CHAPTER 7
Literature
CAN LITERATURE BE EQUIPMENT FOR POST-POSTMODERN LIVING?
Users don’t read. —WEB DESIGN TRUISM1
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that literature was king during the academic postmodern revolution of the late twentieth century. Taking “the linguistic turn” as its central premise, postmodern theorizing in myriad disciplines turned to avant-garde poetics and narrative as models for what the world feels like if it’s structured like a language, if indeed “there is nothing outside the text.” In short, the linguistic turn of post-modernism made textual skills—reading and interpretation—central to discourses and disciplines that formerly had very little overt traffic with the ins and outs of language. From the study of history and philosophy, through the workings of the unconscious and subjective identity, even as far afield as economics and the life sciences, a Saussurean version of language (that socially constructed place where there are no positive terms, only differences) was the postmodern paradigm that overcoded all the others.
Insofar as literature was, to steal a phrase from Kenneth Burke (1973), “equipment for living” in the postmodern era, it specifically served as equipment for making your way through this world saturated with the lacks or gaps so characteristic of the literary hermeneutics that I discussed at length in the previous chapter—undecidable meanings, undecipherable codes, unconscious desires, uncertain values, unforeseen plot twists. The postmodern world was a world where reading or interpretation (specifically understood as the art of inhabiting and maybe suturing such narrative gaps or aporias) was the primary pivot: the referential guarantees of essentialism (the “positive terms”) were dead in all the academic disciplines, so meaning throughout the humanities had to be made rather than found. And what better laboratory than postmodern literature for studying those anti-essentialist, meaning-making operations?
But over the past fifteen years or so, there’s been a slow but decisive turn away from the linguistic turn in the North American academic world. This has perhaps been most obvious in literary studies, which (as I argue in Chapter 6) has swerved away from interpreting texts—from pivoting on questions about textual meaning and its discontents—to examining the historical, archival, scientific, biological, and political contexts of literary production. Likewise, other humanities and social sciences discourses have quietly abandoned the linguistic turn—economics has almost completely reterritorialized on mathemes, and if you told anyone working in contemporary academic psychology departments or in language acquisition research that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” the person would think you were crazy. Likewise, academic sex and gender studies were during the 1980s and ’90s nearly synonymous with the “performative identity” linguistic theories of Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, just as postcolonial theory was for a long time taken with Homi Bhabha’s language-based theories of “dessemi/nation” and “hybridity,” but not so much anymore.
Even in continental philosophy, arguably the home of the linguistic turn, it seems that the deconstructive phase of axiomatic linguistic mediation has been eclipsed. Deleuze is the thinker du jour; and Deleuze’s wide-ranging corpus is, one might argue, held together primarily by his consistent and harsh critique of the linguistic turn. Nowadays even sympathetic Derrideans like Catherine Malabou suggest that if deconstruction is to “live on,” it needs to move beyond its myopic focus on the literary suture of écriture.2 Finally, one might note that in recent biological research (where Malabou suggests we turn our attention), life itself is no longer primarily understood on the genomic analogy of the book (where life contains a hidden code, requiring the scientist’s interpretation), but on a model of the microscopic or molecular, the smallest particles that might be manipulated by researchers. So, with an ironic nod to Marx, one might say that contemporary biology is not merely interested in interpreting genes, but in changing (and thereby potentially financializing) them.3
And this is maybe what biology has most decisively in common with its various sibling academic fields who are fleeing the linguistic turn: they participate in a general movement away from the postmodern metaphorics of socially constructed mediation (the literary problem par excellence, filling gaps and working through undecidabilities), to examining more direct modes of biopolitical and economic manipulation. From a focus on understanding something to a concern with manipulating it—from (postmodern) meaning to (post-postmodern) usage, one might say. And as any Web designer or technical writer will tell you, “Users don’t read.”
Maybe a linchpin for all these disparate anti-hermeneutic maneuvers is found in Foucault’s work on biopower, which Foucault diagnoses as a form of power that works on bodies differently than the institutional mediations of disciplinary training. Rather than see it function as a series of linked practices in play at scattered disciplinary sites (hospital, family, school, workplace, and so on), Foucault sees biopower as a new type of power that works on bodies “really and directly” (réellement et directement) at every point in the power-saturated socius.4 So, for example, your disciplinary identity as a soldier or a student is mediated through training in a specific institution, the army or the school; on the other hand, your biopolitical identity—your sexuality, for example—is under constant construction at all times, everywhere, inside and outside the training grounds of institutions. What Randy Martin (2002) calls “the financialization of daily life” over the past several decades is probably one of the most widespread markers of this smear of power into places where it previously didn’t travel, but the infiltration of subjective identity questions into the spaces of work (the idea that your job is or should be a self-actualization technique, rather than a means to garner the free time to practice self-actualization) is likewise an intense and emergent smear of biopolitical identity questions—which have mutated from previously rarified realms like literature into the office cubicle and the factory floor.
To put it another way, if you understand social power as working inexorably through institutional mediation, then language is a key methodological tool, insofar as language is a figure for social mediation in its most widespread and inescapable form. However, if mediation at privileged institutional sites has given way to direct access of various kinds (if your whole life, public and private, is the surface area of biopower rather than the discrete parts of your life that discipline worked on one at a time), then language will also, it seems, be displaced as the primary grid of intelligibility. When power is at work literally and figuratively everywhere, on the surface of “life” itself, then the spaces of mediation (between the subject and the socius, the body and the state, science and literature, and so on) are no longer the privileged fields where the agon of social power and resistance is worked out in its most intense manner.
Language and literature were king in the postmodern era precisely because they were the most economical markers for the experience of a social world where essentialism had lost its explanatory focus, and the mediations of social construction were the questions du jour. And if understanding an anti-essentialist world of endless mediation is the problem, then language and literature constitute the most obvious place to begin looking for a solution (or at least a grid for understanding the problem). If not, probably not. In other words, maybe this post-postmodern (anti-language or anti-hermeneutic) set of stances is not exactly a return to essentialism (as some have charged),5 but rather a recognition that not all deployments of force (social, biological, historical, unconscious, etc.) can easily or satisfactorily be modeled on a Saussurean understanding of linguistics—that we’re looking at a mutation or evolution of paradigms rather than a simple return to the essentialist past. Indeed, fifty years hence, one imagines that people will puzzle over why so many people in the twentieth century thought that language was the privileged paradigm for understanding literally everything else.
In a slightly different lingo, one might say that if “fragmentation” (the anti-essentialist necessity to put disparate things together) was the watchword of postmodernism, then, of course, reading follows as post-modernism’s linchpin practice, largely through synecdoche: the hermeneutic conundrums of literature (especially avant-garde literature) functioned as the part that stood in for the whole postmodern world of piecing together undecidables. Post-postmodernism, on the other hand, seems to take “intensification” (an increased spread and penetration) as its paradigmatic ethos, with globalization as its primary practice—all access all the time. And this historical shift of focus or orientation inverts (and maybe destroys) literature’s privileged synecdochic role. In short, in our critical work throughout the humanities we no longer tend to go to the revelatory “part” in hopes of grasping the larger “whole” (arguing, for example, that reading Gravity’s Rainbow gives us a window into the workings of the world at large, the contradictory logic of everyday life); rather, we now tend to start with the larger, post-postmodern whole (e.g., globalization), of which any particular part (say, postmodern literature) is a functioning piece. To repurpose a quote from Gravity’s Rainbow, it may be that post-postmodernism “is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting-into” (Pynchon 1972, 3); and if that’s the case, the “disentanglement” function of literature (the interruptive, hermeneutic power of reading’s hesitating slowness—its questioning of “meaning”) becomes increasingly less useful as a way to engage the superfast post-postmodern world.
To put it crudely, in a world of economic globalization (flat, though unevenly so to say the least), it’s not clear that mediated representations or signs matter as much as direct flows of various kinds—money, goods, people, images. And the question posed by this historical novelty to literary research is obvious: whither poetics in a world where language and its workings are no longer the privileged pivots? What’s the role of literature in a world where language is no longer seen as the central humanities concern, as it was throughout the second half of the twentieth century? How do we move, as I’ve asked previously, from the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion to a post-postmodern hermeneutics of situation?
W(h)ither Poetics?
Unfortunately, much of the literary world’s response to this colonization of everyday life by an emergent post-postmodernism has relied on a kind of linguistic nostalgia, clinging to the life raft of the hermeneutics of suspicion. If literature has any “use-value” or offers us equipment for living after postmodernism, that value remains primarily thematized as a kind of spoiling move, an antiquarian slowing down of all the superfast flows that characterize the post-postmodern world. Recently I heard a Pulitzer Prize–winning contemporary author say just this on (where else?) National Public Radio: “The world is so insanely complex and fast and distracting, and one of the things I think a good book can do is slow the reader’s attention down a little bit and give them [sic] a chance to think through some of the consequences of these changes which otherwise are so quick that all you can do is react.”6 This kind of sentiment is unfortunately not far from seemingly more sophisticated or “radical” attempts within contemporary theory to reinvigorate an ethics of close reading, or to rekindle various other high-modernist theoretical nostrums concerning the autonomous, resistant importance of reading or interpretation. If we continue the line of reasoning laid out in modern and postmodern meditations on literature of the twentieth century, most contemporary gambits concerning poetics as “equipment for living” continue to suggest that literature’s real use-value is . . . that it has none. Literature functions as a mode of inexorable slowness, maybe interruption on a good day, in a too-fast world of capital; and as such it indexes the old dream of poetics as the last remaining realm that’s semi-autonomous from the world of getting and spending.
A primal scene for this kind of critical investment in postmodern literature is, arguably, constituted by the response of poets and critics to Fredric Jameson’s notorious use of Bob Perelman’s poem “China” in Jameson’s famous “Postmodernism” essay. According to the critical response offered by those interested in “defending” avant-garde poetics from Jameson’s positioning of it, Jameson is perhaps right when he says that postmodern architecture or robust markets in museum art are synonymous with late capitalism and the structural position it affords to a formerly autonomous aesthetic notion of “innovation”; but not so avant-garde poetics. In other words, contemporary avant-garde poetry is not really another symptom of late capitalism’s saturation, as Jameson suggests; rather, its defenders argue, such linguistically ambitious literature constitutes a critique of said capitalism, in terms of both its form (parataxis is hard to consume, so a certain Brechtian V-effect morphs the reader into something other than a mere consumer) and content (even the most successful poetry, avant-garde or otherwise, is hardly a meaningful niche market on the spreadsheets of multinational capital).
Charles Bernstein nicely sums up this skeptical response to Jameson’s discussion of “schizophrenic fragmentation” (1993, 73) as the trace of late capitalism within language poetry:
The “same” artistic technique has a radically different meaning depending on when and where it is used. . . . Juxtaposition of logically unconnected sentences or sentence fragments can be used to theatricalize the limits of conventional narrative development, to suggest the impossibility of communication, to represent speech, or as part of a prosodic mosaic constituting a newly emerging (or then again, traditional but neglected) meaning formation; these uses need have nothing in common. . . . Nor is the little-known painter who uses a neo-Hellenic motif in her work necessarily doing something comparable to the architect who incorporates Greek columns into a multi-million dollar office tower. But it is just this type of mishmashing that is the negative horizon of those discussions of postmodernism that attempt to describe it in unitary socioeconomic terms. (91–92)
Like many poets and critics who respond to cultural studies work on the economies of poetics, Bernstein here tries to highlight what we might call a certain semi-autonomy for the literary—insisting on the fact that the poet’s work, like the cultural production of her friend the “little-known painter,” in fact can’t be discussed in the same vocabulary as multi-million-dollar skyscrapers, at least not without mangling the work of poetry by wrenching it into a foreign idiom and context.
However, it’s just this critical move—harnessing literature as an “other” to the dictates of late capitalism—that I want to wonder about, after postmodernism, after the linguistic turn. If everything’s modeled on language or the mediating workings of language, then paratactic interruption has a crucially important job to do—interrupting all the too-hasty conclusions and too-easy consensus of “totalization,” that thing to be avoided at all costs in the world of postmodern literary and cultural theory. But if the binary pairs of fragmentation and totalization, meaning or chiasmus, are no longer the structuring tropes of post-postmodern life, how to reposition the literary, away from its (now unfortunately comfortable) deconstructive posture as the subordinated, supposedly subversive term in any opposition (the literary as the constant reminder of the meaning’s impossibility, its inability to be totalized or “whole”)?
As I have argued earlier concerning Jameson’s Postmodernism, it doesn’t help much to follow Bernstein’s path of critique and isolate one of Jameson’s postmodern cultural modes—avant-garde poetry, video art, painting, the novel, architecture—in order to suggest that he’s gotten its connection to socioeconomic phenomena wrong (that X phenomenon resists late capitalism, rather than is merely a symptom of it), because that’s to make the very “modernist” mistake that the essay suggests is no longer available to us. Everything does in fact exist on the same flat surface of culture; or, as Jameson provocatively puts it, “Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good . . . ‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature’ ” (1991, ix). If, as everyone in the theory game seemingly agrees, there is no transhistorical “human nature” existing somehow “outside” contemporary capitalism, then the question necessarily becomes, How are these modes of cultural production related; how do they configure a kind of odd open totality (what one might call, in another lingo, a poem)? And how can one kind of cultural production process usefully overcode another, insofar as what formations “mean” is of as little relevance for contemporary poetics as it is for economics or cultural studies? What, we may want to ask, can poetics tell us about the workings of economics and culture, rather than vice versa? What roles can literature play, other than “the other”?
To take a question and make it into a statement, I’m trying to follow out the methodological gambit of this book (the language of overcoding, from a postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion to a post-postmodern hermeneutics of situation) by suggesting here that the socioeconomic questions of culture can quite fruitfully be explored by deploying the tools and languages of poetics—so skilled at the creation of discontinuous, open entities—“at” seemingly unrelated cultural and economic formations, rather than strictly the other way round (deploying the cultural/economic theory “at” the literature, which tends to yield not much more than the tautological conclusion that, like everything else, contemporary literary production bears traces of the economic system in which it’s produced). In short, if poetics wants to have any substantial traction in contemporary debates about culture, literature will in fact have to be discussed in the same socioeconomic terms as downtown office towers, museum art, or hip hotels—with the important caveat that literature being discussed in those terms doesn’t mean literature being determined by them. In fact, the practices of economics are these days becoming more overcoded by the language of poetics than the other way round (as many of us learned painfully in recent years, even the value of your home is a bardic “performative” rather than an objective “constative” entity); so this historical situation should, if nothing else, give another directionality to engaging the debate between literature and economics.
Baldly stated, it seems to me that the general line of reasoning concerning the uselessness and/or semi-autonomy of literature is all but exhausted at this point in our economic and cultural history—and not so much because we’re all inexorably forced to work through the omnivorous leveling logic of “the market” (a defensible position), but because the notion of aesthetic semi-autonomy implied by this kind of argument is more a hindrance than a help in harnessing the singular critical potential of poetics in the contemporary world. This suggests that what remains culturally singular and potentially critical about “ambitious” literature at this historical juncture is not some negative notion of its contentlessness, or its inexorable frustration of meaning—literature as something like Adorno’s noncommodity par excellence. Rather, the “equipmental” (sorry, Heideggerians) force of literature at this historical juncture may precisely lie in intensifying and expanding our sense of “the poetic” as a robust form of cultural engagement or analysis, whose force is enabled not by its distance from dominant culture, but its imbrication with contemporary socioeconomic forces. Within such a rethinking, even literature’s seeming uselessness could be recoded from a stoic, prophylactic avoidance to a positive (maybe even joyful) form of critical engagement with contemporary bio-political and economic life. Is there literary life after the hermeneutics of suspicion?
Negatory
Without such a refashioned notion of literature’s engagement with the superfast world of capital, about all you have left is a kind of saddened nostalgia for days gone by—all you’ve got left is the negative pole of a dialectical thought, one might say. For example, this is overtly the function of literature that Don DeLillo lays out in his (both ironic and prescient) novels Mao II (1991) and White Noise (1985). As Bill Gray, the writer-protagonist of Mao II, is quoted by his assistant: “The novel used to feed our search for meaning. . . . It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel” (73). Gray, who is portrayed as the postmodern author-function writ large (Pynchonian genius recluse), sees the visceral visuality of terrorism and its manipulation of the news media (all the screens and moving images of visual culture) as having taken over the hermeneutic identity-shaping functions of literature. As he puts it in his meditation on “novelists and terrorists,” “Years ago, I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory” (41). He continues and clarifies later in the novel: “Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair collisions and crumbling buildings. This is the new tragic narrative” (157).
There has, of course, been a lot of ink spilled over these passages since 9/11, and surely DeLillo was on to the importance of media saturation, globalization, and terrorism long before the academic world caught up with it—not to mention his various tutorials, in Mao II and Underworld (2000), on the importance of the World Trade Center as a global symbol, and his foreseeing (in White Noise) commercial airplanes being used as missiles by terrorists (146). While that prescience is all very interesting, and seems maybe to argue against Bill Gray’s entire line of reasoning on the obsolescence of literature, the thing to focus on for our purposes is less the argument about literature’s centrality (or not) in an image-saturated world, but the implied reasons why DeLillo’s character suggests that literature is no longer central to such a mediatized socius. Literature is outmoded, on this reading, not so much because it’s prisonered by old-fashioned sentences and language rather than visual images, and thereby can’t produce anything relevant or “new”; but the problem is much more that literature can’t produce interruption of the same (anymore).
In a world of lightning-quick turnaround in news cycles, capital flows, and images, only the spectacular excess of terrorism, DeLillo’s characters conclude, can overtake literature’s traditional job and slow us down, show us a glimpse of the outside: “What terrorists gain novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous. . . . In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. . . . Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate him” (157). This sense of literature’s obsolescence is importantly different from the usual canards concerning literature’s demise: it’s not so much that people don’t read anymore, or that a combination of the Internet, ubiquitous TV screens, and rampant smartphone use has shortened our collective attention spans to the point where we can no longer engage productively with literature’s unique temporality. DeLillo is not, in other words, playing the subjective depth of literature off against the mass delusions of image-saturated culture; rather, I take the point to be that media images have taken over the very resistant, interruptive power of the “thought from outside” that for so long was the privileged territory of literary language. The value of poetics—indeed, the value of art itself—on such a rendering remains the unthematizable contact with the outside that has made literature a privileged ethical discourse within modernism and postmodernism. Which is to say, artistic value remains thematized in DeLillo as interruption, plain and simple.
However, given not so much its temporality but its privatizing form (the book and private time of reading), literature is forced to pursue its interruptive work on what we might call the “retail” level of the individual consciousness; and if that’s to be the case, it would seem literature is gone forever as a generator (or even as a reflector) of meaningful levels of widespread cognitive dissonance. The inscribed page is simply not a mass phenomenon in the way that the dancing screens of visual culture (television, Internet, even film) inherently are.
Given DeLillo’s characters’ rendering, one might say that writers have become the last believers—not in any positive content or anything as predictable as “meaning,” but writers are the last believers in language’s ability to be the primary driver in the interruption and reshaping of subjectivity (which is also to say, the resisting and disrupting of so-called normative subjectivity). It may, in fact, be that writers are among the last to hold faith in the linguistic-turn creeds of postmodernism itself. And in the process of morphing into those last believers, writers in Mao II become figures almost identical to the nuns in DeLillo’s White Noise, who explain to Jack Gladney that they don’t actually believe in anything so silly as God, but their job is to continue to act as if they still did: “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse. . . .We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible” (1985, 318–19). Perhaps surprisingly (perhaps not), this sentiment is iterated in Mao II by Brita, the obsessive photographer of writers: “I want others to believe, you see. Many believers everywhere. I feel the enormous importance of this. . . . I need these people to believe for me. I cling to believers. Many, everywhere. Without them, the planet grows cold” (1991, 69). Initially here, Brita is talking about her attractions to writers—those who still believe in the power of the word to change the world. But of course the passage is also the linchpin for her post-postmodern abandonment of writers at novel’s end, in order to photograph terrorists: those who really are, as Bill Gray insists, involved in the project of radical cultural disruption and change, bulwarked by strong beliefs.
On DeLillo’s account, one might say that the contemporary author-function has ironically become one not with the terrorist-function, but with the nun-function: in the present, a professional class of intense “believers” comprises both nuns and authors, a “tiny minority” upholding and venerating tradition of consciousness raising in a world where most people don’t have time or inclination to care about preserving the past or mulling over the questions of what it all means for the future. And this version of literature’s future provides an even less appealing subject position for literary critics, who could be said to share their worldview less with the savvy, doubting clergy than with the credulous, pious churchgoers—those who still believe in officially sanctioned believers.
Two Powers of the False
Rather than see literature’s power emerging primarily through its status as the bearer of old truths (even if they’re essentially negative modernist or postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion verities concerning the falseness of all totalizing truths), one might directly focus on literature’s powers of the false, its post-postmodern abilities to create other, virtual worlds. The “powers of the false” is a phrase most immediately associated with Gilles Deleuze’s use of it as the title of chapter 6 in his Cinema 2: The Time Image.7 There Deleuze presents the “time image” as a direct mode of manipulating filmic time (a general kind of maneuver we’ve been calling “post-postmodern”), in contradistinction to the montage-laden “movement image” and its necessarily mediated relation to temporality. (In its insistence on mediation, the movement image is then more symptomatically “postmodern,” though this is not a terminology that Deleuze uses.) As Deleuze explains, time images “are direct presentations of time. We no longer have an indirect image of time which derives from movement, but a direct time-image from which movement derives. We no longer have a chronological time which can be overturned by movements which are contingently abnormal; we have a chronic non-chronological time which produces movements necessarily ‘abnormal,’ essentially ‘false’ ” (1989, 129). For example, one sees the movement image’s mediating powers of the false on display in ideology critique: the power of the false as that which unmasks the exclusions or illegitimacy of the totalizing “truth” by showing it to be beholden to multiple mediating viewpoints—think the montage as the most intense form of movement image, the extension and contraction of chronological time in Eisenstein’s “Odessa Steps” sequence. In contradistinction, the time image’s direct power of the false does not work through mediation by the true (by interrupting, deconstructing, or questioning the objectivist truth), but gives another account of the real altogether, one that’s beyond the current regimes of true and false. Deleuze here draws on examples from American film noir, which is clearly driven not by movements that reestablish norms but by the navigation of virtual worlds created by packs of falsehoods. Likewise, Deleuze leans very heavily on Orson Welles’s final film, F for Fake, which equates whatever creative power cinema possesses not with being true to the auteur’s individual vision, but with the collective powers of error and the false.8
To articulate the same point somewhat differently, one of the primary things falsified by this second power of the false is the idea that art or language primarily strives (and inexorably fails) to be “true.” In fact, Deleuze’s work with Guattari on language constitutes a decisive swerve around the despotic nature of signification or representation—the idea that language is primarily made for communicating truth or meaning; they insist on “the unimportance of [the question] ‘What does it mean?’ ” (1983, 180). “Interpretation is our modern way of believing and being pious” (171), Deleuze and Guattari write, because signification is consistently territorialized on tautological questions about meaning, truth and its absence, “the symbolic lack of the dead father, or the Great Signifier” (171). Because every signifier fails adequately to represent its signified (attesting to the absence of the signified, not its presence), then every interpretation always already lacks—it inevitably fails to do justice to the text at hand. As I argued previously, such an assured interpretive failure (and its symmetrically inverse flip side, the postmodern infinity of interpretation) inexorably defines meanings and subjects not in terms of what they can do, but in terms of what they can’t do: they can’t be complete, “true” in an objective manner. However, such a subverting hermeneutics of suspicion discourse is also oddly totalizing or “despotic,” because each and every term in the field shares the same fate, an unfulfilled destiny doled out by the central logic of the signifier. This “weak” power of the false, represented most succinctly by the logic of the signifier, performs the relentless work of the negative, always and everywhere hollowing out the true (the signified).
“There are,” then, “great differences between . . . a linguistics of flows and a linguistics of the signifier” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 241), insofar as a linguistics of the signifier remains territorialized on tautological questions of representation (on the question, What does it mean?), rather than on axiomatic determinations of force or command (the question, What does it do?). For Deleuze and Guattari, “Language no longer signifies something that must be believed; it indicates rather what is going to be done” (250): “No problem of meaning, but only of usage” (77–78). As they argue in A Thousand Plateaus, “The elementary unit of language—the statement—is the order-word. Rather than common sense, a faculty for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words” (1987, 76). Language is better treated as a direct form of interpellation than it is as a mediating form of communication, information, or signification. Language directly commands and configures—“ ‘I’ is an order-word” (84)—and hence it is not treated productively as the trace of an absent or future meaning. In short, Deleuze and Guattari teach us that language is not primarily meant for interpretation, but obedience and resistance: “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (4–5). One might say that the performative in Deleuze doesn’t succeed by failing to be a constative; rather, it succeeds the old-fashioned way—as a direct deployment of force, as a provocation. The cash-value of truth or representation is beholden to a prior deployment of force—the power of the false as production (of something, not necessarily the “new”) rather than as interruption of the same.
As odd as it sounds, this strong or positive sense of the power of the false is actually a linchpin of twentieth-century French thinking, most obviously within Georges Canguilhem’s work on truth and normativity in the life sciences. All discourses are essentially games or regimes of truth, Canguilhem points out, so any new discovery will, within the truth procedures of these existing games, simply have to be received as an error or a falsehood. Given, for example, a scientific consensus concerning how photosynthesis works, any new discovery that challenges this dominant understanding will, by definition, be rendered “false” in terms of the existing paradigm. Error, then, is not the thing that scientific discourse works ceaselessly to eliminate (merely the “other” of the true), but error is in fact that which science thrives on, what science actually seeks to produce.
The emergence of “truth” is largely an effect not of a sudden triumph over the darkness of falsity, but of the slow evolution of “true” practices that consistently work to normalize the effects of new discoveries, finding ways to account for (rather than simply dismiss or exclude) emergent falsehoods. As Foucault explains in his work on Canguilhem, “Error is not eliminated by the blunt force of a truth that would gradually emerge form the shadows but by the formation of a new way of truth-telling” (1998, 471), the emergence of what the late Foucault calls a new “mode of veridiction.” There is, in other words, a “strong” power of the false that lies in its direct ability to create the new, understood specifically as the abnormal or the error—rather than (or at least in addition to) the false’s traditional philosophical, “weak” job of subverting the true.
Following the course laid out for the false in Plato’s dialogues, this weak (mediating or interruptive, what I’m calling “postmodern”) power of the false is inevitably to be found in the designed-to-be-overcome arguments of the minor characters, who function not as generators of new knowledge, but as the (Socratic) true’s other or its bungling interlocutor. Thereby this weak power of the false is simply a momentary sidekick, serving as adjunct or enabler along the path to a higher truth. And, of course, literature has for a long time played this Platonic part as the dialectical rival, the subverting other, of philosophical thought. Indeed, even in the high-flying, anti-Platonic realm of postmodern theory, this job of interrupting the true remained the primary job laid out for literature.
However, it’s this more robust, direct, post-postmodern, or “strong” power of the false that I’d like to try to reconnect with as the power of literature. As Foucault argues in his essay “Lives of Infamous Men,” as early modern sovereign power began to break down, practices of power became more invested in “everyday life.” In other words, sovereign practices of the “true and false” began to pay attention to things they’d never seen as important before: the comings and goings of “infamous,” everyday people. The lives of the not-famous—of everyday people and their relations to family, health, sexual matters, diet, and so on—increasingly became places for the dominant mode of power to look for truth. But precisely because of this increasing spread or saturation of power, the dramas of everyday life likewise became intense sites for a certain kind of resistance within the emergent dispositif of power. Among the names for this early modern resistance was “literature.” As Foucault writes,
Just as an apparatus [dispositif] was being installed for forcing people to tell the “insignificant”—that which isn’t told, which doesn’t merit any glory, therefore, the “infamous”—a new imperative was forming that would constitute what could be called the “immanent ethic” of Western literary discourse. Its ceremonial functions would gradually fade; it would no longer have the task of manifesting in a tangible way the all too visible radiance of force, grace, heroism, and might [puissance], but rather of searching for the things hardest to perceive—the most hidden, hardest to tell and to show, and lastly most forbidden and scandalous. A kind of injunction to ferret out the most nocturnal and most quotidian elements of existence . . . would mark out the course that literature would follow from the seventeenth century onward, from the time it began to be literature in the modern sense of the word. . . . Whence [literature’s] dual relation to truth and to power. Whereas the fabulous [le fabuleux] could function only in an indecision [une indécision] between true and false, literature based itself, rather, on a decision of nontruth [une décision de non-vérité]; it explicitly presented itself as artifice while promising to produce effects of truth that were recognizable as such. (2003, 292–93)
Here, Foucault explicitly ties a direct or strong power of the false—“a decision of nontruth”—to whatever “resistant” function literature may deploy under the dispositif of an emergent modern practice of power. While it’s not immediately clear what the positive content of such a claim might be (which is not surprising, as the emergent or resistant can hardly be circumscribed in advance), I think it’s very clear what Foucault is avoiding or critiquing in this passage, concerning the powers of literature and their relation to the powers of the false. Foucault here subtly but decisively upends or “falsifies” the Tel Quel faith that literature primarily functions to subvert the totalizing claims of philosophical or social truth.
Foucault lays out here in a very economical fashion the two literary powers of the false that I’ve been discussing: first, there’s the “fabulous”—or “fabulating” (fabuleux)—“weak” or “postmodern” power of the false, which consists in subverting the true, thereby bringing about a neodeconstructive “indecision between true and false.” Further down the literary continuum, however, there is a “strong” power of the false in literature (the one I’d like to harness to post-postmodernism), based on “a decision of nontruth” that nevertheless “produces effects of truth” in an alternative fashion. And this decision of nontruth indexes the emergent power of error, the intensification of the power of the false as the engine for the emergence of another, different mode of speaking the truth. No longer merely serving as the interruptive or indecisive “other” of philosophical or social power, literature here takes on a productive function of its own within the dispositif of an “everyday” biopower.
Those of us who lived and worked through the years of big theory in academia know all about the weak or interruptive power of the false, which was the job that literature was explicitly given throughout the postmodern linguistic-turn years: what, for example, would deconstructive literary criticism be without its breathless claims to literature’s resistance to philosophy, consistently interrupting the sinister dream of reified, completed meaning?9 And this assault on reification is likewise the kindred thread that connects deconstruction with other postmodern critical discourses that may have seemed hostile toward deconstruction in its day—for example, Marxist ideology critique or new historicist work on politics. All that literary critical work was territorialized on the power of literature as the power of interrupting totalization, a certain weak power of the false. And for interruption to function plausibly as a mode of resistance to truth, the primary social and theoretical “problem” logically has to rest in a social system that does whatever sinister work it does through the desire for totalization.
In the end, what’s “subverted” in virtually all postmodern notions of “subversion” is the desire for totalized “meaning.” Hence the great thematics of literature as an interruptive mode of what de Man called “negative assurance”—the literary as the primary guarantee of Adorno’s negative-dialectical catchphrase, “the whole is false”; thereby for many modern and postmodern theorists, literature and language have also functioned as powerful models of resistance to the exclusions and closures characteristic of fascism, racism, sexism, and the mutually assured destruction of the cold war nation-state. To put it bluntly, all the potential functions of literature and language got overcoded, in the postmodern years, by literature’s ability to interrupt something like singular truth. Literature carried a certain power of the false, but one that was characterized almost wholly by the negative—literature’s power was simply in displaying the inability of its binary partner, philosophical “truth” or totalized “meaning.” Thereby that interruptive power of the false under postmodernism remained parasitic on falsification’s relation to what remains necessarily a primary mode, the dominant power of the true. This weak or postmodern power of the false, then, has no power of its own, one that’s not already understood in terms of truth (and its discontents).
But what of this “other other” power of the false, the power not to interrupt existing truths, but to create objects or posit different ways of separating out the true and the false? What of those powers of the false that are directly related to its ability to create error (rather than primarily to reify or subvert truth)—the affirmative powers of the false, rather than the primarily negative ones? When I think about this strong power of the false in literature, where it’s on display in a most intense version, I tend to think first of the work done by so-called language poet Bruce Andrews, whose composition method consists of writing down phrases and sentences on small rectangles of paper and editing them together into discontinuous onslaughts of phrasing.10 The result looks something like this, the better part of a more or less randomly chosen chunk from the opening section of his I Don’t Have Any Paper so Shut Up:
Brandish something clean—there is no more reason to limit ourselves to the customary rhetorical confinement. White commission, piss shall triumph.
Get busy looking at immaculate doves; I couldn’t stab myself . . . you want subgum?—fuck your kitchen. Gandhi becomes handsome cholo. I hate scenes.
And palpitating! Candle suckers, don’t react to the given. Dignity for resale ankle be sister farm fear swallows the unwary unison feeble heart such me mug sauce plenitude preservatives; spores, variable halvah. Thinking about genocide all the time make me hopeful. Catholics fly to the lips & smoke out the sting, you can poop my duck, mastery of craft; turquoise makes the I dumb stick.
Buckets of chicken urine in the blue gauzy non-urban sounds apocryphal. Brood of drum majors to cause their trouble. Once bread got that staff of life crap attached to it, it became Inedible. Wasn’t it Solzhenitsyn that pardoned Patty Hearst? (1992, 10)
In Andrews’s work, it’s as if the entirety of poetic meter wants to be reduced to spondee—the desire at least is for all stressed syllables all the time. And literature is thereby reduced, like a watery sauce is reduced, to its stronger version: not the job of meaning or edification (“Get busy looking at immaculate doves . . .”), or even the job of pleasure (“ . . . there is no more reason to limit / ourselves to the customary rhetorical confinement . . .”), but the austere task of relentless provocation: “fuck your kitchen.”
Literature gets repurposed, in Andrews’s work, precisely because of its too-easy links to the sacred trace of meaning: “Once bread got that staff of life crap attached to it, it became / Inedible. . . .” Of course, there’s a certain kind of “interruption” here, parataxis in its perhaps strongest form, but the focus is not so much on deforming wholeness (where would totalization rest in the force field that is this page?), but obsessively on production of all kinds, all the myriad productive powers of the false: reflexive or “critical” statements, nonsense, insults, porn lingo, slightly changed “ad-buster” style slogans, hate speech, bureaucratic discourse and its evil of banality, religion, cults of personality, and so forth. Andrews speeds up language as a series of creative practices, rather than primarily slows it down and territorializes it on one function, language’s meaning (or lack thereof). It’s the confrontation of performative or inventive force that you see on every line; in every “gap” there’s not meaning waiting to burst forth (or not), but a kind of hinge, linkage, movement, intensification—what Andrews calls “torque.” And this torque returns to poetry a series of other jobs, the functions it had years, even millennia, before poetics became linked inexorably to the question of meaning and its discontents: here, we see poetry function as discourse that’s ceremonial, aggressive, passive, communal, seductive, repulsive, humorous, persuasive, insulting, praising, performative, and lots more. But one thing it doesn’t do—or even really attempt—is to “mean” something. What you get in Andrews’s texts is precisely a kind of massive overcoding operation, this schizoid “dialectic,” mishmashed all at once. Reading is less a hermeneutic operation than the kind of performance that Andrews sometimes does with dancers and musician improvisers—they respond to his words with their own riffs, do their own “readings” of these provocations as body and sound gestures, movements, translations.
Perhaps an even sharper example of a post-postmodern writing practice is found in the work of so-called Conceptual Writers. The leading practitioner and theorist of the movement, Kenneth Goldsmith, suggests that he doesn’t so much write (in the sense of innovating new forms or expressing anything in particular) as he does transcribe, quite literally. His magnum opus trilogy, The Weather, Sports, and Traffic, consists of straight transcriptions of eleven o’clock news weather reports (a year), a baseball game (every word of a single Yankee game radio broadcast), and traffic reports (a full day of traffic reports, “on the 1s”)—as well as works that consist of retyping every single word in the New York Times for a single day (which becomes the nine hundred–page book Day), every movement made by the author over a thirteen-hour period (Fidget), every utterance for a week (Soliloquy), and what is to my mind his masterpiece, Head Citations, a list of more than eight hundred misheard popular song lyrics (like “Killing me softly with Islam,” or “This is clown control to Mao-Tse-Tung”). The point of all this, you ask? Goldsmith (2004) thematizes his writing practice like this:
In 1969, the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as, “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. I’ve transformed from a writer into an information manager, adept at the skills of replicating, organizing, mirroring, archiving, hoarding, storing, reprinting, bootlegging, plundering, and transferring.
Goldsmith’s poetics puts him squarely within an Internet age—what does “writing” look like when a searchable database of nearly everything ever written is easily within reach of anyone with an Internet connection? If postmodernism played to an end game the thematics of innovation born in modernism (can you really “make it newer” in the twenty-first century?), then the problems of writing shift to negotiating through the vast archive of the powers of the false, the creative powers in combining preexisting language, rather than hoping through force of creative will to add something novel to that archive. As Goldsmith (2009) puts it succinctly, referring both to the Conceptual Writing he’s aligned with and Flarf, a rival but related movement dedicated to writing poems through Internet searches: “With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material.”
When pressed to explain further, Goldsmith likes to quote Brion Gysin’s mid-twentieth-century observation that writing is fifty years behind painting, and certainly his project owes much to the Burroughsean cut-up and the antisubjectivist collage and splatter methods of modernist visual art: What do sculptors do but take blocks of given material and carve something out of them? What does Jackson Pollock foreground but the basic stuff of painting—movement and oil paint, that’s all there is. Ditto someone like Rothko—color and shape—not inventing anything new in terms of what art “is” on a traditional register, but inventing new questions, juxtapositions, modes of provocation (which is, of course, what art has become: a series of discourses and practices as much as it is a series of discrete objects). The midcentury conundrums that forced painting into the abstract expressionist and pop art realms (i.e., the economic and technological truism that photography had by that point completely taken over figuration) have for a long time now hung over literature as well, even more so poetry: if advertising and the greeting card industry have completely territorialized short, pithy expressions of “authentic” sentiment, showing us how to reenchant even the most mundane corners of everyday life (everything’s an opportunity for self-actualization, even doing the laundry, doing your job, or driving your car), then what’s left for poetry to do in a post-postmodern world?
On someone like Andrews’s account, what’s left for poetry is relentlessly to avoid those very structures of “meaning,” to reinvent or reemphasize alternative uses for poetry—for intense language usage—that have long since been forgotten as the lyric became the safe repository for our authentic, “true feelings” or affects. And Goldsmith’s project is certainly related to Andrews’s—deploy language’s powers of the false—but goes in a slightly different direction. As Goldsmith (2001) writes about work like Andrews’s, “Language Poetry has fulfilled the trajectory of modernist writing and as such, has succeeded in pulverizing syntax and meaning into a handful of dust. At this point in time, to grind the sand any finer would be futile.” For Goldsmith, the critique (if there is to be one) is not to be found so much within the work, but in what might come after it—the discourses, acts, and further appropriations that surround, circumscribe, and respond to the work. As Goldsmith (2004) writes, “The simple act of moving information from one place to another today constitutes a significant cultural act in and of itself.” This post-postmodern project constitutes a decisive turn away from the linguistic turn of resistant, infinite meaning (from all the powers of the true—even the critical ones), and returns a different kind of density (a new set of everyday concerns regarding how one manages language overload) to the complexities of contemporary language use. If everyone’s a poet in this sense, the reason is that everyone has to sculpt his or her linguistic identity out of a vast sea of available, iterable text.
Of course, this anti-originalist performativity was surely the project or home terrain of postmodernism and deconstruction as well, although it’s hard to imagine either of those discourses working without some sense of linguistic meaning, if only negatively; so perhaps, as I suggest throughout, the practice of something like Conceptual Writing is less “other than postmodern” (wholly foreign to it or simply beyond it) than it is post-postmodern—intensifying certain strains within postmodernism in order to render it not so much a “new” postmodernism, but a kind of intense, hyper-postmodernism of positive usage—a power of the false not derived from the powers of the true, but one that remains the ground of any truth-effects. The performance of poetry sparks other types of performance, provokes other powers of falsification, rather than primarily calls for contemplation or understanding of the truisms contained therein. This sentiment is, of course, as old as the hills—or, in poetic terms, at least as old as Jack Spicer’s 1959 pronouncement, “No / One listens to poetry” (2008, 373), which is to say, no one listens to poetry—harkens after or obeys its hidden truths. No, one listens to poetry—responds to it.
In the end, though, the positive pole of the powers of the false is hardly “contained” in a particular literary work or even kind of work (it doesn’t need to be as relentlessly avant-garde as Andrews’s or Goldsmith’s work is); but their work is instructive precisely in its relentlessness and the way that its intense deployment of the powers of the false models a mode of engagement, with the text or the world. Though one might be tempted at this point to begin putting together a list of operative texts that foreground this strong power of the false, on the “eat this, not that” template of contemporary weight-management pseudoscience: Pynchon, not Foster Wallace; poets Lyn Hejinian or Charles Bernstein, not most of the stuff Garrison Keillor reads on the radio; Brian Evenson, not William T. Vollman; Dashiell Hammett, not Raymond Chandler; Gertrude Stein, not Virginia Woolf; the Flaming Lips, not emo bands; Appadauri, not Bhabha; Nietzsche, not Hegel; Shakespeare, not Spenser; Irigaray, not Kristeva. Negri, not Agamben; Adorno, not Benjamin. Steven Shaviro, not Bernard Stiegler. The Derrida of force and provocation, not the Derrida of prayers and tears. Or Jameson, not Jameson—depending on how you read him, and what you emphasize within your reading.
Of course, these last two quite deliberately suggest the utter nonsense of pretending to have located privileged texts that “contain” more of the strong power of the false (and less of the weak). Maybe at the end of the day, thinking about literature as equipment for post-postmodern living is less a plea to “read this, not that” than it is “read this way, not that”: sure, literature and cultural theory have a powerful conceptual resource in meaning, memory, and nostalgia, and as such can be a wedge against the present, in memory of a day gone by, or a series of roads not taken. Likewise, on the sentence level of literature or on the theoretical plane of language, the linguistic turn can continue to mirror that kind of recovery project by slowing thought down, the weight of the signifier always forcing us to turn things over in our minds—to hesitate, own the connections we make, all that other “ethics of reading” stuff. All that remains crucial to the arsenal of reading, of making sense (rather than making meaning) of the present.
But by itself, the linguistic turn of hesitating slowness does not constitute an effective arsenal against the present and its ubiquitous post-postmodernism of speed and production. So now maybe I’m back to where I began this book, looking closely at Jamesonian critique as a mode of engagement with the present and trying to affirm or intensify its positive modes. This is not necessarily to exclude the negative modes of dialectical critique, but to suggest that they can’t do all the work (even most of it, really). If the Jamesonian dialectic is an operation primarily of overcoding—of rewriting one sense with another—then one can’t dispense with the weak power of the false; but it may be more a matter of trying to overcode the weak power with the strong power, rather than the opposite operation that was so characteristic of the postmodern, big theory years—where it was all lack all the time, literature hollowing out the positive claims of this or that totalizing discourse.
So, the post-postmodern call is not simply to abandon slowness, the work of the negative, or even nostalgia as a mode of literature’s engagement with the globalized world; but it is rather a call to reinvigorate those more “positive” powers of the false and modes of engagement with that world, and with literature’s myriad positive critical connections to it, outside the purely negative suture of undecidability. From the hermeneutics of suspicion to the hermeneutics of situation. So, for example, it may be less a matter of abandoning literature’s privileged relation to subjectivity, memory, and identity than it is reemphasizing literature’s roles not in provoking us to become otherwise. Literature could again be a key component in the project that Foucault lays out for us in his late work: “Maybe the project nowadays is not to discover who we are,” he writes, “but to refuse who we are” (2003b, 134).
In the end, this is perhaps less a call to innovate “new” roles of jobs for literature, new modes of equipment, than to recall that literature was equipment for a lot of becomings before it somewhat myopically became equipment tailor-made to interrupt the totalizing claims of philosophy. And literature can be a lot of things again in a future that seems sure to be festooned with spam messages, texts, and tweets so enigmatic as to make the most difficult postmodern novels or avant-garde poetries seem recognizable and usable in new ways. Literature, of course, didn’t choose the job of totalization-interrupter par excellence—it was the job given to literature in the postmodern era of big theory (and, hey, academic jobs have long been hard to come by). But for thousands of years before (in fact, for virtually all of its existence), literature was equipment for living in myriad ways, not just as a provider and/or frustrator of “meaning.” Hopefully, a more robust sense of the literary can make it crucial, or at least useful, equipment again for post-postmodern living.