Historicism
Remembering
In Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, and African-Americans are black dogs. Several questions—several kinds of questions—are raised by this typology: What does it mean to represent different groups of humans as animals? Is it a successful parody of Hitler’s dehumanization of the Jews, or does the parody end up repeating that dehumanization? What about the principles on which the typology is based? Do the different animals constitute different racial groups? Or different nationalities? Or perhaps different religions, since Art’s French wife, once a frog, becomes, when she converts to Judaism, a mouse? Part of the interest of Maus is that in raising these questions without making it possible definitively to answer them (actually while making it impossible to answer them), Spiegelman registers—instantiates—the posthistoricist commitment to seeing the world as organized by identities. But I want to begin this discussion by asking a question not so much about the overall logic of the typology as about one of its categories: Why are African-Americans dogs? Or, to begin to give the question some point, why aren’t Jewish Americans dogs?
In his “Epilogue” to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley records a remark Malcolm X made while watching “several cherubic little children” playing and “exclaiming in another language” as they waited for their baggage at the airport: “By tomorrow night, they’ll know how to say their first English word—nigger.”1 The point of the story is not just that the United States is or was a racist country; it is, rather, that learning how to say “nigger” marks a crucial stage in the Americanization of the immigrant; it marks the fact that in laying claim to a new national identity, the immigrant is also gaining access to a new racial identity. In eastern Europe, Art’s father, Vladek, belonged, as a Jew, to a racially oppressed group; under the Nazis, he would be defined by opposition to Aryans. But America makes the Jew white, and it does so by distinguishing him from blacks. Indeed, Malcolm X’s point was that America’s racial binary has functioned as a machine for making a wide range of people white: not just the Jews but the Irish, Italians, Poles, and, more recently, one might argue, Asians, all of whom, while being subjected to various forms of prejudice and discrimination, have nonetheless found themselves transformed into the racial brothers of what used to be called Anglo-Saxons.2 (Indeed, insofar as economic success is a measure of success in American society, the most recent data rank Asian Americans at the top of the charts and African-Americans at the bottom.)
From this standpoint, the fact that Maus’s American Jews remain mice is remarkable both because all its other immigrants have melted into dogs and because even those people whose racial distinctiveness has enabled the melting—African-Americans—are depicted as dogs. Maus’s primary concern is not, of course, racial difference in the United States; the animals it deploys are meant to represent the racial categories of eastern Europe before and during the Holocaust. At the same time, however, its extensive frame story, extensive enough to introduce an African-American presence and even to embarrass Art with his father’s hostility to “schvartsers,”3 does a certain racial work of its own. It shows us the United States through the lens of the Holocaust. And through that lens, the United States is divided not into blacks and whites but into dogs and mice, Americans and Jews.
It is this use of the Holocaust, this insistence not simply on its enormity but on its relevance to racial life in America (an insistence officially sanctioned by the creation of the federally funded U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.), that has sometimes produced an angry response from African-Americans. Hence the famous dedication of Toni Morrison’s Beloved to the sixty million and more, a figure used also by Leslie Marmon Silko, although applied in Almanac of the Dead to Native Americans: “I have to laugh at all the talk about Hitler,” says one of her Mexican Indians. “Hitler got all he knew from the Spanish and Portugese” (216). Although comparisons of the numbers of Jews killed by the Nazis with the number of blacks killed in the middle passage and in slavery or of the Native Americans killed by the European conquest of the Americas have been criticized as a kind of competitive victimization, this criticism misses the point of what Hilene Flanzbaum has called “the Americanization of the Holocaust,”4 the way in which the deployment of the Holocaust in contemporary America functions to make the victimization of Jews a fact of American history. In its criticism of the recent proliferation of holocausts, it misses also the new appeal of the very idea of holocaust, an appeal that has nothing to do with a debate over numbers but everything to do with holocaust precisely as an idea.
Holocausts are not, after all, statistical events. A holocaust is not just a mass murder; the murder even of millions of people, if they were randomly selected, would not amount to a holocaust. It is the attempt to exterminate a people, not the number of people exterminated, that confers its specificity on holocaust. What turns mass murder into holocaust is that the target of holocaust is only incidentally some number of persons; it is more fundamentally that thing that makes those persons who they are—holocaust is a crime of identity. Hence the claim to have been the victim of a holocaust is not only the claim to be a victim; it is also the claim to an identity. It is because Hitler’s goal was not to exterminate some large number of people but instead to exterminate a particular group of people—Jews—that Maus’s American Jews remain mice in America. Art’s parents remain mice to mark the distinctiveness conferred upon them by the Holocaust; Art and his children remain mice to mark the fact that this distinctiveness, the distinctiveness of the European Jew, is retained by, indeed inherited by, the American Jew. All Maus’s other Americans are dogs because none of them has inherited the Holocaust. And the fact that today in America it is African-Americans rather than Jewish Americans who are marked as nonwhite and are more usually and more destructively the objects of racism is rendered irrelevant by the appeal to history (the history that Art’s father is said to “bleed”) as the guarantee of identity. It is this appeal, turning blacks and whites into Americans (dogs) and distinguishing only between Americans and Jews (mice), that makes sense of the otherwise inexplicable Jewish fear of black anti-Semitism that played such a prominent role in the public discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s. And, of course, it is only another version of the appeal to history that makes sense of the otherwise equally inexplicable interest of some African-Americans in the fact that there were some Jewish slave traders.
Indeed, this appeal to history, to the idea that it is only the heritage of a holocaust that can confer the desired distinctiveness, is accepted even by writers like Morrison and Silko. That is why, despite the fact that slavery ended more than a century before Beloved was written, Morrison’s book is an antislavery novel. And that is why, in Almanac of the Dead, we have already seen the Cuban Marxist who wants to organize the people to fight against private property and doesn’t want to listen to their stories about “the Native American holocaust” be indicted by them for “crimes against history” (516). The prosecutor at his trial reads a chronicle of Native American resistance to and oppression by Europeans (e.g., “1542—Mexico—Indian rebellion at Mixton is put down, and all the rebels are branded and sold into slavery” [528]; a few years before Silko, Simon Wiesenthal published a Jewish version of this almanac called Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom).5 But Silko’s Marxist keeps on insisting on the primitiveness of “tribalism” and on the primacy of the class struggle, and so, because he “has no use for indigenous history” and because he “denies the holocaust of indigenous Americans” (531), he is, as we have also already seen, executed. Crimes against history—holocaust denial or revisionism—are the worst crimes of all. They are worse than capitalist exploitation because the capitalist steals the worker’s labor, not his identity. And, in a way, they are even worse than the holocausts themselves, because where the holocausts destroy life, at least they acknowledge identity—indeed, they are a tribute to it. But indifference to or denial of the holocausts refuses identity.
Hence the urgency in Silko’s turn to history and hence, in the same year that Almanac of the Dead appeared (1991), Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s insistence on the importance of history to American life and, indeed, to the very idea of what it means to be American. “History is to the nation,” Schlesinger wrote in The Disuniting of America, “rather as memory is to the individual. As an individual deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, … so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present…. As the means of defining national identity, history becomes a means of shaping history” (20). Memory is here said to constitute the core of individual identity; national memory is understood to constitute the core of national identity. Insofar, then, as individuals have a national as well as an individual identity, they must have access not only to their own memories but to the national memory; they must be able to remember not only the things that happened to them as individuals but the things that happened to them as Americans. The way they can do this, Schlesinger says, is through history. Each of us has his or her own memories of the things that have happened to us personally; history can give us memories of the things that happened to us but not to us personally, the things that happened to us as Americans (or Native Americans, or Jews). And it is in giving us these memories that history gives us our “identity.” Indeed, it is because our relation to things that happened to and were done by Americans long ago is the relation of memory that we know we are Americans. We learn about other people’s history; we remember our own.
But how can we be said to remember not just things that happened to us but things that didn’t happen to us? Taken literally, the effort to imagine this possibility may produce exotic results. Under hypnotic regression therapy, for example, a writer named Whitley Strieber began to remember a series of encounters with creatures who looked, he thought, like the ancient Babylonian goddess Ishtar. When he subsequently met several of these creatures in person, he realized that they were in fact alien “visitors,” and he began to “wonder” whether what he had thought were memories of his childhood in Texas were really memories of Babylon and “of the shadowy temples where the grey goddess reigned.” “Do my memories come from my own life,” he wondered in his best-selling memoir Communion (1987), “or from other lives lived long ago?”6 And, in an equally literal although more explicitly fictional (the subtitle of Communion is A True Story) mode, Greg Bear’s science fiction novel Blood Music (1985) imagines the restructuring of blood cells so as to enable them to perform a kind of memory transfer, first from father to son—“The memory was there and he hadn’t even been born, and he was seeing it, and then seeing their wedding night”7 (111–12)—and then more generally: “And his father went off to war … and his son watched what he could not possibly have seen. And then he watched what his father could not possibly have seen.” “Where did they come from?” he asks about these memories, and when he is told, “Not all memory comes from an individual’s life,” he realizes that what he is encountering is “the transfer of racial memory” and that now, in “his blood, his flesh, he carried … part of his father and mother, parts of people he had never known, people perhaps thousands of years dead” (217). Blood Music imagines as science what Communion, identifying its “visitors” with the “Greek pantheon” and speculating that they are the “gods” who created us, imagines as religion.
Both Blood Music and Communion, however, should no doubt be considered marginal texts, partly because of what I have already characterized as their literality, but just as importantly because their account of what Blood Music calls “racial memory” is, in a certain sense, significantly anachronistic. By “racial,” Greg Bear means “human”; it’s the human race, not the white or the black or the red race, that his transfusions of blood unite. And while it is true that, in a remarkable moment, Whitley Strieber speaks of “visitor culture” and imagines our encounter with it along vaguely multicultural lines (it may be only “apparently superior”; we will come to understand “its truth” by understanding its “weaknesses” as well as its “strengths”), it is essential to remember that the “visitors” he has in mind are not merely foreigners. Strieber does produce the familiar nativist gesture of imagining himself a Native American, the “flower” of his “culture” crushed by “Cortez”-like invaders, but the vanishing race for which he is proleptically nostalgic is, like Greg Bear’s, human rather than American. It would only make sense to understand Communion’s aliens as relevant to the question of American identity if we were to understand them as allegories of the aliens threatening American identity. Insofar, however, as the apparatus of the allegory requires the redescription of differences between humans as differences between humans and others, it has the effect of establishing the human as an internally undifferentiated category and thus of making the designation of some humans as American irrelevant. In Communion and Blood Music, the emergence of “racial memory,” of a history made almost literally universal, unites us all.
So the technologies of memory imagined in Blood Music and Communion provide an image, but only a partial image, of what is required by Schlesinger’s invocation of history as memory. If the obvious objection to thinking of history as a kind of memory is that things we are said to remember are things that we did or experienced, whereas things that are said to belong to our history tend to be things that were neither done nor experienced by us, Blood Music and Communion imagine ways in which history can be turned into memory. But they don’t meet Schlesinger’s and Silko’s and Spiegelman’s requirement that this history be national. Which is to say that they don’t deploy the transformation of history into memory on behalf of the constitution of identity; in Communion, the remembered past is merely a testament to the visitors’ persistence; in Blood Music, the moment in which the past can be remembered actually marks the disappearance of nationality. It is instead in a much more important and influential text of 1987, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, that Schlesinger’s identification of memory, history, and national identity is given a definitive articulation.
And this is true despite the fact that Beloved, according to Morrison, is a story about something no one wants to remember: “The characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to remember.”8 What no one wants to remember, she thinks, is slavery, and whether or not this characterization is accurate, it succeeds in establishing remembering or forgetting as the relevant alternatives. It establishes, in other words, that although no white people or black people now living ever experienced it, slavery can be and must be either remembered or forgotten. Thus, although Sethe’s daughter, Denver, thinks early on that “only those who lived in Sweet Home [where Sethe was a slave] could remember it,” it quickly turns out that memories of “places” like Sweet Home can, in fact, be made available to people who never lived there.9 A “house can burn down,” Sethe tells Denver, “but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world” (36). Thus people always run the risk of bumping into “a rememory that belongs to somebody else,” and thus, especially, Denver runs the risk of a return to slavery: “The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.” Because Denver might bump into Sethe’s rememory, Sethe’s memory can become Denver’s; because what once happened is still happening—because, as Denver says, “nothing ever dies”—slavery needn’t be part of your memory in order to be remembered by you.
From Sethe’s standpoint, this is, of course, a kind of threat; she and her contemporaries are, as one critic has put it, “haunted by memories of slavery that they seek to avoid.”10 But if Beloved’s characters want to forget something that happened to them, its readers—“black people,” “white people,” Morrison herself—are supposed to remember something that didn’t happen to them. And in insisting on slavery as the thing they are supposed to remember, Morrison not only gives Blood Music’s “racial memory” what counts in posthistoricism as its proper meaning but also establishes what we might call, in contrast to the marginality of Blood Music, the centrality of Beloved or, at least, its discursive distance from the genres of science fiction and New Age space invasion. This distance involves, as I have already noted, the political difference between a certain universalism and a certain nationalism, but in fact it’s much greater than that. For Morrison’s race, like Schlesinger’s nation, provides the mechanism for as well as the meaning of the conversion of history into memory. Blood Music requires weird science to explain how people can “remember stuff” they haven’t “even lived through” (197); The Disuniting of America needs only the nation, Beloved needs only race. And while probably almost no Americans now believe that blood transfusions can make us remember things that did not happen to us, and probably only some Americans now believe that “visitors” can help us remember the lives we lived long ago, probably a great many Americans believe that nationality (understood by Schlesinger as citizenship in a state, transformed by Morrison and by multiculturalism more generally into membership in a race or culture) can do what blood transfusions and visitors cannot. It is racial identity that makes the experience of enslavement part of the history of African-Americans today.11
On the one hand, then, the supernatural presence that haunts 124 Bluestone Road outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, should not be understood as a version of the supernatural presence that haunts Whitley Strieber’s cabin in upstate New York. On the other hand, however, it is a striking fact about Beloved that it presents itself as a ghost story, that its account of the past takes the form of an encounter with a ghost, a ghost who is, as Valerie Smith has said, “the story of the past embodied.”12 And if one way to regard this ghost is (along the lines I’ve just suggested) as a figure for the way in which race can make the past present, another way to regard the ghost is as the figure for a certain anxiety about the very idea of race that is being called upon to perform this function. For while races are, no doubt, more real than “visitors,” it isn’t quite clear how much more or in what ways they are more real. To what extent, for example, are the races we believe in biological entities? Nothing is more common in American intellectual life today than the denial that racial identity is a biological phenomenon and the denunciation of such a biologism as racial essentialism. The race that antiessentialists believe in is a historical entity, not a biological one. In racial antiessentialism, the effort to imagine an identity that will connect people through history is replaced by the effort to imagine a history that will give people an identity.
If, then, we must not see the ghost in Beloved as a real (albeit biologically exotic) entity (like a visitor), we should not see her either as a figure for a real (and also biologically exotic) entity (like a race). She is a figure instead for a process, for history itself; Beloved is, in this respect, not only a historical but a historicist novel. It is historical in that it’s about the historical past; it’s historicist in that—setting out to remember “the disremembered”—it redescribes something we have never known as something we have forgotten and thus makes the historical past a part of our own experience. It’s no accident that the year in which Communion and Beloved were published (1987) was also the year in which the University of California Press series The New Historicism was inaugurated, or that the year in which Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize (1988) was the year in which Shakespearean Negotiations—written by the editor of The New Historicism and beginning with the author’s announcement of his “desire to speak with the dead”—was also published.13 The ghost story, the story in which the dead speak, either like Beloved in a voice that’s “low and rough” or like Shakespeare through “textual traces,” is the privileged form of the new historicism.
If, in other words, the minimal condition of the historian’s activity is an interest in the past as an object of study, Stephen Greenblatt’s accounts of the origins of his vocation (“I began with the desire to speak with the dead”) and of the nature of that vocation (“literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans”) both insist on a relation to the past (he calls it a “link”) that goes beyond that minimal condition, and beyond also (it’s this going beyond that the model of the shaman is meant to indicate) various standard accounts of the continuity between past and present. Greenblatt is not, that is, interested in the kind of continuity offered by the claim that events in the past have caused conditions in the present or in the kind of continuity imagined in the idea that the past is enough like the present that we might learn from the past things that are useful in the present. Indeed, the interest proclaimed here has almost nothing to do with taking the past as an object of knowledge—what he wants is to speak with the dead, “to re-create a conversation with them,” not to find out or explain what they did. And although he himself proclaims this ambition a failed one, from the standpoint of the heightened continuity that the New Historicism requires, the terms of failure are even more satisfying than success would be: “Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead.” (1). If what you want is a “link” with the dead that is better achieved by speaking with them than by studying them (which is achieved, that is to say, by understanding studying them as a way of speaking with them), then the discovery that what one hears when one hears the dead speak is actually the sound of one’s “own voice” can’t really count as a disappointment. “My own voice was the voice of the dead”; the link envisioned in conversation is only made stronger by the discovery that the conversation is with oneself. Continuity is turned into identity.
For both Morrison and Greenblatt, then, history involves the effort to make the past present, and the ghosts of Beloved and Shakespearean Negotiations are the figures for this effort, the transformation of history into something that can be remembered and, when it is not remembered, forgotten. Without the idea of a history that is remembered or forgotten (not merely learned or unlearned), the events of the past can have only a limited relevance to the present, providing us at best with causal accounts of how things have come to be the way they are, at worst with objects of antiquarian interest. It is only when it’s reimagined as the fabric of our own experience that the past can be deployed in the constitution of identity and that any history can properly become ours. A history that is learned can be learned by anyone (and can belong to anyone who learns it); a history that is remembered can be remembered only by those who first experienced it and it must belong to them. So if history were learned, not remembered, then no history could be more truly ours than any other. Indeed, no history, except the things that had actually happened to us, would be truly ours at all.
This is why the ghosts of the New Historicism are not simply figures for history; they are figures for a remembered history. But this is also why there is a problem in thinking about these ghosts as figures, as well as in my earlier characterization of Beloved as less literal than Blood Music or Communion. For without the ghosts to function as partners in conversation rather than objects of study, without rememories that allow “you who never was there” (36) access to experiences otherwise available to “only those who” were there, history can no more be remembered than it can be forgotten. The ghosts cannot, in other words, be explained as metaphoric representations of the importance to us of our history because the history cannot count as ours and thus can have no particular importance to us without the ghosts. It is only when the events of the past can be imagined not only to have consequences for the present but to live on in the present that they can become part of our experience and can testify to who we are. So the ghosts are not merely the figures for history as memory; they are the technology for history as memory—to have the history, we have to have the ghosts. Remembered history is not merely described or represented by the ghosts who make the past ours; it is made possible by them. Beloved’s ghosts are thus as essential to its historicism as Communion’s visitors are to its New Age mysticism; indeed, Beloved’s historicism is nothing but the racialized and, hence, authorized version of Communion’s mysticism. Without the visitors, the remains of UFOs are just fragments of old weather balloons; without the ghosts, history is just a subject we study in school.14 It is only accounts like Sethe’s of how other people’s memories can become our own that provide the apparatus through which our history can, as Arthur Schlesinger puts it, define our identity.
Writing about “literary history in the shadow of poststructuralism,” Cary Nelson argues that “poststructuralist” historiography is distinguished from the “conventional” kind by its recognition that it can “never actually contain or fully represent the history it engage[s].”15 Where “conventional literary histories often aim for a confident sense that history is effectively relived within their narratives,” Nelson’s own history of early twentieth-century American poetry, as he describes it, acknowledges that it could not “find the lived time of history,” that “the actual lived time of history would remain elsewhere,” “unknowable” (47, 51). In one sense, of course, this view is simply mistaken. Insofar as Nelson’s skepticism is founded on the recognition that our accounts of the past are “mediated” by our own interests and so are never “neutral,” it cannot lead us to conclude that our beliefs about the past—interested though they must be—may not nonetheless be true. Only a geneticism that conflated true with disinterested would require such a conclusion. Nelson is, of course, on stronger ground when he says that “we need to admit that we will never know for certain what it was like to live in an earlier period” (50), but the ground is stronger only because the claim is so much weaker; who would deny it? What it was like to live in the past is one of the many—actually innumerable—things we will never know for certain. And since our inability to know things for certain is even less an obstacle to our knowing them than our inability to be “neutral” is, it’s hard to see why we can’t more or less cheerfully admit it.
More striking, however, than Nelson’s conflation of not knowable for certain with not knowable is his conflation of knowable with relivable, his claim that the reason we can never “fully represent” history is because we can never relive it. “Conventional” historians might criticize this claim by reminding Nelson that representing history has nothing to do with reliving it—we can know that Caesar crossed the Rubicon without ourselves getting wet. But we have already begun to see how irrelevant to posthistoricist historicism this criticism is. Where the conventional historian may be happy to settle for knowledge, Morrison and Greenblatt are more interested in experiencing the past (if only by talking to it) than they are in having true beliefs about it. If, in other words, Nelson makes the mistake of thinking that knowing about the past involves experiencing it, Morrison and Greenblatt correct this mistake not simply by disconnecting knowledge from experience but by preferring experience to knowledge. In fact, from this perspective and with respect at least to certain events, knowing about the past instead of experiencing it may come to look not like an impossibility but like an easy way out, a way of trying to avoid the reality of slavery or the Holocaust, and we thus see the emergence of a certain hostility to the idea that the Holocaust is the sort of thing that can be known.
Claude Lanzmann, for example, has insisted that the purpose of his documentary Shoah is “not to transmit knowledge” and has instead characterized the film as “an incarnation, a resurrection,”16 thus identifying his ambitions in terms that we may understand as characteristically New Historicist: the incarnated dead are the ones with whom Stephen Greenblatt wishes to speak. But where, in the New Historicism, understanding the past is at worst an irrelevance and at best an aid to the more crucial task of remembering it, understanding the Holocaust seems to Lanzmann an “absolute obscenity,” and to try to “learn the Holocaust” is, in fact, to “forget” it.17 The representations and explanations of historians, he thinks, are “a way of escaping,” “a way not to face the horror”;18 what the Holocaust requires is a way of transmitting not the normalizing knowledge of the horror but the horror itself. And it is this “transmission”—what Shoshana Felman calls “testimony”—that the film Shoah strives for and that, according to Felman, is the project of many of the major literary and theoretical texts of the post–World War II period as well as of Shoah.
But how can texts transmit rather than merely represent “horror”? How, as Felman puts it, can “the act of reading literary texts” be “related to the act of facing horror?” (2). If it could, then, of course, reading would become a form of witnessing. But it is one thing, it seems, to experience horror and another thing to read about it; the person who reads about it is dealing not with the experience of horror but with a representation of that experience. And Felman has no wish to deny this difference; on the contrary, she wishes to insist upon it, and it is out of her insistence that she produces her contribution to the theory of testimony. For when testimony is “simply relayed, repeated or reported,” she argues, it “loses its function as a testimony” (3). So in order for testimony to avoid losing its proper function, it must be “performative” (5); it must “accomplish a speech act” rather than simply “formulate a statement.” Its subject matter must be “enacted” rather than reported or represented. The problem of testimony is thus fundamentally a problem about “the relation between language and events” (16). Language that represents or reports events will fail as testimony, will fail, that is, to be properly “performative” or “literary.” Language that is itself an “act” and that therefore can be said to “enact” rather than report events will succeed. The reader of the “performative” text will be in the position not of someone who reads about the “horror” and understands it; he or she will be in the position of “facing horror.”
But how can a text achieve the performative? How can a text cease merely to represent an act and instead become the act it no longer represents? The idea of the performative is, of course, drawn from Austin’s speech act theory, where it is famously instantiated in the marriage ceremony: “When I say, before the registrar or altar, etc., ‘I do,’ I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it.”19 Austin’s opposition between reporting and indulging anticipates (in a different key) Felman’s opposition between reporting and enacting. But in Testimony, the first exemplar of the performative will not exactly be, as it is in Austin, the act of “saying certain words” (13); it will instead be what Felman calls the “breakdown” or “breakage of the words” (39). Citing these lines from Celan,
Your question—your answer.
Your song, what does it know?
Deepinsnow,
Eepinow,
Ee-i-o.
she argues that it is “by disrupting” “conscious meaning” that these “sounds testify” (37). It is, in other words, at the moment when the words as words begin to “break down” that they become performative, that they begin to enact rather than report. And it is at this moment that the readers of those words are “ready to be solicited” not by the “meaning” those words convey (since, as they break down, it is precisely their meaning that is put in question) but by what Felman calls the “experience” of their author, Celan.
The genealogy of this version of the performative is, of course, as much de Manian as Austinian and is articulated most explicitly in the discussion of Rousseau’s Confessions that I have already cited, where de Man analyzes Rousseau’s effort to escape being blamed for stealing a ribbon from his employer by blaming the theft instead on the young servant girl, Marion. Recognizing, with Rousseau, that the crime of having named Marion as the thief is a good deal more serious than the theft itself, de Man works through a series of accounts of what Rousseau might have meant when he said “Marion,” moving from his desire to blame Marion to his desire to possess Marion to his desire for a public scene in which both the previous desires are shamefully displayed but concluding that none of these interpretations is adequate. For, ultimately, de Man argues, Rousseau never meant to and did not in fact name Marion; he was “making whatever noise happened to come into his head,” he was “saying nothing at all.”20 So, no attempt to understand what “Marion” means can succeed because, properly understood, “ ‘Marion’ is meaningless.” And de Man goes on to assert that the “essential non-signification” of this text is exemplary of textuality as such: “It seems to be impossible to isolate the moment in which the fiction stands free of any signification…. Yet without this moment, never allowed to exist as such, no such thing as a text is conceivable.” On the one hand, it is the “arbitrariness” of the sign that makes meaning possible; on the other hand, it is the revelation of that same “arbitrariness”—“the complete disjunction between Rousseau’s desires … and the selection of this particular name … any other name, any other word, any other sound or noise could have done just as well”—that “disrupts the meaning.” For de Man, the speech act becomes performative only in the moment that it becomes illegible.
In the wake of the discovery of de Man’s wartime journalism, some critics read “The Purloined Ribbon” and the theory it articulates as a kind of alibi for de Man’s own disinclination to acknowledge whatever involvement he may have had in the apparatus that produced the Holocaust. According to Felman, however, the refusal to confess is a sign not of indifference to one’s own morally scandalous behavior but of a heightened sensitivity to exactly what is scandalous about it. The “trouble” with confessions, she writes, “is that they are all too readable: partaking of the continuity of conscious meaning and of the illusion of the restoration of coherence, what de Man calls ‘the readability of … apologetic discourse’ (AR, 290) pretends to reduce historical scandals to mere sense and to eliminate the unassimilable shock of history, by leaving ‘the [very] assumption of intelligibility … unquestioned’ (AR, 300).” What is scandalous in “historical scandals” is what, in Felman’s view, marks the Holocaust above all, its resistance to intelligibility. Insofar as confession produces a “referential narrative,” it necessarily diminishes the crime it confesses to. Thus, following Lanzmann, who identifies the Holocaust as a “pure event” and who characterizes the effort to make sense of it as a “perverse form of revisionism” (YFS, 482), Felman insists on the “refusal of understanding” (YFS, 477) as, in Lanzmann’s terms, “the only possible ethical … attitude” (YFS, 478). The attempt to explain it can only be an attempt to reduce it.
Felman thus regards what some have thought of as de Man’s worst sin, his failure to confess, as his greatest virtue. For confession, diminishing the crime, would excuse the criminal. But, whatever we may think of de Man’s personal morality, his real contribution here is not his (from Felman’s standpoint admirable) refusal to confess; it is his discovery of the linguistic form that, unlike the “referential narrative,” is adequate to the Holocaust, the “performative.” The essence of the performative is, as we have seen, its irreducibility to “mere sense,” and it is precisely this irreducibility that makes it appropriate as a technology for what Lanzmann calls the “transmission” (YFS, 486) rather than the representation of the Holocaust. Felman thus focuses intensely on the moment in Shoah when Lanzmann, listening to some Polish peasants describe the efforts of a Ukrainian guard to keep his Jewish prisoners quiet, hears sounds that he recognizes right away are “no longer simply Polish” (230). The Poles are saying, “So the Jews shut up and the guard moved off. Then the Jews started talking again in their language …: ra-ra-ra and so on” (230). The “ra-ra-ra” here is the aural equivalent of “eepinow, / ee-i-o,” and both “ee-i-o” and “ra-ra-ra” are occurrences of the performativity theorized in “The Purloined Ribbon” and embodied in Rousseau’s “Marion.” “Rousseau was making whatever noise happened to come into his head” (39), de Man writes; testimony from “inside” the “horror” can only be heard as “pure noise” (232), according to Felman. If to understand is, inevitably, to misunderstand, to bear false witness, it is only the “mere noise” one “does not understand” (231) that makes it possible to bear true witness.21
The point of the performative, then, is that, itself an event, it “transmits” rather than represents the events to which it testifies. This is what Felman means when she says that Shoah “makes the testimony happen” (267), and even that it happens “as a second Holocaust.” So the Holocaust, like slavery, is never over—it is “an event that … does not end” (67). And just as the transformation of history into memory made it possible for people who did not live through slavery to remember it, so the transformation of texts that “make sense” of the Holocaust into events that “enact” it makes it possible for people who did not live through the Holocaust to survive it. “The listener to the narrative of extreme human pain, of massive psychic trauma,” says Felman’s collaborator, the analyst Dori Laub, “comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself” (57). “Is the act of reading literary texts itself inherently related to the act of facing horror?” (2) asks Felman. De Man’s account of the performative, of the replacement of “meaning” by “event,” makes the answer yes.
But what de Man characterized as the failure of reference—in order for a text “to come into being as text,” he says, its “referential function” has to be “radically suspended” (44)—Felman cannily characterizes as the return of reference, “like a ghost” (267). Reference has returned because the text, insofar as it ceases to refer to things, has become a thing that can be referred to; it has returned “like a ghost” because the thing it is is a kind of absence, “the very object—and the very content—of historical erasure” (267). When he said “Marion,” Rousseau “was making whatever noise happened to come into his head; he was saying nothing at all, least of all someone’s name” (39). Both erased and embodied by performativity itself, Marion, like Beloved, walks. But this turn to the ghost makes clear not only an important point of resemblance between deconstruction and the New Historicism but also an important point of difference. For the ghosts of New Historicism are, as we have seen, essential to its functioning, but, as the simile—reference returns “like a ghost”—suggests, in deconstruction they are essentially supererogatory. In deconstruction the texts do what, in New Historicism, the ghosts must do. Indeed, if we take the ghosts of New Historicism as a figure for its ambition to turn history into memory, we can understand the “mere noise” of Felman’s deployment of de Man as an effort to provide the thematics of historicism with its formal ground. Deconstruction requires no ghosts because the emergence of a meaningless and untranslatable signifier in the poem of Celan or in the film of Lanzmann can actually produce what Lanzmann calls the “resurrection” that a text like Beloved only narrates. Understood in these terms, deconstruction is the theory of (rather than the alternative to) the New Historicism; deconstruction explains how texts not only can thematize the transformation of the historical past into the remembered past but also, by way of the performative, can actually produce that transformation.
And it is, as we have already seen, this transformation that is required to make it possible for us to remember things that happened when we weren’t there and thus make it possible for those things to count as testimony to who we are. For Jews, as Geoffrey Hartman has written, this necessity has recently come into sharp focus: “As the eyewitnesses pass from the scene and even the most faithful memories fade,” Hartman says, “the question of what sustains Jewish identity is raised with a new urgency.”22 What the eyewitnesses witnessed, and what they have begun to forget, is, of course, the Holocaust, so if the idea here is that memories of the Holocaust have sustained Jewish identity and thus that the imminent disappearance of those memories (as even the survivors die) poses a threat to Jewish identity, the task becomes to keep those memories alive if only in order to keep Jewish identity alive. Like slavery, the Holocaust must never die. So if the passing of eyewitnesses and the fading of memories does indeed give the question of what sustains Jewish identity a new urgency, this new deployment of deconstruction helps make the Holocaust available as a continuing source of identitarian sustenance. But in seeking to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten, deconstruction contributes not only to the maintenance of but also to a change in Jewish identity. For insofar as Jewish identity is understood to depend on what Michael Krausz has called “identification” with the “narrative” of the Holocaust as “the most salient episode in contemporary Jewish history,” it is significantly detached from the racial base that was definitive, for example, for the perpetrators of the Holocaust.23 The primacy of the Holocaust as a guarantor of Jewish identity marks, in other words, the emergence of an explicitly antiessentialist Jewishness.
This antiessentialist Jewishness is disarticulated from the idea of a Jewish race and also, albeit less sharply, from the idea of a Jewish religion. Many of those who think of themselves as Jews do not think that they are Jews because they have Jewish blood and are, in fact, skeptical of the very idea of Jewish blood. For them, as for many members of other races (so called), cultural inheritance takes the place of biological inheritance. And many of those who think of themselves as Jews do not think that they are Jews because they believe in Judaism. But by redescribing certain practices that might be called religious (circumcision, for example) as cultural, Jewishness can sever their connection to Judaism, enabling Jews to give up their belief in Jewish blood and their belief in a Jewish God while still remaining Jewish. What they can’t give up is Jewish culture. Hence the significance of the Holocaust and of the widespread insistence that Jews remember it, and hence the importance of the idea that “understanding” the Holocaust is a kind of “obscenity.” For the prohibition against understanding the Holocaust is at the same time formulated as the requirement that it be experienced instead of understood, and this requirement—supposedly fulfillable through technologies like the deconstructive performative—makes it possible to define the Jew not as someone who has Jewish blood or who believes in Judaism but as someone who, having experienced the Holocaust, can—even if he or she was never there—acknowledge it as part of his or her history.24
And just as remembering the Holocaust is now understood as the key to preserving Jewish cultural identity, the Holocaust itself is now retrospectively reconfigured as an assault on Jewish cultural identity. “The commanding voice at Auschwitz,” Lionel Rubinoff writes, “decrees that Jews may not respond to Hitler’s attempt to destroy totally Judaism by themselves co-operating in that destruction. In ancient times, the unthinkable Jewish sin was idolatry. Today, it is to respond to Hitler by doing his work” (“Jewish Identity and the Challenge of Auschwitz,” 150). Jews who might today be understood to be doing Hitler’s work are not, of course, murdering other Jews, which is to say that Hitler’s work, the destruction of Jewishness, is understood here as only incidentally the murder of Jews. Rather, the Jews who today do Hitler’s work are those who “survive” as people but not “as Jews” (136); they stop thinking of themselves as Jews, they refuse the “stubborn persistence” in their “Jewishness” that is required by Rubinoff as the mark of resistance to Hitler. What this means is that the concept of “cultural genocide,” introduced in analogy to the genocide of the Holocaust, now begins to replace that genocide and to become the Holocaust. “A culture is the most valuable thing we have” (“Custodians,” 122), says the philosopher Eddy M. Zemach, and this commitment to the value of culture requires that the Holocaust be rewritten as an attack on culture. Thus the “Judaism” that Hitler wanted to destroy ceases to be a group of people who had what he thought of as “Jewish blood” and becomes instead a set of beliefs and practices, and the Hitler who in fact “opened almost every discussion on Jewish matters with the assertion that the Jews are not primarily a religious community but a race” is now reimagined as a Hitler who wished above all to destroy Jewish religion and culture.25 From this standpoint Hitler becomes an opponent of cultural diversity and those Jews who have, as Zemach puts it, “lost the will to retain their culture” (129) become not only his victims but his collaborators. They do his work by assimilating, and insofar as, according to Zemach, American Jews in particular are abandoning their culture, what Jews now confront is the threat of a second Holocaust: if American Jews give up their Jewishness, Jews “will have lost the greatest and most advanced part of their people” … “for the second time this century” (129).
This revaluation of assimilation as Holocaust marks the complete triumph of the notion of culture, which now emerges not merely as the defining characteristic of persons (“the most important thing we have”) but as itself a kind of person, whose death has a pathos entirely independent of the death of those persons whose culture it was. The Jew is here subsumed by his Jewishness26—the person is transformed into an identity, and the identity is treated as a person, albeit a person without a body or, for that matter, a mind. An identity has no body because it can die without any bodies dying; Holocaust by assimilation is like the Great Train Robbery—“no loss of train.”27 And it has no mind in the sense that it doesn’t require any beliefs—that’s what it means to be culturally instead of religiously Jewish. To be a Jew—or an African-American—is, we might say, to inhabit a subject position rather than to be a subject, and it is this transformation of subjectivity into subject position that is, as we have already seen, posthistoricism’s defining parallel to the transformation of text into object.
Dismembering
Unlike identities, however, ordinary persons do have bodies so; despite appearances, there is no contradiction when, in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman professes disapproval of anti-Semitism (“Just cool it with the anti-Semitic remarks” [37], he tells his friend Preston) and of a joke about black women (“It’s not funny…. It’s racist” [38]) while at the same time butchering dozens of men and women, some of them Jews and African-Americans. Of course, the temptation to think of this behavior as something like hypocrisy is more or less inevitable. After all, the conversation in which the psycho objects to his friend Preston describing the guy who got the Fisher account as a “lucky Jew bastard” will be followed a few chapters later by his regaling Preston and some other friends with the serial killer Ed Gein’s reflections on women: “When I see a pretty girl walking down the street,” Gein says, “I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet.” “What does the other part think?” someone asks Bateman. “What her head would look like on a stick.” And the psycho’s complaint that Preston’s joke about JFK and Pearl Bailey is “not funny but racist” (38) will be followed by his vicious attack on a homeless black man, in which he himself will enthusiastically use the racial epithet (“you crazy fucking nigger”) he disapproved of in the joke. Nevertheless, I want to suggest, it isn’t anyone’s identity that Bateman is interested in attacking. When, for example, he ends up beheading the man whom Preston called a “lucky Jew bastard,” it’s not exactly a hate crime—his motive, insofar as he has some recognizable motive, is his own desire for the Fisher account.28 And, more generally, the categories of difference in which American Psycho is relentlessly invested—say, the difference between Armani and Armani Emporio or between a “hardbody” from Vassar and one from Queens—have nothing to do with either respect for or hostility to racial or cultural difference. The difference between Armani and Armani Emporio is not cultural but economic, and the difference between girls from Vassar and girls from Queens is also economic; it’s a difference in class.
It’s this interest in money and class rather than culture and race that establishes American Psycho as the novel of manners (rather than mores) it declares itself (beginning with the epigraph from Judith Martin) to be, with its notorious insistence on documenting the dinners, the toys, and above all the clothes of its “yuppie scum” and with its establishment of Bateman himself as the rightful heir of men like Edith Wharton’s Larry Lefferts. Lefferts, Wharton says in The Age of Innocence (1920), was “the foremost authority on ‘form’ in New York”: “As a young admirer had once said of him: ‘If anybody can tell a fellow just when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and when not to, it’s Larry Lefferts.’ ”29 And Bateman is “total GQ,” the man who can answer questions about “the correct way to wear a cummerbund” (316) or the “right way to wear a tie bar” (160) or about how a vest should fit—“trimly around the body…. It should peek just above the waist button of the suit jacket” because “if too much of the vest appears, it’ll give the suit a tight, constricted look that you don’t want” (87). As American Psycho understands them, what the people interested in these questions belong to is a class instead of a culture—what brings them together is their money. That’s what it means for Bateman not to have “anything in common” with the bum on the street, and that’s why, even when “things are getting bad” (385), he’s “left with one comforting thought: I am rich—millions are not” (392).
Books like Beloved, Maus, and Almanac of the Dead imagine societies organized by identity. The injustices against which they protest fundamentally involve disrespect for difference; their murdered bodies (six million Jews, sixty million and more African-Americans, another sixty million Native Americans) died, as these novels understand it, for their cultures, the victims of genocide and Holocaust. But the butchered bodies of American Psycho don’t have a culture—even the group that constitutes Bateman’s preferred target, pretty “girls,” doesn’t constitute a people: women are not a culture. And, more generally, what the rich don’t have “in common” with the poor is not a culture either. It’s money. To call American Psycho a novel of manners, then, is just to say it is a novel in which the world is fundamentally organized by class rather than by culture and in which people’s behavior represents their relation to their money—how much or how old.30 The utopian ideal of the novel of identity—the novel of cultures—is a world in which since, as Gordon and Newfield insist, cultures must be understood as essentially equal, difference is respected. But class differences, as we have already had occasion to note, are constituted by inequality, and the novel of class (the novel of manners) is thus in principle no respecter of difference.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the contrast between the way that texts like American Psycho and texts like Beloved and Maus imagine the transmission of difference from one generation to the next. The mechanism in both cases, of course, is inheritance, but what the psycho gets from his parents is a brokerage house, while what Denver and Art get from Sethe and Vladek is their identity. In the novel of manners, what you inherit is property. Thus American Psycho has no need to imagine the relation between generations, whereas Beloved and Maus are fundamentally concerned with that relation and with the scenes of instruction—about slavery, about the Holocaust—through which the young learn who they are. And if the contrast with American Psycho is sharp, the contrast with a text like the African-American writer Samuel Delany’s The Game of Time and Pain (published in 1987, the same year as Beloved) is even sharper, since The Game of Time and Pain, like Beloved, is a story about slavery and, like Maus, is told by an older man to a younger one. But where the characteristic scenes of identity in(and con)struction in Maus and Beloved involve the narrative transmission of a heritage from parent to child (virtually all of Maus consists of Vladek telling Art about the Holocaust, and much of Beloved involves Sethe telling Denver about slavery), the parallel scene in The Game of Time and Pain involves a middleaged Gorgik (“the Liberator”—he’s a former slave who led the rebellion that ended slavery) telling about slavery to a boy (Udrog) young enough to be his son but about, instead, to be his partner in what the boy hopefully describes as “real rough” sex.31 The Game of Time and Pain has its “holocaust” (80), but it isn’t an effort at genocide, it’s just a lot of people killed in the mine where Gorgik used to be enslaved, and he mentions it just in passing. Indeed, although Gorgik does, like Morrison, complain that the slaves had been denied “our history,” he isn’t really interested in reclaiming it. Instead he asserts the importance of what he says the slaves had replaced it with—“a personal history,” one that he imagines to be founded on “desire” rather than “memory.” Hence, what brings Gorgik and Udrog together is not the filial piety required by the transmission of a history that is something more than “personal”—the transmission of a heritage—but their shared “desire”: to “fuck real rough.”
What’s being passed on here—as if it were but precisely because it isn’t a heritage—is the sexual practice of what Delany calls “sadomasochism.” Slavery, of course, is crucial to this practice, but the history of slavery is not, and the racialized identity that Morrison anchors in that history isn’t either. What this means in part is that being a masochist is obviously different from being an African-American or a Jew—masochists are not a “people.”32 If, in other words, slavery is important to them, its importance doesn’t consist in its being part of their shared past. Udrog never was a slave; he wears “willingly” (it’s the crucial element in their “rough sex”) the “collar” that was “clapped and locked” around Gorgik’s “most unwilling neck” (32) when his parents were killed and he himself sold into slavery. But just as Delany’s text has no particular interest in the fate of Gorgik’s parents (here again the contrast with Maus and Beloved could hardly be more striking), it has no particular interest in the slave narrative as a recruiting device. The point, in other words, is not that by listening to the history of slavery, Udrog will come to see himself as an heir to it. Just the opposite; Udrog spends most of his time wishing Gorgik would stop talking and start fucking. What Udrog is interested in is not the history of slavery but the idea of slavery, and what The Game of Time and Pain is interested in is the slave collar as both a political and an erotic device for representing and revising that idea.
Politically, of course, the collar is the mark of enslavement, and there’s nothing very erotic about the short and brutal lives Delany imagines for Nevèrÿon’s slaves. At the same time, however, there’s nothing erotic in The Game of Time and Pain without the collar either, since it’s the collar—the token of one man’s submission to another—that makes masochism (the text’s sexual dominant) possible. But if there is no masochism without slavery (without the idea that one man can be enslaved to another), there is no masochism in slavery either. For what excites Gorgik is not the fact of the collar being fastened on him by his captors but his first vision years later of a “lord” placing the collar around his own neck: “I had known that the masters of Nevèrÿon could unlock the collar from my neck or lock it on again. What I had not known was that they could place it on their own necks and remove it” (55). The first of these acts—a master locking the collar around Gorgik’s neck—is “as empty of the sexual as it is possible for a human gesture to be” (54); the second—placing it around one’s own neck—Gorgik describes as a “sexual gesture” so intense that it makes his “joints go weak.” And when the lord who’s wearing the collar looks back at Gorgik, when “the slave and master” exchange a look, Gorgik says, “I became myself” (76).
One way to understand this moment of self-realization is as the replacement of a racial or cultural identity by a sexual identity. But, even setting aside the structural difference between culture and sex (the difference marked by the irrelevance or merely antiquarian interest to the masochist of the history and traditions of masochism), Delany makes it clear that Gorgik’s excitement involves not just the discovery of his sexual preferences but the deployment of those preferences as the eroticized form of a political position. The “tingling” of “lust” that Gorgik feels for the “Lord” is, he says, “the same tingling” he feels when he is liberating slaves by murdering their masters—it is the feeling of “freedom” (62). Hence the meaning of his masochism goes beyond its irrelevance to the idea of a people. It’s not just that what you are is replaced by what you want; it’s that what you want is articulated both as a desire and as a political principle—the commitment to freedom. And the fact that it’s masochistic desire that Delany identifies with freedom gives that principle its full political meaning. If the slave is someone who is owned—whose freedom belongs to another—the masochist is someone who, owning himself, willingly relinquishes his freedom, who exercises his will and insists on his freedom precisely by relinquishing his freedom. “I knew,” Gorgik says, “that the power to remove the collar was wholly involved with the freedom to place it there when I wished” (57). Insisting that if he is truly free, he must be free to give his freedom up, the masochist understands his freedom as the right to convey it to another, as, in other words, the fundamental freedom of liberal capitalism—freedom of contract.
This is why masochism has from its inception (in the texts of Sacher-Masoch) been identified with contract, and why in Delany, too, putting the collar on and taking it off are understood as the elements of contract, of a “proposition”—“Let me put a proposition to you” (149), as one man says to another. “Wear the collar” (173), and “I will pay you whatever you ask” (174). Insofar, then, as masochism involves taking one’s freedom to market, it enacts the commitment to freedom by turning the slave (whose body belongs to his master) into a prostitute (whose body is sold to a customer); before Udrog realizes that Gorgik wants him “to be my slave,” he imagines that after they have sex Gorgik might give him “a coin” (18–19). But masochism also goes beyond prostitution as an exercise of freedom. The problem with prostitution is that while, on the one hand, it makes sex into a celebration of the free market, on the other hand, it counts as a continual critique of the market by way of its implicit reference to an unprostituted alternative, one that would involve sex without exchange, without contract. In prostitution, in other words, giving up one’s freedom—which is to say, freedom itself—need not be eroticized; the prostitute need take no pleasure in prostitution. He may (and no doubt characteristically does) sell himself not for the pleasure of selling himself but for the money. But masochism is different. In masochism the contract is intrinsic to the pleasure, since what’s desired is the transformation of submission into choice. The prostitute exercises his freedom in giving up his freedom; the masochist not only exercises his freedom but finds his pleasure.
Gayle Rubin begins to make this point (in “The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and S/M”) when she writes that “you can do S/M by agreement and it can still be a turn-on,”33 but the surprise embodied in the italicized “and” makes it clear that she still thinks of the masochist’s consent to the loss of her freedom as something essentially extrinsic to her pleasure. For Rubin and for many of the other writers in Coming to Power, a collection of essays and stories first published in 1981 (just after Delany began the Nevèrÿon series), “sadomasochism” (especially lesbian sadomasochism) was always defended against the accusation that it reproduced men’s oppression of women by the insistence that masochism was a “consensual exchange of power” (30)—that the “distinction” between “men’s violence against womyn” (remember?!) and “lesbian S/M” was that lesbian S/M was “consensual” (37). “It is the presence of consent,” as another writer put it, “which legitimates acts that in a different, nonconsensual context would be oppressive, degrading, or criminal” (87). The fact that it is chosen thus guarantees the legitimacy of the choice: the members of SAMOIS are to battered women what Gorgik the Liberator is to Gorgik the slave. And SAMOIS’s critique of those who seek to deny masochists the right to exercise their freedom parallels the critique of the state’s effort to deny prostitutes the right to sell themselves in the market and of the government’s efforts more generally to limit people’s ability to do what they want. “I want lesbians to understand that anything you want is alright as long as you don’t coerce or abuse anyone to get it” (35), says Juicy Lucy in Coming to Power. If it’s consensual, it’s not criminal (“In sex law, consent is what distinguishes sex from rape” [224]). Juicy Lucy and her friends are outraged by the idea of the state interfering with a woman’s desire to be spanked in the same way that Bateman and his friends are outraged by the government’s attempt to put an unwilling homeless woman in a shelter: she actually “wants to be out on the streets … and we have a mayor who won’t listen to her, a mayor who won’t let the bitch have her way” (6). Letting the bitch have her way (leaving her on the streets if that’s what she wants, cuffing and spanking her if that’s what she wants, putting the collar on him if that’s what he wants) is the fundamental principle of SAMOIS’s, Ellis’s, and Delany’s liberalism—the commitment to contract.34
But the point for Delany is not just that “you can do S/M by agreement and it can still be a turn-on”; his point is that it can be a “turnon” only if you do it by agreement, that the agreement is the turn-on. It’s not just that masochism is legitimated by freedom of contract or that masochistic sex is something everyone should be free to engage in. Rather, masochism is itself the love of that freedom; the “tingling” you get when you put the collar on is “the same tingling” (62) you get when you take it off: “Why not call it freedom?” says Gorgik. Masochism in Delany is thus the eroticized form of liberalism. It’s as if Delany is here responding to one of the standard critiques of the liberal society—that, with its valorization of individual choice and its privatization of beliefs and desires, liberalism provides no object of affect for its citizens, no sense of a community that can be the object of their loyalty, above all, we might say, no culture. The formal valorization of choice over any substantive good (over what gets chosen) cannot, on this account, provide an adequate basis for a human community. It cannot provide something for the members of that community to love, which is just what culture and cultural identity do provide. But if you redescribe the commitment to freedom of choice as sexual masochism, you convert the formal into the substantive. Liberalism here is not the guarantee of your ability to choose what seems to you good, it is itself the good; the masochist doesn’t choose what he loves, he loves choosing.
Understood in these terms, masochism is the solution to a problem. During the Cold War, the alternative to liberalism—communism—made freedom loveable and could at least be imagined to make the exercise of that freedom (buying and selling) into an ideologically meaningful activity. But even though this phenomenon made a brief comeback in the months after the attack on the World Trade Center—with the president urging citizens to fight terrorism by shopping and vacationing—the end of the Cold War has mainly left writers from Fukuyama to Slavoj Žižek complaining about what Fukuyama called the “boredom” that must characterize a society devoted above all to “the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” and what Žižek describes as the abandonment of the ambition “to change the world.” Instead of seeking to change the world, the “Last Men” (and women) of posthistoricism seek to change themselves, replacing the devotion to a “Cause” with the commitment to “new forms of (sexual, spiritual, aesthetic …) subjective practice” (85). But even sex, according to Žižek, isn’t any good if it’s confined to the private sphere. The “only way,” he says, for two people “to have an intense and fulfilling personal (sexual) relationship is not for the couple to look into each other’s eyes, forgetting the world around them,” but for them “to look together outside, at a third point (the Cause for which both are fighting)” (85). The problem, of course, is to find the Cause. Fukuyama’s point was that there weren’t any more causes (that’s what makes what Žižek calls “our postideological era” postideological), that once socialism ceased to count as a cause, liberalism did too—there could be nothing heroic about fighting for liberalism when everybody was already a liberal. But masochism in Delany makes liberalism heroic again. What Žižek’s lovers can’t find in each other’s eyes, Delany’s lovers—exchanging the gaze of willing submission—can.
Masochism in Delany might thus be understood as an effort both to redeem Žižek’s lovers and to supply the intensity that he and Fukuyama miss. The “Lord” and the “slave,” the top and the bottom, aren’t looking desperately out for socialism; they’re looking passionately in at liberalism. More abstractly, they are looking at the transformation of their desire into a politics. Identities, as we have already had occasion to note, have desires in a way that they cannot have beliefs, if only because beliefs necessarily transcend the person who holds them: to believe that something is true is to believe that it is true for everyone and thus only incidentally true for oneself. So Delany’s masochists are not only not a people (on the model of Jews or African-Americans); they don’t, insofar as they are defined by desires that have been redescribed as beliefs, exactly inhabit a subject position either. If, in other words, identity is the complete triumph of the subject position, and the subject position is defined not only by who you are but by what you want—by everything, in effect, except what you believe—masochism’s redescription of desire as ideology makes it the salient alternative. It’s as if Delany wanted to put the passion that Fukuyama and Žižek miss back in liberalism by converting it from what it used to be (the alternative to socialism) to what it now becomes (the alternative to identity).
As a strategy for making fun of the identitarianism of writers like Morrison and Spiegelman, this is pretty effective; as a politics—or, at least, as a left politics—it isn’t: the absolute commitment to freedom of contract can hardly function as the basis for a critique of economic inequality. On the contrary, it’s the mechanism through which the inequality between labor and capital is imagined out of existence. The laborer, as Melville’s Bartleby made clear long ago, doesn’t have to sell his labor; he can prefer not to. But, of course, this formal equality—no one has to buy, no one has to sell—may comfortably be accompanied by forms of inequality. In fact, from the standpoint of (a no doubt discredited) Marxism, the contract between buyer and seller is the technology through which inequality is reproduced. If, then, peoples’ conviction that they belong to races and cultures (that they have identities) may make them less alert to the disadvantages accompanying the fact that they actually belong to classes, the eroticization of the mechanism through which those classes are established may make even the classes themselves—or, at least, the society they structure—look more attractive than does the structure of inequality on which that society depends.
Delany’s characterization of what he calls “sadomasochism” as “marginal” and his interest in what it means for “a middle-class man or woman to desire the lower or marginal classes”35 is revelatory here. For one thing, as we have already seen, there’s no sense in which the masochist’s love of freedom is at the margins of liberal society; on the contrary, it’s at the center, and this misrecognition of the center as the margin turns what is imagined as the critique of liberalism into a celebration of it. More striking still, however, is his equation of the “lower” with the “marginal” classes. The difficulty here is not just that the lower classes (like the idea of the masochist) are in no sense marginal to capitalism (without them, there would be no capitalism); the problem is rather with the whole apparatus of the center and the margin, and with its commitment to granting the marginal its own status. No doubt masochists (who, unlike the liberalism they epitomize, probably are marginal—in the sense, at least, that there aren’t so many of them) should not be stigmatized. But the problem of the “lower” classes is not being stigmatized. The problem of eliminating inequality is not the problem of reorganizing the relations between the margin and the center, and the solution to the problem of inequality is not learning to love it.
Forgetting
In Delany’s Nevèrÿon, you don’t need to remember the history of masochism in order to be a proper masochist. The point can be extrapolated to a higher level: you don’t need to know its history in order to love freedom, which is just another way of saying what has already been said—if history isn’t able to serve as a source of identity, it isn’t needed to serve as a source of ideology. It isn’t able to serve as a source of identity because things that didn’t happen to us can’t count as part of our history. And it isn’t needed as a source of ideology because beliefs need reasons rather than sources, and the fact that our (or anybody else’s) ancestors believed in, say, socialism, isn’t much of a reason for us to believe in it. But, of course, the fact that we cannot derive either an identity or an ideology from our history doesn’t mean that we have no history or that the history we have is utterly irrelevant to us. In fact, there is an obvious sense in which we are entirely the product of our histories, the sense in which we are all the end result of a long chain of causes. If, for example, our parents were rich, it may be a significant truth about us that we went to the best schools. If our parents were poor, it may be an equally significant truth that we didn’t go to good schools. And while the fact that your ancestors were slaves cannot make you black, it can make you poor.
Hence the comparatively recent intense interest in the history of slavery may be understood not only as the failed effort to explain who we are but also, more successfully, as the effort to explain how we came to be who we are. Indeed, in a text like The Debt (2000), Randall Robinson’s widely noticed polemic in favor of the idea that the United States should make monetary reparation to the descendants of slaves, both these views are on display. The Debt, that is, deploys (more or less interchangeably) both the argument that wrongs done to the slaves are wrongs done to African-Americans today (on the grounds, à la Beloved, that the history of slavery is their history) and the argument that wrongs done to the slaves, while they were not done to anyone living now, have nonetheless had effects on people who are living now. The Debt is simultaneously committed, in other words, to the view that people are owed reparations because they’re black and because of the many injustices that have been visited in the United States on black people, and to the view that people are owed reparations because they’re poor and because their poverty is the consequence of an injustice done to their ancestors. And while the difference between these commitments may seem negligible—after all, aren’t the two populations, African-Americans and the descendants of slaves, for all practical purposes identical?—it turns out that quite a lot actually hinges on which argument you choose.
For one thing, the claim to racial identity—the claim to reparations in virtue of being black—explicitly produces the metaphysics that the Beloved-style appeal to history sought unsuccessfully to bypass. When, for example, Robinson announces that he was born in 1941 but that his “black soul is much older than that,”36 he deploys racial identification as the technology that makes it possible to understand events that apparently happened to other people before you were born as nonetheless having really happened to you. It’s in this sense that a poor young black girl can, he argues, benefit from the study of American history—she can learn “what happened to her” (239). So even though Robinson sometimes analogizes race to merely physical characteristics—if “short people had been enslaved, reviled, kept illiterate” (77), and so on, their test scores would be as much below those of tall people as blacks are below whites, he says—he clearly doesn’t think that being black is like being short. There is no short soul. And since he is skeptical also of “the very ascientific social notion of race” (and rightly so, since the social notion of race is either entirely dependent on the physiological criteria of descent—black people are people who are descended from other black people—or entirely empty,)37 what he’s left with is a metaphysical instead of physical entity—the soul.
The advantage of this entity is that it solves the problem of how things that didn’t happen to you can nonetheless be thought of as part of your history—they did happen to you, or at least to your soul. The disadvantage is that it’s hard to see why anyone should think there really is such a thing as a racial soul. It’s possible, of course, that Robinson intends the soul as a kind of metaphor. But the problem then is the same problem we had with the ghost in Beloved—a metaphor for what? The soul can’t be a metaphor for the thing that unites black people today with black people long ago, since if we believe in the biology of race, that thing is the very opposite of the soul—it’s the body—and if we don’t believe in the biology of race, we need the soul itself to be real, since there’s nothing for it to be a metaphor for. But, of course, the argument for reparations needn’t depend on the ghost of slavery or the black soul. It needn’t depend on the idea that slavery is ongoing or on the claim that the things that happened to the slaves are somehow still happening to black people today. Robinson’s entirely plausible insistence that what he describes as “the socioeconomic gap between the races” in the United States today “derives from the social depredations of slavery” (173) does not require a racial soul to identify the descendants of slaves with their ancestors. It requires only that we accept the idea that the economic disadvantages under which slaves labored were passed on to their children and that the additional economic disadvantages (the disadvantages produced as well as maintained by Jim Crow) under which the slaves’ children labored have been passed on to their children. So the fact that black people today are disproportionately represented in the lowest quintiles of American wealth can be causally linked to the fact that many of their ancestors were the victims of injustice. The history of slavery is relevant here because it is in the best sense a history of the present—as a history of how African-Americans have come to be poor, it is also a set of arguments for why the United States owes them reparations. The debt owed to African-Americans today depends not on them suffering an ongoing injustice (the debt is owed even though slavery is over, and it does not depend on racism continuing—if it did, then the proper response would be not to pay the debt but to end racism) but on them suffering the consequences of a previous injustice. The history of slavery is the history of the poor little black girl whom Robinson imagines destined to failure because slavery is a crucial link in the causal chain that explains how that girl came to be poor and so—since the greatest predictor of economic status for children is the economic status of their parents—of why she is likely to remain so.
The argument for reparations is thus a historical one inasmuch as it involves studying the past in order to explain how the present came to be. But it crucially involves also what Orson Scott Card—in his counterfactual or alternative history, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996)—calls “the unmaking of history.”38 Alternative histories are devoted to imagining what the world would have been like if certain events had turned out differently (What if Hitler had been aborted? What if Castro had signed with the Giants?), and the very idea of reparations is crucially linked to questions of this kind. Thus, for example, Lord Anthony Gifford, in a paper presented to the First Pan-African Congress on Reparations, begins by citing a decision by the Permanent Court of International Justice (the predecessor of the International Court of Justice) which argues that the purpose of reparation is, “as far as possible,” “to wipe out all the consequences of the illegal act and re-establish the situation which would, in all probability, have existed if the act had not been committed.”39 What if Columbus had not begun the European colonization of the Americas? What if we could go back in time and induce both him and the “Indians” he encountered to behave very differently? What if we could prevent the conditions that made the market for slaves and hence the slave trade possible? Reparations for slavery require us first to imagine and then to seek to establish the situation that would have existed if there had been no slavery, which is precisely what the historians and time travelers of Pastwatch seek to do. Only where real historians must reconstruct how things were and imagine how they might have turned out differently, the historians of science fiction novels (in Pastwatch through a machine called the Truesite) actually get to go back to the past, turning you who never was there into someone who might have been there after all, and not only been there but done something about it.
Alternate histories like Pastwatch thus take up the Greenblattian project of listening to the dead and push it a little farther; Card’s historians spend more time talking to the dead than they do listening, since it’s through the talking that they can not only learn about but alter the past. Greenblatt, of course, was already headed in this direction, which is why critics of the New Historicism like Carolyn Porter could accuse him of a kind of “linguistic colonialism” in his essay “Invisible Bullets,” claiming that the “potential cultural agency” and ability to “speak for themselves” of the Algonkian Indians were being “eradicated” by Greenblatt’s discussion of them.40 And the implausibility of this accusation—how, with the best will in the world, could Greenblatt silence people who had been dead for over four hundred years?—was somewhat mitigated by Greenblatt’s own conception of his vocation. He “began,” we remember, “with the desire to speak to the dead,” and once you think of yourself as trying to hear the dead speak, you more or less inevitably license others to think of you as trying to shut them up. Either way, listening or interrupting, your conception of your relation to the past has gone beyond just learning about it; the time-traveling historians of Card’s Pastwatch are only literalizing a condition that both the New Historicism and its critics had already envisaged and on which the reparations movement has constructed itself.
In the reparations movement, of course, it is money (rather than Greenblatt’s middle-class shamanism or Orson Scott Card’s Truesite) that functions as the technology for undoing history. But the questions raised about the relation between past and present, in particular the question of what the consequences for the present would be if we could indeed make it as if there had been no slavery, remain central and unresolved. Pastwatch insists that the most obvious consequence of retroactively eliminating slavery (or, for that matter, of changing the past at all) would be to eliminate the present we have—there would, to begin with, be no descendants of slaves—and it understands both the history and the legacy of slavery as so unacceptable that its historians are willing to take that step. But the actual descendants of slaves are bound to have a different view. The heroine of one of Octavia Butler’s first novels, Kindred (1976), for example, is a woman descended from both slaves and slaveholders who keeps being called back to the past to rescue first the white man and then the black woman who will become her ancestors—if she fails, there will be no present to which she can return.
From the standpoint of reparations, obviously, this is a skeptical position, since the story makes at least this one descendant of slaves the grateful beneficiary of (and reluctant contributor to)41 their ability to survive hardship. It’s a version of David Horowitz’s argument—expressed in his “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Are a Bad Idea for Blacks”—that black as well as white Americans are better off because of slavery, since, without slavery, African-Americans would just be Africans and would, he claims, have average per capita incomes considerably smaller than the ones they have now.42 Butler casts no aspersions on Africa, but she too is committed to the idea that, as bad a thing as slavery was for the people who experienced it, it was a good thing for their descendants, and not only for the white ones—causal gratitude to the brutal white slaveowner who raped your great-grandmother more or less inevitably trumps moral disapproval of him.43
But Horowitz’s point—that African-Americans, who owe their very existence to slavery, are better off than Africans—doesn’t get at the core claim of the reparations movement, which is that white Americans today are disproportionately better off than black Americans, and that the comparative disadvantage of blacks can be attributed to slavery and past racism. No one, including right-wing polemicists like Horowitz and Dinesh D’Souza, denies, what I’ve already noted, that blacks are overrepresented at the lower levels of American wealth. And it’s hard to see how this fact can be explained without recourse to the history of slavery and racism. Even D’Souza’s notorious invocation of the “pathology” of black culture must rely on some such historical explanation, for the culture that supposedly keeps blacks from attaining economic equality with whites is a product of the same history that Robinson and the advocates of reparation invoke.44 Whether we blame the failure of Robinson’s emblematic nine-year-old on her poverty or on the “pathology” of her culture, we can’t possibly blame it on her—the cause in either case is a situation over which she has no control that is itself the product of a series of events that were over before she was ever born.
And it is, of course, precisely this fact that makes the project of undoing history so attractive. If we could create a world in which there had been no slavery and somehow limit the effects of that change to the disadvantage suffered by the descendants of the slaves, the “yawning economic gap between whites and blacks in this country” would disappear: blacks would be proportionately represented (13 percent) at every level of American society. Where, in other words, blacks currently make up a disproportionately large segment (around 20 percent) of the population with a household income under $15,000, they would, if we could undo the effects of slavery and racism, make up only 13 percent. And where they now account for only about 7 percent of the households earning above $75,000, they would, once history was undone, make up 13 percent of that group, too.45 This wouldn’t, of course, eliminate economic inequality. But while the gap between the rich and the poor would remain, the gap between black and white would disappear; inequality would no longer be racialized.
To put the point in this way, however—to describe the goal of reparations as a racially proportionate redistribution of wealth—is immediately to invite the objection that it’s hard to see how leaving the economic inequalities of American society intact while rearranging the skin color of those who suffer from and those who benefit from those inequalities counts as progress. And, if what we are seeking is economic equality, it doesn’t. What drives the reparations movement, however, is not the mere fact of economic inequality—“Lamentably,” Robinson says, “there will always be poverty” (8). The point of reparations is not to eliminate poverty but to compensate those whose poverty “derives from the social depredations of slavery” (173), whose poverty is an effect of the great crimes committed by an unjust social system. Once not only the social system but also its consequences have been destroyed, whatever economic inequality survives may be, as Robinson says, “lamentable,” but it won’t be unjust. If, in other words, some or even many people still become poor, from the standpoint of the logic of reparations, we will want to argue that their poverty is their problem—that poverty is acceptable (i.e., not compensable) as long as it’s not the product of injustice, as long as the people who are poor are poor because of what they themselves have or have not done rather than because of what has or has not been done to or for them.
This is, of course, a familiar position, if not exactly a familiar left position.46 And, if we can imagine a world in which everyone really does begin with an equal opportunity to achieve the various forms of success, it is, at least, a defensible one.47 If reparations were paid to the African-American population, perhaps those African-Americans who still—despite the reparations—ended up poor could be said to deserve their poverty. But it’s hard to see how the children of these deserving poor would deserve their poverty. More generally, it’s hard to see how children raised in poverty can be held responsible for that poverty whether or not their parents were the victims of an unjust social system. Shouldn’t they be given an equal opportunity regardless of how their poverty was produced? Why does the cause of their poverty matter, as long as they are not themselves its cause? Hence, and still more generally, why should this policy of reparations apply only to African-Americans? Everybody’s poverty is the result of some cause; every child’s poverty is the consequence of some event in which that child was not involved. Why should slavery and apartheid be compensable while, say, free but poorly paid labor is not? Or—more to the point—why should any particular narrative, any particular history of the events that culminate in some child having less of an opportunity to succeed than some other child, matter? If I’m born in poverty, what does it matter whether my father was an exploited slave or a spendthrift playboy? The money, after all, is going to me, not to my ancestors; it is my victimization, not theirs (they’re dead), for which reparation must be made.
The point here is not that our sense of whose histories need to be taken into account must be extended; it is instead that no one’s history need be taken into account, that the recognition of inequality makes the history of that inequality irrelevant, and that the question of past injustice has no bearing on the question of present justice. The “blameless” but poor and hence “embattled nine-year-old” (239) who is Robinson’s emblematic victim of the history of slavery and discrimination would be just as blameless if her great-great-grandfather had been Simon Legree. Every nine-year-old is blameless; what a just society owes them is not reparations for bad things that were done to their ancestors but an opportunity equal to that of all the other nine-year-olds. So what’s relevant is never any particular account of why some child has been impoverished but only the recognition that, whatever the account is, the child cannot be understood to deserve his or her impoverishment. Our schools could stop teaching the history of slavery and of the wrongs done to the native population and of the exploitation of immigrant labor—our schools could stop teaching any history—and our sense of what’s owed to the children attending those schools would be utterly unaffected. If no one knew anything about American history, the world would be more ignorant but not less just. Which is only to say that the knowledge that each student’s poverty has a cause is crucial to justice; the knowledge of what that cause is is not.
The Debt begins by asking why “African-Americans lag the American mainstream in virtually every area of statistical measure” and by claiming that the “answer can be found only in the distant past.” Its historicism consists first of all in its interest in the causes of contemporary conditions. But, of course, Robinson is interested not only in the essentially academic question of how current conditions have come to be but especially in the ways in which the knowledge of how things have come to be can alter the way they are. This alteration takes at least two forms: self-knowledge (which involves racial self-knowledge and hence the racial soul—knowing what happened to your ancestors is knowing what happened to you) and compensation (which doesn’t, strictly speaking, involve the notion of race at all—the relevant group is the group of people who have inherited the harm). Both these interests (history as self-knowledge, history as causal account of our current situation) are today widespread; they are what people have in mind when they say that we can’t know who we are without knowing our history, that history is what makes us who we are. But I have tried to suggest that both these interests are, in different ways, misplaced.
The first—history as self-knowledge—is based on a mistake, the mistake of thinking that things that didn’t happen to us can nonetheless be understood as part of our history. But the knowledge of things that didn’t happen to us is precisely not self-knowledge, and the effort to imagine things that happened to other people as having happened to us too (as being part of our history) requires racialized fantasies that their own proponents are not prepared to defend. Does Randall Robinson really believe in the racial soul he begins by invoking? If he doesn’t, if the racial soul is really another name for the racial body, then he needs an account of how things that happened to people with bodies like mine can be bootstrapped into things that happened to me. Or if the racial soul is really just a metaphor for nonbiological historical continuity, then he needs an account of what it is that’s nonbiologically continuing. Which is just to say that he needs the soul.
The second interest—in the history that makes us who we are—is not based on a mistake: it’s true that history makes us who we are, but it’s also, for the purpose of making our society more just—at least if we identify justice with equal opportunity—irrelevant.48 What we owe the victims of injustice is justice, not a causal account of how they came to be victimized. If, however, we don’t identify equal opportunity with justice, if we think that the diminished access of some nine-year-olds to the opportunities our society makes available to some other nine-year-olds is not in itself unjust, then, of course, history does become crucial. For if inequality can be justly inherited, it’s only history that will be able to tell us which children have been the victims of injustice and which ones haven’t, which ones have been deprived of their inheritance and which ones have no inheritance to be deprived of. The proper use of history, in other words, will be to legitimate (at least some) inequality. But if you’re not interested in legitimating some inequality, if you think that equal opportunity is a right, not an inheritance, then the causal account of how our inequalities came into being can have only an antiquarian interest. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Nothing I’ve said here is meant to count as an argument against antiquarianism. My point is only that the interest in the past shouldn’t be mistaken for an analysis of or an attempt to deal with the problems of the present. It’s one thing to celebrate Black History Month; it’s another thing to redistribute wealth. And, in fact, the two things are not only different, they are, in crucial ways, opposed: reparations and the celebration of a history involve the respect for identity and for inheritance, which is to say, the respect above all for property, whether it takes the form of cultural heritage or of money. History here is a technology designed not to produce equality but, like the lawsuits brought by victims of the Nazis, to return to people the things they own. Redistribution of wealth, however, involves a certain skepticism about ownership, matched by indifference to inherited identity and hostility to inherited property.