often agreed upon by the performers, or decided by how much program time was available. In the music with lengths specified by the composer, the passage of time does not delineate time in the structural sense. Instead, there is often a presence of accumulated sound events in the time domain, often

collecting on the surface. The graph-notation works of Morton Feldman (e.g., The King of Denmark, 1964; Intersection 3 for Piano, 1953), or even his later, precisely notated pieces (The Viola in My Life, 1970; For Frank O'Hara, 1973), despite fixed lengths, certainly support this notion. The exact notation carefully directs the listener to the sonorities in nonreferential time.

Perhaps Henri Bergson's observations pertaining to time and motion are apropos. He proposed that since our minds seek fixity, we perceive duration as an unfolding ofjuxtaposed static events where the contents are displayed the same way regardless of speed: our memory records it "out of time" and our consciousness reconstructs the movement.? The nonevolutionary status of the sound does indeed separate content from duration. Brian O'Doherty's thinking must have been influenced by Bergson when he described the effect of Feldman's music on the perception of time:

"Real" time then, its literal passage, is used to denote a convention of time, a fabrication. Time is used to destroy time. The resulting stasis is what opens the way to the spatial idea. And in turn the spatial idea more or less suggests simultaneity, the possibility of seeing all the piece at once. Here we have telescopic reciprocities occuring between wholes and parts. And this implies a control of remembering and forgetting, or rather a prompting to forget. I get the idea occasionally that time is being reversed and cut up, bits of the future interspersing bits of the past (entirely acceptable if you spatialize time). Therefore, though one knows more or less where the sounds may be coming from, one does not know where one is. This may to some extent explain the feeling one has in Feldman's music of an exact and maddening superimposition of logic and enigma. 10

What remains is sound as structure, while form is generalized; or, as simply stated by Christian Wolff, "Form in music could be taken as a length of program time. "II

In the present context, it is easy to understand why sound itself did not come forth as an uncompromisable and structural entity in Western music until this century, most noticeably in the early experimental music of the fifties. Actual sonorities, though often very carefully constructed, were rarely elevated to structural status-to stand alone as sound. I like to believe that, in special areas of Beethoven's late piano sonatas (Op. Ill, for example), his brief excursions, as they transcended the formal limits, were more about sound and less about progression. Also, repetition in the late nineteenth century often appeared to be generated out of variety in sonority and a growing awareness of nuance. But the idea content of music was transferable to other combinations of instruments."

An expansion ofthe limits of sonority by extending the resources of sound does not constitute sound as structure. We are not simply looking at new

• ActuaUy, Schoenberg was successful in using sound as sound in No.3 of the Five Pieces/or Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909).

orchestration methods for composition, but new compositional issues fabricated from sound. Varese called for a reevaluation of sound and noise as an enrichment of sonority; he shared this basic premise with the Italian futurists. He did not orchestrate pitches as much as he built sonorities in the musical space by linear stratification. Both Stravinsky and Feldman were known to compose at the piano. However, Feldman's instrumental works cannot exist musically as piano reductions, though the Rite ofSpring and L'Histoire du Soldat do. For Feldman, the piano consists of eighty-eight different sonorities (rather than a transposable system of twelve pitchclasses), each of which acts as a reference to range, not to linear goals. As he selected chords, he committed instruments for each sonority; the piano never interprets or interferes. In this way, the actual instrumentation of a work was sometimes not definite until the last sonority was written (e.g., The Viola in My Life, IV, 1971, where a piano enters for the first time on the last sonority of the piece)."

Feldman's approach is totally intuitive. He treats the page like a canvas, filling the flat musical space with sounds of minimum attack and dynamicsblurring their source, never looking back or thinking ahead. Cage generally suppressed self-expression and allowed the inclusion of the environment as well as simultaneous performances of his pieces (e.g., Cartridge Music, 1960; Atlas Eclipticalis, 1961-62; and Winter Music, 1957). Earle Brown leaned more toward conceptualism, assigning a transitory position to the musical elements in the score that constantly move through the timet space continuum. Few constraints on pitch, tempo, instrumentation, direction, time, form, or space are fixed until the performance (e.g., Fo/io, 1952-53; Four Systems, 1953). Brown preferred the communicative relationship between performer and composer. The spontaneity that results at both the compositional and performance levels shows a profound influence of Pollack, while the "mobility" of the spatial proportions and subjective time schemes in his later scores reveal Brown's interest in Calder. Christian Wolff, like Brown, explores the sensibilities of performers, but his is a type of social communication among players. He supplies material in the score that may consist of musical fragments, graphic indications, printed instructions, or metaphorical outlines; some being very restrictive, others quite free (Burdocks, 1971; Stones, 1968). One performer is directed toward a specific situation that is dependent on what he/ she hears from another player, or in multiplicity performers become responsive as a group without particularly realizingjust how they are affecting one another.

Liberation of the musical elements was accomplished, of course, by new attitudes toward the process of composition. Cage's withdrawal from the

Feldman has often advised that when it comes to defining the instruments at your disposal, "think of yourself as a millionaire."

decision-making process through the use of chance procedures to answer questions about the material, and his Zen-like affinity for time, sound, and art/life, nonetheless, describe a "method" or "nonmethod." In the early chance pieces (e.g., Music ofChanges, 1951) the asking of questions is done at the compositional level; the score is a transcript ofthat procedure; and the performance, for the most part, is fixed. The process is completed before its realization and not perceived by the listener. This applies to most serial music since Webern as well. In common practice music the process is also transcribed on the score, but presumably the listener can hear it during an intelligent performance. The unified transmission between composer, performer, and listener undoubtedly peaked during the highly developmental and variational styles of the mature classical period. In 1955 Cage took quite the opposite view of this communications link: "Composing's one thing, performing's another, listening'S a third. What can they have to do with one another?"12

In Cartridge Music we do in fact see a twofold removal of listener from composer. Cage supplied the materials and instructions from which each performer makes his or her own part for the realization of a performance. The sound-producing media, which are amplified through phonograph cartridges and contact microphones, are freely chosen by players who also make changes in intensity and tone on the amplifiers throughout the entire piece. As the performers follow their parts to determine when to produce sounds, they may accidentally reinforce or cancel sounds of others while controlling intensity. Thus, a spontaneous, indeterminant situation among performers arises over and above that initially supplied by the composer-a condition that Cage has continued to seek in recent works (e.g., 49 Waltzes/or the Five Boroughs, 1977). It is also interesting to point out that in his collaborations with Merce Cunningham, Cage's music is produced independently from the choreography. The two meet only at the performance.

For Feldman, process at any level is not an issue: "There was a deity in my life, and that was sound. Everything else was after the fact. All 'realization' was after the fact. Process was after the fact. "13 As early as 1950, he used squares in graphic notation to specify approximate ranges of sounds in a time grid: "My desire here was not to 'compose,' but to project sounds into time, free from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here. "14 Later he abandoned graph music because of the freedom it gave performers-not the freedom to produce sound, but to place phrases in continuity. He needed to remove that continuity from the performers' options in order to uphold his nonconceptual approach to sound. It was less a question of when sounds occurred in time than where they appeared in time/space. This led to his use of "free durational" music, where all the pitch material is specified, though unbound by metrics. In Piece for Four Pianos (1957), all four players perform from the same part at their own rate creating a beautiful, loose

echoing. The performers do not consciously interact with each other; the shape of the piece itself comes out of its sonic identity. Free durational notation was also employed by Cage (e.g., Etudes Australes, 1974). Feldman's lack of concern for how things were made, a sensibility heightened by his close association with, among others, Guston, Rothko, Kline, and Motherwell continued to dominate his "method" of composition.

Earle Brown moved from the almost content-free pieces of the early fifties (Folio. Four Systems), where performers made nearly all the decisions, to a structural type of "open form" where the score contains flexible, composed segments. Available Forms 1 (1961) takes on form when the identifiable content of the mobile score is given an overall shape by the conductor and players. Corroboree (1964) comes, in essence, with a closed form, i.e., a fixed sequence of interpretable events. Brown articulates the performers' position regarding process:

As to Form in particular in my open form works, I have primarily asked that the form be left open until it is necessarily closed and the material formed by responses and actions within the performing process itself-per-forming rather than pre-forming. I have not, however, prohibited pre-thinking and planning of various kinds in relation to a performance of the materials. It is obviously not sensible nor desirable to expect no-mind in the process; and, in fact, the endless extensions of combinatorial possibilities, both before and during the performing, are intensely mindful.t!

Here, an identity emerges that is quite different from Feldman's. Both process and realization are definable in a work, though they may vary in repeated performances.

Christian Wolff, the youngest composer of this group, began his association with Cage and Feldman in late 1950 at the age of sixteen. His fundamental musical activity took shape in the luxury of this free environment. Accordingly, the early music (e.g., For Piano I, 1952) dealt with a limited number of pitches, durations, and dynamics (Webemian influence), which were selected by the composer. Their sequencing in time was determined by chance processes. As he moved toward interaction among performers (e.g., Summer, for String Quartet, 1961), a collective process became the determining factor in the unfolding of events. The events are made up in varying lengths and are repeatable. Process involves how the players decide to start events, or how they follow by listening for the beginning of a part. Wolff explains this relationship: "People sometimes ask, why don't you specify what you want and be done with it? I do! Actions are indicated more directly and simply. Their results, the sound and rhythm of these pieces (the rhythm, for instance, produced when one no longer knows where one is) could, as far as I know, be brought about in no other way. It's as though you take a walk with a friend or friends, going by whatever ways you like, agreeing on the way, with a direction in mind or getting lost or going nowhere in.

particular and you are absorbed by this: the landscape in which they walk is given."'6

We know that Zen is a way of life rather than a religion. For Cage, chance is more of a philosophy (life) or aesthetic than a compositional device. His process lies not in answers but in questions. Brown continues to search for identity through creative spontaneity. Wolff's social, collective attitudes in respect to performance have led him recently into pieces whose contents are inspired by political causes. In Feldman's music, selfexpression translates into each sonority as feeling and is entirely nonsystemic; compositional process would be a burden. It is clear that these four composers fill the time/ space continuum with events in ways that promote a free creativity, as opposed to a musical structure. The processes set in motion allow for the occurrence of events as individual elements or groups of elements without directing our perception toward formal boundaries.

An attempt to evaluate the profound influences of this experimental group on subsequent generations of composers would require another essay. However, a number of relevant observations are possible. Cage's belief that performers should be physically freed in space (i.e., be allowed to spread out on the stage or performing area, even disseminate among the audience) shares an affinity with theater in that his indeterminant performances eliminate the purpose of a regimented ensemble. His concern with mixed media (theater, film, dance, electronics, etc.) stems from works in the thirties. In 1952 at Black Mountain College he produced the first modern-day happening with David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. Since then, visual aspects have continued to enter into his works (e.g., HPSCHD, 1969). Intermedia works were quite the rage of the sixties, most noticeably in groups such as the Sonic Arts Union (Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma), and Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV: Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum), and movements like FLUXUS (George Brecht, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, LaMonte Young). Indeterminacy, in one form or another, became a popular prerequisite, as did conceptualism (with roots in Duchamp, Cage, Brown, and Wolff) and minimalism (inherent in Feldman's aesthetic, though not necessarily explicit in his music, and the stasis of Webern's controlled variation).

Cage's conviction that theater is not to be separated from music ("listeners also have eyesj has perhaps been carried to its greatest extreme by the FLUXUS composers. George Brecht, formerly a painter and a student of Cage at the New School for Social Researchin 1958, brings performance to the fringes of dada and conceptualism, as the following exercise demonstrates.

TWO EXERCISES

Consider an object. Call what is not the object "other."

EXERCISE: Add to the object, from the "other," another object, to form a new object and a new "other." Repeat until there is no more "other

EXERCISE: Take a part from the object and add it to the "other," to form a new object and a new "other." Repeat until there is no more object. 17

Pauline Oliveros uses meditation to link a conceptual performance directly to an inner consciousness-a midway point in that inner psyche described by Jung.

Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations

V:

Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears."

Her instructions, which describe a mood of sensitivity instead of an idea for realization, extend beyond the performable context that Wolff prescribes in selections from Burdocks:

IV

At least fifteen players in an orchestra. Each player chooses one to three sounds, fairly quiet. Using one of these each time, playas simultaneously as possible with the next sound of the player nearest you; then with the next sound of the next nearest player; then with the next nearest after him, and so forth until you have played with all the other players (in your orchestra, or if so determined beforehand, with all players present), ending with the player farthest away from you.

X Flying, and possibly crawling or sitting still.t

Of the above pieces, the Oliveros work and Burdocks X can be interpreted as a type of prose music that communicates immediately with the reader (listener). Realization of the concept is complete, with or without musical execution. LaMonte Young goes even further by solely indicating real literary images:

01974 by Smith Publications, 2617 Gwynndale Ave., Baltimore, MD 21207. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

t 0 1971 by C. F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Piano Piece for David Tudor #3 (November 14, 1960)

most of them were very old grasshoppers.

Prose music and actual text-sound composition have been explored vigorously by Cage (e.g., 45' for a speaker, 1954-55; Sixty-Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham, for amplified voice, 1971; Empty Words, 1974-75; etc.) and by Wolff (You Blew it, 1971).t Empty Words for solo speaker consists of four 2!.1-hour sections-a total of ten hours-and is perhaps the most extreme example of using elements of language as sound (outside the context of linguistic meaning). Cage subjected the entire Journal of Thoreau to a series of chance operations. Letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, silences, punctuation, and every aspect of selection and placement, were chosen by consulting the I Ching through a list of questions. Successive sections systematically eliminate these elements from the choice process, until the fourth section simply contains letters and silences as sound material. Empty Words reminds us that the multiplicity implied in Cage's processes of composition also allows singularity in objects, which is in line with the allinclusive premise.

The minimalists of the sixties rejected the multiplicity of indeterminacy for the "oneness" of drones and simple repetition (Eastern influences), tuning themselves to the most subtle nuances of sound. LaMonte Young's long performances would often consist only of singing or playing with a single interval, usually generated electronically (e.g., Drift Study). This heightened sensitivity surely was evident in Cage's openness to sound and Feldman's impeccably beautiful sonority. The variety of perceptible nuances increases in minimal music; the listener has the time to focus on the single sound source, its actual production, and its interaction with interference patterns, audience ambience, atmosphere, and room acoustics (an excellent example is Alvin Lucier's Music on a Long Thin Wire, 1977). Repeated performances of some minimal pieces may result in a variety of outcomes, given these conditions. Therefore, minimalism identifies with music that is indeterminate with respect to its performance.

The early repetitive works of the mid-sixties belonged to the minimal concept of stasis created by patterns. Terry Riley's In C(l964) contains fiftythree motives, varying in length from very short to very long, which oscillate around C. The players have the flexibility to decide where, when, and how to enter with motives and how many times to repeat them, but at the same time

• 01963 by laMonte Young.

t Text pieces, of course, have roots in the experimental literary works of writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and the early sound poems ofdadaists such as Kurt Schwitters and Tristan Tzara. Text-sound continues to flourish in the works of recent composers, most noticeably by Robert Ashley and Charles Amirkhanian.

they must be sensitive to the progress of the rest of the ensemble. Riley thus implants a type of formal control along with the completely determinate source material. Philip Glass projects process directly on the surface by extending the initial motives with a systematic, additive rhythmic technique (e.g., Music in Fifths, 1969). In Music with Changing Parts (1971) he frees the unfolding of the process slightly by allowing his performers to change parts (if they so desire) at specific points throughout the seventy-five-minute piece. Recently, Glass has coordinated clear cadences with the rhythmic grids in a totally controlled process (e.g., Einstein on the Beach, 1976). He feels that a very direct tonal progression is necessary, so as not to remove the listener's focus from the logical spinning-out of the form. This idea of using time lengths as the basis of musical construction is naturally reminiscent of Cage, though in Glass's case the cadential progression is of prime importance.

Both Glass and Steve Reich have discouraged outside performances of their works. They insist that the high degree of control in their compositional procedures demands a strictly trained, quality ensemble which must rehearse regularly. Reich also views his pieces as processes; processes that are heard, not compositional processes that simply supply the musical material. Reich initially set up basic motives or ideas that would be repeated by multiple players for long periods of time. The motive first appears in unison and then gradually separates as each individual line proceeds to get faster than the original; this was done electronically (as in Come Out, 1966) or mechanically by performers (as in Phase Patterns, 1970). The "out of phase" effect creates a myriad of resultant patterns and cross rhythms that the listener perceives as "metamusic," a phenomenon created by the brain's perception of unique patterns from groups of pitches in close-range proximity, all of which emanate from quick, repeated melodies. This contrapuntal interaction from a single line was certainly understood by earlier composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, who often employed this technique in his solo violin partitas and sonatas to generate harmonic function. In 1971 Reich began to add instruments for the purpose of reinforcing the metapatterns heard in Drumming. These resultant patterns are also evident in Glass's fast, undulating melodic material without the use of Reich's phasing process. Reich has since abandoned "phase music," but continues to use patterns in rich sonic textures. Like Glass, he too has recently consolidated harmony and form in his works (e.g., Music for 18 Musicians, 1976). Riley continues to improvise patterns around drones with added tape (now digital) delay (e.g., Shri Camel for just-intoned electronic organ, 1977).

Indeterminancy still plays a role in the performance of even the most controlled process music of Reich and Glass, since the metamusic may vary with articulation of the melodic patterns from performance to performance. The use of tonality, witnessed in much recent music, shows a new concern

for an accessibility to the listener, though the present interest in art rock and new wave music undoubtedly can be credited as an influence on young composers. This must not be misconstrued, however, as a return to tonality. The new direct, transparent harmonic explorations could not have appeared without the experiments and aesthetics of the fifties and sixties. Perhaps it represents a modern realism and expressionism that seems to have gained currency in the literary and visual arts as well. Robert Ashley, whose new video opera Perfect Lives, 1981 (Private Parts), deals with contemporary social realism, provides us with some insight: "The imaging of aural-as distinct from 'tonal'-comprehension (to derive specific images, as in dream, from aural patterns) is the condition of deja-vu, or time confusion. The effect gets watered down, but can be prolonged better, as the aural patterns are more specifically tonal. "21

Today, owing to the progressive attitudes and contributions of four New York composers, music can enjoy a pluralism that is unprecedented in the history of the Western world. John Cage, quoting Charles Ives, accepts this vitality with pleasure:

"What music is and is to be may be somewhere in the belief of an unknown philosopher of a half a century ago who said, 'How can there be any bad music? All music is from heaven. If there is anything bad in it, I put it there-by my implications and limitations. Nature builds the mountains and meadows and man puts in the fences and labels. The fences have come down and the labels are being removed. An up-to-date aquarium has all the fish swimming together in one huge tank."22

We must all feel free to share in this optimism. Life demands it from our art.

I. Earle Brown, a lecture from Darmstddter Beilriige zur Neuen Musik X, 1965, reprinted in SOURCE, no. I (January 1967), p. 49.

2. Morton Feldman, "After Modernism," Art in America, November-December, 1971, p. 73.

3. Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (Garden City, New York: Doubleday &. Co., Inc., 1964), p. 265.

4. Satie's own description of Furniture Music is quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins ofthe Avant Garde in France 1885 to World War [(New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 168-9.

5. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 8.

6. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974), p. 28.

7. Quoted in Walter Zimmermann, Desert Plants: Conversations with 13 American Musicians (Vancouver: A.R.C. Publications, 1976), pp. 50-51.

8. Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 11-12.

9. Henri Bergson. An Introduction to Metaphysics: The Creative Mind(Totowa, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams &; Co., 1965), p. 20.

10. Brian O'Doherty, from the liner notes for CRI SD 276, New York: Composers Recordings, Inc., 1971.

11. Christian Wolff, "On Form," die Reihe, Vol. 7 (London), 1965, p. 26.

12. Cage, p. IS.

13. Quoted in Elliot Schwartz and Barney Childs (eds.), Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1967), p. 366.

14. Morton Feldman, from the liner notes for TIME # 58007, New York: Time Records, Inc.

IS. Brown, p. 51.

16. Christian Wolff, from the liner notes for TIME #58009, New York: Time Records, Inc.

17. Reprinted in Nyman, p. 64.

18. Quoted in Marina LaPalma, ed., Catalog of the. New Music America '81 Festival, (San Francisco: New Music Alliance/New Music America, 1981), pp. 10-11.

19. John Cage, Empty Words: Writings 73-78 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p. 179.

SOURCE DISCOGRAPHY

John Cale (b. 1912):

Music of Changes (1951), for Piano. Books III and IV.

David Tudor, piano. NEW WORLD RECORDS 214. 4'))" (1952).

Gianni-Emilio Simonetti. CRAMPS RECORDS CRSLP 6101.

Indeterminacy (1959); "New Aspects of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music," lecture of 90 stories performed simultaneously with the solo from Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58) and Fontana Mix (1958). John Cage, speaker; David Tudor, piano and electronics.

FOLKWAYS FT-3704 (2 records).

Cartridge Music (1960).

John Cage and David Tudor, performers. MAINSTREAM 5015. Atlas Eclipticalis (1961-62), Winter Music (1957), and Cartridge Music (1960); performed simultaneously.

Ensemble Musica Negativa, Rainer Riehn, director; Lissa Bauer, Chaia Gerstein, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Gertrud Meyer-Denkmann and Mario Venzago, pianos; Fred van der Kooy, mix. DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 137 009.

Song Books I-II (1970) combined with Empty Words II (1974-75).

Stuttgart Schola Cantorum, Clytus Gottwald, director; John Cage, speaker. WERGO 60074.

HPSCHD (1969, jointly composed with Lejaren Hiller), for 7 Harpsichords, 51 computer-generated tapes, films, projections and lights. Antoinette Vischer, Neely Bruce, David Tudor, harpsichords (3 harpsichord version). NONESUCH H-71224.

Sixty-Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham (1971).

Demetrio Statos, voice. CRAMPS RECORDS CRSLP 6101.

Etudes Australes (1974), for Piano. Books I and II (Nos. 1-16).

Grete Sultan, piano. TOMATO 2-1101 (2 records).

49 Waltzesfor the Five Boroughs (1977), "For Performer(s) or Listener(s) or Record Maker(s)."

Alan Feinberg, Yvar Mikhashoff, Robert Moran, pianos; with auxiliary sounds and environmental tapes from the various areas of the boroughs indicated on the score. NONESUCH DIGITAL 0-79001.

Earle Brown (b. 1926): Folio (1952/53).

Ensemble Musica Negativa, Earle Brown, conductor. EMI C 165-28 954/57.

Four Systems (1954).

Ensemble Musica Negativa, Earle Brown, conductor. EMI C 165-28 954/57.

Available Forms (1961).

Rome Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Madema, conductor. RCA VICS1239.

Corroboree (1964), for Three Pianos.

Yuji Takahashi, pianos (multi-tracked). MAINSTREAM 5000.

Morton Feldman (b. 1926):

Intersection 3 For Piano (1953).

David Tudor, piano. ODYSSEY 32 16 0302.

Piece For Four Pianos (1957).

David Tudor, Russell Sherman, Edwin Hymovitz and Morton Feldman, pianos. ODYSSEY 32 16 0302.

The King of Denmark (1964), for Percussion Solo.

Max Neuhaus, percussion. COLUMBIA MS 7139.

The Viola in My life (1970). Nos. I-III.

Karen Phillips, viola; Anahid Ajemian, violin; Seymour Barab, 'cello; David Tudor, piano; Paula Robison, flute; Arthur Bloom, clarinet; Raymond Des Roches, percussion. CRI SD 276.

For Frank O'Hara (1973).

Members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, State University of New York at Buffalo, Jan Williams, conductor. ODYSSEY Y 34138.

Robert Ashley (b. 1930): Private Parts (1977).

Robert Ashley, voice; "Blue" Gene Tyranny, piano, polymoog, clavinet; Kris, tablas. LOVELY MUSIC LML 1001.

Perfect lives (1979); "The Bar."

Robert Ashley, voice; "Blue" Gene Tyranny, piano; Jill Kroesen, chorus; David Van Teighem, percussion. LOVELY MUSIC VR 4904.

Alvin Lucier (b. 1931): Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977). Electronic. LOVELY MUSIC LML 1041 (2 records).

Christian Wolff (b. 1934): For Piano 1 (1952).

David Tudor, piano. WERGO 60063. Summer for String Quartet (1961).

Matthew Raimondi, K.enji K.obayashi, violins; Walter Trampler, viola; David Soyer, 'cello. MAINSTREAM 5015. Burdocks (1971).

David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, John Nash, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff, performers. WERGO 60063.

Terry Riley (b. 1935): In C (1964).

Terry Riley and Members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, State University of New York at Buffalo. COLUMBIA MS 7178. Shri Camel (1977).

Terry Riley, electronic organ. CBS M 35164.

La Monte Young (b. 1935):

31 VII 69 10:26-10:49 PMfrom Map of49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery.

La Monte Young, voice and sine wave drone; Marian Zazeela, voice.

EDITION x RECORDINGS.

23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM the volga delta.

La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, bowed gong. EDITION x RECORDINGS.

13 1735:35-6:14:03 PM NYCfrom Map of49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery.

La Monte Young, voice and sine waves; Marian Zazeela, voice; Jon Hassell, trumpet; Garrett List, trombone. SHANDAR 83:510

14 VII 73 9:27:27-10:15:33 PM NYC Drift Study.

La Monte Young, sine waves. SHANDAR 83.510

Steve Reich (b. 1936): Come Out (1966).

Electronically manipulated voice-track. ODYSSEY 32 16 0160. Drumming (1971).

Steve Reich and musicians. 3 DOG 2740 106 (3 records). Music for 18 Musicians (1976).

Steve Reich and musicians. ECM I 1129.

Philip Glass (b. 1937): Music in Fifths (1969).

Philip Glass, electronic organ. CHATHAM SQUARE 1003.

Music With Changing Parts (1971).

The Philip Glass Ensemble. CHATHAM SQUARE 1001/2 (2 records).

Einstein on the Beach (1976).

The Philip Glass Ensemble. TOMATO 4-2901 (4 records).

Freedom and control in twentieth-century music

M. William Karlins

In twentieth-century music the words "freedom" and "control" have assumed great significance. They have actually polarized composers and performers into separate and/ or opposing camps. We have seen completely controlled music (i.e., total serialization) and absolutely free music (i.e., many chance or aleatoric pieces).

Is it possible to compose totally controlled music without the freedom to at least choose the method of control? Is it possible to be totally free without at least an intellectual control of the decision to do so? How does the composer determine what to be free of or from? Just what does freedom and control have to do with communication? After the fact, isn't the most important function of any art to communicate with the people in one's own culture? Should the artist be concerned with the human gesture, that is, the inborn genetic makeup and the special, culturally acquired actions of human beings, in one's society?

I have chosen a short and simple poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Rain," to help illustrate and answer these questions:

The rain is raining all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea.

In "Rain" Stevenson has constructed a simple work of four lines with six words to a line. Lines 1 and 3 include eight syllables. Lines 2 and 4 have six syllables, each word having one syllable. The only three-syllable word, "umbrellas," comes in the only line that does not include an alliteration. Therefore, line I has two words, "raining" and "around," that have two syllables; the fourth line has one three-syllable word but no two-syllable words. Thus the third line takes on a certain emphasis, creating a climax that resolves in the fourth line, ending with the rhyming word "sea."

There are instances of alliteration and words containing similar sounds throughout the poem. "Rain" and "raining" in the first line suggest "around." The "a" sound continues in "falls" with the continued emphasis on "f", which goes to the "e" sound of "field" and "tree." While lines 2 and 3 are connected by a common starting word, "It," they are also connected by the "r" and "re" sounds in "rain," "umbrellas," and "here". Line 4 moves the alliterative words from the second and fourth words (as in lines I and 2) to the fourth and sixth words, emphasizing the new sound "s" and creating the cadence rhyme between "tree" and "sea." This is the only rhyme in the poem.

This short and incomplete analysis is very much like the analysis of a short piece of music. While it does not outwardly consider freedom and control, it does suggest that much or all of the poem was calculated and highly controlled. Just how many choices were made by consciously controlling the material is a matter for speculation. Certainly, the requirements of the English language and of the gestures basic to Stevenson's society were important to his choices and to the ratio of freedom and control he used while creating the poem.

Let us go one step further. I have composed two variations of the poem using a logical method of controlling the material. Observing that the poem has twenty-four words, I freely chose to take the first and fourth words of each line to form two new lines of four words each. I applied the same method to the second and fifth words, and to the third and sixth words. The result is a six-line variation of the original poem:

The raining It field It the And ships rain all falls and rains umbrellas on at is around, on tree, on here, the sea.

Being a rather traditional person, I altered the variations by placing capitals and commas at the beginning and ends of lines, respectively:

The raining it field, It the and ships, Rain all falls and, Rains umbrellas on at, Is around on tree, On here the sea.

The pleasure of this construction is that it breaks into three groups of two lines each, with important words ending lines I and 2 and 5 and 6, and with practically the same word beginning lines 3 and 4. The last two lines contain the rhyme, which is also pleasing.

Another variation was composed through the freedom of rotating words within each line. One strict control was that no word from anyone line could move into another line:

It the raining field, It and the ships, All and rain falls, At umbrellas rains on, On around is tree, On here the sea.

The freedom of rotation allowed me free choices that had to do with the control of word placement. This freedom of placement can control the form as well as the total sound of the poem. There were many possibilities. The ultimate choices were satisfying to my ear but always followed those self-imposed rules that controlled the parameters I wished most to regulate.

This variation also breaks down into three groups of two lines. Again, the rhyme is maintained at the end of the last two lines. Here the groupings are emphasized by placing common starting words at the beginning of lines I and 2, and 5 and 6. The word "on" used in lines 5 and 6 is set up by placing "on" at the end of line 4. The fourth line could have read "On umbrellas rains at," but the reiteration of"on as the first word in three consecutive lines was not a choice I wished to make since it would destroy the control of the symmetry. Also the fourth line is the only one that I decided would sound better not ending with a noun or verb. The "t" sounds at the beginning of lines I, 2, and 4, and the reiteration of the final "s" in "umbrellas" and "rains" in line 4 are attractive. A final"s" was not used in line 4 since it would connect it too directly with the first half of the poem, and because the word "on" had to end line 4.

There are other places where certain words have been manipulated in order to make a pattern. Lines 2 and 3 are connected by the placement of "and" as the second word in each line. "Raining," "rain," and "rains" are all placed as the third words in their lines. Of course, the third line could have read "And all rain falls," but it would have sounded too much like a continuation of line 2. More importantly, the rhythm would have lost its interest. As an interpretive aside, when reciting the variation aloud, I would pause after the first word of each line (i.e., "It the raining field, All and rain falls," etc.). The fourth line is the weakest in that regard but remains my choice because of its "t" sound. Lines 2 and 3 have, besides their common "and," last words that end on "s",

Endless variations can be composed by rotating line order, word order, etc. However, that is unnecessary, for the point has been made that freedom and control go hand in hand when composing. While the theme and two

variations are a simplistic abstraction, they do include the kinds of calculations which go into the composition of a piece of music.*

We should discuss why some of the art of the twentieth century has not communicated with its audiences over a relatively long period of time. That the original poem communicated better than the variations is due to its concern for and involvement in the basic human gestures of human beings in Stevenson's society and with those of mankind in general. We simply deny that all healthy humans are born with certain similar inborn behavior patterns. Human beings in different cultures have certain similar types of actions, activities, and rituals. They also acquire certain actions that are unique to their individual cultures. I call the combination of these the "human gesture" of the culture, and agree with Desmond Morris that "cultures are not as different as they seem. If you look for differences you will find them, but if you look for similarities you will find plenty of those, too. Unfortunately the natural inclination has been to notice the differences and overlook the similarities. It is rather like a tourist visiting a foreign country. He is impressed by the few unfamiliar elements he encounters and ignores the many familiar ones The often striking, superficial variations in social behavior have been mistaken for fundamental differences. "I

It should be obvious that every person has something individual to contribute toward the expansion ofthe human gesture. Naturally, as time passes some human responses will cease to be important, and may even seem alien to the culture through disuse. The artist is in the unique position to introduce his personal expansions and elaborations of the human gesture, so that the art and the human gesture itself are constantly changing in a natural way. Attempts to impose gestures contrary or unnatural to those of the prevailing society have not worked. The successful iconoclast knows just what and how much to break down. New images may be built by responding to, or inventing upon, ones that naturally come forth from the creative mind. Like those variations of the Stevenson poem, mechanical calculation, without a preestablished image from the human mind, will most often fail, even though the calculated image may respond to analysis and prove itself, in that way, logical.

The creation of music is not more cerebral today than it was in earlier times. Rather, some of the compositional materials we control are alien to the listener and performer (i.e., new attempts at creating cadences and melodic lines, music without conventional melody, harmony, and rhythm; new electronic sounds and new sounds from ordinary instruments; scales with more than twelve tones [microtonal music]; the use of noise and silence,

• While music uses pitch instead of words and includes such parameters as octave placement, dynamics, and counterpoint, and harmony, which create density, the idea of using a poem as source material in an article is convenient for people who may not be able to read or analyze music.

etc.). These sounds give the impression that the music is simply a product of calculation. Our music no longer has the conventional, standardized "grammar" that came out of the long tradition of tonality, which is understood by the concerned audience. Without such a common language, it becomes more difficult to compose. Each piece attempts to create a new language of its own, or to expand upon a language related to that of other pieces written in an as yet unestablished musical language.

It is unfortunate that some music in the recent past has become famous more because of how it was organized than how it sounded. The logic of its procedure was important to composers because it appeared that new languages were evolving. It became very important, therefore, to be able to master these languages. To calculate a piece of music in a common language is less difficult, because then we are already aware of the techniques and gestures that will constantly communicate. Therefore, it is easier to expand upon the given language when trying to express something new than to attempt to build a new language with little dependence upon the old. One can imagine what it would be like were we to attempt to create new spoken and written languages, instead of constantly expanding and/ or altering the ones we have.

Musical language does not consist of pitch only but of all musical parameters. We have found over the centuries that the proportions of consonance and dissonance in pitch content, as in most other parameters (i.e., rhythmic dissonance, tone color, density of sound, etc.) have changed, sometimes radically. We have also found that any pitch, if properly approached, can be made to sound like the tonic (proper ending) note. Yet these modifications have been accepted as natural into the ongoing musical language. It would appear, then, that these differences over the centuries are related to the ways in which human beings alter the manner in which they respond, through social change, to other inborn activities such as laughing and crying.

The composer must recognize and accept his will as creator and accept his mission to change the status quo of his culture. He must try to impose upon society that which is genuine to him and could therefore become natural to his society. If a normal person is frightened, he will certainly not exhibit signs of calm in his culture unless he is trying to cover up his fright. His body will experience his fright and deal with it in the same or similar manner as people in other cultures do. The reactions of a person of one culture may appear more exaggerated or more reserved to someone of another, but there will be little doubt as to what is being experienced. Therefore, the composer/ creator who contemplates an exaggeration or restriction of a musical gesture may choose to use an alteration that he recognizes as a conceivable human gesture. Thus, music changes in a natural manner.

It is obvious that concern for the human gesture does not guarantee a

good piece of music. That mystery will probably remain unsolved. It is also clear that freedom and control of material has little to do with communication. Rather, it is the material upon which one imposes freedom and control that matters most.

There may be a point beyond which control or freedom can interfere with communication. If one has the freedom to choose a system ofcontrols over a piece of music, he may choose a system that offers total control. This is done by organizing the parameters of a piece beforehand, and by designating how each parameter will work without exception to the rule. The piece begins to work through the predesigned system on its own. Further influence by the composer from measure to measure is made impossible. (This kind of system could work if the composer designs a way in which he can interfere with or superimpose his personality upon the controls.) The reverse may be said of total freedom. In both cases there is a random result that makes it impossible for the composer to assure that the music will be involved with the human gesture.

Anything a composer does now is considered music because of the lack of a norm. This freedom from standardization can be a heavy burden. As a literary example, there was a time when certain words were considered "dirty" to most people in our culture. As our language loosened up, these words became much more acceptable, so that some now may be included in everyday conversations without any embarrassment or anger. Because of this freedom of expression, our language has lost a good deal of its power to offend or to shock. As obscenities and other kinds of words and expressions become neutralized, the power to express without recourse to a new language or to the absurd becomes difficult. The composer finds himself in this position to an extreme degree. Charles Wuorinen makes this point in his book Simple

Composition:

Much more responsibility for making decisions rests on individual composers nowadays than it did in the past. Certainly from the 17th century onwards until the 19th century, when the principles of composing tonal music were the "laws" of music, and an awareness of other ways of doing things existed in no western mind, much of the burden of compositional choice was assumed by convention and tradition. Composers in those years really had only to fill in surface detail. This, of course, in no way minimizes the greatness of the achievements of the Bachs, Mozarts, and Beethovens-nor our love for their works, as listeners. But composers must try to be clear-headed about the circumstances in which they compose. The artists of the past were not burdened with the necessity of making basic decisions. We must make fundamental choices. They had security. We have freedom.2

Later in his book, Wuorinen writes, "It seems to me that art requires for its highest practice a long initial period of subjecting self and submitting to constraint and discipline. Remember always that freedom can be had only if it is earned; in art it is earned by prior submission to discipline. And

remember, too, that freedom means nothing unless there are coordinates, fixed and clear, whose very immobility allows the one who is free to measure the unfetteredness of his flight."!

Because the issue of freedom and control is a major one at this point in history, I do not wish to limit this discussion to one composer's viewpoint. Therefore, I have requested a written critical response from several colleagues to the topic, "Freedom and Control in Twentieth-century Music." Their letters were gratifying and extremely interesting. Some were written formally and others in a conversational manner. I am indebted to those who took the time and energy to respond.

1. Desmond Morris, Manwatching (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), p. 13.

2. Charles Wuorinen, Simple Composition (New York: Longman, Inc., 1979), p. 13.

3. Ibid., p. 164.

14 February 1980

My work continues in various ways to exemplify controlled non-intention. What in Zen is called purposeful purposelessness. I was recently asked to distinguish between chance, indeterminacy, contingency, etc., and I found it helpful to separate each of these things and to include, where I could think of them, others, and then to bring them together under the heading of nonintention. We could say then that there are available various kinds and degrees of control, but their common denominator will be a tendency towards freedom (non-intention).

(Good to hear from you)

John Cage

22 February 1980

My books have been an attempt to answer the question you put. Why is it important for you to control non-intention? I long ago accepted the traditional view that the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences. In my search for quiet mind I took the path of Zen Buddhism and had the good fortune to study for two years with Suzuki Daisetz. He one day went to the board and drew an oval on it which had half way up the left side two parallel lines. He said: this is the structure of the mind. The parallel lines are the ego. The ego has the capacity to cut itself off from its experience whether that comes in through the senses

250

from above or in through the dreams from below, or the ego can flow with its experience which goes full circle. Zen wants this flow to take place. Generally students of Zen, in order to bring about this flow, sit crosslegged, and follow disciplines of breathing, etc. which are a purposeful way of reaching purposelessness. Which is to say the ego follows a strict control in order to become part of Mind. I therefore decided, since I was devoted to music, to go out rather than in but to adopt disciplines as strict as those of Zen sitting and breathing. That is chance operations based on the mechanism of the I Ching. Instead of making choices, I ask questions and I accept the answers given by the chance operations.

I am sorry to be so brief, but I am hedged in by many commitments. Cordially,

John Cage

The following is an excerpt from an interview of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Jonathan cou, which Mr. Stockhausen submitted as a response to Mr. Karlins's question. The entire interview initially appeared in the September/October 1974 issue ofThe American Poetry Review.

QUESTION: How much of your music do you think the composer should in fact determine, and how much should be determined by the instrumentalists themselves or, as you said during your talk, by the audience? And how much of your music do you think ought to be handed down to posterity and how much just written for the moment, for the particular occasion?

STOCKHAUSEN: Now the question arises for the musician: what does he do? He reflects nothing but life, nothing but the cosmos, and when we think about the cosmos we see that it's fairly ridiculous to wonder how much is predetermined and how much is left to chance. Are the super novae left to chance or not? Certainly we wouldn't say that the revolutions of the moon around this earth are left to chance, or the revolution of the planets around the sun in the solar system, otherwise there would just be what we call chaos, entropic distribution of the particles, as we say. Well, there you are: how much the musician inclines to one side or the other depends on the kind of spirit that is incarnated in this person. If he is an extremist then he may be an extreme determinist and fight with words, even fight physically against the aleatoric trend, which was actually a necessary expansion of the traditional concept of organization; on the other hand, if one makes an absolute of aleatory methods or chance operations and lets everything happen at random, then one soon reaches a situation where nothing is interesting any longer. because things are just floating around-it doesn't reflect the reality

of the cosmos. If a composer is deeply involved, let's say, in reflecting nothing in his work but the most basic principles ofthe cosmic forces and the balance between them, then he will find a system which is relatively harmonious, as we say, a system where all these different forces are playing together, but with a harmonious relationship between the larger aspects-I always say that the large scale aspects must be ordered in a highly determinate way-whereas the small scale aspects can follow aleatoric principles. Look at a tree and see how the leaves are distributed: count the leaves of a beech tree and compare it with the number of needles on a fir tree: you see clearly whether it's a beech tree or a fir tree. So the distribution of needles seems to be fairly aleatoric as far as the individual needle is concemedwithin a certain range, naturally. If you take off a thousand leaves, you won't even notice because it's still a beech tree. So in the detail, in the smaller proportions, we should leave a lot of space for the aleatory, for randomness. And nowadays we should even determine the degrees of randomness, from nil to total randomness, etc. There you are-a composer is always reflecting a certain degree of consciousness.

QUESTION: There's a question which has been touched on before, but I'd like to dwell on it just a bit, and that's the question of dehumanization in contemporary music that people talk about, specially as regards electronic music. As you know, the two criticisms that have been made are firstly that the medium itself is slightly dehumanised, that things like sine waves are very bare, sterile, and don't have the human eccentricities around them that we hear in the concert hall; the second criticism is perhaps a little more fundamental, and that has to do with the actual content. Although you don't divorce it from the form, you say it is the form, there is some sort of content, and presumably this reflects some sort of social phenomenon. The question is, in effect, if this phenomenon is so dehumanized itself, maybe the art is going to die fairly quickly. If art doesn't have the potential oftouching basic human concerns such as love and hate, these kind of things, can it live? Is it really valid art?

STOCKHAUSEN: Well, there are two possible answers to what you have said. The first one is that it is certainly a mistake to consider all human beings equal. As Albert Schweitzer says, between the ape and the saint there is a whole scale. They all look like human beings, more or less. There are some people who say that from the age of about twenty-three onwards, everybody is responsible for his face, for the way he looks. What we mean by this is that there are very few people who constantly work on the degree of illumination and the expansion of consciousness: we are in a state where human beings are multiplying at an enormous speed, and I doubt whether the most illuminated people will multiply at the highest speed. Which means that the

subconscious is exploding in a very necessary and healthy way (and I stress mb-conscious, not supra-conscious).

The second answer to your question is a little more esoteric. If you have ever heard the name Sri Aurobindo, then you may know that there is this Indian sage who died in 1950, and who foresaw several thousands of years of human evolution, or involution as he calls it. Basically he says that we are nowadays in a situation which is comparable to the situation at the beginning of the film 200] (that's not what he says, naturally-I add this parenthetically) when the first so-called human being emerges from the kingdom of beings that scientists or other human beings do not regard as human. Animals, we would say, though today there is controversy as to whether human beings weren't a special breed from a particular moment onwards. Nevertheless, there is that moment in 200] where the ape takes a bone and kills the other one with it: the flash of intelligence raises him above the others, even though he is physically weaker. Aurobindo says we are at the threshold of a new terrestrial mutation where a few beings, very few for the time being, are changing into something else, into a kind of supra-human being, and what you call dehumanization is actually the fear of the majority that we might not make it. People call this dehumanized; what they really mean, without being able to formulate it verbally in this way, is not dehumanizing but supra-humanizing, or super-humanizing: the enormous jump, like from animal to man, from the man to a superhuman spirit or being. This is certainly true as far as my personal experience is concerned: there are already beings among the human beings who are in every sense far beyond the rest, not only in the way they live and behave, but in what they can really do. And certainly the arts reflect this whole process as well: naturally this is a moment of extreme crisis which, at the same time, is that fruitful moment which comes very rarely in the ages of the world where everything switches onto a new level, or rather, where consciousness switches on a new level (though not in large numbers). We might ask Aurobindo why not all the animals have become human beings. We can say that nowadays they almost have (the chicken farms are retarding the process a bit, but what you eat there is more cardboard than animal anyway). What I mean by this is that we have almost eaten up the plant and animal crust of this world, and transformed it into human bones and flesh, and this process will continue with enormous speed until the middle of the next century or longer, by which time there might be fifteen billion of us, and food will be scratched from the bottom of the sea or produced completely artificially by chemicals: what we actually eat is of little importance. What I mean is that ultimately everything is transformed into human beings, and then there are no animals any more (perhaps we can still see them in a few zoos and in photographs). The principle has been to transform into human beings, so naturally the next step is: what are human beings becoming? Now we can at least say that only very

few will make it: the general fear, the general crisis, simply reflects that process. Most human beings sense they have this inner clock that tells them where evolution is going, but also that they can't make it in this life, so that creates antagonism and fights, and God knows what else: extermination, Fascist systems, all sorts of things. It's a sign of the rebirth of humanity.

Most improvised music is controlled! "Whatever" and/ or "anythinggoes" is not what improvised music is about. It is a contextual situation and those controls are operative in artistic improvisation. For example harmonic, metric and sometimes thematic considerations are the controls in most Jazz improvisation. In so called "FREE MUSIC" the controls are contextualMUSICALITY (what and/ or when to play) and taste are usually what count. There is some past Dada music that requires an elevated state of mind that will allow the unconscious to take over this is the way one would perform pieces like Harold Budd's NOVEMBER 1967.

Completely notated music requires the freedom to let the music breathe, clarify the structure and articulate the contrasts. Control and Freedom are one and the Same!

Bertram Turetzky

I think that my response to questions of freedom and control in my own compositions has to be tempered by my attitudes as a performer in all manner of music, new and old. On a subtextuallevel, the composer is always in control, for ultimately it is he who determines the relative rigor and latitudes within which the music is conceived and notated. In 1980 we have many procedural options available to us, including mixtures of Eastern and Western philosophies. Our own popular music can (and does, in my music) provide an interesting framework for attitudes relative to the freedom ofthe performer.

Of course, in "old music," one knows he is expected to interpret the music-to be the middle man, so to speak, between the composer and the listener. It is too bad that most performers confronting new music are so intimidated (or confused by complex syntax) that the performance becomes an impersonal presentation, not very exhilarating to either the composer or the listener. I think that as composers we must encourage the performers' sense of freedom-even within the most rigorous controls and technical demands that we might impose.

Paul Zonn

At first glance, "freedom"/"control" may appear no more fatuous than any other current dichotomy. Music has not escaped the ingrained tradition of Western European thought to divide and classify, this probably to satisfy an apparently desperate need to impose clear order upon experience.' Even esthetic merit may be held dependent upon degree of order: "That value is enhanced when rich relationships arise from modest means is scarcely a novel thesis. "2

At first glance, perhaps, but the terms are not that binary opposition which tradition suggests. Both "freedom" and "control" are presumably Good Things. I can't think of many composers who wouldn't bridle at being told their music has no freedom (a critic's phrase "lacks spontaneity" comes to mind), and even fewer who would put up with being told they lack compositional control. Further, one need not look far to find explanations of how this compositional strategy or that has permitted freedom within control, or judicious control of freedom. Few appear to be satisfied with either alone.

Writing music is simply making choices, at whatever level and to whatever detail one may feel suitable. That these may be held by the composer to express or affirm some infra- or extra-musical significance suggests that control is equivalent to selectivity and, by implication, to judgment. Analysis may then reveal relationships, some perhaps actually intended, which presumably validate both the composition and the composer's expertise.

I recently received a commission which stipulated "a major work" for the instrument, and this phrase led me to some fairly melancholy speculation about the work's required duration, "expressivity," technical demand, and hierarchical ingenuity of construction. Can an improvised piece be "major"? or indeterminate music, allowing much freedom of performer choice (and the ostensible corollary absence of structural relationships)? Has the composer of such music abandoned control? "responsibility''? The premises of indeterminacy posed just such pesky questions, providing a situation in which any musical event (including no event at all) was as "good" as any other, with no fixed relationships, no hierarchies-in short, no material available for the apparatus of evaluative judgment. Overlooked at first was that indeterminacy does specify controls over what may and may not occur, merely expanding the range of possibilities for choice within the limits provided by the controls, but for many this was insufficient as a legitimate answer.

The solution to make indeterminacy officially palatable was one already affirmed in postclassical serial music. This was the discovery that one could deal with musical process, whether precompositional or in performance instructions, in the same fashion as one had previously dealt with the musical product. As an analogy, compare a painting by Jackson Pollock with one by N. C. Wyeth. The first is a kind of fingerprint of an activity'S having

happened, a record of this activity, with no overt pictorial end or goal. The process has been realized by the painting, which is significant as such a record. The Wyeth, on the other hand, is important as a directed artifact, and how it got the way it did, what activity went into it, how it was made, is subservient: from the start it was conceived and executed to be a certain way, to show certain things.

Musical process could now be discussed, analyzed, and validated as such, and indeterminacy, no longer critical anathema, became merely another process. European composers appear to have found this justification particularly welcome. One example can be taken from many similar statements: Stockhausen is here speaking about Zyklus.

Fields containing points and groups are distinguished by differing degrees of combinatorial potential; in the sequence as composed they mediate continuously between the wholly determinate and the extremely free; the structure having the greatest degree of freedom-the extreme point of "instantaneity"-is formed in such a way that it might well be taken for the extremely determinate structure that immediately follows it.3

The dramatism of a work, previously dependent solely upon its audible rhetoric, could now reside in the making audible of its process, in the affirmation of its means and, in some cases by this, the philosophical rationale behind the means. The possibility could now be acknowledged that one no longer needed to hear the music, that a thorough comprehension of its process was sufficient. Conversely, the performance of the work-the doing of the activity-could become the dramatism, an affirmation through realization, even if ephemeral and unique.

Our concern with order is that, even though we may not be able to eliminate difference, variety, and the unexpected, we can at least invent an ordered manner of thought and speech to deal with it all, to clarify and simplify. However, complexity of the conventions in which any activity becomes dealt with does not change the nature of the activity, although it will almost certainly alter how we think about it. Any activity may be codified: increasingly ornate rules, a growing audience, invention and detailed cataloguing of styles, a special language, the keeping of records, Halls of Fame (or "masterpieces'), a burgeoning literature of commentary and analysis. Finally, given a culture with sufficient opulence and leisure, the level reached may include professional careerism.' arduous and extended training, media exposure, marketing, and, by this time, the real possibility for dishonesty and sharp practice. Two activities variously along this progression are skateboarding and free-style skiing, surely in the abstract no more foolish than the writing of music hardly anyone wants to play or hear.

The special language developed with any such activity can produce whole new areas of discourse. We can even reach a point at which the language and its attendant presumptions upon our thought become so persuasive that the

model thus presented begins to be accepted as a replacement for the activity. At this point one acts in the presence of the world of the language instead of the presence of immediately perceived activity as such, and we become a tribe of structure codifiers. As Whyte remarks about the social sciences, accuracy of the mathematics is confused with accuracy of the premises. Admission to any Arcadia presumes renunciation of the world outside it.

If one does not prefer to stay within the boundaries, to Play up! play the game! governed by the official constructs and artifices, speculation on "freedom"/"control" seems even at best a brief and feebly entertaining theoretical diversion. That making of choices I have mentioned as being the composer's business is not limited by nature. Despite those controls one has decided (by choice!) to impose on its range, his selection of alternative at each point is free, or it is no choice at all. And perhaps 1, 2, 3 n will some day appeal as much to a Yankee as I, 2!

Barney Childs

l. This despite the work of Morse Peckham (e.g., Man's Rage/orChaos)and others.

2. Leonard B. Meyer, "Grammatical Simplicity and Relational Richness: The Trio of Mozart's G Minor Symphony," Critical Inquiry 2:4 (Summer 1976), pp. 693-94.

3. In Karl Worner, Stockhausen: Life and Work, tr. Bill Hopkins (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), p. 42. This position was reached by approaching indeterminacy as the result of statistical and so-called stochastic processes, a direction of negligible concern to New World composers.

4. "I suppose that the first thing one learns, as a younger composer is a kind of folklore, that of the hero. You could say that we have a tradition for the fast young guns in our society; we breed guys who try to outshoot the old guys Robert Ashley, unpublished conversation with Morton Feldman, March 1963.

7 January 1980

In the fall of 1978 I wrote a "Do-It-Yourself-Piece" [The Age of Surveillance] (one of a genre of my devising which entails a typewritten recipe on how to make a piece of music). This one was the fifth in a series (actually, the sixth, as one not so-called qualifies) and like some of the others pushes back the boundaries of what can be called music, since it is altogether verbal, spoken in the normal mode.

The Age ofSurveillance was a reaction to the activities of a campus group of students and faculty whose political convictions are fairly clearly Marxist in outlook. In this context, much is made of sociopolitical significance in art, and a scornful, even at times insulting attitude to all art which has no such intentions is usually projected. Music and all teaching activity surrounding it is rather excessively verbalized. A special jargon is cultivated and forced on others whenever possible. While there are many positive effects of this concern for contextual relevance, there are also quite negative effects. The

aggressiveness and doctrinaire approach are the least of these drawbacks, though they are the most evident. Perhaps the most insidious is the massive use of negative emotion in public meetings to disrupt the expression of contrary opinions. After a year or so of struggling with this situation, I felt impelled to make a critical statement about abuses of freedom ofexpression.

Also behind the conception of this angry piece is alarm over the abuse of electronic surveillance devices, notably in the oval office of the Washington White House, but also by such agencies as the CIA and the FBI and their overseas equivalents in other countries. The paranoid atmosphere created by the constant suspicion that one's activities are being monitored, by one can't be sure who, is a major cause of tension in modern life. One may add to this the vitiation of effectiveness of the expression of opinion by deliberate overloading of the public channels of communication. The first of these conditions is characteristic of police states and any degree of it in a society is cause for alarm. The second is a uniquely American technique, possible only in an atmosphere of overt "freedom of expression." It is an insidious undermining of freedom by means of an abuse of freedom.

I decided to compose a situation which represents itself to be an open forum of controversial opinion, but which is actually riddled with both kinds of abuse. I wanted to write a piece which would demonstrate the vast difference between a truly political artistic statement and the "politicizing" of art by talking about it in a special way.

The Age ofSurveillance attempts to delineate a social abuse by subjecting an audience to an example of it. It comments on fear by arousing it. It abuses communication in order to protest such abuse.

In my opinion art cannot spring from shallow sources such as the projection of ideological or political doctrines. It may project such content, but this is a side effect. The basic context is always more fundamental than such ideas: myths, beyond ready conscious and verbal expression. This is especially true of music. Art has some of the same functions and values as dreams: it puts us in contact with less superficial aspects of ourselves than waking ego-consciousness does. An artist cannot dictate to these sources what he wants to say. He can only dry them up by such an effort.

The power of art lies precisely in its ability to transcend natural thoughts and put us in a mode of symbolism which interconnects all of us in an exploration of the unknown in ourselves. It is only incidentally "psychiatric" or "social" or "ideological" since it transcends such categories. Such issues can be addressed artistically only by getting beyond them to the basic form of experience of which they are simply examples. This cannot be achieved merely by intellectual effort.

Art needs freedom, religion needs freedom, philosophy and science need freedom if they are to plumb such depths. Freedom, like all human conditions, is vulnerable to abuse.

Art needs control, religion needs control, philosophy and science need control if they are to plumb such depths. Control, like all human conditions, is vulnerable to abuse.

Yours,

Ben Johnston

II April 1980

As to the question how I compose, I think of freedom as the result of control, not as its antithesis. (We are talking here about art, not society. There is an analogy with self-discipline, not with social functionings, except to a very limited extent.) Control may be exerted before freedom is brought into action. I usually do this. Control may work entirely in tandem with freedom, but this is more difficult. I usually do this only in addition to applying control ahead of time. As to applying control after allowing freedom, I have not done that except in combination with the other two combinations, another way of saying that it sometimes works best to alternate freedom and control.

This is especially true in group composition. Compare Visions and Spels with Vigil, which it is a realization. In this case the realization camefirst, and the description of how it came into being only later. Whether Vigil is workable as a "recipe" remains to be seen. It has sometimes been described as a conceptual piece.

In my orchestra piece Quintetfor Groups I tried to use various levels of freedom and control from the performers point of view. This is a fairly common way to compose by now. For me in 1965 it was quite new. I measure levels of indeterminacy by using S.S. Steven's nominal, rank-order, internal, and ratio scalar order. Nominal scalar ordering governs soundobject organization. Rank-ordering is the simplest way to use a "parameter" (employing the word in its common "new music" usage). Interval ordering, especially serial ordering, is prevalent today. Ratio ordering governs tonality, metricality and proportional time plans of all types. Statistically speaking, ratio scales are the most precise, nominal scales the least. It is also true that nominal scalar ordering is the most indeterminate, ratio ordering the most determinate. Quintet for Groups is the only composition in which I mixed a wide amount of levels of indeterminacy. I usually keep to one or two with the rest subordinated to those. More rarely I concentrate on one level.

The Age of Surveillance (if not viewed as a conceptual piece) begins to involve the audience. Its content has to do with the precarious balance between control and freedom which the audience actually experiences (or think they experience).

Ben Johnston

Do it yourself piece #5: The Age oj Surveillance

Ben Johnston

LIST OF PERFORMERS:

Chairman/ Moderator of panel

Six volunteer debaters

LIST OF EQUIPMENT:

Two tables and seven chairs

Electronic bugs for audience areas

Loudspeakers for audience areas with cables to booth or off-stage

Every seating area in the audience space is bugged and the signals picked up and recorded on separate tape machines (not mixed). Separate amplification and playback for each separate tape machine is located near and ready to be broadcast toward the area with its bug monitors.

The listeners are duly warned of this in accordance with United States federal law. They are invited to participate in the multiple debate and told that their questions and remarks should be made, as they come to mind, in a normal conversational tone of voice; and that they will be canned for playback in the discussion period after the debate period is over.

The announcer of these remarks is the chairman/ moderator of a panel of six debaters seated in typical convention fashion.

Preparations of the electronic set-up (except for the exact location of the bug devices, which must be in place before any of the audience is admitted) should be done as efficiently and unobtrusively as possible by real technician's assistants able to detect and report or correct any malfunctioning in the devices. They should perform this duty as rapidly as will permit efficiency, and without interacting with audience members.

The debaters should be selected by lottery well ahead of the public event,

An abridged version of The Age 0/Surveillance. 0 1979 by Media Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

from volunteers responding to an announcement which offers six debate positions (see below) and allows a volunteer to express a preference for any particular point of view, or a choice of more than one, or no preference at all. The announcement also states that once chosen, each volunteer will be assigned his debate position by lottery. The six debate positions, numbered 1--6, are assigned when each volunteer chosen casts a die until each has cast a different number. Both the lottery drawing and the die-casting procedure are conducted according to local laws, with neutral witnesses present.

Each debater then prepares a twenty-four minute written argument pro or con the point of view he has been assigned, also rebutting in it any of the other positions he wishes. Each debater must make an honest effort to maintain the point of view he has drawn as successfully as he is able.

The chairman/ moderator will also have cues to speak and to be silent, but he will improvise his remarks, attempting to reconcile as convincingly as possible whatever conflicts are currently in debate. He must have and use unostentatiously a stopwatch capable to timing twenty-four minutes divisible anywhere at ten-second intervals.

The chairman/ moderator must make a cue sheet in the following manner. Prepare or have prepared a computer program.

Goal

Generate first a fifteen-minute section; second, a nine-minute section. Each section is built of subsections whose durations range from ten seconds to three minutes by ten-second increments. (Thus there are a total of eighteen possible durations for each subsection.)

In each section, the probability that anyone of the eighteen durations will be used for a given subsection varies as follows:

The probability that the subsection will be three minutes in duration decreases exponentially from one hundred per cent to zero per cent across the duration of each section.

The probability that the subsection will be ten seconds in duration increases exponentially from zero per cent to one hundred per cent across the duration of each section.

Similarly, for all other possible durations, the probability of shorter durations increases while the probability of longer durations decreases across the time span of each section.

The chairman/ moderator next tosses a die to determine how many panel participants speak at once in each successive time segment and which debater or debaters speak at any given time.

The chairman/ moderator now prepares a cue sheet marked off in tensecond increments, with indications in each chance-determined time frame who is to begin speaking and who is to become silent.

Unseen by the lottery-selected debaters or even by the chairman/moder-

ator, the score of the sound technician has been spattered by him with a diptype pen or by several such pens. These spatters are to be read by him as cues to introduce various kinds of noise, interference, distortion, disruption, and discontinuity into the PA channels. This distortion should not begin until the chairman/moderator's opening remarks are over, which is the start of the stopwatch timing. He mayor may not respond to discreet but preemptory glances from the chairman/ moderator, who may attempt at will to moderate his activity as well as that of the debaters.

At the fifteen-minute cue, a general cue, visible and startling to the audience but not seeming to motivate or cause what happens next, the technician comes on stage as if summoned as soon as he can set levels on the playback. He should seem to be responding to a demand for assistance as he takes over the cueing from the chairman/ moderator. (It is obvious that from the time he comes on stage the distortions he has been introducing into the PA system suddenly cease.)

As soon as the technician takes over the chairman/ moderator's duties, which he does without finesse or subtlety, cueing more in the manner of a musical conductor or even a military leader, the chairman/moderator begins to harangue the audience for not having contributed sufficiently or with adequate pertinence to the subject matter. This part of his speaking may be prepared rather than improvised; but if so it necessarily must be memorized and acted effectively. The chairman/moderator (who has lost his moderation entirely) must strive to override the whole proceeding. At the end he is left suddenly alone in his harangue as everything else comes suddenly upon silence. He stops at a pitch of intensity, stares intently at everyone, turns abruptly and exits.

The five topics offered to volunteer debaters in the lottery all concern freedom or control of artistic expression from (1) a Maoist standpoint, (2) an American Bill of Rights/Constitutional standpoint, (3)a Soviet Russian standpoint, (4) a Zen Buddhist standpoint, (5) a terrorist standpoint (this may be general or quite specific), (6) a Christian Marxist standpoint.

The computer program, generously provided with comment statements, may be displayed on an easel in the lobby. If this is done an accompanying sign should be conspicuously displayed:

TIMFRM PROGRAM FOR GENERATING PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION OF SPEECH AND SILENCE

VIEWERS ARE REQUESTED TO REPLACE NEATLY WHEN NOT PERUSING

DO NOT TOUCH

At each entrance/ exit are stationed three young men (preferably in their early or middle twenties, neatly groomed, clean shaven, with short haircuts, dressed casually in young executive style). They should not be previously known by sight to any of the audience if this is possible to arrange. They detain each member of the audience politely but firmly, requesting each to sign a legal release form for broadcast or publication of his remarks. Those declining to sign are further detained while the "ushers" confer, scrutinize them with seeming casualness and finally wave them on after handing each a leaflet (see below for text).

Similar "ushers" request copies of each debater's script as the debaters leave, presenting legal release forms and adopting the same routine procedure above.

The text of the leaflet is as follows:

IT IS REQUESTED THAT ALL PRESENT AT THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

(I) DO YOU THINK THAT PERFORMANCE OF THIS PIECE SHOULD BE LEGALLY FORBIDDEN'1

(2) WHY DO YOU THINK THAT PERFORMANCE OF THIS PIECE (A) SHOULD (B) SHOULD NOT BE LEGALLY FORBIDDEN?

(3) DO YOU THINK THE COMPOSER OF THIS PIECE THINKS THAT PERFORMANCE OF IT SHOULD BE LEGALLY FORBIDDEN'

(4) WHY DO YOU THINK THE COMPOSER OF THIS PIECE (A) THINKS (B) DOES NOT THINK THAT PERFORMANCE OF IT SHOULD BE LEGALLY FORBIDDEN'

(S) WHY DOES THE COMPOSER OF THIS PIECE CARE WHETHER PERFORMANCE OF IT IS LEGALLY FORBIDDEN'

PLEASE ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS TRUTHFULLY TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITY. DO NOT OMIT ANY QUESTIONS UNLESS YOU OMIT THEM ALL.

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Liliput at the Cabaret Voltaire

Greil Marcus

Freedom can mean the license to do anything, with consequences that may be indistinguishable from crime, hooliganism, or littering. Freedom can also mean the ability to find out what it is that one truly wants to do-to discover, in the memorably overheated words Edmund Wilson penned one night in Paris in 1922, "for what drama our setting is the setting"-with consequences that are unpredictable.

1 "Punk presents itselfforthrightly, and demands that you be for or against it." [Tom Carson, the Boston Phoenix, 1981]

In the 1950s, over ten thousand rhythm and blues vocal groups made records, mostly for tiny, regional, independent American labels. Only the smallest fraction of those ten thousand groups was ever heard by the public-though all were bent on the public, which is to say on fame and money. Nevertheless, this was a surge of new voices unprecedented in American history or in the history of popular culture, and along with other kinds of rock 'n' roll-the rockabilly of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, the urbane R&B of Ray Charles and the Drifters, the irresistible noise of Little Richard, the savvy teen anthems of Chuck Berry (all of whom had their countless, independently recorded imitators)-this event permanently transformed popular music all over the world. It also set the terms for something that would be called "youth culture," which was understood as a new market, though it was more than that.

The second major event in rock 'n' roll, the emergence of the Beatles, produced no such cacophony. Thousands of new bands did appear in the Beatles' (and Bob Dylan's, and the Rolling Stones', and Motown's) wake, of course; the music was again excitingly changed, and linked to youth rebelHugo Ball, 1916. 265

lion in an explicit manner. But by the mid-1960s the independent labels had mostly ceased to innovate or, for that matter, to exist; by and large, major corporate record companies covered the major artists and built a center, so that idiosyncratic music sounded merely cranky. The music business moved toward rationalization; the process would be almost complete by the mid1970s, when conglomerates had concentrated record sales in the hands of a very few interlocking labels.

By this time, though, the flush economy of the mid-1960s had given way to an irrational, shrinking economy that mocked both economic security and traditional values. In 1975, this was more true in the United Kingdom than in the United States, which would take a couple of years to catch up: it is no accident that Margaret Drabble's novel, The Ice Age, appeared right along with the Sex Pistols, for both were a response to a world in which society'S promises were no longer kept and in which those who believed they would be kept were swiftly exposed as fools. In the U.K., as in the U.S. not long after, unemployment, especially among youth, soared, inflation rose, and capital dried up. Panic-based less on concrete suffering than on blocked expectations-set in; so did the instinct to seek revenge.

Rock 'n' roll continued to play out its own story to rhythms that were anything but congruent. Sixties utopianism was reduced to a well-heeled solipsism. Like movie stars, rock stars had made so much money that most were left untouched by and uninterested in what was happening in the world, and their renderings of a life of ease or of small problems proved attractive and reassuring to a very large audience. The center held, but it also emptied itself.

It was at this point that Malcolm McLaren, owner of a London boutique that specialized in outre fashions and a good jukebox, assembled four London teenagers-two petty criminals, one street kid, and one clerk-and set them to rehearsing. McLaren was a former art student, and a former follower of the Situationist International: a group of European writers who from the late 1950s had railed with real humor and real venom-and real thought-against both Stalinism and consumer society; they disappeared after the French revolt of May '68, for which, through Daniel Cohn-Bendit and their own disciples, the Enrages, they had provided the essential texts and manifestos. McLaren had looked to Paris in those days and he had not forgotten it; but he was also a rag trade, pop culture hustler. He had an idea.

The idea was that rock 'n' roll, the primary culture of international youth, had turned into a rotting, moneyed corpse, and could therefore be used as a weapon against itself, against a tired and cramped society, and against history. He proposed, in his plots and fantasies, to (1) turn society upside down, and (2) make a great deal of money. He planned to do this by presenting to the public a near incompetent rock 'n' roll band that would sing with unprecedented fervor about the politics of nihilism, whatever that

was (they would figure it out as they went along). He would wipe out the history of rock 'n' roll, making everything that had come before sound effete, compromised, and cowardly; start the pop culture story all over again; expose the fragility and repressiveness of welfare state capitalism by eliciting a hail of abuse from those nominally in power; and, all in all, see what happened.

The band he put together was the Sex Pistols. The music they presented to (in the early days, forced upon) the public was called punk rock. The Sex Pistols' first single, released late in 1976-after a year of haphazard shows and brilliantly sustained scandalmongering-was "Anarchy in the U.K." It was issued by EMI, Britain's biggest and most conservative label-which promptly dropped the band and recalled the record, leaving the bizarre (and, to Mclaren, ideal) situation in which a nation's most popular record had been turned into contraband.

The disc lived up to its title. It was both mythic (opening with a horrific gale of laughter, and following that with the line, "I am the Antichrist," somehow made credible) and socially specific (England reduced by the last verse to a block of public housing or the chaos of revolutionary Angola); it was both political and anomically thuggish. The record was crude, powerful, alive, and original: unlistenable to some and irresistible to others. It drew a line straight through pop culture; it was ranting, vengeful, and unlike almost all music one had come to take for rock 'n' roll, it did not seek to please.

The singer was named Johnny Rotten (ne John Lydon): he announced that there was no future, and that therefore he intended to destroy the world, or, failing that, to tip over a trash can. As if by fiat, he brought into view, made real, the sort of freedom that is merely license and the sort of freedom that can allow one to realize for what drama one's setting is the setting. Denying the future-and making that denial seem exciting, seem funRotten performed a magical act of deconstruction, and challenged those who heard him to reinvent the present.

The result was not simple. Society did not fall, and Mclaren did not make a great deal of money. But within five years-not the ten years of the 1950s-more than ten thousand groups in the U.S., the U.K., Europe, and points east and west made records, mostly on tiny, independent, regional labels, many of them no more than a typed letterhead and a post office box. Unlike the R&B records of the 1950s, most were not even aimed at the charts: they sought less to sell than to create or discover new audiences. Mainstream rock 'n'roll-the music that continued to dominate the charts and sell millions of copies of albums-went on as before. It also became irrelevant; while conglomerates remained in control of the music business as such-and thus remained in position to exercise control over their artists, to maintain the center-self-censorship vanished. For those to whom pop culture impinged upon real life, rock 'n' roll (which all of this surely was,

2

though many punks denied the connection, like the post- WeekendJean-Luc Godard denying his connection with "cinema'') became a culture that had to be sought out, prized, talked about, that could not be taken for granted: marginal and intense, secretive and ambitious. Unlike the rock 'n' roll of the fifties, it seemed likely to remain that way commercially dubious, artistically ambitious to stop short of losing, realizing, or testing itself as mass culture, but to work as an authentic, international popular culture all the same.

By this time for convenience's sake, by January, 1978 the Sex Pistols had ceased to be. Johnny Rotten had quit the band, immediately following its final performance in San Francisco, refusing to become just a part of "Rock and Roll," forsaking a promised stardom that almost certainly would never have materialized not in the U.S., anyway. But never mind. Rotten had made music so scabrous, so scary, so exciting, and so convincing that no one could follow him; he could not even have followed himself, and so he reclaimed his given name and went on to wreak his vengeance in more gnomic fashion. As Pauline Kael wrote of Godard after seeing Weekend: "Other filmmakers can't walk behind him. They've got to find other ways, because he's burned up the ground."

In that sense, punk really did come to an end: it was a perfect little story, a perfect little media hype, all wrapped up and sent on its way with the final, screaming headlines about ex-Sex Pistol Sid Vicious: ARRESTED FOR MURDER, then, DEAD BY HIS OWN HAND. What, then, of all those people who had glimpsed something new in Rotten's performance?

"Dadaism forced artists to take sides." [George Grosz, Abwicklung," 1924]

In January, 1981, Robert Hughes, art critic for Time, presented a BBC television series to American viewers. The subject was avant-garde art, and Hughes discussed it as an altogether finished thing: as a movement, or a wave, or a disease, peculiar to the twentieth century, that had run its course, turned back on itself, and (in the words of Jon King, singer in the U.K. postpunk band Gang of Four) "gone up its own ass." And yet those who have followed the course of pop music since Malcolm Mclaren attempted his coup might have been brought up short had they watched Hughes's segment on art and politics, "The Powers that Be'" brought up short, and convinced that what Hughes was talking about was anything but finished.

Retitled "The Faces of Power" in Hughes's book version of The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1981).

Hughes's tightest focus was on Berlin dada that strange outbreak of antiwar/ antiart protest, violent noise, blithering politics, and maddeningly garbled poetry that started up at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916and what he put on the screen was eerily familiar. One saw audiences hurling abuse at performers they couldn't, or wouldn't, understand; one saw collages that, even though one was looking sixty years into the past, seemed to show present-day society breaking up and taking new shape; one listened to the still-unsatisfied Berlin dada manifesto of 1918. "Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives," announced a German medical student and mad-dog Cabaret Voltaire veteran named Richard Huelsenbeck, disposing of the reigning Expressionist soul-search with a swipe of his hand, "and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday'S crash." This was the face of dada, and it looked like the face of punk.

Not long after I watched Hughes's program, I went to an exhibit of Weimar photography: a pointed example of Neue Sachlichkeit (usually translated as "new objectivity," though Weimar historian John Willett prefers "new sobriety"), the anti-Expressionist art movement that followed dada in Germany. The Weimar photos looked like the face of postpunk: the severe, witty, tensely inventive music being made by groups which, though often speaking with lowered voices and sidestepping dada/punk provocations, would not exist had not the Sex Pistols, like dada, created an explosion to clear the ground.

The sense of wary distance that governed the Weimar photographs an insistence on the prosaic that nevertheless is not artless in the manner of Walker Evans, but rather always artfully intervenes in the prosaic to communicate distrust of any simple relationship between prosaic images and their real meanings is the same sort of distance that is the most striking characteristic of postpunk. It might seem very different from Huelsenbeck's call for an art of yesterday'S crash, but in its commitment to ordinary life it is only a less spectacular version of the same thing and it is what sounds most "modern" about such postpunk bands as (to name only ten of the ten thousand) the Gang of Four, the Raincoats, PiL (John Lydon/Rotten's group), Young Marble Giants, Delta 5, the Beat, the Passions, the Au Pairs, and Essential Logic, all from the U.K., and the Zurich band Liliput (originally named Kleenex, but only until Kimberly-Clark's lawyers got on the case).

There are literal connections that can be drawn. Malcolm McLaren's eight years in art school had left him well-versed in the story of dada; what happened in Zurich and Berlin six decades ago was almost certainly a model for what McLaren hoped to bring off in mid-1970s London. It's a coinci-

dence that Lora Logic, leader of Essential Logic, is a distant cousin of Kurt Weill-she'd never heard of him in 1977, when she was a sixteen-year-old saxophonist for the seminal punk band X-ray Spex-but her 1981 music shows she's been drawing on the connection as if she's learned how much it might be worth. Nevertheless, the point isn't one of dressing up present-day rock with art history cachet." The point is this: can the past help us understand what choices are possible, what choices are most likely to make sense, after an explosion that clears the ground (or burns up the ground)-a narrowly based cultural explosion that is also a failed political revolt?

Both dada and punk were part liberating prank and part desperate negation. "I drew and painted from a spirit of contradiction, and 1 tried by means of my work to show the world that it is hideous, sick, and dishonest," wrote George Grosz, a born-again dadaist in the Berlin of the late teens and early twenties, and Johnny Rotten tried to do something very similar. Both dadaists and punks denied the worth of the past and attacked the art they thought had shaped and betrayed them-because they thought the past, in the shape of a senseless world war or a corrupt welfare state, had bequeathed to them a future that was unthinkable and an art that was a self-satisfied lie. Both affirmed what freedom they could get their hands on in the voice of nihilism: nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. Whether or not there is a direct line from Grosz's caricatures of loathsome Berlin businessmen, generals, priests, and prostitutes to the Sex Pistols' wildly disturbing"Holidays in the Sun" (set, as it happens, at the wall in present-day West Berlin, gateway to "the New Belsen''), both work on precisely the same terms of refusal and disgust.

The other side of "nothing is true," of course, is "everything is permitted"-which can be a way of saying that everything is possible. As politics, even symbolic politics, which both dada and punk blindly struggled to become, very little turned out to be possible: the same social forces that gave legitimacy and purpose to artistic revolt produced a far more widespread reaction. Looking back, Huelsenbeck, who had chanted his "Fantastic Prayers" from the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire while flogging the air with a riding crop, once said that "there was a moment in Berlin" when he "would have accepted the help of the Devil to change society," but the Devil was otherwise occupied; Johnny Rotten, who proclaimed himself the Antichrist in his first recorded sentence, was little more than a year later best known as an ex-Sex Pistol.

• Nothing could be easier, or more meaningless. The U.K. band Cabaret Voltaire is, of course, named for the original Cabaret Voltaire, but instead of looking for "yesterday's crash," the group looks longingly, pedantically, at the crash of Zurich, 1916, and tries to produce the "bruitist music" (Futurist noise) of which the dadaists were so proud. Talking Heads, the popular, arty, once-punk U.S. band, made a rock song out of a dada phonetic poem by Cabaret Voltaire founder Hugo Ball. So what? An empty homage is not even a touchstone.

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In terms of art, a great deal may be possible. The negations of the dadaists and the Sex Pistols dissolved apparent limits with equal violence, and as violent moral statements, dada and punk made it seem as if art and rock 'n' roll were appearing for the first time, without ancestors, without standards, yet with an undefined but undeniable moral responsibility. The explosion that clears the ground and that is also a failed revolt makes it clear that artas-politics, art as an agent to magically transform the world, is an illusion; it also convinces those who are seizing the new kinds of freedom the explosion has revealed that art, to be interesting and valid and sustaining as art, must be politicized.

With postpunk, as with Neue Sachlichkeit, this argument has not turned out to mean that art should take the form of protest or agitprop-and because postpunk, unlike the more glorified artifacts of Neue Sachlichkeit, is made within a vulgar context of small-scale laissez-faire capitalism and hitor-miss popular appeal, this argument has not led to anything like the utopian (and, ultimately, totalitarian) fantasies of the Bauhaus. It has turned out to mean something close to the opposite: that (to use Robert Hughes's description of the original intentions of Neue Sachlichkeiti art in any form must be "visibly and determinedly part of a social whole, and [its] ambition to work as exemplary public speech, to interpret and comment on and shape the fabric of the time instead ofjust decorating it." In other words, an art of yesterday's crash-from a distance, in a lowered voice. Art becomes more prosaic, and the prosaic becomes more and more accessible to art.

"There is always, in such movements, a moment when the original tension of the secret society must explode in a matterof-fact, profane struggle

[Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism," 1929]

Having served its purpose, nihilism turns into commitment. "I will not give up," says John Lydon, Mr. No Future of 1977. "There is a future. 1 will not accept the nuclear threat as the be-all and the end-all. 1 will not crawl back into escapism. The nuclear threat is just another form of escapism for the manic-depressives. Or alcoholics. Or drug fiends." Pop music puts aside its apocalyptic pretensions and its dreams of revolution (still keeping an eye on the youth riots in Zurich and Berlin in 1981, on Paris in May '68, and perhaps even on that Berlin dada manifesto of 1918).*

And, with the black, Asian, and working-class white riots that spread across Great Britain in the summer of 1981, wonders just how it fits into the situation. The riots began, after all, when hundreds of skinheads-white, working-class youth often linked to the U.K.'s racist, nco-Nazi National Front party-arrived in an Asian London neighborhood for an "Oi" show (Oi is a politically and musically reactionary form of punk rock, aimed at skinheads), vandalized the

Yet at the same time, pop music begins to construct its own political context, because after an explosion that clears the ground, "one's own feelings" seem, to some, less sacred than a conceit, less profound than unreal. Pop can become less a matter of private hopes and romantic fantasies than of consciously shared social facts, less a matter of escapist spectacle than of public speech, less a message than a conversation or an argument. It can posit a public space in which the stuff of pop-private hopes and romantic fantasies, mostly-are changed by the fact of public scrutiny. Private hopes are turned into social facts.

This is a question of voice before it is a question of analytically acute lyrics-rock 'n' roll, after all, is the art of making the" commonplace revelatory. The first and perhaps last thing you hear on the postpunk singles by Kleenex/Liliput, or on such U.K. postpunk records as the Au Pairs"'Diet" (1980) or their Playing with a Different Sex (1981), the Gang of Four's Entertainment! (1979) or Solid Gold (1981), the Raincoats' Odyshape (1981), the Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth (1980), or PiL's Metal Box/Second Edition or Paris au Printemps (both 1980), is a voice that through worry, sarcasm, irony, panic, or humor is manifestly trying to figure things out. It's a distanced, off-center voice, antinaturalistic, almost never comfortable: the voice of an observer, perhaps of one observing oneself. Most strikingly, it is an anonymous voice."

What I mean is that Jon King and Andy Gill of the Gang of Four, Lesley Woods and Paul Foad of the Au Pairs, or Klaudia Schiff, Chrigel Freund, and Marlene Marder of Liliput are not exactly singing "as themselves," not in the way pop music has led us to understand the idea. They are not, as would Joni Mitchell or John Lennon, singing to refine an individual sensibility, to communicate personal knowledge, or to project a personality or a persona on the world. Rather, they are singing as factors in the situations they are trying to construct.

The Au Pairs copyright their songs under the rubric "Ideal Home Noise": the single "Diet" is about a housewife who can't or won't think, the album Playing with a Different Sex about how what we bring to male-female relations limits what we can make of them. The Gang of Four's Entertainarea, and then saw the site of their concert burnt to the ground by Asian youths. What was surprising was that the riots that followed-in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Coventry, and more than a dozen other cities-were not, in the same sense, racial: they were directed against the police and, by implication, the U.K's Tory rulers.

• "We wanted an anonymous and collective art," wrote Hans Arp of Zurich dada. "We buried all namesl Beginning with our own," wrote Neue Sochlichlceit designer Werner Graeff (signing his)-meaning that art must reveal the object or the subject (in postpunk terms-which are more dramatic-must reveal the situation, the condition, the conditioned response) not for what it makes the artist think or feel, but for what it is capable of making various people think or feel: therebydissolving the status ofthe artist-as-artist, and making him or her part of a social whole.

ment! and Solid Gold are, in very different ways, about how the authoritarian personality presents itself as a regular guy and how repression is advertised as everyday life ("Each day seems like a natural fact," says Gill, thus noting that each day is made up of unquestioned assumptions about what's "natural"). Liliput's songs are about women and the possibilities of play and rant. But this music is also about the anonymity and the distance of the voice that gets these things across. The voice says, "Look, this is ordinary life, and you didn't think it was worth thinking about or singing about. It's not sexy, you walk through it each day. One no more questions the signs by which we speak and act than one questions a traffic light." But the voice bears down so insistently, with such a hard sense of bewilderment, fear, bemusement, outrage-or with such qualities so confusingly mixed together and transmuted through the music-that the ordinary becomes very interesting.

The question Lesley Woods's voice raises in "Diet" isn't that of the notconscious housewife-that question is in the lyrics, which are a string of cliches-but the question of how one thinks about the fact that some people don't think. Woods mulls it over: her shifting tones of voice, ultimately, are about thinking itself, and a version of it, seen from many angles, acted out.

"I was good at what I did," Andy Gill-but not quite "Andy Gill, guitarist for the Gang of Four"-states flatly in "Paralysed," the least imposing and most effective number on Solid Gold. It's a song about unemployment, about the shock of a displacement that's both social and private. The piece is so reduced to fact, its claustrophobic, doomy music so reduced to bare rhythms cut up with silences, that the performance seems to turn the singer into a statistic even as you listen: even as the singer makes statistics-in other words, himself-real.

On the Au Pairs' Playing with a Different Sex, "Armagh" is about a lot of things: the British occupation of Northern Ireland, a female IRA prisoner, torture as patriarchy, how speech about atrocities can be conducted without the speaker being drowned out by the subject. As the tune opens, one line is repeated over a popping, searing, but also uncertain beat: "We don't torture, we're a civilized nation-" Other lyrics fill in the details-grim and graphic details-but that recurrent opening line rules the song, not because it's "ironic," but because its irony, attacked by the rhythm and confronted by the acrid plainness of Lesley Woods's voice, is burnt off, and leaves an authentic paradox: the notion that civilized nations don't torture is one of the dispensations by which we live our lives. A situation is set up, and then broken down, and the listener is left to put it back together, if the listener can. In the hilarious and somewhat frightening "Come Again," a woman and a man, both quite unattached, make love. They're trying hard to be modern-no wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am here-and to enjoy themselves, or, at the

least, each is trying to convince the other hel she is enjoying it. Questions keep creeping in, until they take over. What you hear is the disjunction between the hopeful, helplessly addled voice of the man ("AM I DOING IT RIGHT, AM I DOING IT RIGHT?'" and the weirdly distanced voice of the woman-who, as she fakes her way through the act, is judging the action as a cold critic of herself, her lover, and sexual mores in general. You can't help but laugh, and you can't help but feel distinctly uncomfortable. It's as if you've been treated to the secret version of every pop sex song you've ever heard.

Liliput works somewhat differently. Remember the woman Miou-Miou played in Alain Tanner's film, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000? Liliput has the spirit of that character: gay, frivolous, and hard as nails ("It takes nerve to make music like that," said a friend after hearing the band for the first time). The three women, who sing in English but also in bits of pure sound ("Woo-woo-woo-woo" is a big favorite) achieve that postpunk anonymity through apparent noise, a torrent of squeaks, yells, screeches, and rhythms that seem crude only until you realize how implacable they are. There's no room for the exposure of an individual personality here, just the sound of women declaring theirI your presence (as on Kleenex's "You"1"0," 1979, a feminist celebration nicely divided between a "Friendly Side" and an "Angry Side"), having nasty fun (Kleenex's "Heidi's Head," 1978), making demands, or, in rare sober, reflective moments, presenting a catchy version of what it means to be accosted by a sailor (Liliput's "Die Matrosen," 1980), or while hitchhiking. There's a lot ofdada provocation in Liliput: they really don't care what anyone thinks of them, and they'll try anything. "Split" (1980) may be about a hangover ("Last night was a party," runs the almost incomprehensible tag line, "last night the drinks were strong", but it comes off like a free-for-all at a playground, petulant and full of rule breaking, with cries of "Hopscotch!" crashing into shouts of "Hugger-mugger!" "Harikari!" "Hiccup!" and "Hexa-pood!"-whatever that is.

Liliput can also force a listener into a confrontation: their music is not that far from the spare, jarring postpunk of the Gang of Four, Delta 5, or the Au Pairs, but it is far enough away to hold onto more of the Sex Pistols'spirit than most postpunk bands can handle. "Eisiger Wind," the group's 1981 single, begins with a gorgeously lyrical guitar passage (very reminiscent of the lovely piano triplets that opens the Falcons' 1959 R&B hit, "You're So Fine," in fact); you're hooked, set up for a classic rock theme, and then suddenly the entire structure of the song is collapsed and flung in your face. The band replaces something recognizably and conventionally beautiful with what seems to be a shouting match: it's as if a fight has broken out on stage and in the audience, as if someone has rushed the band and seized the mike. One word cuts off the guitar as the melody is trashed and the rhythm sabotaged: "She's-" But it's a one-word manifesto of, somehow, impossible

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power, and it takes over. The new song moves through furious rhythms, screams, exclamations of delight and triumph, and finally, in one last surge, whole lines begin to emerge: something, I once thought I heard, about a woman who demands cunnilingus whether her lover wants to provide it or not. Whether or not that detail is "correct" is beside the point: what counts here is not the specifics of the demand but its momentum, its force. You've forgotten Liliput, interesting postpunk band from Switzerland (with that guitar introduction, you were thinking, Wow, that girl sure can play): this is a public riot.

In such music, anonymity highlights the situation, not what "the artist" is doing with it: the situation of unemployment, bad sex, thinking, official terror, a score of other ordinary matters. Anonymity does not quite mean that the music sounds as if "anyone could make it"-recall the punk rallying cry of 1976-but that the music sounds like a conversation in which everyone is actually taking part. Any sort of pop voice, the sound makes you think, can find some kind of audience to talk back to it. In this conversation, the most obvious facts of life are worth questioning; everyone deserves a hearing and a reply. The music works as a kind of fantasy of good public life, where the affairs of private life-and in postindustrial society, almost everything seems private-are given public significance simply by being presented as if they're puzzling, displacing, contradictory, and most of all, held in common. One begins to get a sense of for what drama one's setting is the setting; each day no longer seems like a natural fact.

"Punk is a mode ofanarchy as much as the Dadaist 'Cabaret Voltairetn Zurich at the end ofthe First World War, and how many people are particularly familiar with that?"

[Isabelle Anscombe, Punk, 1978]

Dada, said Richard Huelsenbeck in 1918, was an "artistic reflex," part joke, part fury: a voice that, given the contradictions of the twentieth century, would arise naturally in response to "offensives, peace congresses, riots in the vegetable market." The voice could be discovered, as it was at the Cabaret Voltaire, a free-floating, arty nightclub act originally intended, Hugo Ball wrote as it commenced, as "buffoonery and a requiem mass," a "Candide against the times"; it could, with a little history in the back of one's mind, be reconstructed, and then, as with the Sex Pistols, sent out into the world to test itself and any situation it entered or created; it could, with history simply absorbed through signs and symbols rather than learned, be discovered again. If it really were a "reflex," then it would be inevitable that it be discovered again.

As a combination of liberating prank and desperate negation, dada is both

a reflexive artistic response to the weight of power in the twentieth century and, after sixty years, a common legacy available to anyone who wants it. For punk and postpunk, dada is more than anything a legend of freedom, diffused through artifacts and styles and stories that may not even suggest, let alone carry, its actual name-just as for uncomfortable, hopeful people scattered all over the world, punk is now a mysterious legend of freedom, a combination of prank and negation that, seemingly by magic, convinced thousands of individuals, otherwise unacquainted and uninterested in their common predicament, that they had things to say to each other. There is, of course, no guarantee that in these hands "freedom" will mean what one might want it to mean: punk's prankish negation, its negating prank, has led as surely to the glamorization and legitimization of thuggery and racism among Los Angeles punks and U.K. skinheads as it has to the politicized artistic context that makes possible the cool vision of the Au Pairs.

For the time being, rock 'n' roll has jumped the track of its own past, and an appeal to Chuck Berry may tell those who are interested less than the half-forgotten words of a 1918 Berlin troublemaker. But history is always necessary-and there is a sense of worth and pleasure one can find in the realization that history contains not only dubious lessons but authentic comrades. It is a point that Liliput has taken pains to make.

In 1916, in Zurich, Hugo Ball dressed himself in a bizarre cardboard costume-variously described as the raiment of a "mystical bishop," a satanist, or an alchemist-and chanted a phonetic poem called "Karawane." Grinning on one face of the sleeve of "Eisiger Wind" and trying to look serious on the other, the Zurich women of Liliput appear in pieces of the very same outfit. Or, as a young factory worker caught up in the riots that have split Zurich for the last year put it, when asked by a reporter if she and her friends were communists: "We are more influenced by British punk, German rockers, and the dada movement-"

Letters

The following letters were received in response to a questionnaire that asked these questions: (I) What do you perceive to be the major political/social/ economic issues of today, nationally and internationally? (2) How do you feel about the safety of the world for future generations, given the extraordinary stockpiling of nuclear weapons, the rapid and seemingly uncontrollable arms buildup throughout the world, and the rampant international spread of nuclear technology? (3) How do you feel your attitudes on these issues are expressed in your work as an artist? Whether they are or not, what do you think is the desirable relation between such admittedly social and political considerations and art? Further correspondence on these or related matters is invited by the editors.

Jonathan Brent

Arms control leading to disarmament. Overpopulation. Conservation. Economic leverage exerted by a few countries at the expense of the many. The development of a democratic system less vulnerable to mobs and money. The meshing of politics (and writing) with reason and ethics. A social, business, and political system based on responsibility. Your second question is loaded. Who could possibly feel that the world is made safer by the production of arms? In the abstract, a world without arms is safest. As soon as arms are introduced anywhere, however, the issue becomes far more complex. It's the weapons of mass murder-nuclear arms, poison gasses, and germs-which make us yell the loudest. A truth is revealed thereby, one we may not like: the more primitive the weapons, the safer the privileged societies and the privileged members of all societies. Now that we all feel threatened all of the time, we are more likely to speak up. Hence, the arms race forces us, ironically, to be aware: we cry out, it would seem, only when the bell tolls unmistakably for us, or at least for a neighbor. In other words, our better-Iatethan-never may be too late, but let's try. Imprecise thinking and expression, phony "poetic" vision and posing, and a soggy bedding down in anything vague or mysterious are right in league with bad and stupid acts anywhere-in poli-

tics, in the military, in schools, anywhere. Literature is not opposed to the problem. Literature-most of it-is the problem. "The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity." The behavior of poets and critics is often self-serving and competitive, and lacking in both philosophy and compassion. I consider myself a poet of ideas, and my ideas are philosophic and generally against the conventional wisdom. It's all I can do, sometimes. A revolution changes governments. Art changes individual consciousness. One is abrupt, the other is slow. We know that revolutions fail and that new rulers become old rulers. Moreover, democracy is not finished yet and with all its problems still has the best chance. The poet who announces that he or she is writing political poems is usually not, but merely mentioning current events or damning evil. Politics is deeper, much deeper, and it cannot exist in poetry without more philosophic and ethical grounding than a simple belief in good and a reflexive hatred of institutions.

The radical thinks mainly of the past and the future, while the artist thinks mainly of the past and the present. The radical lives for a better world tomorrow, while the artist tries to seize the day. There are no pure radicals and no pure artists. Yet these may be the poles and often we see a writer use a political evil

to draw attention to himself or herself and his or her work. On the other hand, how easily praise turns into congratulation and congratulation into selfcongratulation. Finally, art is subversive, but so is clear thinking and any form of reconsideration. It is probably impossible to understand the implications of one's own view unless one fully understands an opposing view in its own terms. In the end, art gathers and reflects and is of accidental use to everyone but the artist. Still, it would be of interest and value if those who write about poems would take the radical step of reading them, not for general themes but for particular ideas.

P.S. and P.P.S. I would write a more political poetry if I could, and I will when I can.

Marvin Bell

1. I refer you to R. Buckminster Fuller's recent book Critical Path. We look forward to the cessation of nationalism and internationalism, the use of intelligence rather than power for bringing about an equation between human needs and world resources such that the present division of mankind into "haves" and "have-nets" will no longer obtain. The law instead of protecting the rich from the poor should change so that poverty is agreeable, as it was for Thoreau.

2. Otherwise there is no safety in the world for future generations. Perhaps a holocaust is necessary to bring us to our senses, hopefully not too complete a one.

3. Art as I see it has to do with changing the mind, turning it away from the confines of ego (art in my opinion is not self-expression) and getting it to flow outward through sense perceptions full circle (the relative, the absolute) and inward through the dreams (Suzuki: the structure of the mind and the philosophy of Zen Buddhism). I agree with the late Marshall McLuhan that through electronics we have extended the central ner-

vous system. The world being a mind can change its mind. The present internationalism is schizophrenia. If art were more socially effective than it is it could be the pleasing alternative to holocaust. It could persuade people (all of them) to change their minds.

Sincerely, John Cage

Dear Jonathan Brent,

Thank you very much for your letter. Here are my responses to the issues and questions:

1. Human, and not just human, but universal rights. Such rights imply respect for people, animals, plants, and what nurtures them, our earth, air, and water. It also implies viewing people as individuals and not as categories.

2. Anxious, apprehensive. It is a fearful situation. Yet goodwill and fear of danger may save us. Democracy, freedom of the press, by making the public aware of the consequences of war, can help preserve peace.

3. An artist loves life; his very art is life. If I strive to express things as best I can, I feel I am doing something for truth and beauty. I think that, ultimately, truth is what is well expressed, and that the ethical, aesthetic truth is at the basis of art, science, politics, philosophy, justice, and our social structure.

Sincerely,

Arturo Vivante

Dear Jonathan:

In brief response to the overwhelming questions: The issues are what they've always been: (a) equality of opportunity obtained without massacre and (b) the collective enterprise expressed not by terror and bellicosity but by projects of exploration and creation. The insane allocation of the world's wealth confirms every pessimistic assessment of humanity. The technology of information

offers the hope that more human relations can proceed at a distance along the lines of equity, but we have always found a way of getting in our own way. The power of modern weapons and our insane piles of it almost persuade the rational person that he's part of a diabolic force, that he's seeing the inorganic taking its revenge on human exploitation of it. The "death wish," the drive to dissolve into component elements, has been discarded as an interpretation of collective process. The artist, more than any other human, goes against the grain of the collective so as to register whatever in him differs (that is, his individuality). By being true to everything in himself that has not been expressed, he becomes a part of the expanded collective, but while he works, he works against its grain. To some extent, he serves to absorb some of the energy which would otherwise express itself in meaner ways. The artist is most political, most social and most moral when he is being true to those insights and feelings which in themselves are apolitical, asocial and amoral. He deepens and subtilizes human possibility which counters hatred and anxiety, broadens tolerance and reemphasizes the human need for equality.

Yours, Richard Stern

Dear Jonathan Brent,

It appears to me that humankind is in a crisis over the definition of life. We keep finding that some people think they should have the decision of life over other people. At one point that was blacks and whites; at another European and Asian; always it has been men and women. One group, one tribe, one culture feels itself superior to another and therefore justified in the mistreatment, if not actual genocide, of the other side. For us today, as simple as it may appear, abortion, euthenasia and suicide are crucial. Men are trying to tell women

how, and under what circumstances, they must present their bodies to another's will. Abortion and rape are clearly twin issues. But the Israelis have the same mentality when they determine they can bomb something, anything, in another nation, in another's home, because it may be harmful to them in the future. The Americans felt the same way about the Indian; the Romans about the Carthaginians. It simply goes on. All other issues, I believe are subordinatewhether it is economic, political or social we need a definition of life that is inclusive of all living things. We can start on the slow side with people and work up to inarticulate mammals then move on to immovable flora and fauna. Whether we wish to admit it or not humankind has recognized, viscerally, that we are a very small, very dangerous species; planet Earth has not been enhanced by our presence. We must consciously change our relationship to each other, to our planet and to the life beyond our planet if we are to survive.

The safety of the world bodes ill for our young. But again I think that the problems of humankind can be solved by human beings. We simply have made no concerted effort in that direction. Education, and not that junk they pass off in schools both public and religious, is key. Reading is fundamental because it allows us to see the progress in some terms and lack of progress in others that the species has made. We must not continue to play on the fears, superstitions and ignorance of Earth's people. We must move toward the 21st century as a species, not as nations or peoples.

I try to reflect in my work the understanding that we are all in this manure pile together. I also try to reflect my belief that we can all get out. Art is and always has been political. In all its forms. Television would tell us on the one hand that one minute to display your product during the Super Bowl will net you so many sells but on the other hand the remainder of the show teaches nothing. 280

Bunk. I don't believe you are what you eat but one's vision is certainly informed by what one sees. The old folk, of course, tell us to believe nothing that we hear and only half of what we see. Even if we follow that advice we still have a dim vision of the world. All of us need to upgrade, to deliberately try a little harder to do more, be a little better, to understand that no matter what it is there will come a time when all that matters is that we tried to do better for those who, if we are proper humans, will come after.

Sincerely,

Nikki Giovanni

Dear Jonathan,

Below are some reactions to the three questions you sent a few weeks ago.

I. Besides the standard concerns relating to energy shortages, misuse ofnuclear energy and rampant inflation, I have become very concerned with the increase in aggressive, violent behavior and, proportionately, the decreasing value of life.

2. Scared, helpless and disillusioned. Betrayed, angry and frustrated.

3. My attitudes are expressed through concepts like confrontation and tension. I use it as the raw material and energy for my work rather than to depict issues in a narrative sense. That is to say, that a wider range of conclusions is more potent than a singularly illustrated one.

Sincerely, Ed Paschke

Dear Mr. Brent:

I read and hear "the news"; I live in my own time. I am, like most, unimportant, and realize the unimportance of the unimportant. I also realize I am uninformed, and probably misled. So far, I have gotten by, and done some work, naturally of my time, but unobtrusively so.

J.V.c.

[J. V. Cunningham]

Dear Mr. Brent,

The very scale of your questions, so to speak, makes bleakly evident the dilemma I feel in trying to answer any one of them. That is, "major political/social/economic issues of today," "rampant international spread of nuclear technology and weaponry," and "what do you think is the desirable relation between such admittedly social and political considerations and art," affect me equally as generalizingly tangent to, not directly engaged by, the "issues." In short, they seem to me part of the same manipulation of attention and civil act. Saying that, I have no thought to attack you, but, rather, to emphasize how inclusive the mode of this use of people has become. Simply ask them questions they can't conceivably answer, generalize their own resources beyond their own sense of possible self-determination, and thereby force them to yield whatever hope of relieving action they might have had. Or give them only the alternative of the I.R.A. or the PLO-which may well be what they're left with at that.

In any case, my answer to your first question reads like the script of any Bmovie: there are people out there who want to reduce us to mindless, powerless zombies of their will, stripped of all political agency or civil place-and they are motivated by unremitting greed for money and power. I believe it, seeing, literally, no reason not to. Therefore I hardly feel secure in the thought that those people, like they say, are those also responsible for the conduct of the arms buildup and its consequences.

Finally, I presume, rightly or wrongly, that my moral disposition is evident in my writing itself, both as a way of proposing the world and of acting in that presumption. I do not put "social and political considerations" in one box and "art" in another. I hate it that people will sell one another so glibly, just to be left with five more minutes of the proverbial peace and quiet, things as they were, etc. At this point, art's the least of my

worries and probably always was.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Creeley

Dear Mr. Brent:

I'm inclined to stay clear of interrogations which presuppose an interacting relationship between the writer and the world around him. But your three questions are simple, and I can give you my replies in a few words.

1. Overpopulation and the rapid worsening of conditions necessary to sustain human life.

2. It seems unlikely that there will be enough "future generations" to warrant consideration of them.

3. At this moment the writer could (but is not likely to) exert some small influence in helping to prepare humanity for its forthcoming extinction.

Sincerely,

Paul Bowles

Dear Mr. Brent:

Yes, I'm quite despairing-and frustrated, because one of my livelihoods is writing NY Times editorials, free-lance; and I can't put in my despair. Also my temperament is that of an optimist, so I find myself twisted askew. Nature is dying faster than civilization, however; so, insofar as I write about nature, I'm a pioneer in attempting to deal with despair. In foreign affairs, I care most about the so-called Third World, which is being neglected to a scandalous, incredible degree in policy matters.

Yours,

Ed Hoagland

Dear Jonathan Brent:

Thank you for your letter of June 23, and forgive me that it took this long to respond. Which is, in a way, part of the problem itself: we postpone for lack of

alternative-or under the illusion that our labors are an elected alternativethe attempt to answer such serious questions as yours.

All serious issues are global these days; they do not respect frontiers. Hunger, pollution, energy, the population problem, nuclear warfare, human rights, racial hatred-whatever crisis one chooses to address, and in whatever ranking-will admit of no local solution. Divisiveness thrives but the world is not now, if indeed it ever was, divisible. Our grandchildren will be in greater peril than we are. This administration is a flock of ostriches; its policies are sand.

The survival of humanity is, I suppose, at stake. And it's less and less apparent that we deserve as species to outrank the dinosaur. But insofar as the solitary artist might find a voice for or give voice to "the major political/social/ economic issues of today," he should do so and we must listen. Partly that's a matter of salvaging the language from its wreckage on speechwriters' desks; one honest man was sufficient to save a city before. Yours sincerely,

Nicholas F. Delbanco

1. Because survival is the sine qua non of all the political, social and economic changes so desperately needed today, the utmost possible participation in the attempt to halt the arms race and dismantle nuclear stockpiles, and thus stave off the ever more urgent danger of catastrophic war, must be the top priority for any thinking person. There is no issue more major. However, the other things that need to be done-the unemployment and world hunger we need to combat, the energy needs we ought to redefine and find safe ways to supply, the pollution and environmental destruction we must prevent, the problems of nuclear and chemical waste that must be solved, the inadequacies of housing, education, and health care (the causes of most crime) to which we must address

ourselves, the racism and other prejudices we must eradicate-all are issues intricately tangled with that major one, the menace of World War III, and it cannot be a question of deferring these tasks until that is averted somehow, for not only are they also urgent but in various ways they are linked to the causes of militarism and war. It is, after all, the same old military industrial complex, which one gets so tired of talking about, that is involved; even the simplest scrutiny soon reveals that it's the same bunch who bring us the whole spectrum of evils: the support of torture and genocide in El Salvador and elsewhere, the busting of unions here, the sale to Third World countries of pharmaceuticals that are banned here, the cynical arms sales to both sides in the Middle East, destruction of the sacred sites of indigenous peoples by uranium mining-etc., etc.-nothing is unconnected. And in the many, many individuals involved in perpetrating these evils, and fomenting the fear that persuades ordinary decent people that they are unavoidable and "acceptable" (including the prospect of nuclear war itself), there lies a deep psychological problem: what are the causes, and what is the mechanism by which they-the politicians, generals, corporate big-shots and their equivalents in non-privateenterprise countries-have shut off in themselves their feelings and intuition, their imagination, and thus their compassion and humanity, to become half-humans suffering the delusion that no matter what happens, somehow they'll be OK? Such questions-of values, ethics, psychology-are also major and inseparable issues of our time.

2. Already answered under I.

3. In my most recent work I've increasingly found the issues discussed above entering into poems which do not start out seeming to be 'political'. Although I wish that angst and a sort of Cassandra tone of warning were not such unavoidably dominant notes in my

work, I'm glad that a fusion of this kind is taking place naturally, since I've long felt that I'd like my "engaged" poems to be no less lyrical than any others; and it is only by such an osmotic process that this can occur.

One of the greatest living poets, Yannis Ritsos, summoned before a high official during the regime of the Greek Colonels (which Ritsos spent in exile and imprisonment) when asked why he, a poet, meddled in politics, replied, "Precisely because I am a poet it is my duty to do so." He said a poet was "the first citizen" of his country-meaning, as one can deduce from his poetry, the most privileged, by virtue of being the bearer and transmitter of the gift of song; and therefore the one with the most obligation. I think that's the answer to the second part of question three.

Denise Levertov

An answer to the three questions in sequence: I'm at that age when the thought of death is uppermost in mind. I think about the life that those I leave behind will be living, surrounded by arsenals of neutron bombs, and I wonder what worth will there be for them in living under the constant threat of annihilation. I also think of the men in power today, many of whom are of my age and with children whom they will leave behind, as I will. Isn't it possible, I ask myself, that they could be thinking my thoughts also, asking themselves the same question in sight of the arsenals they have built up everywhere on the earth? Do they not, like I, realize the horror of leaving behind all of this mass threat to life itself for their children to live with? Is there no sense of guilt, remorse, nausea that their lives have been spent in creating the condition for a catastrophe of the most awful imaginable, the total destruction of the earth and its people? Secretary Haig has children; Brezhnev has children and grandchildren, and there are so many others in

their positions of power who have children, blood relatives, close friends, loved ones. Surely they are seeking a way out of the maze of terror. I simply cannot conceive of these men not thinking and trying to rid the world of this threat. Surely they are all men with normal desires for the perpetuation of their kind in their family, relatives, pets, homes, cities, gardens, lakes. Can we not then hope for their cautious and prayerful approach to the problem, as we raise our voices with theirs so that it becomes a universal supplication-to whom but to ourselves so that we will turn upon ourselves to realize we are our own guarantee of safety and perpetuity. In this I see a world government finally emerging out of the necessity of keeping ourselves alive and our hopes for our children realized in their freedom from fear. This is my one faith in rescuing us from total destruction by our own hands.

As for the major political, social, economic issues of today, when the leading nations begin to realize that all these problems are inextricably bound up with the safety of the world from nuclear disaster, we will begin to see a measured, sane and reasoned approach to the solution of each of these issues. Until then, we cannot hope for solutions at all.

As for reflection upon these issues in the art I practice, these issues inevitably are reflected in the mood I bring to personal problems and in personal problems that I see are inextricably bound up with social, political and economic problems nationally and internationally. We have become one world, but so many still cannot concede that the inevitable has happened. Still, there is no clear-cut need to write of these issues in their literal sense, since as

poets we write out of the world that we create with language and that world of language is never a simple world of "issues." It is rather a world as absolute in itself for each writer as the language creates, with its own referential keys, guides and directions that have arisen in the person from conditioning, training and innate capacity for language, so that as each of us emerges as writer from his or her environment, he or she has the stamp of a unique person. It can happen that a person will be able to write authentically of issues in the style that is the mark of this writer's world. Bertolt Brecht was such a writer, but it doesn't follow that each of us must model ourselves upon his style, and yet each of us knows full well how deeply affected we are by the whole range of problems that afflict the earth, and so each of us works within the capacities given us to express, communicate the very source of our private concerns. Thus, the relation between the social/ political/ economic issues and one's art is never a one to one relationship, and yet every poet's art has within it these elements that can be traced to social/political/ economic conditioning and practice, and are expressive of those issues in terms of his or her personal art. There is no other way for an artist whose one function, ultimately, is to create his or her own world of perception, understanding and spirituality. It is never a life and art totally divorced from the lives of others. It is a contribution to the life of the whole earth in its confounding variety, and so adds to the one voice of the cry, Life, now and forever.

David Ignatow

To a young exile

Surely it is more than inserting the word word

Over others descending in hell

Or rising in scum and mist to ask how one might love this physical disease

To that one whose sex is unknown and immaterial

Ice in the river and ice in the sky,

Ice in the negative and ice on the lens and the eyes

Ice and flowing past us, every part of our inorganic life, oxymoronically spent

Two nations after all like two birds frozen over in pastel dust over their little prey

They were not thinking we could see anything

But we did see the sentences running over and the Two souls you had alas always housed in your breast

The house loves to be cut up

Exterior and interior exiles

I do see and I see also beyond this field of books

Fangs glittering

The nations destroyed simultaneously like fireflies

David Shapiro

Contributors

Theodore Lidz is the Sterling Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine. Robert Coles is the author of the five-volume study, Children of Crisis, as well as books on William Carlos Williams, Erik H. Erikson, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor. He is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard Medical School. Leonard Krieger, University Professor of History at the University of Chicago, has published several books, including The German Idea of Freedom and An Essay on the Theory ofEnlightened Despotism. Currently a Senior Mellon Fellow and Senior Lecturer in philosophy at Columbia University, David Couzens Hoy is the author of The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics.

Jon R. Schiller, corresponding editor for The Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory-whose special issue "Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Language" was recently published-is editing a forthcoming issue on the psychology of the family. "The New 'Family Romance'" is an excerpt from a work-in-progress on incest and Freud's seduction theory. Richard Seheehner is a professor of performance studies at the New York University School of the Arts. Founder and formerly director of The Performance Group, he has directed many experimental works of theater, including Dionysis in 69, Commune, and Cops. His books include Essays on Performance Theory and Environmental Theater. Born in Czechoslovakia, Erazim Kohak is a professor of philosophy at Boston University. His book Narod v ntis (The Nation within Us) was banned by Czech authorities His most recent book is Idea and Experience, and he is completing a study tentatively entitled The Embers and the Stars: An Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, which extends the ideas developed in the present essay.

Michael Wood is a professor of English at the University of Exeter. Eugene Goodheart, a professor of English at Boston University, has published four books, The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence, The Cult ofthe

Ego, Culture and the Radical Conscience, and The Failure of Criticism. He is at work on a book on skepticism in literary studies. Chairman of the English Department at Northwestern University, Gerald Graff is the author of Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society and is presently developing a study of the history of academic criticism. Daniel L. Guillory is an associate professor of English at Millikin University. A regular reviewer for Library Journal, he has published articles in several journals and recently served as a Fellow in the National Humanities Institute, at the University of Chicago.

David Hayman, professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has published articles and books on James Joyce and European fiction. His article in this issue reflects a current project on the mechanics of the contemporary, to be entitled Transparent Bodies. Robert Pinsky's most recent book is An Explanation ofAmerica. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently holds a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is a painter and art critic. A volume of his writing will be published soon under the title Immanence and Contradiction: Recent Essays on the Artistic Device. He is presently a member of the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts. Senior art critic of The Vii/age Voice, Peter Schjeldahl won the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association in 1980. His recent book of poems is entitled The Brute.

Peter Gena is a composer and assistant professor of music theory and composition at Northwestern University, where he directs the contemporary music ensemble. He is co-director of the Chicago Interarts Ministry, an arts presentation group, and of New Music America '82. He is the guest coeditor of an issue of TriQuarterly planned for the spring of 1982, which commemorates the seventieth birthday of John Cage. M. William Karlins, professor of theory and composition at Northwestern, is a founder and past president of the Chicago Society of Composers and is president of the Little Orchestra of Chicago. His music has been performed internationally, and four of his compositions have been recorded. Two works by Ben Johnston received premieres in the winter of 1981-2. The New Repertory Ensemble presented his "Diversion for Eleven Instruments" at Carnegie Hall, in New York City, and the Swingle Singers performed "Sonnets for Desolation" at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where Johnston is a professor of theory and composition. A revised edition of Greil Marcus's book Mystery Train: Images ofAmerica in Rock n'Roll Music, will appear in the spring of 1982. Marcus covers books and pop music for California Magazine (formerly New West) and is working on a book about punk and Dada.

Round-table participants

A lecturer in the Art Department at Northwestern, Maryrose Carroll has had several shows in Chicago and Europe, and was

Letten

awarded the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 1980-1. Ed Paschke, chairman of the Art Department at Northwestern University, is a painter whose works are included in several private and museum collections in the United States and Europe. An associate professor in the Art Department at the University of Chicago, Vera Klement has had shows recently at the CDS Gallery, in New York, and the Deson Gallery, in Chicago. Dennis Adrian is an art historian and critic, specializing in Chicago art Robert Lostutter, a Chicago painter, has had five one-person shows, including a two-month exhibit in the winter of 1981 at the Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York.

John Cale's recent musical works are Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras and Dance for Four Orchestras. He has recently completed a new book, Composition in Retrospect, and two series of etchings, Changes and Disappearances and On the Surface. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who lives in Kurten, Germany, has published sixty-seven compositions, many of which last an entire evening; over seventy recordings of his work have been published. He is also the author of a four-volume collection of essays, TEXTEI, II, III, and IV, published in Germany. Bertram Turetzky, a composer and contrabassist, has published more than 300 compositions and performed in Europe, the United States, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand. Paul Zonn conducts the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble and the Contemporary Chambers Players at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. His "Symphony in F" was premiered in 1981 by the Fort Worth Symphony, under the sponsorship of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Barney Childs is a senior professor of composition and music literature at the University of Redlands, in California.

Marvin Bell, a poet who teaches at the University of Iowa, has published three new books in 1981-2: These Green-Going-toYellow, William Stafford and Marvin Bell: A. Correspondence in Poetry, and Old Snow Just Melting: Essays and Interviews. Arturo Vivante, who contributes fiction regularly to The New Yorker, is the author of a recent collection of stories, Run to the Waterfall, and a handbook, Writing Fiction. He teaches at Bennington College. Richard Stem's recent book is The Invention of the New, a collection of stories. A professor of English at the University of Chicago, he is at work on his eighth novel. Nikki Giovanni has published fifteen books, including eleven volumes of poetry, and has appeared on six records. University Professor Emeritus at Brandeis University, J. V. Cunninpam is the author of Dickinson: Lyric and Legend. The poet Robert

Letten on contemporary music

Creeley's most recent books are Later and Was That a Real Poem & Other Essays. He is Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Paul Bowles has published several books, including a recent collection of stories, Midnight Mass. Ed Hoagland's tenth book, published this winter, is a collection of essays entitled The Tugman's Passage. He is at work on his fourth novel. Nic:holas F. Delbanco's most recent novel is Stillness; his study, Group Portrait: Conrad, Crane, Ford, James & Wells, will appear in the spring of 1982. Denise Levertov is the author of a new collection of prose, Light Up the Cave, and of two new volumes of poetry, Candles in Babylon and Pig Dreams. David linatow is poet-in-residence at York College, in New York City, and visiting professor at Columbia University. He has published eleven books of poetry, including Whisper to the Earth, which appeared in the fall of 1981. David Shapiro is the author of several volumes of poetry and art criticism, including A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel, which was nominated for the National Book Award in poetry in 1971. His recent book is Jim Dine.

Clive James

The Critic in Arms

Frances Fitzgerald

Remembering Vietnam Howard Gardner

The Piaget-Chomsky Debate

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I.A. Richards at Harvard interviews with Mark Strand, Tim O'Brien, Charles Rosen, Frederick Wiseman and poems by Octavia Paz, Charles Simic, Rachel Hadas

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But our special issue will provide English readers with their first general selection (and criticism) of those writers who mark the most important intellectual shift in France since the "events" of 1968. Be d·Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann, and, translated for the first time, G.,.Lardreau, Christian Jambet, and lean-Paul Dolle.

'RaYlllond Aron, Fran�ois Aubral, and Xavier Delcourt contribute essays against the New Philosophy.

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Jack Jones fashions an American reading of Solzhenitsyn presented as complement to the translations.

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Coming in Future Issues of Tri«J2(Y]��

Fiction by Stanley Elkin, Richard Ford, and others

Thomas LeClair on Avant Garde Narrative

An interview with Robert Stone

A Celebration of John Cage's 70th Birthday, with contributions by Pierre Boulez, Merce Cunningham, Morton Feldman, Kathan Brown, Marjorie Perloff, Paul Zukovsky, and others, and with etchings by Cage

An interview with Eugenio Montale

Fiction and poems by Arturo Vivante, Jay Wright, and others. Sophocles translated by Robert Fagles

A novella by William Coven, and more fiction Poems by Pamela Hadas, Bruce Weigl, linda Pastan, Theodore Weiss, and others

Michael Harper on jazz and writing and more.

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Jonathan Brent

leonard Krieger

Robert Coles

Theodore lidz

David Hoy

Jonathan Schiller

Richard Schechner

Erazim Kohak

Eugene Goodheart

Gerald Graff

David Hayman

Daniel Guillory

Robert Pinsky

eremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Peter Schejldahl

Peter Gena

William arlins

Greil Marcus

Marvin Bell

John Cage

Arturo Vivante

Richard Stem

Nikki Giovanni

Ed Paschke

J. V. Cunningham

Robert Creeley

David Shapiro

Paul Bowles

Nicholas Delbanco

Edward Hoagland

Denise Levertov

David Ignatow