This chapter argues that in addition to a political advocacy regarding equal access to—and adequate rewards for—the “co-creation” of exchange value by social actors, there is also a need for a critique of the exchange value frame itself. It is through that economic frame that language is increasingly commodified, as the words and images of social actors are shaped into marketable material forms. This chapter turns to the aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and integrates them into the theory of performative citationality. Relying on Christoph Menke’s reading, Adorno’s thesis in Aesthetic Theory—regarding the dislocation of normative meanings through the work of art—is extended to the potential dislocation of normative values.
It is also argued in this chapter that in addition to the potential for the utterances of artists to generate “aesthetic negativity” (Menke 1998, xi), everyday social actors might issue utterances—as well as participate in interactive dialogues—which have the potential to dislocate normative values and identities. This argument is tied to Butler’s work on how recontextualization processes open a space for the dislocation of normative identities. The work of Erving Goffman on “frame-breaking” is also discussed in this regard. Finally, the work of Benjamin on the aesthetic potential of modern media technologies is also considered—especially given the “citational” aspect of photography.
In his discussion of the controversies regarding the inclusion of various subcultural groups in the educational canon, John Guillory (1993) distinguishes between “cultural representation,” “political representation,” “aesthetics,” and “aesthetic value.” These distinctions will be useful to us in speaking of cultural values, political values, and that which potentially dislocates value discourse itself—“aesthetics.” Guillory’s main point in his book is that cultural representation, as regards the inclusion of a particular minority group in the educational canon, should not be confused with political representation, which concerns the access of group members to the means of cultural production (13; 18).
Guillory argues that the question of “aesthetic judgment”—evaluating the quality of works regardless of subcultural origin—is obscured in the curriculum debate by a contemporary relativism advocating for the mere inclusion of the works of various subcultures into the literary canon. For Guillory, this kind of advocacy for cultural representation addresses neither the question of access to the means of cultural production, nor appreciates the autonomy of “aesthetics” from other contemporary value discourses.
While Guillory’s critical interest is much the same as Bourdieu’s—to critique the inequality of access to “cultural capital” (an issue in the value domain of politics)—his analysis is also applicable to the main concern in this chapter; namely, the possibility of an “aesthetic” disruption of valuing discourses themselves, and of the exchange value system which measures their worth. Of particular relevance is Guillory’s argument that the canon debate regarding educational curriculum in the United States has reduced art to merely cultural capital, and thereby launched an attack on “aesthetics” itself. In consequence, such a move limits the operation of aesthetics in resisting the exchange value frame—and instead assimilates aesthetics into the current hegemonic discourse of exchange value by way of “aesthetic value.”
As Guillory argues, cultural representation is not the same as political representation. For example, de Certeau (1988) has shown that certain syntactical forms are used by dominant groups to “report” on the speech of subordinate groups. This results in cultural inclusion or “representation,” while simultaneously denying the political agency of subordinate groups. For Guillory, the voice of the excluded other may “return” through inclusion in the educational canon, but still be excluded from full economic and political participation in the larger society. The political question, as Guillory sees it, concerns who has control over the “social conditions governing access to literacy” (16). In the language of citationality, this involves control over normative citational practices, and over the production and distribution of citational resources. In other words, following Guillory, “exclusion” cannot simply be defined as “exclusion from representation” (18) within normative citational practices, but rather in terms of access to the normative distributional network of these citational resources.
This question of greater equality within the political economy, as advocated by Guillory, is indeed urgent. However, this strategy—of greater “access to the means of cultural production” (18; italics in the original)—must be combined with a critique of those same cultural practices, inasmuch as they are implicated in the continuing re-citation of the consumer economy itself. In other words, contemporary critical theory must graft together the political question regarding “access to value,” with the question of the performative re-citation of exchange value itself.
As Derrida argued in Specters of Marx (1994), this latter endeavor involves the dislocation of any anticipated, desired, or even identifiable political values of the future—because any critique of “value” demands an unknown future in which its repetition and re-citation necessarily occurs. Despite the uneasy relationship between critical theory and poststructuralism to date, a graft of these projects may not be altogether incompatible; indeed, the material forms which perpetuate unequal access to value within capitalism are the very same material forms which re-cite the ideology of the “presence of value” itself. Commodified material forms tend to close off alternative futures as they re-cite the temporality of exchange value—which not only generates class inequality, but interpellates the very identity of class-based “consumers.”
For Guillory, then, the simple insertion of a particular author into the literary canon—who supposedly “represents” the collective identity, values, and experiences of a subcultural group—cannot be taken as an adequate political strategy to improve group access to the economic and political means of cultural production (10). Extending Guillory’s argument, such political access to the means of identity production must be combined with access to particular aesthetic citational resources; that is, resources which have the potential to dislocate the interpellation of class-based Cartesian subjects. As discussed above, this type of Cartesian individualism has historically supported the development of capitalism itself, and is necessary for the contemporary re-citation of exchange value. Recognizing this (poststructuralist) point does not lessen the importance of the political question regarding access to cultural capital—the specific concern of Guillory, Bourdieu, and of critical theorists generally.
This question of dislocating normative citational practice, in addition to an advocacy for full political participation within the existing hegemonic structure of value, is especially urgent today given the contemporary reduction of politics to the mere marketability of one’s “political” words—as we see with the proliferation of politically oriented talk radio, Internet sites, or cable television stations. Clearly, the mere inclusion of the voice of a subordinated group within institutionalized, syntactical forms—designed to generate exchange value—perpetuate the current political economy more than challenge it. Increasingly, it seems that in this age of media politics the question of political legitimation becomes simply one of citational hierarchy—which political authority is cited where. Thus, we find that political decision-making is too often moved not by the force of the better argument, but rather by those words and images which have a better market value—that is, those words and images can be valorized as better experiences for those who consume cultural commodities marked as political.
While Guillory and Bourdieu have implicated the educational institution in the unequal distribution of cultural capital, we can also recognize the school’s critical location as a potential site for the dislocation of normative citational forms. Schools are one of the last non-commercial alternatives to the mass media for the distribution and positioning of language in society (see Guillory 1993, 8)—especially as family life is increasingly plugged into commercial media, and contemporary social interaction has become saturated with a mobile and commercialized Internet. In this sense, the canon debate over the exposure of students to aesthetics, as an alternative to the more marketable material forms of the consumer economy, becomes an important site of contestation regarding the commodification of language generally—and thus over the construction of social identity itself.
Because cultural commodities shape the materiality of the future social environment, and thereby shape the citational resources through which future identities will be interpellated, certain political questions become crucial—such as the ownership of media networks for the distribution of language, the control of and commercialization of the Internet, and the commercialization and rationalization of educational curriculum. However, as Butler (1993) has shown in her discussion of the work of Slavoj Žižek, because of the iterability of political language itself, the effectiveness of particular challenges to hegemonic economic formations cannot be guaranteed in advance—in alignment with known political positions. Rather, those who would change contemporary articulations of values and identities must seek to open unknown future contexts which may provide, rather than foreclose, opportunities for alternative identity and value formation. If “present” politics concerns the negotiation of already-known values and identities, then aesthetics—in disrupting the existing “identity of value” itself—opens the space for a (tentative) new politics, and a (contingent) new articulation of identities and values. As Derrida (1994) has shown, the anticipation of such an unknown future is not the same thing as the calculative anticipation of political or economic strategies.
The next sections of this book address the question of “breaking” the hegemonic exchange value frame, in order to instead provide an opening for an unknowable future. If meaningful cultural forms have increasingly become commodities in the closed system of exchange value, it is precisely in the “play” of language, meaning, and value—given their iterability across contexts—where the possibility of opening the future lies. The critique developed by the Frankfurt School regarding the culture of late capitalism—as dominated by exchange value—is thus moved into a discussion of performativity and citationality.
As suggested earlier, Erving Goffman’s (1986) work in Frame Analysis might be used to consider exchange value discourse as a “frame,” within which social reality is organized in a particular way. In that work, Goffman was not only concerned with the construction of the frames by which experience was organized, but also was concerned with the “vulnerabilities” of frames (10). The work of Goffman on “breaking frame” might be considered when discussing the possibility of an aesthetic configuration through which an utterance might unsettle normative value discourses—particularly the dislocation of the hegemonic frame of exchange value.
For Goffman, when an individual “breaks frame,” they have a “negative” or non-normative experience (379). Goffman discusses how the anxiety experienced by some when normative frames are broken might become pleasurable experiences for others—as when a practical joke is played. Interestingly, Goffman cites as examples of “breaking frame” both cultural commodities, such as televised wrestling, as well as the work of avant-garde artists (see 401–08). For Goffman, both art and commodities have the potential to disrupt normative frames and experiences.
Goffman points out that the dislocations of normative value frames are usually only temporary. In addition, frame-breaking techniques can themselves become routinized. Yet, as Goffman points out, routinized and repeated violations of the boundaries of frame, as normalized violations, might over time result in a change in the boundaries of the frame itself (420). Using Butler’s (1999) example, we can imagine that initial performances of a gender parody—which might produce a temporary “negative experience” for audiences—also could become a more regular occurrence in television shows—as a gendered cultural commodity. Applying Goffman’s insight, we can see that while any particular citation has less “aesthetic negativity” (see Menke 1998, xi) following its routinization, the cumulative effect of such commodification might be an alteration in the frame itself. We can see here the affinity between Judith Butler’s argument regarding the political potentialities of recontextualization, and Goffman’s notion of frame-breaking (Sherlock 2011).
In other words, as gender parodies become routine, the category of gender itself might itself be altered. Thus, as a political strategy, Goffman’s “micro” approach to interactional “frame-breaking” becomes interesting as a way of “disorganizing the world” (Goffman 1986, 493). Routinized frame-breaking, he notes, will result in “a generative effect, systematically transforming all instances of the class, and, incidentally, systematically undermining the prior meaning of the acts” (493). In this sense, perhaps even the commodification or routinization of certain “aesthetic” citational practices may undermine the value frame or identity category itself. To use Derrida’s (1981) notion of the pharmakon, the commodity may be both “poison” and “cure” relative to the exchange value frame.
As Butler has shown, gender categories not only limit subjectivity, but enable a particular subjectivity at the same time. The dislocation of identity categories by “enabled” subjects must therefore occur within situated action, through repetitions which re-cite the categories “with a difference.” In Goffman’s sense, while any citational configurations which temporarily dislocate gender or value categories might easily be re-commodified, the cumulative effect of such recontextualizations might be an alteration of the sedimented meaning of the value category itself. Thus, the dislocation of identity categories involves the effort to alter those very frames which simultaneously enable one’s own agency; Butler has noted the “uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong” (1993, 219).
It must be remembered that, as Butler shows, citational practices are not just a matter of choice. As in the case of gender, social sanctions enforce normative citational practices. Yet, as Derrida and Butler have shown, even enforced repetition necessarily involves alteration, and thus also involves the potential for the dislocation of sedimented meanings. Although normative utterances interpellate normative interpretive contexts, the grafting of utterances into unknown future contexts always opens the possibility for alterations of frame. For Butler, this possibility “is precisely the political promise of the performative, one that positions the performative at the center of a politics of hegemony, one that offers an unanticipated political future for deconstructive thinking” (1997, 161; italics added).
Thus, like Derrida, Butler locates the hope for alternative citational practices in an open and unknown future, as opposed to an alignment with known political values. At the same time however, as Butler points out, no political subject has agency outside of contemporary regulatory (value) discourses; rather, contemporary subjects are always already constituted by such discourses, and configure their utterances within the existing constellation of normative discourses (1993, 15).
In developing her argument, Butler appeals to Žižek’s work on the performativity of political signifiers. According to Butler, Žižek argues that political signifiers should not be taken as “representative” of pre-existing political constituencies, but rather that these communities are themselves interpellated from such signifiers (191). Like Anderson (1991) or Guillory (1993), Žižek argues that such “imagined communities” lack the value consensus which is typically attributed to them—the signifier can never guarantee the adequate representation of a “pure” valuing community (Butler 1993, 191). Integrating this insight with Derrida’s work on citationality, Butler argues that “It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity” (191).
Any regulating “unity”—including group norms—as interpellated from political signifiers must be continually re-cited to maintain its regulatory effect; however, this re-citation also opens it to alteration (193). Butler follows Žižek in arguing that the recognizable political values supposedly shared by a community are, in fact, subject to the “contingency” of signification (193). In this sense, the re-citation of normative subcultural values are always subject to the possibilities of “breaking frame.”
Just as Žižek and Butler have suggested that political signifiers can be considered as performative, we can also consider those economic signifiers—which continually re-cite exchange value—to be performative. The re-citation of exchange value interpellates the subject to be a member of an imagined subculture which in fact lacks the “valuing unity” attributed to it—as does the abjected collectivity required for the identity of the “valuing” group. For example, the maintenance of the “fashionable” subculture, as a social location where value is presumed to be present, requires the continual abjection of those who reciprocally emerge as the unfashionable. The inherent instability of both identities require their continued re-citation; for Butler, this requirement simultaneously opens the possibility of their dislocation and alteration. While objecting to certain Lacanian aspects of Žižek’s political theory, Butler embraces Žižek’s argument that this possibility can be called the “democratic promise” of the political signifier (195). We can also here see its applicability to the economic signifier which re-sites the presence of exchange value.
Along with the contributions of both Goffman and Butler on “frame-breaking,” Henry Louis Gates’s (1988) work in The Signifying Monkey also shows how re-citation can dislocate normative value categories. Gates shows how aesthetic citational configurations, such as the “Monkey tales” told over generations in particular African-American communities, can disrupt normative signifying practices. For Gates, this community tradition has long made use of the repetition and variation of particular themes in new contexts—a repetition with alteration (see xxii–xxiii; 50–51). The way stories are repeated—that is, the citational style by which traditional themes are voiced—becomes more important than the content of the story. Gates notes, in discussing the work of Roger D. Abrahams, that what is important in these tales is that “one does not signify something; rather, one signifies in some way” (54, italics in the original). These aesthetic styles thus “play with” the syntactical forms of citational practice itself.
For Gates, the emphasis in the telling of the tales is less on the referential meaning, and more on the “play of language”—an emphasis on the material, syntactical form. Like Butler, Gates argues that resistance to dominant meanings occurs not from their “outside,” but from within normative citational practices and their associated identities. In fact, Gates argues that the very usage of the alternate term “‘Signifyin(g),’” within the black community, has the rhetorical function of challenging “the nature of (white) meaning itself”—that is, of normative “signification” (46–47). In other words, an aesthetic modification in linguistic form is used to disrupt normative value contexts, as it dislocates normative referential meanings.
For Gates, a particular “rhetorical strategy” (47)—that is, a particular citational style or syntactical arrangement—is meant to unsettle the values of the dominant group; here, the normative system of racial categorization. Importantly, as Gates points out in reference to the Monkey poems, it is the materiality of the signifier which is involved in this play of language. This materiality signifies differently than normatively assumed.
Gates cites Bakhtin’s notion of the “double-voiced word,” which for Bakhtin involves “inserting a new semantic orientation into a word which already has—and retains—its own orientation” (Bakhtin, in Gates 1988, 50). Thus, the normative meaning of a word is repeated “with a signal difference” (Gates 1988, 51)—a difference which grafts a usually excluded context onto the normative referential context. Thus, while the normative context and usual meaning exists, the usually excluded context is simultaneously cited—distancing itself from and playing against the normative meaning. Both meanings are kept in tension in the “play” of language. Gates recognizes this dimension of language in literary (aesthetic) tropes, and describes their predominance in African-American language use (52).
Thus, Gates shows that aesthetic citational configurations can dislocate dominant value discourses, as the play of language dislocates the interpellation of normative referential contexts. In this sense, we can see how such play of aesthetic language might resist the automatic signification of exchange value. Words with exchange value as a cultural commodity, such as a literary tale, may signify differently as they are re-cited in an aesthetic way which resists their normative commodification. Aspects of materiality which are normatively taken to signify the “presence of value” can be made problematic through aesthetically configured citational forms. Despite the hegemony of exchange value—that all language can signify a market “worth”—aesthetic citational configurations have the potential to unsettle this interpellated context through the generation of “aesthetic negativity” (see Menke 1998, xi). Language itself has a certain “play” such that its connotations cannot be controlled in advance; it cannot be made entirely subservient to the demands of commodity circulation.
Recalling our discussion above regarding reported speech, it is interesting to note that in the traditional Monkey poems, it is precisely reported speech which usually starts the “trouble”—employing a technique of “indirection” (Gates 1988, 77). Typically, in these tales the monkey reports on what the elephant previously said about the lion, which leads to a conflict between those two. The “play” is between strips of language (supposedly) spoken in different contexts—the “absent” conversation is re-cited in the present conversation. Gates notes that such “indirection” is also how tropes function: an absent or excluded meaning comes to problematize the automatic understanding of “present” meaning (80).
Thus while “reported speech” can be used to marginalize groups, as in the de Certeau or Inoue examples discussed earlier, we can also see how particular syntactical forms (like aesthetically configured reported speech) can disrupt normative referential contexts—both in a subject/author’s utterances when narrating a story, as well as in the character’s utterances speaking within the story. As another example, Gates discusses how Zora Neale Hurston, in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, uses a “double-voiced narrative mode,” mixing syntactical forms of “reported speech” to create a particular aesthetic effect (xxv–xxvi).
In this sense, aesthetics can be considered as a kind of “playing with context,” disrupting normative referential links between the material sign and its typically interpellated context. What is at stake in the “playing,” however, are not just the social relationships and values involving a single context; rather, the materiality which disrupts normative signification processes involves the negotiation of multiple contexts—and their implied social relationships. Aesthetics involves “playing” with several contexts simultaneously—both dominant and subordinated contexts.
For Bakhtin, the modern novel is precisely an aesthetic form which grafts or plays with several contexts simultaneously; in the novel a “heteroglossia” of voices might disrupt the “monologic” voice of any modern political ideology (Allen 2006, 30). The aesthetic form of the novel showcases the intertextuality of language, as in the case of Dostoevsky’s novels (Allen 2006, 25). “Intertextuality,” as Julia Kristeva has argued, necessarily disrupts the identity or values of any individual subject (Allen 2006, 44–45). For example, according to Graham Allen, Gates argues that in the Hurston novel white and black speech patterns were blended into a “hybrid voice beyond any notion of singular or stable identity” (171). This revealed the “tradition of the African-American people’s struggle to find identity between imposed and self-designed linguistic forms” (172).
Considering the intertextuality of language in everyday life, it can be argued that beyond the literary text, everyday utterances might be “poetically” configured so as to disrupt exchange value contexts. Utterances issued in everyday life, like those formulated in novels, can be more or less aesthetically configured to “break” anticipated interactional frames—even though, unlike dialogue written into novels, their outcomes cannot be controlled in advance by the intentionality of the “artist.”
While literary artists may be able to control the responses of other characters to their protagonist within the novel, they have no control over the responses of others in real life to their novel; the latter situation parallels that of the subject issuing utterances in everyday life. The aesthetic negativity of the novel, as a work of art, is only achieved to the extent that the novel disrupts normative meanings and values in its “external” reception in unknown future situations. The responses of others to aesthetically configured utterances—whether to the entextualizations of subjects issued in everyday life, or to novels presented for public reception—are beyond the “present” intentionalities of the artists.
Judith Butler has argued that resistance to the identity category of gender must occur from within that normative category, since the same categories which restrict citational practices simultaneously enable them. Similarly, if normative value categories, such as the hegemonic exchange value discourse, are to be resisted, then literary or everyday utterances—which can themselves be given an exchange value—must be configured in such a way as to simultaneously resist that exchange value framing. In Goffman’s sense, in order to “break frame,” the exchange value context must be systematically altered, even as it repeated. Although the focus of the Frankfurt School was on the reification of consciousness, their work on the commodification of culture and the possibility of such an “immanent critique” (see Buck-Morss 1979) can be “re-sited” into a poststructuralist perspective. In this section, Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, as interpreted by Christoph Menke, will be reconsidered within the theory of performative citationality.
In The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, Christoph Menke draws upon the work of Adorno to argue that art is both “autonomous” and “sovereign” (1998, x-xi). The autonomy of art means that it is distinct from other spheres which are “not art.” The sovereignty of art, in Menke’s words, positions the aesthetic as a “subversion of the rationality of all discourses”—what Menke refers to as “aesthetic negativity” (1998, xi). Menke wants to develop the critical potential of art, as the basis of criticizing other non-aesthetic discourses, by appealing to the concept of aesthetic negativity—which he finds in the work of both Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida. Although ultimately Menke’s position is closer to that of Adorno than Derrida, he also disagrees with that reading of Adorno which conflates art and social critique—in Menke’s view, violating the autonomy of art (7-8). For our purposes in this book, Menke’s emphasis on the sovereignty and autonomy of the aesthetic will be specifically considered relative to those other valuing discourses over which exchange value has become hegemonic—such as political, religious, or other subcultural values.
It is important at the outset to emphasize that the aesthetic theories of Adorno (1997) and Menke are not being introduced here as part of an argument that the aesthetic realm is somehow transcendental to that of value or meaning. Rather, it will be argued that the “aesthetic” has to do with a particular syntactical arrangement of material forms, where the situated singularity of particular aesthetic configurations play against the normatively-signified meanings of the materiality involved. If, in Derrida’s sense, “meaning” and “value” are identifiable as they are interpellated from the repetition of recognizable materialities, an aesthetic configuration of such materiality plays against those referential meanings and values. As Gates argued, the aesthetics of “Signifyin(g)” has to do with the way citational practices can dislocate normative referential meanings—and here, normative value discourses.
In short, the “aesthetic” effect emerges through material forms as they are repeated—with a difference (see Gates, xxii-xxiii; 50-51). Aesthetic effect does not belong to a transcendental realm apart from meaningful materiality. Menke argues, in his reading of Adorno, that aesthetically configured material forms can be contrasted with the materiality of cultural commodities, in the way that aesthetic forms tend to resist normative meanings. This argument will be extended from Adorno and Menke’s concern with the aesthetic dislocation of normative meaning, to the possible dislocation of normative values.
Citing Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Menke argues that for Adorno, the “commodified pleasures” derived from culture industry products differ from the pleasure derived from aesthetic experiences. In the case of commodities, Adorno argued that pleasure simply becomes amusement, as “aroused by the ‘automatic’ recognition of something already known” (Menke 1998, 11). As opposed to this kind of pleasure, as when an audience easily anticipates the progression of a popular song, Adorno contrasts the pleasure or enjoyment derived from aesthetic experience—which he characterizes as “non-conceptual” (12). In other words, for Adorno, aesthetic experience disrupts understanding, or in a Derridean sense, the “presence” of normative meaning (12). This aesthetic experience is based on the failure of a subject’s “automatic understanding” of a material form. Menke argues that this is Adorno’s understanding of “aesthetic negativity.”
As Menke discusses, Adorno sees aesthetic experience as involving an active role of the subject. In confronting the art object, the subject initially seeks an understanding of the object in non-aesthetic terms, attempting to derive its normative meaning. However, the materiality of the aesthetically-formed object blocks such “automatic” understanding. For Adorno, Menke argues, aesthetic experience is thus an experience of the failure of the material form to signify in an automatic or normative way.
In the language of poststructuralism, the “experience” of aesthetic negativity occurs when normative values or identities cannot be readily interpellated from the material form. The material form itself does not automatically summon normative interpretive contexts, to be applied to its interpretation. Importantly for Adorno, that which subverts normative understanding (and value) is within the material form. It is the materiality of the art object itself—the “utterance” of the artist—which resists or subverts the attempts of the subject to understand its meaning.
It is important to note that this subversive quality, for Adorno, relates to the material form of the work of art as sign, which is materially entextualized in such a way as to block or resist normative significations. This is in contrast to the way that commodities signify—where a material form readily and easily signifies recognizable identities and values. Menke shows that for Adorno, the automatic understandings achieved in all non-aesthetic discourses—which, for our purposes, includes all value discourses—are based in the identification of signifier with signified (36). In other words, it is only the materiality of art which has the potential to disrupt the signification of normative values and identities. To put it differently, what is called “art” is that type of material configuration which plays against normative interpellations in particular ways.
In everyday life, it is only certain aspects of material forms which signify normative meanings. Menke emphasizes the importance here of not confusing the entire materiality of the object with those particular aspects or elements of it which signify; in other words, the signifying elements are a subset of the comprehensive materiality of the object. Beyond those particular signifying characteristics of any material form is what Adorno finds to be a “superabundance” (113) of “excess” materiality—to which he appeals in his aesthetic theory. In non-aesthetic and non-problematic understanding, subjects quickly focus only on particular aspects of material forms, which they have been taught are relevant to the signification of normative identities and values. In other words, there are taken-for-granted links between certain aspects of the material form—as signifiers—and particular signifieds.
Whereas it is true that understanding in non-aesthetic processes is occasionally disrupted, Adorno argues that this confusion usually occurs only temporarily, and is resolvable—eventually resulting in the re-establishment of some normative understanding or meaning (59). In these non-aesthetic processes, as Menke discusses, this resolution of occasional ambiguity typically occurs with the restoration of social context—the selection of an alternative, culturally-available interpretive context. In other words, if one interpretive context cannot be evoked in order to interpret a particular aspect of the material form, another interpretive context is quickly evoked instead. If this misunderstanding is not eventually resolvable through the restoration of some normative, interpretive context, the non-aesthetic object does not signify—it lapses into a “mere thing” lacking social meaning.
By contrast, Adorno and Menke argue, in aesthetic experience there can be no such easy appeal to alternative interpretive contexts to restore meaning, since the disruption of normative signification lies within the materiality of the art object itself. In other words, precisely because the material form of the aesthetic object is non-normative, it cannot invoke any of the typical interpretive contexts—such as any normative value domain. The material form of art continually resists the socially meaningful restoration of any interpretive (valuing) context (60). This is because for Adorno, as Menke shows, the materiality of the aesthetic object has been entextualized into a “self-subverting signifier formation” (59, italics in the original). In poststructuralist terms, the syntactical configuration of the material form resists the ready interpellation of any normative context.
If the subject, attempting understanding, cannot appeal to any culturally-available interpretive context in the search for meaning, Adorno argues that they can only return to the aesthetic object for a closer examination of its materiality—of precisely those “superabundant” or “unselected” aspects of the materiality usually ignored (or abjected) in normative signification processes (67; 69). Thus for Adorno, the aesthetic experience involves a dislocation of understanding and meaning (58)—that is, the loss of a normative context which guides interpretation. Because the total materiality of the object always exceeds those particular aspects which signify, the disruption of normative meaning keeps the audience of the work searching, in vain, for normative signification in the rest of previously “unselected materiality” (67) However, no definitive meaning emerges from aesthetic objects. Extending this argument to the signification of exchange value, we might say that the aesthetically configured form cannot be identified or experienced as a materiality of known value—that is, as a “measured” representation of known subcultural values.
Whereas even non-aesthetic signs are ambiguous in the sense that elements of their materiality may signify differently in different contexts (i.e., multiple understandings may be taken from any cultural “text”), it is only in aesthetic experience that these normative associations between material aspect and signified understandings are themselves disrupted (68). It is not just that one understanding or valuation is favored over another; rather, it is that understanding or valuation is itself disrupted. For Adorno, the aesthetic object thus attains a status somewhere between a mere thing, and a signifier with automatically-linked meanings. The superabundance of the materiality stands against, or takes a position in resistance to, normative interpretive contexts.
Applying these insights to the problematic of this book, we can see that while the work of art clearly is a social product and not a mere thing, no normative meanings are readily available for its interpretation; instead, in the experience of art all normative (and meaningful) valuing contexts are disrupted. In poststructuralist terms, the work of art is an utterance which resists the interpellation of any known value discourse. While in normative signification processes identifiable cultural values are cited, in the case of an aesthetically configured citational resource, subjects are unsure of its “value”—and thus become unsure of their own interpellated identity relative to that materiality. The Cartesian subject becomes unsure of what subcultural values the materiality represents, or of its exchange value as an “experience” of those values.
As Menke points out, for Adorno “interpretive speech,” as aesthetic criticism, is the attempt in words to describe or assess this experience of aesthetic negativity (110). While this attempt can never wholly succeed, Adorno argues that the best aesthetic criticism approximates, in its own material form, the experience of aesthetic negativity. In other words, the critical essay must itself—within the conceptual, discursive form of language—employ self-subverting tactics which resist automatic or normative understanding. This is why Adorno paid so much attention to the material form of his own writings, trying to create a “discontinuity” of meaning—in order to approximate aesthetic experience as much as possible (110; Nicholsen 1999, 110). The interpretive speech of criticism performs its own inadequacy as an “expression” or “representation” of aesthetic experience (Menke 1998, 111). The materiality of “aesthetically configured” language—in both aesthetic works as well as in aesthetic criticism—is thereby configured in such a way as to resist the interpellative grafting of normative values and identities.
Adorno was drawn to Walter Benjamin’s notion of a “constellation,” applying it to the configurative arrangement of interpretive statements in his essays, in such a way as to potentially resist automatic understanding (see 110). Thus, while aesthetic experience itself is nonconceptual, the critic might configure an essay about the aesthetic object in such a way as to enable “aesthetic experience to lodge itself within interpretive speech” (111, italics in the original). Menke points to two ways to achieve this “configurative discontinuity” in the interpretive speech of critics (112). We will here extend Menke’s work to consider these two ways more generally—as applicable to any instance of reported speech—given that an art critic is “reporting on” the utterance of the artist.
The first strategy of dislocating normative meaning concerns Derrida’s deconstructive methodology, whereby—according to Menke—the critic is able to reveal an “undecidability of interpretations” (112; italics in the original) of a material form. Menke argues that this method reveals that any particular interpretation of an aesthetic object is incompatible with another possible interpretation (112). Derrida’s work shows that no particular conceptual discourse or interpretive frame can adequately cover the aesthetic object. The ambiguity generated from the tension between multiple interpretations thus disrupts any particular, identifiable meaning of the material form.
The second type of critically-formulated speech creates discontinuity in another way, favored by Adorno and Menke. As Menke notes, this type of “configurative discontinuity” involves “the superabundance of the aesthetic object itself” (113). Rather than showing the relativity of competing interpretive contexts (i.e., differential value domains), the materiality of the aesthetically configured critical essay itself resists any interpellated context by which normative understanding can be achieved. Citing Paul de Man, Menke notes that this method attempts—in the material configuration of the critical essay—to re-perform the subversive “strategies” entextualized into the aesthetic object—rather than, as for Derrida, supporting diverse readings by different audiences (112-13).
While it would not be correct to differentiate “art” vs. “commodity” as pure categories with differing properties, it would be true for Adorno that the “stringency” of works of art is greater than that of most commodified forms—that is, their self-subverting material forms have a greater potential to evoke an “experience of aesthetic negativity.” Unlike art, many commodified forms are entextualized in such a way as to readily and clearly evoke particular value contexts—especially that of exchange value. Thus for Adorno, as Menke notes, social objects like art or commodities can be critically evaluated as to the “degree of stringency” experienced from their material forms (131). The “experience” of the exchange value of commodified language can thus be contrasted with the “experience” of aesthetic negativity, as generated by aesthetically configured language (see 131)—whether in the art object itself, or in aesthetic criticism.
Menke argues that Adorno describes the material configuration of an aesthetic work as a kind of “‘thing of a second order’” (146; Adorno 1997, 99)—which is not the material status of a mere thing, but is also not the materiality of a sign with an automatically-understood meaning (Menke 1998, 146). According to Menke, citing Derrida (147), it is here that Adorno locates the “beauty” of aesthetic works. In blocking or subverting normative signification, this “thing of a second order” is itself showcased or performed. In his reading of Heidegger, Adorno argues that in the experience of aesthetic negativity, it is the materiality of the “thing of a second order” which comes forth (146)—as opposed to a signification of its referential meaning (or, by extension, its value). This materiality is described by Adorno as the “aesthetic image” (149), which exists between the non-meaningful materiality of a mere thing, and the “surpassing of the thinglike in the presence of a meaning” (155; italics added). In a Derridean sense, we might say that the “value” of the aesthetic image—as an identifiable domain with a “presence” of meaning—is dislocated or deferred. In other words, in the experience of aesthetic negativity, a subversion of the normative temporality—of the “presence” of value—occurs.
Thus for Adorno, the “stringent” resistance of the aesthetic object to normative, automatic significations results in a “transfiguration” of its materiality (156). In poststructuralist terms, this resistance—and resultant transfiguration—makes the normative interpellation of evaluative contexts problematic. While the identity or value of the non-aesthetic object is secured through the interpellation of normative interpretive contexts, in aesthetic negativity all evaluative contexts are disrupted—in Menke’s terms, the aesthetically-transfigured materiality “distances us from the contexts in which we have always stood in our non-aesthetic, understanding-based use of representations” (229; see also 156). Aesthetic negativity thus loosens the one-to-one correspondence between the materiality of the object, and the normatively signified value context—as well as dislocating the social identity typically interpellated with that value. Unlike commodities, aesthetic objects no longer “represent” valuing subcultures. The material form of aesthetically configured language or objects—both art works and “self-subversive” art criticism—has instead been entextualized in such a way as to potentially dislocate normative significations of identity and value.
Menke argues that Derrida attempted to extend the moment of “aesthetic negativity”—the disruption of normative understanding (and by extension, value)—to all texts, including the non-aesthetic (162-63). Menke calls this a “non-aesthetic sense of negativity” (167). The issue at stake, regarding the problematic of this book, is whether only an aesthetic transfiguration “motivated” by the stringent form of the object itself, or also a Derridean deconstruction brought to the reading of the social object, can result in the dislocation and subversion of the normative signification of exchange value.
It is Menke’s position, which will be followed here, that Derrida is ultimately unsuccessful in this attempt to generalize the experience of aesthetic negativity to non-aesthetic textuality. Menke argues instead, following Adorno, that the moment of aesthetic negativity—with the potential to disrupt meaning (and value)—must remain within the autonomous sphere of art. The reason Menke favors the approach of Adorno over Derrida on this point—regarding the applicability of aesthetic negativity to non-aesthetic discourses—has to do with claims regarding the “presence” of meaning in Western metaphysics.
For Derrida, the establishment of meaning in Western metaphysics and culture involves an “absolute” claim involving the recognizable “self-identity” of the mark (195). As discussed earlier, Derrida’s critique of metaphysics reveals the ultimate failure of this claim. For Derrida, the replication of any identity across contexts, as well as its internal reliance upon an abjected and differential supplement, dislocates the claimed “presence” of this identity (195). For Derrida, the experience of this failure to secure identity—as a negative experience—applies to both aesthetic objects as well as to non-aesthetic “texts.” Any “positive” identity or meaning necessarily excludes alternative identities and meanings, and is therefore never quite “present.”
Menke, however, argues that in the case of non-aesthetic texts, meaning (and value) tend toward normative understandings—even competing interpretations of a text can be resolved through negotiation in everyday life. Following Adorno, Menke argues that the assertion of strong metaphysical claims to “identity” and “truth” only arise as a result of a prior disruption of these normative significations and “automatic” understandings—in an experience of “crisis” which occurs only when the subject confronts aesthetic forms (216-17; 227). It is this initial disruption of signification through an encounter with aesthetic forms which leads to the subsequent assertion, and ultimate failure, of metaphysical claims—as an (ideological) attempt to ground the meaningful identity of signs in intentional subjectivity. By contrast, in interaction involving non-aesthetic forms, “automatic” or normative assumptions proceed in an unquestioning way—without the need for absolute claims regarding the “presence” of meaning and the autonomous self-identity of signs (195).
Menke shows that both Adorno and Derrida agree that the aesthetics of negativity are grounded in the failure of metaphysical claims to “presence” and “self-identity.” Both would agree that the failure of these metaphysical claims reveals (what Adorno would call) their “unintentional truth” (see Buck-Morss 1979, 77)—that their identity is neither “present” nor secured (Menke 1998, 205; 216-17). However, in his reading of Negative Dialectics, Menke argues that only Adorno is able to show why the metaphysical claims must be raised in the first place—following the aesthetic disruption of normative signification processes, which in turn initiates the assertion of metaphysical claims regarding the presence of meaning (217; 239; 241-42). Menke thus concludes that Derrida is unable to ground the necessity of the metaphysical impulse—or the ultimate experience of its failure—in non-aesthetic discourse (241).
For Adorno, when the appeal to “reason” (in understanding) undergoes a crisis, as when the subject encounters (or cites) the aesthetic object, the recourse is to raise “infinite” claims in order to ground itself—the “metaphysical impulse” (217). Interestingly, Menke terms this metaphysical impulse for universal grounding, citing Adorno, the “‘desire for presence’” (220, italics added). The difference here is that Derrida argues that there is, in all discourse, a structural alterity undermining the metaphysical “presence,” which deconstruction techniques can reveal. Adorno is arguing that socially produced forms of materiality—such as commodities or aesthetic forms—have been entextualized with lesser or greater degrees of self-subverting strategies within their material, syntactical forms. Materialities must repeat “with a difference,” if their meanings and values are not to be re-cited as “present.”
We here re-arrive at the same divergence from Derrida as that of Judith Butler: in favor of a social rather than a structural iterability (Butler 1997, 152). For Adorno, the material form which dislocates the “presence” of value is socially produced, as in the case of aesthetically configured utterances. In a Bakhtinian sense, the entextualized form of the aesthetically configured utterance takes a particular shape and stance relative to normative social meanings and values. Having said this, it is also true that critical readings of non-aesthetic texts can themselves become aesthetic utterances in particular material configurations—in Adorno’s sense that aesthetic criticism can itself approach the kind of aesthetic negativity experienced in art.
Derrida is correct in emphasizing that the “aesthetic reception,” or political consequences of art’s later recontextualization, can never be controlled in advance—either by the audience or by the artist. Similarly, commodities may in fact end up in future syntactical arrangements with aesthetic effect. Thus, a rigid distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic texts (like cultural commodities), cannot be fixed once and for all. However, the more general point is that any contemporary syntactical arrangement is more or less conducive to the aesthetic disruption of normative meanings, values, and identities—even recognizing that this effect is not guaranteed in future re-articulations. It is not that value is “present” in non-aesthetic forms, while “dislocated” in aesthetic forms; rather, in non-aesthetic forms the “presence of value” is re-assumed and re-cited in a relatively unproblematic manner.
Thus for Menke, art must be considered as both autonomous and sovereign. It must remain autonomous, rather than extended to a general textuality, because the false claims of the metaphysics of presence—which Adorno’s negative dialectics and Derrida’s deconstructive methodology rightly expose—are claims grounded in a “crisis of reason” (216-17) provoked only by aesthetic forms. This crisis which initiates aesthetic negativity cannot be first provoked in non-aesthetic discourses, because the normality of less-stringent, non-aesthetic material form tends to provoke normative significations (i.e., meaning, value, and understanding).
It is precisely because aesthetic experiences do not work according to the logic of these less-stringent discourses (like commodities) that it has potentially destabilizing consequences for normative meanings and values—thus the sovereignty of aesthetic subversion. This politically subversive result is what Menke calls the “‘postaesthetic’” consequence of aesthetic experience (179; 225). Thus, Menke argues that although aesthetic experience is autonomous from non-aesthetic (value) discourses, such as politics, it is not without consequences for them—it is just that this aesthetic experience is “logically prior” to these consequences (225).
Applying this argument to the problematic at hand, we can see that the disruption of the “presence of value” must occur as a result of the experience of the failure of metaphysical claims regarding the presence of value—which can only originate from their prior assertion and ultimate inadequacy. The material form which first “motivates” metaphysical claims to value, and thus ultimately initiates the experience of the failure of such claims, is aesthetic form—that materiality which disrupts normative significations and interpretive (value) contexts. Thus, following Adorno and Menke, the “last refuge” for the critical disruption of exchange value discourse must be aesthetic form.
It is in this sense that it might be suggested that Western metaphysics functions as a defense against the threat of aesthetics, inasmuch as art threatens normative reason, Cartesian-based understanding, and—for the purposes of this book—normative value. In the contemporary cultural economy, metaphysical claims specifically function to defend against aesthetic disruptions regarding the “presence of exchange value.” Cultural commodities are said to both represent subcultural values, and themselves “have” an exchange value—as inherent features present in their material forms. In contrast, aesthetic objects are of ambiguous value—both as a commodifiable object, and as a representation of subcultural values. The metaphysical assertion of the “presence” of exchange value—the process of commodification—responds to the aesthetic constellation of materiality by attempting to reframe its ambiguity into known and recognizable domains of value.
While Menke does not follow Derrida in generalizing the processes of aesthetic negativity to non-aesthetic discourse, he does follow both Adorno and Derrida in arguing that aesthetic negativity has “destabilizing consequences for non-aesthetic discourses” (173). Having undergone an aesthetic transfiguration, Adorno argues, aesthetic materialities become “things of a second order”—as estranged from normative contexts (229). Extending this argument to the question of value, we can see that the materiality of a “thing of a second order,” as a citational resource, potentially disrupts the interpellation of value discourses—including that of exchange value. In addition, this book argues that the syntactical configuration of citational resources is not limited to the utterances of an artist, an art critic, nor even the utterances of a solitary subject—but can be extended to the material configuration of interactive dialogue. Entextualized strips of language taken from the ongoing flow of social life can be more or less “stringently” configured, as they are “reported” in new social situations.
Interestingly, in a critique of Kierkegaard, Menke characterizes the destabilization of meaning, generated by the experience of aesthetic negativity, as a “devaluation” of meaning (230-31). In this sense, the exchange value of the material signifier, as it “represents” normative meanings and values, is devalued in aesthetic configurations. Thus, both subcultural valuing discourses—as well as their exchange value—are “devalued,” as the material configurations from which they are interpellated become “things of a second order.” We can see here a direct application of Adorno and Menke’s aesthetic theories to the potential dislocation of normative value discourses—including the exchange value discourse.
As Menke points out, aesthetic transfiguration does not refute the “validity” of non-aesthetic (value) discourses on their own terms, nor assert an alternative validity (231). In other words, “aesthetic negativity” does not enter into a political arena regarding the appropriate prioritization of social values, nor an economic arena as a kind of “aesthetic value” (see Guillory 1993). The aesthetic disruption of value is not an appeal to irrational social action. Rather, what is disrupted is the “presence” of the automatic understanding, or normative signification, assumed by value discourse (232). In other words, aesthetically configured utterances open a space which unsettles the automatic re-citation of normatively-interpellated grafts of identity and values. This experience of aesthetic negativity precedes any tentative re-articulation of social identities or social values, in potentially new configurations or proportions; that is, it precedes any new “hegemonies” or new “universal values” such as democracy or social justice (see Laclau and Mouffe 1994; Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000).
For Adorno, as Menke describes, when automatic understandings are frustrated, and normative meanings and values are disrupted, repeated attempts are often made at understanding what the aesthetic object (or utterance) might mean. For Adorno, these become only tentative, speculative assertions (Menke 1998, 59-60). In other words, meaning is drawn into question and becomes estranged (59), rather than rejected (i.e., the object does not revert to “mere thing”). As Menke notes, eventually some social meaning will often be re-affixed to even the most ambiguous works of art (59).
As automatic contextual assumptions are disrupted following the experience of aesthetic negativity, new assumptions and interpretive contexts are tentatively—rather than automatically—applied to the aesthetic object, in a continuing search for its meaning and value. Interestingly, Adorno argues that these new tentative re-applications of interpretive context, which might tentatively ground the now-unsettled meaning of the work, are “quoted”(60). In Menke’s words, “This reference to the context by quotation rather than by application creates distance: contextual assumptions that guarantee understanding become ambiguous when they are quoted” (60, italics added). In other words, it is “quotation,” or re-citational practice, which retains an element of “tentativeness” in the re-generation of meaning following aesthetic negativity—as opposed to a reified, automatic re-application of a pre-existent meaning. In this sense, the process of citationality is not only involved in the disruption of meaning and values—as in the case of aesthetics—but also is crucial for their (always-tentative) restoration.
In this formulation, the re-articulation of meanings and values, following the disruption of hegemonic forms, are tentative or provisional, rather than naturalizing and reified. The tentative “quoting”—by which meaning and values are re-cited following aesthetic negativity—leads neither to nihilism, nor to the re-installation of a reified universal discourse following a dialectical negation, but rather reveals the contingency and tentativeness of all (universal) claims to identity and value (see Laclau and Mouffe 1994).
Thus, the disruption of any particular value discourse—such as exchange value—cannot be achieved through a mere appreciation of the diversity of valuing domains, or the (political) citation of alternative value contexts; rather, it can only be achieved through the aesthetic dislocation of “value” itself. This type of “immanent critique” opens the space for a tentative restoration of “values,” and perhaps opens, appealing to the language of Laclau and Mouffe (1994), a space for an ongoing critique of the universalizing, hegemonic claims of any particular value discourse—including that of exchange value.
This discussion of aesthetic negativity not only has implications regarding the value or meaning of a (more-or-less) stringent material form, but also for the social identity of the subject who incorporates that form into their citational utterances. When a subject cites an aesthetic object, their interpellated identity is destabilized or made tentative, inasmuch as the meaning and value of the citational resource is itself tentative. We see here how the citation of an aesthetic object may unsettle the (Cartesian) identity of subjects, in a way that the citation of less-stringent resource (i.e., commodities) does not. Following the experience of aesthetic negativity, the process of “quotation as tentative understanding” does not automatically re-establish secure Cartesian identities and values; rather, the material form of the “self-subverting” aesthetic object continues to frustrate any perfect fit of these tentative identity contexts (see Menke 1998, 61). The identity and exchange value of the Cartesian object, and the interpellated identity and values of the Cartesian subject, are de-stabilized by aesthetically configured material forms.
In this section we have extended Menke’s reading of Adorno’s aesthetic theory to argue that the experience of aesthetic negativity not only disrupts normative meanings, but also normative values—including the hegemonic exchange value discourse. Of course, Adorno himself saw the realm of aesthetics as perhaps the last refuge for critical thinking in late capitalism—where culture had become commodified and a discourse of exchange value prevailed (Rose 1978, 48; Jay 1973). This insight can be moved from a perspective emphasizing the reification of consciousness into a framework based on Derrida and Butler’s notions of performative citationality. Following up on Adorno’s insistence that it is the materiality of the aesthetic form which generates such a disruption of meaning, and thereby value, we can see that citational utterances—whether issued by artists, everyday subjects, or social institutions—may be more or less configured in aesthetic ways to initiate such disruption.
While no strict dichotomy can be maintained between commodities and aesthetic objects as citational resources, it is clear from Adorno’s work that aesthetically configured utterances have greater potential to unsettle normative value discourses, as well as the identities interpellated from the utterances. Recognizing this, we can re-site Adorno’s aesthetic theory into a theory of performativity which emphasizes re-citational practices. As Butler argued, re-citational practices have the potential to re-install, or to resist, normative values and identities. This occurs not through a process involving the implementation of a pre-existing political intentionality, but rather through the aesthetic reconfiguration of normative material forms—including linguistic utterances.
As Menke argues, the disruption of contextual frames depends on an aesthetic negativity which cannot be generated from non-aesthetic textual configurations—such as that of politics. As Adorno suggests, it is the stringent qualities of the material configuration itself which resists “automatic” abstractions—such as the universalizing measure of exchange value. This is why political (non-aesthetic) opposition itself cannot generate the aesthetic negativity necessary to unsettle the re-citation of the exchange value context. The strategy of a contemporary critical theory must therefore include not only political opposition to inequality—and, in Guillory’s sense, an advocacy for full inclusion within the system of cultural production—but also the aesthetic disruption of the automatic interpellation of the exchange value frame itself. Using Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, the articulation of a new, more democratic “universal” must follow the aesthetic disruption of the current, reified, hegemonic formulation—that of exchange value. In short, aesthetics is not a “new politics,” but rather precedes it as the dislocation of the “old politics.” In this sense, it is the materiality of aesthetic form which continually reveals, and re-performs, the tentative nature of any particular system’s claim to universal truth or universal “values.”
As discussed earlier, Guillory (1993)—drawing on the work of Howard Caygill (1989)—argues that “aesthetic value” emerged historically as a category with the development of the market economy, and with the accompanying hegemony of exchange value. The work of art was considered as a sphere separate from that of the commodity (317). However, as Guillory points out, this strict separation can be maintained neither in theory nor in practice—even Marx reintroduced aesthetics in his theory to explain consumption as “the object’s capacity to produce a need in the consumer that did not exist before” (321).
Perhaps, following Adorno and Butler, it is better to distinguish between meaningful social objects—such as “commodities” and “works of art”—to the extent that they re-cite sedimented meanings and automatic understandings, or whether they incorporate self-subverting strategies which allow for a greater possibility of the experience of aesthetic negativity in future constellations and contexts. Given that, in a Derridean sense, any identity always already incorporates alterity and thus cannot be a pure category, we might—using a term from Bakhtin—speak of the ratios in which citational forms like art or commodities embrace or distance themselves from normative understandings and values, in given constellations with other citational forms. For example, several gender parodies might differ in the extent to which they disrupt normative gender categories, or are marketable as commodified experiences (see Butler 1999, 176-77). The extent to which any particular performance is a commodity or work of art becomes a matter of ratio or proportion, relative to normative understandings and values.
Utterances—whether as everyday words, text messages, photographs, songs or video clips—are more or less marketable. Some are marketed against the wishes of the subject who uttered the word or was captured in the photograph; other utterances have been entextualized by subjects precisely for mass media distribution. Some utterances are artistically designed to prevent ready incorporation into current distributional forms, while others are formulated precisely to fit such forms. While the distributional technology is often ideologically considered to be a neutral transmitter of value and experience, in fact the materiality of the distributional form always already “takes a stand” relative to normative meanings and values. This raises the question of whether aesthetic negativity can be achieved within those distributional forms and networks precisely designed to deliver commodified language.
As Gillian Rose (1978) has pointed out, at times Adorno seemed to suggest that the culture in late capitalism had become “‘completely reified’” (48). Adorno argued that not only did the reification of consciousness obscure the inequalities of the capitalist system, but also obscured any possible alternatives to existing conditions. The ability to critically analyze the political-economic system was severely limited by mass culture; Adorno thus turned to aesthetics as the refuge of critical consciousness in such a reified culture (Jay 1973). Inasmuch as contemporary citational technologies “re-cite” exchange value, then the writings of the Frankfurt School on the critical potential of the aesthetic remain relevant. With contemporary citational technologies, any utterance can quickly achieve national media distribution into virtually any referential context, and language itself is thus increasingly commodifiable.
Peter Uwe Hohendahl (1995) argues that Adorno’s work on the “culture industry,” and his accompanying pessimism toward the future, was historically situated relative to “Fordist capitalism” (128). The focus of production in that 1940s economy, according to Hohendahl, was on pre-packaged, pre-planned culture (130)—against which Adorno strongly reacted. However, Hohendahl points out that Adorno, especially in his essay “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” shifted the focus of his analysis as the economy itself shifted. Citing Miriam Hansen, Hohendahl points out that in that essay, Adorno is more sympathetic to the struggles of modern filmmakers or musicians (131).
In that later essay, we find Adorno giving less of a sweeping indictment of mass culture, and instead offering a closer analysis of the materiality of the particular artwork in question, and the extent of its stringency (135). Hohendahl argues that the work of the later Adorno explores the progressive potential of modern art—especially film (131). It is this later work which is most compatible with the notion that aesthetically configured citational resources may be disruptive of normative values and identities, especially when combined with the Derridean insight that the re-citation of normative identities and meanings necessarily involve their alteration. Having said this, however, Adorno also recognized that modern art could never be “pure,” and was necessarily tied to the commodity form (172).
This later work of Adorno becomes relevant to the analysis of contemporary citational resources, and the extent to which they self-subvert their own commodified form. Despite a more sympathetic treatment of modern art in his later work, however, Adorno never abandoned his concern with commodification. Instead, he argued that the modern artist must work to undercut normative expectations through the formulation of the materiality of the work—using techniques which “in-cite” critical reflection on the part of the audience (135).
In Derridean terms, the aesthetic form occupies the space between the normative and unquestioned repeatability of the meaning and value of its material elements, and an unintelligible singularity with no recognizable meaning or value across situational contexts. This syntactically-configured tension involves the repeatability of meaning and value “with a difference.” In Goffman’s (1961) sense, the materiality of the aesthetic form has to screen out a certain amount of “difference,” in order to remain at least minimally intelligible—as opposed to a mere thing. On the other hand, the aesthetically configured screen must allow in some difference in order to challenge normative valuing contexts. Aesthetic tension, playing against normative identities and values, becomes commodifiable when the material screen receives an exchange value within the cultural economy. However, as opposed to easily-commodifiable forms, the aesthetically configured material form resists the “automatic” measure of its exchange value, and its unquestioned assimilation back into the exchange value frame. Rather, its stringent qualities disrupt the reified nature of the exchange value frame itself.
In his critique of Plato’s Phaedrus, Derrida (1981) shows how Plato’s text—which attempts to exclude writing from the Greek polis—in fact is forced to admit to the dependency of speech on writing. For Plato, speech becomes a “‘good’ kind of writing that is inscribed in the soul” (Norris 1987, 35). Derrida’s analysis focuses on Plato’s use of the Greek word “pharmakon” to describe writing. In Plato’s text, the word “pharmakon” at various times is used to mean either “poison” or “cure” (Derrida 1981, 97; 99). Derrida’s critique shows that writing will not remain in a subordinate position in Plato’s text; rather, Plato at times is forced to concede the necessity of writing for communication. For Plato, as Christopher Norris notes in his work on Derrida, “Writing is both poison and cure, on the one hand a threat to the living presence of authentic (spoken) language, on the other an indispensable means for anyone who wants to record, transmit, or somehow commemorate that presence” (1987, 37-38, italics in the original).
The writings of both Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin seem to oscillate between considering the commodity as a source of reification, and alternately, as a potential site of redemption. In this sense, we might say that the commodity could also be described as a “pharmakon”—both a potential poison as well as potential cure. More so than Adorno, Benjamin explored the possibilities for the “redemption” of commodities and political change. For Benjamin, commodities of the past could perpetuate the ideology of capitalism, yet also had the power to “explode” into the present in images which would challenge that ideology.
Benjamin argued that modernity threatened the memory of cultural traditions and values (Wolin 1994, 217). However, Benjamin argued that when faced with the possible loss of this cultural memory, the current generation may yet redeem the sufferings of past generations. Benjamin was attracted to the poet Baudelaire’s use of “correspondences,” through which an almost-forgotten past could be returned to the attention of the current generation, and potentially be redeemed (235). In other words, Benjamin longed for a method by which the sufferings and experiences of the past could be brought forth from their past contexts, and grafted or cited into contemporary contexts in critical ways. Thus, while Benjamin agreed with Adorno’s assessment of the reification process in late capitalism, he held out hope for the redemption of commodities—and at times moved Adorno’s thought in this direction as well.
In her analysis of Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, Buck-Morss (1983) finds the central argument of Benjamin to be that “the recently out-of-date objects of mass culture possessed political, indeed, revolutionary power for his generation” (211). For Benjamin, the “dream-images” (214) of previous generations become embodied in commodities as a kind of collective unconscious, which the present generation reifies as natural (217). While this process could result in the perpetuation of ideology across generations and even contribute to fascism (238), there also was the potential that such commodities could be “read” by future generations within a more critical constellation.
Once the exchange value of commodities had receded, their historical “truth” could potentially burst into the present—in such a way as to make apparent that the promises of the commodity were illusory (214-15). For Benjamin, the promise of an alternate society lay not in the desires of consumers for the current fashions, but in recovering the memories of the past from ruin (222, n24). New technologies, especially film, had the potential to re-cite the promise of unfulfilled desires. In the language of performative citationality, while commodities re-cited exchange value, they also re-cited the unfulfilled desires of past generations for those alternative values abjected within the commodity form.
Benjamin thus argued that the new technologies of mass culture could contribute to either destruction or redemption. On the one hand, capitalism had the ability to absorb the desires and hopes of people into all types of technology-based commodities. On the other hand, the utopian hopes of the past, brought into the present and grafted into new contexts via these new technology-based commodities, could awaken or “shock” the current generation into political action.
Both Adorno and Benjamin shared the view that a critical reading of any “commodity-text” must develop its critique even while employing the language of commodification; that is, critique is bound together with that which it confronts. This type of “immanent critique” tries to discover possibilities for alternative futures, as well as discover traces of unfulfilled pasts, from within the commodity form itself—and transform the commodity through the very process of critique (Buck-Morss 1979, 154-55). For Benjamin, in Howard Caygill’s words, the point of criticism was to “keep open as many futures as possible for the works criticised” (1998, 79). In other words, Benjamin argued that critical theory disrupts the temporality of the commodity’s “presence,” by opening the future and redeeming the past.
Caygill points out that Benjamin’s “speculative” criticism meant that criticism addressed not only what was “present” in the commodity-text as constructed by capitalists, but also considered how the text-at-hand was only one historical possibility. Speculative criticism would reveal traces, within the commodity-text, of abjected possibilities and unfulfilled wishes; in addition, it would reveal potentialities for its future development (35). In this sense, for Benjamin the “commodification” of an object, event, or of language limited or fixed its interpretive possibilities (see 131). The commodification process limited the interpellated context to only that of exchange value, and thereby restricted possible futures.
Benjamin’s method of criticism, whether of a work of art or of a commodity, thus looked both to the past and to the future (92). Given that the configuration of now-outdated commodities may have foreclosed the futures of past generations, a critical reading of the traces of their unfulfilled wishes and desires may lead to their redemption in new contexts. In this sense, a reading of the commodity-text involves not only what values are claimed to be “present,” but also what values have been abjected in the text. The commodity becomes a historical record or archive of what has not happened historically; what Adorno refers to as its “unintentional truth” (see Buck-Morss 1979).
Of course, some texts would be more receptive than others to these types of transformative, critical readings—those aesthetically configured texts with high degrees of stringency would especially encourage such a re-citation. However, any meaningful material form could potentially be “translated,” or transformed, via that kind of recontextualizing critique which revealed that the commodified configuration of the text was only one possible syntactical construction. When recontextualized in unknown future grafts, the commodity could have an alternative “afterlife,” which retrieved “those of its possibilities which had neither been realised in the work itself nor in previous critiques” (Caygill 1998, 47). Caygill concludes that for Benjamin, “Critique disturbs the identity of the work by opening it to future possibilities” (46). In other words, the recontextualization or re-citation of the commodity may later retrieve those alternative values abjected in its once-present “identity”—based only on its market value.
Setting aside for a moment some of the important differences between Adorno, Benjamin and Derrida, we can also see some clear affinities here between critical theory and Derrida’s “poststructuralism.” As Max Pensky has noted, both Adorno and Derrida developed methodologies of textual criticism which “dedicate themselves to the gleaning of unintentional moments of interruption, resistance, deferral, or negation that are cryptically encoded within the material that dominant totalizing discourses marginalize or repress. In this sense both Adorno and postructuralism still understand philosophy as containing the promise, however fragile, of preserving the possibility of thinking differently or thinking difference” (1997, 6). Like Benjamin, Adorno looked to outdated commodities, no longer perceived as valuable, for this abjected other (6).
Commodities whose exchange value had faded and were no longer given a “present” value—could potentially return as oppositional citational resources. Both Adorno and Derrida, according to Pensky, are thus thinkers of “alterity” (6), and, like Benjamin, attempt to indicate a future beyond those processes of commodification and rationalization which characterize contemporary Western cultures. For an alternative to the metaphysics of presence, they all looked to the materiality of citational resources—including commodities.
If Benjamin and Adorno saw the commodity as both poison and cure, using the language of the “reification of consciousness” (see Buck-Morss 1979; Jay 1973; Rose 1978), we might apply the same insight using the language of performative citationality. The citation of cultural commodities may re-interpellate unequal social relations, or may potentially disrupt them in new situational contexts. The commodification of language is the basis of re-producing exchange value in the current cultural economy, yet language-commodities are also re-cited in new syntactical configurations—such that their meaning cannot be precisely fixed once and for all.
Contemporary media technologies are instrumental in shaping the distributional networks for cultural commodities. Strips of social life have become easily entextualizable and marketable, as images or words are delivered as experiences for consumption. In Heidegger’s (1977) sense, this commodity-form has become so pervasive that contemporary subjects now perceive the world as a “picture.” Similarly, Norman Denzin (1995) has noted the cinematic quality of everyday life; the movie-going experience has resulted in the normative practice of citing strips of reality as if taken from a movie. Music heard in a car may thus be experienced as a “soundtrack” to everyday life, as if one is driving in a scene from a film. In short, the technological processes shaping the ways in which cultural commodities are delivered, and cited by the subject, have also shaped the meanings of everyday life as marketable strips of “experience.”
Photographs taken in everyday life might therefore be instantly recognized as having a marketability—especially if they capture a moment which a national magazine, newspaper, or website might profitably distribute. Similarly, one’s own backyard might be perceived through the lens of a national home or garden magazine. In this sense, photography can be considered as part of the societal apparatus which measures or documents the “presence” of exchange value (see Barad 2007). Advancements in digital photography amount to refinements in the measuring apparatus which enables the re-citation of exchange value—as technological advancements in the performativity of exchange value. Photography participates in the performativity of exchange value in that every marketable image taken re-cites that interpretive frame.
Walter Benjamin’s work on photography in particular, and technology more generally, might be helpful in understanding these processes. For Benjamin, photography can be considered as a form of citational practice (Cadava 1997, xvii). In addition, as Cadava notes, Benjamin views history as something which is also cited or quoted (xvii). What the citing of history and photographable images share, as does citationality generally, is the “interruption” of context—as when a quote is lifted out of a text to be inserted elsewhere.
According to Benjamin, the thinking of history, or memory generally, involves the interruption of the “flow” of past events—as a particular event is “cited” into the present (xviii). Photography, like thought or memory itself, fixes or freezes a moment; in Cadava’s words, “photography names a process that, seizing and tearing an image from its context, works to immobilize the flow of history” (xx). History thus becomes an “image,” entextualized for re-citing in another context. As discussed above, the materiality of “texts” are formed through the interruption of the flow of socio-historical “discourse” (Silverstein and Urban 1996). In Benjamin’s words, “interruption is one of the fundamental procedures constitutive of form” (Benjamin, quoted in Weber 2008, 99)—as in the case of photographs “taken” from the discourse of ongoing social life.
As Cadava notes, citing Benjamin and Junger, noteworthy “events” are constructed in modernity through their “technological reproducibility” (1997, xxiii), given that they can be repeatedly reinserted into multiple temporal and spatial contexts. Thus, images from the past can continually return as an “eternal present made possible by the technical media” (xxvii; my emphasis). As Kracauer noted, this reproducibility has in turn affected the modern subject’s very perception of everyday life; in Cadava’s words, “the world’s ‘photographability’ has become the condition under which it is constituted and perceived” (xxviii). In a consumer economy, the marketability of cultural commodities involves such a recognition or anticipation of their potential exchange value, when recontextualized or re-cited in other contexts.
Benjamin was acutely aware of the destructive possibilities of such a technical re-presentation of the past; not only for the perpetuation of economic inequality, but also for political propaganda as in fascism (xxiv). Especially in an age of technical reproducibility, the question continually arises as to whether citational forms like art or commodities can open a space for an alternative future, or simply be recontextualized into the articulations of dominant political and economic groups. On the one hand, Benjamin understood the dangers of modern technology, especially in the context of fascism. Citational technologies like photography have indeed been used, in both politics and in the marketplace, to shut down a potentially redemptive dialogue with the past, and to restrict possible futures (see Caygill 1998, 95). On the other hand, as Caygill notes, Benjamin felt that the new art forms of photography and film had the potential to “create unprecedented experiences of space and time, which will bring with them the dissolution of previously valid experiences of identity” (107).
We thus find in Benjamin’s work a kind of “aporia” or “pharmakon” of photography—the potential of this citational technology for destruction, yet also for redemption. As Cadava notes, for Benjamin it was precisely photography’s link to death which also enabled new identities. As with writing for Derrida, for Benjamin the photographic image “allows us to speak of our death before our death. The image already announces our absence . . . It announces the death of the photographed” (Cadava 1997, 8; italics in the original). This possibility, using Derrida’s term, is inscribed into “iterability” of the image—in that it outlives the initial context of the photographed (10). As with Derrida, the meaning of any material form requires that it function in the absence, or death, of any particular sender or receiver; in this sense, absence or death constitutes the photograph.
For Benjamin, the photograph thus announces death, yet also outlives that which dies; as Cadava puts it, “the photograph, like the souvenir, is the corpse of an experience” (128). If experience—and the value of experience—is said to be “present,” its iterability in fact requires the “death” of that “presence” in order for its meaning to persist across contexts. It is in this sense that photography may be considered a “pharmakon,” enabling a history where “something lives in its death” (128). For Benjamin, this is also the “citational temporality” of history itself. Whenever a strip of language is entextualized in order to travel across contexts, the death of the authentic, original “context” occurs.
Thus, for Benjamin, it is citationality itself—and in particular modern, technological forms of “aesthetic citationality” such as film and photography—which has the potential to open alternatives to “present” political and economic structures. Benjamin’s own form of writing attempted to develop a visual “constellation,” where various images of the past could be brought into a critical configuration with the present—as we see in the unfinished Arcades Project (see Cadava 1997, xxi). Such a constellation of images, where past and present are grafted together, might “in-cite” critical awareness through new syntactical configurations. Benjamin’s own aesthetic construction of texts attempted to replicate the “radical temporality of the photographic structure” (61), where the “past and the present moment flash into a constellation” (Benjamin, in Cadava 1997, 61). Here in Benjamin we can clearly see one way in which critical theory might be moved into a poststructuralist theory of citationality—via aesthetic theory.
Thus we can see not only the influence of Benjamin’s work on Adorno’s aesthetic theory, but also the implications for the problematic at hand. For Benjamin, an aesthetic configuration of words and images can potentially dislocate the claimed “presence” of the exchange value of commodified language. Benjamin refers to the “occasion” of the grafting together of images from different times and places as the “now,” as distinct from the temporal “present” (Weber 2008, 51). For Benjamin, as Samuel Weber notes, the “event” of the now enables “a past that opens—imparts itself—to the future” (51).
Weber argues that what is important for Benjamin is the configuration of words or images—their syntactical relation to each other rather than their semantic or referential meaning (75-77). Similarly, in a discussion of Benjamin’s notion of the “‘historical image,’“ Weber points out that the temporality of the constellation forming such an image does not derive from its “representing” or “belonging” to a particular time period, but rather from the “event” in which various contexts become “synchronic” (230). Citing Sterne’s strategies in Tristram Shandy, Weber notes that such syntactical positioning of language, as in an aesthetic configuration, can alter the normative value of the elements (76).
In other words, while the Bakhtin Circle argued that the syntactical formation of the words of self and others in utterances necessarily enacted and negotiated values, here the argument is that an aesthetic constellation of meaningful elements—as they play against each other—may be potentially disruptive of “value” itself. We can see that for Benjamin, the material, syntactical arrangement of words or images in an aesthetic configuration can disrupt normative values—as well as potentially disrupt the temporality of “presence.” Reified and automatic meanings usually taken for granted can be dislocated through the syntactical arrangement of material signs.
These insights also apply to the potential dislocation of social identity, as interpellated from material signs. An ambiguous materiality also renders ambiguous the social identity interpellated from that citational resource. Even commodities have the potential to contribute to aesthetic experience when grafted into particular syntactical configurations, and re-cited by subjects. In this sense, the type of “anticipation” found in a closed system of exchange value—that is, predicting the calculative behaviors of economically-motivated actors with known and stable identities—may also be interrupted.
We have seen that whenever the words of the other are cited, or a photograph of the other is taken, a strip of meaningful materiality is decontextualized from the flow of everyday life, to be grafted into a new context. The new context always differs from the former context, in that certain aspects of the former context are left out whenever the utterance of the other is entextualized and recontextualized. Even in a verbatim quote of the other’s speech, certain words of the other are selected while others are omitted, as the situated context in which the words were first uttered is lost. In this sense, the words of others are “translated” into new utterances, necessarily involving an alteration of the meaning of those words.
As Cadava notes, Walter Benjamin has argued in his work on translation that a good translator should not simply “render a foreign language into one we may call our own, but rather . . . preserve the foreignness of this language” (1997, 17). In the sense that the words of the other are necessarily “foreign” to the referential perspective of self, we might generalize this insight to inquire as to the ethical responsibility of self toward the words of the other—in other words, to what extent are the words of the other simply consumed as experiences for the (Cartesian) subject, or respected and preserved in their alterity? As de Certeau has shown, the way that the words of the other are incorporated into the subject’s reporting practices is a political matter—the new syntactical form re-presents the intent and interests of the other to a greater or lesser extent.
To cite the words of the other necessarily involves a change of context of those words. As in photography, Benjamin argues that “translation demands the death of the original” (18). In this sense, any citation of the words of the other—not just the translation of a text from one language to another—means the “death” of the original context, and the survival of the words in translation in the new context. Benjamin refers to this as the “afterlife” of the work (Weber 2008, 66). As Samuel Weber points out, for Benjamin the significance of the original words or work has to do with this afterlife—the way that the words of the other are grafted into new contexts—rather than the “semantic” significations of those individual words or works (62). Or, as Weber puts it, “To signify is to be transformed” (63). In other words, the meaning of any word or work is continually deferred, and changing, as those words and social objects are translated into new citational grafts.
Clearly the “words of the other” can be transformed or cited in various ways in the utterances of subjects. These syntactical forms can be more or less marketable within a hierarchical system of valuation, just as various translations of “foreign” texts can be considered to be of differing quality. Thus when cultural commodities, involving the words and images of others, are produced with an eye toward maximum marketability, they are precisely “translated” into those syntactical forms which make them easily re-citable by subjects as valuable experiences—that is, shaped into normatively recognizable “forms of value.” We can see that the ethics of translation involve how the words of the other are cited—not only by producers who market them, but by everyday subjects who incorporate those words of others into their own citational practices.
The syntactical arrangements which translate these words and images into new contexts can be considered as more or less “critical” relative to particular political values, and more or less “aesthetic” relative to value discourses in general. As discussed above, aesthetic configurations have the potential to unsettle all discourses of value. Thus, regardless of the actual citation or translation of any particular work, we can speak of the potential “market-ability” or potentially aesthetic “translate-ability” of any linguistic form into future, unknown contexts (see Weber 59).
Regarding the potential for cultural commodities to disrupt the hegemonic frame of exchange value, we might end this section with a consideration of the work of Constantine Nakassis (2012) on brand performativity. In a discussion of how the “performative citationality” of Derrida and Butler might be effectively revised given some semiotic considerations, Nakassis argues that there are “structural instabilities” within the semiotic configuration, or “citational structure,” of brands (635). While brand managers are often able to recover when brands signify in unexpected ways, Nakassis notes that “not all excesses are necessarily recoupable” (635). For Nakassis, there is always the possibility that the materiality of the branded commodity may signify differently than anticipated by a company, noting the “excesses of materiality, intelligibility, and ontology that haunt the brand” (635).
This argument has an interesting parallel to the earlier discussion of Adorno, especially regarding how the materiality of the work of art may generate “aesthetic negativity”—that is, disrupting normative interpretive contexts in reference to which the work might be given meaning (Menke 1998, xi). That insight from Adorno was extended in this chapter to suggest that art works might disrupt normative values—in addition to normative meanings—and also that commodities could potentially disrupt normative values and identities in particular aesthetic constellations. Applying these insights, we might be consider here—relative to the work of Nakassis—how the materiality of the brand has the potential to signify differently when entering into particular social environments or syntactical configurations. The exchange value frame—as the normative interpretive context for the branded commodity—may be dislocated when the materiality of the brand begins to signify in unexpected ways. In short, the recontextualization of any material form—whether art, branded good, or language-based commodity—always imparts the chance that the material form will signify something other than exchange value.
As Briggs and Bauman argue, citing Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, a “genre”—such as a literary structure or aesthetic form—is intertextual (1992, 146). Considering the work of Adorno and Menke, we can recognize that the stringent qualities of aesthetic forms involve intertextual relationships—to other signs and ultimately to other people. As discussed earlier, for the Bakhtin Circle any utterance posits a relationship between self and other—including an “aesthetically configured” utterance. Thus, the disruption of normative value discourse, in the experience of aesthetic negativity, also disrupts normative relationships between self and other—and opens a space for alternative relationships. If the “automatic understanding” within contemporary U.S. culture is that subjects normatively consume the words and images of the other as a valuable experience for the subject, then the aesthetic disruption of such an assumption necessarily involves a re-negotiation of social relationships between self and other.
In everyday life, the frame or context for social interaction is mutually sustained by co-participants, as when both parties understand that they are “playing a game.” The construction of any interactive dialogue, and its interpretive frame, occurs through both inclusions and exclusions. Appealing to Goffman’s work on games, Adam Kendon (1997) has shown how these mutually-constructed frames are achieved in interaction, as social actors treat some meanings as relevant and some as irrelevant—as we have seen in the work of Callon on economic contracts (1998a; 1998b). Frames are changed as participants give cues to each other within the interaction, indicating a readiness for “frame alteration” (Kendon 1997, 331). In other words, contexts are not pre-existing entities within which subjects assume fixed positions—as Butler points out in her critique of Bourdieu’s notions of “field” and “market” (2000, 119)—but are themselves sustained through normative re-citation, and are thus vulnerable to alteration.
These insights regarding the emergent nature of interactive context have broader implications for the dislocation of value frames. The stringent materiality of works of art—as utterances issued by artists in an ongoing social dialogue—can be considered as “interactional cues” for the transformation of cultural frames. As strategic moves in social dialogue which can indicate a “readiness” for frame shift, “words of art” can configure with the words of others is such a way as to potentially dislocate normative value and identity interpellations. Any utterance in everyday interaction can signal a shift away from normative interpretive frames, and introduce a stringent quality into the mutually-constructed and mutually-sustained frames of everyday life.
As the Bakhtin Circle showed, the utterances issued by a subject are always already “dialogical,” incorporating the words of the other into syntactical arrangements with the words of the self. Like the “utterances” of artists, they cannot be considered as “individual” or autonomous, but are always already social and intertextual. In addition, conversational exchanges between interactants can be entextualized as “strips of interactive dialogue,” and decontextualized from the flow of everyday life. Like the syntactical form of a work of art, the material forms of the social dialogues between self and other can be considered as more or less stringent in their potential to dislocate normative meaning and interpellated value frames. As Michael Holquist reminds us, Bakhtin considered the negotiation of values between self and other, through syntactical utterances issued in interactive dialogue, to be a “problem in aesthetics” (2004, 29; italics in the original). Everyday utterances and strips of interactive dialogue not only negotiate social values between interactants, as Bakhtin shows, but—when configured in aesthetic ways—may disrupt normative values as they are grafted into unknown future situations.
In normative dialogue in everyday life, typified value frames are continually invoked and assumed, and normative social identities are shaped in reference to those valuing contexts. However, when utterances begin to alter or dislocate frame—introducing the potential for aesthetic negativity into interactive dialogue—normative social relationships are no longer automatically assumed or re-cited. Rather, in Adorno’s sense, after normative (value) contexts are disrupted by aesthetic negativity, they can only be tentatively quoted in the attempt to re-establish meaning and interpretive context. In this sense, the meaning of interactive dialogue is made tentative following the stringent characteristics introduced by the (performing) social actors. As John Lucy (1993) has stated, “verbal art is a form of creative metalinguistic play with the power to affect social reality” (21; italics added).
In this sense, we can speak of the “aesthetic negativity” induced by performance, as in the case of performance art, or even regarding the more or less aesthetic citational performances of everyday life. Commenting on “verbal art,” Lucy has noted that “Alternation of direct and indirect speech can be used to create both practical and aesthetic effects” (18-19). In a Bakhtinian sense, the way that the words of others are reported upon in everyday life, or double-voiced in one’s own interactive utterances, can have aesthetic significance—and thus can be considered as a critical move in social interaction. Such moves produce more or less stringent qualities within the interactional sequence itself—as potentially disruptive of normative meanings, values, and identities. Although the flow of everyday dialogue is ongoing, the particular strips of language selected from this discourse will, in Adorno’s sense, come to have more or less “subversive” qualities.
Thus a “performance artist”—whether or not officially recognized as such—may make a move in social interaction, potentially introducing a disruptive element into social dialogue. This performance—as a re-citable resource—may enter into a number of future constellations, as grafted into the utterances of unknown future others. Each newly-entextualized graft will in turn have more or less stringent characteristics as it is re-cited—that is, it will either “automatically” re-instate, or potentially dislocate, normative value domains and identity categories.
For example, as Judith Butler (1999) argues, gender parodies in performance art may re-cite gender in such a way as to disrupt the normative understanding of gender—such that the gendered body can no longer support “automatic” understandings. In parody, the entextualized performance has a material form which resists the automatic application of gendered significations, to a greater or lesser extent. Instead, the meaning of the performance, and the meaning of the performing body as “aesthetic object,” involves the tentative quotation or citation of alternative interpretive contexts, following the initial disruption of their meanings. In addition, the “meaning” of gendered identity, as an iterable and recognizable social category involving particular social values and social relationships, is itself made ambiguous. The same applies to any mutually sustained, interactive performances in everyday life—which are entextualize-able from the ongoing flow of interaction, and thus available for recontextualization in future situations.
In this way, Adorno’s argument concerning “aesthetic negativity” applies not only to traditional works of art or performance art, but to any interactive strip or dialogical sequence taken from everyday interactions—as more or less “stringent” in various future recontextualizations. In fact, the traditional art work itself is never a self-enclosed utterance of an autonomous artist, but is itself always a response to—in dialogue with—the pre-existing words and images of others. All utterances are, in this sense, more or less “aesthetic” citational grafts of the words of self and other.
The task of the “critical” performer—whether the author of written essays, or a street artist—is to entextualize or form their utterances in such a way as to potentially disrupt the automatic application of the exchange value frame. Of course, the performer cannot control future recontextualizations, nor control the potential re-assimilation of the utterance back into normative value frames. As Menke has argued, even the most ambiguous of aesthetic material forms will eventually be assigned some meaning or “value.” On the other hand, utterances do vary in the extent to which they embrace or resist easy assimilation into normative frames. While many commodities are entextualized into a material form which “automatically” signifies exchange value, particular entextualizations of a given performance may not be so readily marketable. The materiality of the performed utterance, or strip of interactive dialogue, may have stringent qualities which resist attempts at re-incorporation into normative value frames. In order to incorporate this new materiality, existing frames may themselves have to be altered.
Aesthetic negativity has the potential to disrupt or dislocate any cultural value discourse, including that of exchange value. While any linguistic utterance made in today’s technological environment can be quickly commodified and given an exchange value, it is also possible that any utterance of a subject can enter into an aesthetic constellation with the words of others in subsequent recontextualizations so as to subvert normative, sedimented meanings. Such aesthetically configured citational practices, precisely because of their ambiguity of meaning, have the potential to resist automatic re-citations of value, and disrupt the interpellations of normative “experiences”—as associated with recognizable social identities.
As discussed earlier, material signs graft at least two contexts; in the case of reported speech, the referential context of self is grafted with the “context of alterity.” When the normative subject cites cultural commodities, the words of others signify exchange value, and become a rankable, consumable experience for the interpellated (Cartesian) subject. In other words, the materiality grafting the referential context of self with the context of exchange value involves a commodity; the exchange value of this commodity is measured in terms of the value of the experience it can deliver. In the case of the aesthetically configured object or utterance, however, the normative grafting process is disrupted. The stringent material form does not automatically signify “exchange value,” as do most commodities; thus, the social identity of the “present subject having valuable experiences” cannot be automatically interpellated through its citation.
Returning to Butler’s example of gender, a male audience member attending a performance involving gender parody may find that the normative experience—in which the female body is displayed for his viewing pleasure (see Mulvey 1989)—is disrupted. In other words, those citational practices entextualized as the “performance” disrupt the normative citational practices of the male audience member, who finds himself now positioned relative to a non-normative citational resource. The material form of the performance no longer serves as a stable and unquestioned resource to be re-cited by the securely-gendered subject, in the “experience” of his masculinity (see Dworkin 1989; MacKinnon 1987). Rather, the normative grafting of the value context of gender, with the identity context of the experiencing subject, is disrupted.
We can see that in this case the meaning and “worth” of the aesthetic performance, the identities of both the performer and audience member, and the value categories themselves are all made tentative. While material forms which objectify women are normatively assigned an exchange value, the aesthetically configured performance makes the automatic citation of exchange value problematic—as well as the normative identity of the “gazing” consumer. The aesthetic construction of citational forms—always already a grafting of the referential contexts of self and others—potentially dislocates normative value discourses. In doing so, such utterances open a space for alternative relations between self and other—as mediated through social identity categories.
In a discussion of the work of William F. Hanks, Silverstein and Urban (1996) have noted that each new citation of a social category or “genre”—for example, “gender” or “value”—remains in a kind of tension with the normative or sedimented meanings of that category; that is, with prior citations of it (8). Not only are particular value domains or social identities subject to this tension (between repeatable category and situated instance), but so are the normative relationships between the value and identity categories—which are (re-) interpellated from the citational instance.
Using Goffman’s language regarding role distance, we might say that each new situated re-citational practice plays against those generic meanings, re-producing or resisting the normative, sedimented meanings to a greater or lesser extent. For example, the performative citational practice which parodies gender is a material form which exists in tension with other entextualized citations of gender, and “takes a stand” relative to normative relationships between gendered social identities. Of course, often part of the strategy of performance art is precisely to position the performance—as an entextualized strip of behavior in a particular setting—in tension with normative meanings (see Carlson 1996). We might thus speak of singular, situated, “citational constellations” involving the words of self and the words of others, which conform to or resist the sedimented meanings of past citational practices.
However, this process involving aesthetic negativity is not a total rejection of normative identity categories; rather, the restoration of meaning to aesthetic configurations, following disruption, results in the estrangement of identity. As Menke’s discussion of Adorno revealed, aesthetic negativity involves a continued attempt by the subject to re-establish (previously-subverted) meaning with a tentative “quoting”—here, of possible identity contexts. Thus, even as identities are dislocated and made ambiguous (for all interactive participants) through the construction of aesthetic interactional configurations, new and tentative interpellations are attempted (or quoted) within the social psychological situation. In addition, utterances often embrace or distance themselves from several identity categories at the same time. The aesthetic configuration of a gender parody, for example, may not only estrange the normative understanding of gender categories, but perhaps those of age or social class as well. Following the experience of aesthetic negativity, the tentative reconstruction of social identity begins.
In thinking about social identity, relative to “aesthetically-formed materiality,” we must also distinguish between the instance of the subject “experiencing” an aesthetically-constructed utterance made by others, and the instance of the subject issuing an utterance which has the potential to be aesthetically experienced by others. In other words, we must distinguish between the self as audience of aesthetically configured utterances, from the self as performer of potentially aesthetic utterances.
In the first case of the self confronting an aesthetically configured entextualization issued by others, the subject finds the automatic or normative signification of value to be disrupted—as when an audience member encounters a gender parody. Here, the usual interpellation of an experiencing, valuing Cartesian subjectivity is disrupted given the aesthetic configuration; that is, the material configuration does not interpellate a normative subject. Instead of the subject using the cultural form to interpellate exchange value (i.e., the worth of the experience), attention is drawn to the materiality of the citational configuration (in Adorno’s sense). The form of the citational resource—here, the materiality of performed language—is itself drawn into question.
Thus, the subject must respond to a situation where their (Cartesian) identity is not secured by the object—in Mead’s (1969) sense, the “I” of self cannot respond to a securely-interpellated “me.” The audience member attending a gender parody is thus positioned relative to an ambiguous materiality, which not only disrupts the “presence” of the normatively-valued “experience” (i.e., of the objectification of women), but also the presence of the interpellated Cartesian subject who so experiences. The ambiguous material form thus disrupts the normative temporality, and normative exchange value, of Cartesian, capitalist experience—as “present.”
In confronting the aesthetically configured materiality, the interpellated identity of the audience member is no longer that of one who experiences events of a recognizable and normative “worth.” Rather, the social identity (“me”) interpellated from such an aesthetic configuration—to which the “I” must respond—becomes ambiguous, and estranged from its usual referential context. The self’s response to such a situation becomes problematic given their positioning within it; a male audience member who grows uncomfortable at a gender parody may begin to worry about the attributions of others as to “what kind of person” with “what kind of values” would attend such a performance. The ambiguity of a calculable worth of the experience may draw into question the investment of time “spent” at the performance. Positioned as an unstable subject by the performance itself, the subject may begin to reconsider not only the meaning of gendered identity, but also the social relationships in which the female identity category of “gender” is normatively experienced as subordinate by males. The citational resources which the subject is citing (i.e., is positioned relative to—have become unstable, as well as the social identities normatively interpellated from them).
On the other hand, even if a performed utterance is potentially “aesthetic,” it is never necessarily so. Each singular subject, located within a unique social addressivity, brings multiple social identities into each situation—and necessarily enters into a different “constellation” with the potentially aesthetic utterance. Thus the “aesthetic configuration” does not necessarily invoke the experience of aesthetic negativity for every subject in any particular situation. Because subjects are simultaneously positioned differently relative to multiple citational forms, the identities and values of subjects are “differentially disrupted.” In Goffman’s sense, subjects are distanced from, or embrace, multiple citational resources simultaneously. Thus each socially-positioned subject necessarily assumes a unique social stance; the experience of aesthetic negativity becomes a question of ratio relative to multiple identity and value categories.
In addition, particular audience members may lack the semiotic codes typically brought to the interpretation of aesthetic objects (and their stringent qualities). Traditionally, works of art are prepared, or entextualized, with particular audience codes in mind—codes which, as Bourdieu and Guillory argue in the case of social class, are unevenly distributed. Thus, a configuration which some audience members interpret as subversive, in reference to other known material signs, may lapse into unintelligibility as “mere things” for other audience members. While the experience of aesthetic negativity does indeed depend on the self-subversive characteristics of the material object, the future “interpretive situations” into which the object will be grafted cannot be known in advance. No one can entirely anticipate the future travels of entextualized cultural forms, their likelihood of generating aesthetic negativity in future situations, or their political implications.
However, this does not mean that aesthetic negativity remains altogether a private, subjective experience. Those who share (Cartesian) identity categories—despite their simultaneous membership in other, differentiated groups—may share an “experience” of disruption. This sense of disruption of Cartesian identity, like any meaning, can be communicated across contexts. While there are certainly limits as to the communicability of subjective experience—including the experience of aesthetic negativity—it is also true that the utterances of self may be more or less successful in this communicative attempt.
We have now arrived at the second case to be considered—that of the subject issuing utterances which are potentially aesthetic to others. Adorno argued that one of the functions of aesthetic criticism was precisely the attempt to put into understandable language the experience of aesthetic negativity—the ironic attempt at “communicating the disruption” of normative understanding. Following the reception of an aesthetic utterance, a subject may attempt to communicate their experience of aesthetic negativity to a wider audience—as in the case of telling others about a work of art or a gender parody. This type of interpretive speech or aesthetic criticism is difficult, because it seeks to shape the experience of aesthetic negativity into understandable, iterable forms; that is, meaningfully communicating the disruption of meaning. As discussed, for Adorno this endeavor means using conceptual language in such a fashion as to self-subvert its own “understandable” form, thus mimicking the self-subversive strategies of the aesthetic object it seeks to re-enact (Buck-Morss 1979, 98; Nicholsen 1999, 3).
As Sherry Weber Nicholsen notes, Adorno’s form of writing was itself “constellational” or “configurative,” seeking to create such a discontinuity of understanding—employing techniques such as the lack of paragraphing or lack of linear argumentation (1999, 96). In such a constellation, concepts were “set in relation to one another” (107), often cross-referencing each other (10). For Nicholsen, Adorno’s sentences in Aesthetic Theory formed a “constellation composed of contexts” (174; italics added), in such a way that connections between sentences could be drawn by readers (175).
Bakhtin has shown us that the syntactical form of the utterance—its “aesthetic” construction (Holquist 2004, 29)—negotiates values between self and other. This argument has been extended, via Menke’s reading of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, to argue that interactive dialogue—as a more or less “stringent” configuration of the words of self and other—can generate the experience of “aesthetic negativity.” Now we see that, for Adorno, aesthetic configurations not only play words, sentences, or texts against each other, but also play interpellated contexts against each other. In other words, Adorno’s work used the materiality of language to graft together contexts in such a way as to disrupt the usual semantic meaning of the words and sentences—using a particular citational or syntactical configuration. While the grafting of the commodified words of others may indeed valorize the referential context of self—re-enacting the system of exchange value—Adorno shows that a “constellation of contexts” may also have aesthetic effect.
Adorno wanted to simultaneously embrace the importance of non-aesthetic social criticism—which appealed to a “nondiscursive rationality” in the critical analysis of society—as well as to embrace the realm of aesthetics, which disrupted normative understanding and opened a space to possible alternative social relations (Nicholsen 1999, 3). In this sense, his essays themselves oscillated between the enactment of particular political values, as well as the disruption of “value” itself. On the one hand Adorno, in “The Essay as Form,” argued that a critical essay itself was not “art,” in that criticism relied on concepts while art undermined normative understanding (Nicholsen 1999, 106). On the other hand, Adorno’s essays—as opposed to more “rationalized” modes of expression—were configured in such a way as to dislocate such meaning and thus potentially approach aesthetic status themselves (106-107). Both aesthetic performance, as well as the “reporting” on such a performance, are re-citational practices with the potential to disrupt normative value and identity categories.
The subject as potential artist or performer has no control over the future contexts into which their “stringently-configured” utterances will be received. Each utterance in face-to-face dialogue, as an entextualized grafting of the words of self and others, may later be experienced by others and responded to in unpredictable ways. The “understandings” which the aesthetically configured utterance potentially disrupts in future recontextualizations depends upon the understandings which others already hold. Thus, any potentially aesthetic utterance takes a chance in its attempt to disrupt normative meanings, with no controllable interpretive outcome, and no guarantee of delivering “aesthetic negativity” to audiences. The utterance may be misunderstood, or may be subsumed into existing value discourses despite its attempt to subvert them. The only defense against such assimilation is to build into the materiality of utterances those self-subversive qualities which might disrupt their easy assimilation into known value and identity genres.
Similarly, the subject might intend an utterance to be a “rational,” conceptual critical commentary on the works of others, but it may instead, in some unknown future configuration, itself initiate an aesthetic experience. For example, Derrida’s commentary on Shakespeare, or Adorno’s essays, may themselves come to be considered as aesthetic objects. In this sense, Shakespeare’s plays are citational forms which are always open to recontextualization—as are the utterances of Adorno, or Adorno’s critics. Subjects can only make utterances—citing the words and works of others—in entextualizations which are more or less stringent relative to normative values and identities.
We have seen that syntactically-arranged citational forms can themselves be seen as “aesthetic objects”—not only in the case of the literary work, but also in the case of interactive dialogues between self and others. Just as Menke, Adorno, and Derrida argued that the experience of works of art can dislocate normative understandings, it has been argued in this chapter that “aesthetically-constructed” citational forms, issued by subjects in everyday interactions, can disrupt normative value discourses within the culture—particularly the hegemonic exchange value discourse.
Such a disruption also makes ambiguous the social identities normatively affiliated with those values, as well as the social relationships between persons categorized into those identities. The aesthetic negativity derived from such aesthetically configured citational forms may initiate a critique of normative value discourses, as well as open the possibility of differing social relationships—considering that utterances always already re-cite social relationships. In addition, such citational practices in everyday life may unsettle relationships with co-present others. Aesthetically-configured utterances which disrupt sedimented gender relations, or other cultural value domains, thus have consequences for interpersonal relationships—as in the case of two people who disagree over the “value” of a gender parody.
Such a dislocation of normative understanding has implications for the assembly of self—as constructed through language. While the normative subject in late capitalism cites the commodified words of others as a valuable experience, the subject experiencing aesthetic negativity becomes dislocated or estranged. Rather than experiencing the “presence of value,” the subject is re-positioned relative to an ambiguous materiality. The interpretive context against which the experiencing subject is normatively defined becomes problematic. This disrupts the temporality of the normative subject (as one who continuously experiences “presence”). Thus, a materiality which disrupts the presence of value also disrupts the temporality of the Cartesian subject. Rather than the “self” as automatically understood and unthinkingly re-cited, the self-construction process is “made tentative.” Experiences of unknown value thus unsettle the archive (of valued experiences) by which the contemporary subject is defined. Opening such a space for critical reflection is especially important today, given the ever-increasing proliferation of cultural commodities used in the construction of normative social identities.
Just as Bakhtin argued that the differential perspectives of the self and other are required for self-constitution and human perception (see Holquist 2004, 20-21), George Herbert Mead also argued that role-taking involves the referential context of others. Influenced by Einstein’s relativity theory in a way similar to Bakhtin, Mead argued that role-taking involves the simultaneous consideration of two differing perspectives, those of self and other (Joas 1997, 158; 173).
Mead appears at times to define a significant symbol precisely in terms of an “identical” meaning shared within a community of users. From that point of view, it is because we share meaning with others that we can predict or anticipate the reactions of others—in other words, significant symbols make role-taking possible. Inasmuch as Mead’s theory interprets “significant symbols” to have an identifiable meaning across contexts, it becomes subject to a Derridean critique—that is, of wrongly assuming that some kind of stable meaning is “present” across contexts (Sherlock 2007).
Importantly, however, Hans Joas argues that Mead, in his theory of role-taking, moves in a more “pragmatic” direction than many theorists, focusing on the “reciprocal anticipation of behavioural expectations” (153)—a reading more consistent with Butler’s notion of a “sedimented” citational practice. In other words, the anticipation of the citational practices of others concerns the expected behavior of others toward self, rather than a focus on a shared conceptual consensus as to the meaning of significant symbols. For Mead, it is not a matter of a pre-existing “group consciousness” enabling multiple applications of intended, normative meanings across situational contexts; rather, meaning is located in social interaction in (what we might call) reciprocal “citational expectations.”
According to Joas, in one essay Mead precisely defines meaning “not with reference to the actual reaction of the other, nor to the mere awareness of one’s own attitude of response, but rather as the consciousness of the relation between one’s own actions and the responses of the other to them, which one can anticipate” (105). Here for Mead, “meaning” is subtly shifted toward an awareness of the normative practices (relative to materiality) which typically govern social interaction, as based on a social history of objectively-accomplished utterances and actions—as well as in our assessment of the probability that they will be repeated in future situations. This “awareness” of social meaning is emergent from reciprocal behavioral practices, rather than—to use Durkheim’s term—a shared “collective consciousness” pre-existing practices.
However, while this shift may spare Mead from Derridean criticism regarding a shared, “present” meaning located in a group consciousness and abstractable from social action, Mead’s position still seems to imply an equivalence between the attitudes of self and the attitudes of the other toward objects and situations—albeit rooted in behavioral expectations. For example, in Mind, Self and Society, Mead argues that “What language seems to carry is a set of symbols answering to certain content which is measurably identical in the experience of the different individuals. If there is to be communication as such the symbol has to mean the same thing to all individuals involved” (Mead 1969, 54, italics added).
We have seen that while Derrida (1988) has also noted the necessity of the repeatability and recognizability of linguistic signs across situations for communication to occur, he also insists that each repetition necessarily differs in each occurrence—an “aporia” of singularity and repetition. For Mead, we can anticipate the responses of others because we can “arouse” in ourselves the same response, and this enables us to adjust our future actions accordingly (1969, 73-74). This language seems to move Mead in the direction of positing a shared, “present” meaning to utterances and citational practices among members of society, “whereby individuals can indicate to one another what their responses to objects will be, and hence what the meanings of objects are” (122, n29).
However, returning to Bakhtin, a stable “other” in time and space must be assumed for anticipation and meaning construction to occur in the first place. Like Bakhtin’s assumed “addressee” in the utterances of self, the perspective of Mead’s “other” in the role-taking process has to be repeatable, recognizable, and stable in time and space. In other words, the “moment” of abstracted meaning, as shared behavioral expectation, must abstract a stable perspective (i.e., that of the other) from which to view the meaning of one’s own anticipated utterances (and the consequent identity interpellations). For Mead, the “me” phase of the self, as a normatively-typified social identity, occurs precisely through the eyes of this stable other.
When the anticipated responses of others toward one’s own citational practices “arouse” in the self the same responses, the subject is seeing one’s own “meaningfully” identifiable utterances from the perspective of a stable, socially recognizable “viewing position.” It is precisely against this “synchronic” moment—of a shared behavioral expectation toward meaningful materiality—that Mead contrasts the dynamism of the “I” phase of the self. Like Bakhtin and Derrida, Mead thus retains a tension between singularity and repetition—recognizing that the existential actions of the self are not limited to those normatively attributed to a particular social identity. In other words, the “I” phase of one’s “self” can respond to (and against) the normative “meaning” of the anticipated social identity—an identity interpellated from normative behavioral practice (the “me”).
Any “trouble” between Mead and Derrida on this point concerns the definition and location of “meaning” relative to these processes. Derrida’s insistence that meaning is never quite “present” does seem incompatible with the way that meaning is defined at times in Mind, Self and Society. As discussed, in those accumulated lecture notes Mead tended to suggest that meaning is located precisely in the “identical” responses of self and other to social objects and social situations. The trouble arises in that we are using the same word, “meaning,” to describe two distinct “moments” or processes. On the one hand, the term can be used, as Mead and Bakhtin do, to refer to the repeatable, shared aspect of language which enables the responses of others—toward “identifiable” signs—to be anticipated. On the other hand, the term can be used more generally to refer to an assumption in Western metaphysics that meaning is “present” in the shared consciousness of subjects—a sense of “meaning” to which Derrida objects, and is precisely not the emphasis which Mead wants to give to the term.
For example, in Mead’s Philosophy of the Present (1959), we can immediately see that his notion of the “present” is not the “metaphysical present” which Derrida challenges. Commenting on that book, Joas notes the importance of the “event” in Mead’s theory of the temporality of self. He states that for Mead, “Without the interruption of the passage of time by the event, no experience of time would be possible” (1997, 176). As Joas points out, Mead defines time differentially in terms of the event, in that each event “in its relation to other events gives structure to time” (Mead 1959, 21). For Mead, the event necessarily involves a change in the material environment. In this process, he argues, past and future enter into the “present” (33).
For Mead, every new event becomes the occasion for the reinterpretation of the past. However, it is also true that the material changes in the environment, as a result of events, to some extent condition the future. All social action, which necessarily occurs in the “present,” objectively changes the material environment in such a way that both enables, yet limits, future behavioral possibilities. Here we see an affinity with Butler’s notion of meaningful materiality as an “enabling constraint.”
In Mead’s view, this change in material conditions is necessary for the emergence of time, because the event creates two different “referential systems” (Joas 1997, 182). The event, as a change in material conditions, involves a “passing”—from the “old” to the “new” referential system (i.e., before and after the material change). It is important to stress that the “time of the event,” for Mead, is in the passing between the systems—the “simultaneity of . . . membership” (183) in both the old and new referential systems, or the simultaneous signification of each. In the language of citationality, this passing would be the temporality of the graft—the simultaneous bringing together, and differentiation, of referential contexts through the materiality of the citational “event.” A temporality which “splits” the present, as described by Mead, does not coincide with the way that the Western philosophical system characterizes the “presence” of meaning.
For Mead, as Joas puts it, “The simultaneity of this membership, or participation, in two systems is thus a defining characteristic of presents” (Joas 1997, 183). Here, the “present” is not that experienced by an autonomous, Cartesian subject; rather, the present is split by the “simultaneity of membership” in multiple referential contexts. In the language of citationality, we can say that every citational grafting of the words of self and others, in a new syntactical (material) arrangement, splits the “present” by uniting and differentiating referential contexts.
As mentioned above, we see here the influence of Einstein’s theory of relativity on Mead. Mead, like Bakhtin, applies this framework of relativity to human interaction (Holquist 2004, 20-21; Joas 1997, 173). For Mead, social interaction takes place in a present, interpretable by two observers, each of whom “embodies a different time-perspective” (Joas 1997, 190). Because the self is able to “role-take,” or simultaneously adopt the referential system of the other in addition to their own, two differential perspectives emerge within the self. Each new event brings an occasion for the self to imaginatively occupy the “passing”—a process through which the self is able to consider the meaning of one’s actions, as well as re-consider the meaning of their social identity, from multiple referential perspectives. According to Joas, by emphasizing the situated and simultaneous referential viewpoints of at least two social actors, Mead “is laying the corner-stone of an intersubjectivist theory of the consciousness of time” (188, italics in the original). Mead’s theory of temporality is clearly not that of the Cartesian subject, but has to do with an intersubjective grafting of contexts which unsettles the “present.”
Although Mead shares with Cooley (1964) the position that the other is important in the emergence of the self concept, he objects to the “mirror” image of the “looking-glass self” in that it distorts the temporality of the self. For Mead, as Joas puts it, “In self-reflection the actor does not turn back upon himself in a frozen present—as in a mirror—but reflects upon the future possibilities in the present conditions, which issue from the past” (Joas 1997, 192). For Mead, the process of seeing any “me” (before or after considered action), through the eyes of others, indeed requires a synchronic, “frozen” moment. However, this synchronic moment is itself embedded in a complex temporality involving past and future, and thus is not quite “present.”
The “moment” of self-reflection, in the planning of future behavior, necessarily involves knowledge of sedimented citational practices which interpellate normative social identities. Agency within social constraints thus necessarily involves past social identities, anticipated future behaviors, as well as an “anticipation of a retrospective” social glance (by self and others) at behaviors now considered, but not yet completed. In addition, the “frozen” moments of anticipating, or retroactively interpreting, social identity is necessarily disrupted by actual, situated behavior—the actual utterances of the “I” which, for Mead, cannot be reflected upon as they occur. Thus (pre-utterance) anticipated social identity never quite aligns with (post-utterance) interpellated identity, precisely because meaning is never quite “present” in dynamic social action—only in the “synchronic” abstraction of its meaning.
Citational practices are not just re-enacted behavior, but are also anticipated and adjusted before enacted, based upon the anticipated reactions of others. Just as utterances are re-cited from previous enactments, in Butler’s sense of performativity, so are utterances re-enactments of imaginative rehearsals. As Mead has shown, human behavior is radically future-oriented, toward action. Like those theorists who emphasize that the process of citationality disrupts the “presence” of intentional subjects, Mead’s theory similarly dislocates the “presence” of sovereign subjectivity by focusing on the temporality of the self—a self not merely present, but one projecting potential actions into the future.
Mead, like Bakhtin and Butler, recognized that the responses of others limited the agency of the self. For Mead, this profoundly affects the process of anticipating one’s own utterances. Even though intentionality cannot govern future contexts, the self is able to anticipate whether one’s particular citational practices—and the resultant interpellated social identity—will likely be interpreted by others as normative or deviant, and thus can adjust considered utterances accordingly. Meadian theory can re-contribute this dimension of anticipation to a contemporary theory of self, although the nature of “agency”—from a poststructuralist point of view—cannot be allowed to lapse back into a theory of Cartesian intentionality. Social identity can never be interpellated from actual utterances in quite the same way as anticipated by self—thus one’s “identity” cannot be controlled or assured across temporal or spatial contexts. It is clear, however, that performative citationality can be rehearsed (see Schechner 1985, 35-36).
Having said this, Mead’s notion of agency, particularly the nature of the “I” and the “me,” seems in need of revision along contemporary poststructuralist lines. The “I” phase of the “self” must be interpreted as an ongoing response to those social identities which are interpellated from re-citational practices. Although the materiality of the social world is shaped by institutional utterances, which profoundly restrict the re-citational practices and social identities of individuals, at the same time the agency of subjects is re-enabled. The re-citation of institutionally-produced citational resources, when syntactically reconfigured by subjects, necessarily alters the identities and values implied by those materialities—to a greater or lesser extent.
In addition, Mead’s concept of “anticipation” needs to be reconsidered in terms of a theory of citationality. In particular, the anticipation of the “known,” normative behavior of others must be contrasted with a more Derridean anticipation of the unknown—as in the unknown consequences of the future re-citations of meaningful material forms. This is an especially important point given that investors in the contemporary cultural economy attempt to establish a closed system involving the presence of value—as they attempt to “anticipate” both future costs and future profits.
Investors attempt to fold the temporality of the future into the restrictive limits of the “present” economic system. As “events” themselves increasingly become commodities in a post-industrial economy, such investments involve an anticipation of the worth of future experiences for consumers. As language has increasingly become a commodity to be delivered via new citational technologies, the positioning of subjects—relative to the future materiality of commodified language—has become increasingly important for investment purposes. If the notion of “anticipation” is to be retrieved in performativity theory, it becomes crucial that it not merely refer to the calculative anticipation of the marketability of language—as an investment in an already-closed system of economic exchange.
Entextualized utterances of the self will enter into unknown constellations with the utterances of others in future situations. Like the two dice “thrown” in Derrida’s (2007) essay “My Chances, Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” the implications of any grafting of the words of self and other will be retrospectively determined in this future. In that essay, Derrida states: “I will throw out two questions. These questions having been cast, imagine that, in one blow, it is a single throw of two dice . . . After the fact, after the blow . . . , once they have fallen, we will try to see (if indeed something still remains to be seen), what sum they form between them: in other words, what their constellation signifies” (347-48).
Let us for a moment consider every singular die as a strip of language—each an entexualization which grafts the words of self and other, and which necessarily interpellates unique value ratios or identities which the die is taken to “represent.” One singular “double-voiced die” is cast today, and is more or less “aesthetically configured” in its syntactical form, thus more or less socially recognizable in terms of its value. A second double-voiced die perhaps will be added to it, thrown in some future situation, by some unknown other in some future game—who for some (now unknown) reason takes the represented “value” of the first-thrown die as somehow relevant to that future game.
Then these two dice—like Derrida’s two questions—having both been thrown (or entextualized), are themselves available for further recontextualization and re-citation for a new game to be determined in some future situation, where perhaps a third die either adds to the two, or replaces one of them, to form a new constellation and a newly-combined “value.” We can see that such activity can continue again and again, with the combined “value of the dice” in any game always being open to further re-contextualization. The value of the dice is thus always deferrable, and always subject to chance.
Like the “value” of the dice, the question of the exchange value of language concerns the nature of these future games. As Goffman pointed out in his work on games, the rules of the game determine what is or is not to be considered as relevant within that game. In a linguistic sense, these rules are part of a collectively-negotiated context or frame (Kendon 1997), shaping which citational resources will count as relevant within the future interaction. In this sense, the normative regulations of a culture attempt to “precontextualize” the future—influencing the selection, the meaning, and the future value of “thrown” or entextualized strips of language. While investors indeed try to shape the rules of future games, no one can guarantee these rules—which will ultimately determine the relevance and value of previous entextualizations.
Given this uncertainty regarding the nature of future grafts into which they may later enter, entextualizations—like thrown dice—introduce an element of chance into the values of the future. For Derrida, chance is essential for any “event,” or any “experience” to occur; both terms imply the occurrence of something unforeseen or unanticipated. As he notes, “If one anticipates what is coming . . . there is no pure event” (Derrida 2007, 349). Because identity demands repetition across situations, the possibility of chance—of singularity and difference within the re-citation process—suggests the potential disruption of identity. Possible alternative relationships between social identities always remain “in play” for future recontextualizations.
In other words, relationships to others can never be finally fixed, and one’s “experiences” involving the words of others (and their values) must always remain open to the future and to chance (Derrida, 2007; see also Direk 2000). Indeed, Derrida (1978) finds Hegel’s “restricted economy” of meaning to be compatible with the “presence” of exchange value, involving “a knowledge of meaning that always already has been anticipated” (271). That is a universalizing economy where “The circularity of absolute knowledge could dominate, could comprehend only this circulation, only the circuit of reproductive consumption” (271; italics in the original). Derrida notes that “Hegel has bet against play, against chance” (260). For Derrida, the values and identity of the other—to which the self must remain open—cannot therefore be already known.
Derrida thus introduces a kind of aporia of anticipation, where two necessary but differing—even contradictory—aspects of “anticipation” remain in tension. While the future, the “event,” and “experience” cannot be anticipated as already known if to occur at all, they must in fact re-occur in order to be socially recognizable and meaningful. It is here where Adorno’s aesthetic theory is particularly useful; normative identities and meanings are disrupted through aesthetic configurations, yet meaningful social categories are tentatively re-applied or “quoted” following the experience of aesthetic negativity. Aesthetic configurations create a space where signifying materiality exists between the automatic signification of normative meaning, and a meaningless lapse into a mere thing. Such a space holds in tension the aporia of meaning as both repeatable (and anticipatable), yet singular as a situated “event.” Social meanings can be anticipated, but not absolutely foreseen. Aesthetic configurations dramatize this aporia, and thus ensure that the anticipation of value remains tentative.
We have seen the importance of anticipation in Mead’s theory of social action. In the process of role-taking, the self is able to anticipate the social reactions of others to their own considered behavior. Inasmuch as the self anticipates normative responses, and mentally makes adjustments to considered utterances, orderly interaction becomes possible—but not guaranteed. Because others may not respond in anticipated ways, social interaction involves a continual readjustment to the actual responses of others—an ongoing oscillation between anticipated and actual responses. Derrida does not reject this dimension of human interaction, but indeed emphasizes that one’s anticipation can never be completely fulfilled. Anticipated meaning or value never comes to be “present”; the re-citation process always introduces an element of the unforeseen.
Chance, for Derrida, always dislocates anticipation as a knowing “in advance” (Derrida 2007, 348). In short, Mead’s framework needs to be expanded to recognize this side of iterability—that not only are meanings repeatable and therefore anticipatable, but also that anticipation itself requires a continual deferral of all meanings (including the meaning of “value”). Derrida uses the concept of anticipation in this sense of a “waiting for the unknown,” and an openness toward it—rather than the anticipation of an already-known identity or value. Thus, chance not only “undoes our anticipation” (348, italics in the original), but also enables a kind of eagerness for an unknown future. Like Mead, Derrida emphasizes the future-oriented nature of citational practices; but for Derrida, the anticipation of the future also radically undermines the presence of stable meaning or value.
As discussed above, investors in the market attempt to anticipate the value of future citational resources. Of course, their interest is not to dislocate the exchange value frame but rather to profit from it—capitalizing on a kind of “profitability of anticipation.” In this sense, the commodification of culture involves the commodification of “anticipation” itself. We also see advertisers involved in the process of marketing the “anticipation of value,” when trying to promise the future delivery of exciting events to consumers. Marketing involves the commodification of a promise of value, as advertisers attempt to draw the attention of the consumer or investor to the coming commodity. Contemporary consumers have been socialized into an eagerness for those commodified citational resources which supposedly will delivered the promised value. As both Goffman (1967) and Haug (1986) note, there is an excitement to the shopping experience itself, as consumers gamble on the anticipated value of their purchases.
As discussed earlier, Jonathan Culler (1981)—citing Roland Barthes—has noted that in tourism everything becomes a “sign of itself” (127). Extending this argument to the notion that commodities in general become “advertisements” for their own value (see MacCannell 1976, 22), we can see the “aporia” of the commodity’s promise—the commodity as a “pharmakon.” On the one hand, the commodity re-cites the ideology of exchange value—that advertised value can be delivered and experienced as present. On the other hand, the commodity also re-cites a promise to consumers—of the experience of its value in the future.
Value is thus both cited as present, as well as promised in the future. On the one hand, the commodity seems to foreclose the future in a perpetual “presence” through the re-citation of the exchange value frame. On the other hand, it re-cites the anticipation of value in the future—necessarily an unknowable “futurity of value.” Capitalism simultaneously involves both types of anticipation—as an investment in a value which will become present, as well as the continual promise of future value.
Exchange value is normatively “re-anticipated,” and “re-interpellated,” as an ongoing context for the interpretation of material signs in the U.S. cultural economy. Normatively interpreted through the ideology of presence, this exchange value frame is assumed to pre-exist the value of any individual commodity—rather than seen as a frame which is re-constructed through re-citational practices. The value of cultural commodities is taken as pre-existing and natural, as commodities—in Adorno’s sense—“automatically” signify their worth.
In semiotic terms, this is a pretense or an ideology that the “signified” has already guaranteed the meaning of its signifier; in other words, that the signified outcome was in fact an already-anticipated identification, and therefore without chance. This ideology of presence assumes that what came to be signified as value was already there in the signifier. In this sense, “value” pretends, retrospectively, to have a natural link with that which socially comes to represent it. This move enacting the “presence of exchange value” in the economy parallels the ideology of presence in Western metaphysics generally.
In contrast, aesthetic negativity problematizes this automatic identification of signifier with signified by precisely disrupting the context within which the sign is interpreted—the normative identification between material signifier and signified value. The stringent quality of aesthetically configured utterances makes the interpellation of “already-known” contexts more difficult and less automatic. As Adorno argued, subjects, following an experience of aesthetic negativity, tentatively cite alternative interpretative contexts or value domains in an attempt to restore disrupted meaning. This “space of tentativity” can be seen as a kind of waiting for meaning or for value. The tentative status of the work, following the experience of aesthetic negativity, is one where its meaningful identity has not yet been established—yet the material form has not lapsed into a mere thing. We see, in a Derridean sense, that the aesthetic form has opened a space for the anticipation of a meaning or value which is perhaps forthcoming, but not guaranteed.
As discussed above, this space of ambiguity, which involves the tentative re-application of interpretive contexts, forces a re-examination of those “superabundant” aspects of the materiality normatively abjected in its entextualization. This superabundance could mean its other material features—that is, art might draw attention to certain material aspects of the work which are usually marginalized as irrelevant. Or, the consideration of superabundance might involve an abjected materiality which has been excluded, and is apparently absent from its current entextualized material form. In addition, “superabundance” can also refer to the way that the same material features are able to signify differently, as in the case of tropes—where differing meanings are held in tension “within” the same materiality. In automatic understanding, the materiality of language is presented and interpreted only in line with normative significations; following aesthetic negativity, other tentative meanings of the superabundant material sign are brought into play.
In encounters with art, as contexts are tentatively quoted rather than automatically applied, the contingency in signification is revealed. Art thus opens the chance that signifiers can signify something other than exchange value—something of unknown value in an unforeseen future. Because art demands that attention be given to the superabundant aspects of citational resources, a space opens for a promise of difference—that is, of a different signification. This openness to alternate, non-normative signification is simultaneously an openness to unknown significations—in future situations into which the work may be grafted. Aesthetics thus problematizes the re-citation of value, through the injection of chance into the material configuration of citational forms. This element of chance involves a waiting for meaning and value, and a promise of difference from the automatic repetition and re-citation of normative value contexts. In this sense, art takes a chance on the future. In his work, Derrida notes the privileged position that art “retains for us, in our experience, as the place of chance and luck. The work provokes us to think the event” (2007, 360).
Although citational resources cannot be neatly separated as “commodity” and “art,” they do vary in their ratio of marketability-to-stringency—that is, they are more or less conducive to the experience of aesthetic negativity, relative to contemporary value frames. In this sense, to use the favored Benjaminian suffix (see Weber 2008), while any cultural form can in fact be marketed, some are less market-able than others. The stringency of the more aesthetically configured utterances indicates their “willingness” to be altered in translation, and not exactly repeated as identifiable and of calculable value (see 47-48). In this way, citational resources vary regarding their differing stances toward temporality. Aesthetic configurations open a space for an unknown future, while more marketable forms are syntactically formed to signify the presence of already-known values.
In an economy increasingly based on the marketability of language, it is interesting to recall Derrida and Benjamin’s writings on the “play” or “promise” of language. As Samuel Weber notes, both Derrida and Benjamin were drawn to those words and grammatical forms of language which introduced an element of chance or play, thus disrupting the “present” moment in favor of a more enigmatic temporality (2008, 126; 66). In formulations such as Benjamin’s use of the present participle, we see that the syntactical arrangement of language—in its material form—can resist easy incorporation into a metaphysics of presence, where the future is already pre-determined as a continuation of normative meanings and values (66). Rather, these particular linguistic forms are more receptive to a future—as their citation introduces an indeterminacy into normative temporal interpellations. In this sense, particular syntactical arrangements might generate indeterminacy as to the “presence of value” in cultural commodities—as opposed to those forms of reported speech entextualized to merely reproduce exchange value.
This disruption of the temporality of the present, via the play of language, involves not only an openness to the future, but also the transformation of the past. When one text is cited into another, as Derrida argues, it is not merely “quoted.” Rather, “the two texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically one into the other and become regenerated in the repetition” (1981, 355). In addition, the cited text not only maintains its ties to its previous context, but, as Derrida argues, transforms that as well. As he puts it, “Each grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal, transforming that, too, as it affects the new territory” (355). Thus, when cultural forms from the past are cited, their meanings and values are altered—as well as the exchange value of the utterances into which they are grafted.
There is, for Derrida, a redemptive or messianic dimension to language—even the language of commodities. This messianic dimension of the commodity, its “promise,” has to do with the alterity through which the identity of the commodity was originally constituted. For Derrida, anything “present” already contains the “spectral” within, as its other. Derrida appeals to this “constitutive alterity” as the promise of a future, and an alternative to the commodity as presently constituted (see Hamacher 1999, 170). While the language of exchange value attempts to close off both past and future in its claim to present value, the critique Derrida develops attempts to open both of these temporal dimensions (see 177).
However, as Derrida shows in his analysis of the “structure of the promise,” there is no guarantee of an alternate future. A promise, as Hamacher states, “must play itself out in a mode of saying which corresponds to nothing given, nothing present, nothing extant and therefore can in no way be placed under the logic of representation, imitation or mimesis” (189). Or, as Caputo notes, for Derrida a “promise” is “the very structure of openness to the future, a word given in advance, to the other, to the future, to what is coming” (Caputo 1997, 30).
If, as Derrida and de Man have argued, the very “act of language is that of a performative promise” (Derrida 1989, 95; italics in the original), then the commodification of language enacts a performative promise of its exchange value. As discussed earlier, the promise of the presence of any subcultural value is subject to commodification, and the assignment of an exchange value to it. At the same time, however, Derrida speaks of the aporia, or unresolvable tension, between the performative act of promising, and the “truth” of what is promised (1989, 133-37). Whereas the commodity’s “promise” is marketed with real economic consequences, its “value” is continually undermined by its own performative structure.
Thus, a different future can be promised, but not necessarily delivered as intended. While “present” structures are necessarily altered through recontextualization and re-citation, it is not necessarily for the better. Derrida thus refers to possibilities, which cannot be known or anticipated in advance. What Derrida terms the “messianic without messianism” (1994, 65) is not a known religion, but rather a future possibility—an event or a “structure of experience” to come (Derrida 1994, 168). It is not associated with any present political party or religious community (or any identifiable value domain). Instead, this possibility is radically oriented toward a future which cannot be politically, economically, or technologically designed in advance (see also Hamacher 1999, 205).
Derrida’s deconstructive strategy attempts a recovery of those elements which have been abjected in the texts of Western philosophy, as well as in Western culture. As Hamacher discusses, Derrida’s work in Specters of Marx is also a re-orientation toward alterity in an unknown future (199). To “become a commodity” is to become an object or experience of known exchange value, which a calculating subject can anticipate. This contrasts with a Derridean notion of futurity, where political or economic values cannot be known in advance (203). As Hamacher notes, Derrida sees language as a future-oriented promise (199)—or having a “prospective structure” (189). This view of language takes a stand against the contemporary trend toward the increased commodification of language.
In this sense, what is at stake in the “commodification of language” is thus the temporality of language itself. Because of its inherent “futurity,” language can never be entirely controlled, or closed off in its entextualization as a cultural commodity; rather, it is a “medium” through which future possibilities are opened (193). Language always “has a play,” outside of any structure which attempts to frame its meaning within fixed boundaries. In short, language can never be totally commodified or reified.
Living in an age bombarded with new citational technologies for the delivery of cultural commodities, we must return to the questions raised by Adorno, Benjamin, and others concerning the political and aesthetic “promise” of these modern technologies. Martin Heidegger argued that in Western cultures, the role of the object is to fix and determine the subject (Weber 1996). As Samuel Weber shows, Heidegger links his critique of Western subjectivity with his critique of technology, which takes “all alterity as raw material to be given form and set into place” (50). Those who are able to effectively objectify the words of others into their utterances—using modern citational technologies—are also able to maintain their privileged social identities, and privileged institutional positioning. Heidegger argues that it is fear which drives modern technology, in that subjects attempt to increasingly “secure” a future. While this is one possible outcome of technology, Walter Benjamin argues that the arts which employ the new technologies, such as film, may open alternative futures (Caygill 1998, 78). For Benjamin, “Technology can be used to resist the change in experience, to monumentalise the present by closing it off to any other future than the repetition of the present, or it can be used to promote the transformation of experience itself” (95).
Both Derrida and Benjamin found redemptive possibilities within technology itself. However, while Benjamin (1968) ends his “Work of Art” essay with a Marxist hope for political redemption over fascism, Derrida insists that the future situation must be kept open-ended, unknowable, and not reducible to a known political system—we can find Derrida objecting to this kind of “structured” Marxism in Specters of Marx (1994). Having said this, and despite Benjamin’s concluding remarks in the “Work of Art” essay, Benjamin’s view regarding the possible technological transformation of experience often comes very close to Derrida’s views regarding the “messianic” and the “promise.” As Cadava argues in his reading of Benjamin’s work on photography, the photograph is a promise “that everything may be kept for history, but the everything that is kept is the everything that is always already in the process of disappearing, that does not belong to sight. What is kept is only the promise, the event of the promise” (1997, 65-66).
Today we see technologies such as computers develop as an archive of value, where entextualized images and words can be saved, stored, and “re-experienced” in ways never before possible. Television networks keep digital libraries where the “valuable” historical images of sports, television, and film are at their disposal for rebroadcast. For Derrida, there is an important connection between such archival technologies and experience, and between the archive and the future. He notes that “what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives” (Derrida 1996, 18).
In this sense, new archival technologies influence how syntactical forms will be entextualized, saved, and experienced by subjects in the future. The words and images saved on today’s computers, or available through the Internet, will be left for future generations who will engage this archive in new situations—they will “experience” our archives of value. Inasmuch as the commodity form limits what our language says to our children, and given that the traces of our “collective experience” have often been reduced to what has sold well in our marketplace, future possibilities have been reduced. On the other hand, “present” cultural entextualizations, and the alterity abjected in their construction, is necessarily open to unexpected re-valuation in the future. Thus for Derrida, the “question of the archive” is “a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (36). The question of the future concerns in what way our archived language—whether produced for today’s marketplace, or as aesthetically configured—will be grafted into future situations.
The Cartesian self is normatively considered to be an archive of valued experiences accumulated over a lifetime, and is thus interpreted through an exchange value frame. As such, normative social identity—as currently configured—is relatively closed to the future. Yet, because we think about our self in a language, the play and promise of language always remains at work—even as today the self is continually re-positioned relative to commodified citational resources. If language can never be completely commodified, neither can the “self.” The words of others might come to the contemporary subject with a normative worth as a valued experience, but as these words are re-grafted into new situations, the play of language prevents a complete closure of their meaning and value. If re-citations are necessary to re-enact their exchange value, then these very recontextualizations open the possibility for “breaking frame.” Neither the self, nor one’s values, are ever quite present; the meaning of one’s values relative to those of others, tentatively re-enacted through utterances, are always open to reinterpretation.
Values and valuing domains are necessary and inevitable in social life—as Menke noted, even the “aesthetic” disruption of normative value categories usually results in some kind of restoration of meaning and value. Laclau and Mouffe (1994) have shown that a theory of performativity need not lead to political nihilism, because new and contingent hegemonic articulations can construct new “universal” values—such as what they term “radical and plural democracy” (167; italics in the original). The re-interpellation of valuation frames can be made less “automatic,” and the contingency of any particular claim to universality can be made more transparent (see Butler, LaClau, and Žižek 2000, 86).
As Butler points out, subjects are both enabled, and limited, through normative identity and valuing categories; such categories themselves are both repeated and altered through recontextualization. Like Derrida’s deconstructive technique, the “breaking of frame” involves not just a reversal of the present hierarchy of valuations, but a displacement of the hierarchical system itself. In other words, in frame-breaking, the ratio of differential social values relative to each other is not simply “re-mixed” following political opposition to normative framing hierarchies—resulting in a mere re-shuffling of identifiable political values. Rather, in frame-breaking, the very identity or identification of known value categories is aesthetically contested and thus opened to alternative formulations—in a future. If subjects are typically re-positioned relative to normatively-valued signs, then aesthetically configured material grafts—of unknown value—force a reconsideration of normative social identities and values. While subjects may always already be socially positioned within dominant values which are likely to be re-cited, this re-citation process always re-introduces the possibility or chance of difference.
If “value” has a structural iterability, it is “structural” in the sense that its identity is continually re-structured in situated citational practice. Subordinate groups and their associated values are thus continually re-subordinated through ongoing, normative citational practices. The utterances of both individual subjects and social institutions continually altercast the social identities of others. As Julia Kristeva has pointed out, subordinate groups are constructed through—as Hebdige puts it—their “positioning in language” (Hebdige 1996, 120, italics in the original). In this sense, one’s responsibility toward others is a responsibility for one’s own words—that is, for the interpellative consequences of one’s own citational practices. Normative social relationships can either be re-cited or resisted to varying degree. “Agency” thus involves the responsibility for one’s utterances, which necessarily take a stand relative to the words and values of others.
According to Culler (1982), Derrida “does not dispense with the category of intention” (216); at the same time, however, he asserts that intentionality cannot control or dictate meaning. In his analysis of Austin, Derrida discusses the notion of an “intention-effect” (216), where the author attempts to guide an argument in a particular way, only to have language exceed or displace this meaning (216-18). Similarly, even though a person cannot be entirely responsible for how others may recontextualize or re-cite their utterances in the future, we might speak of a “responsibility-effect.” Social actors are responsible for the material forms of their utterances.
As discussed above, the utterances of subjects may be more or less stringently constructed; in other words, more or less ready to automatically signify normative values. In the language of the Bakhtin Circle, utterances are more or less ready to be assimilated into dominant, “monological” social discourses such as the exchange value frame. For Bakhtin and his associates, a “dialogized” work of art, such as the novel, “incorporates a variety of viewpoints that may be artfully played off one another” (Hanks 1989, 114). In a discussion of parody, Butler similarly refers to “an openness to resignification and recontextualization” (1999, 176). In this sense, social actors have a responsibility for entextualizing and double-voicing their utterances in such a way that resists the automatic re-citation of those meanings which perpetuate inequality.
In this effort, actors must anticipate those known strategies by which power typically re-incorporates resistance. As Butler points out, “Parody by itself is not subversive” (176). Rather, social actors must “understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (176-77). In other words, responsibility involves a knowing anticipation of how power works, in order to open the future as an anticipation of the unknown.
Social actors are thus responsible for the material form of their utterances, as well as the social positioning of this materiality. In the global political economy, some social actors are positioned with greater access to wider audiences than others, and actors differ in their ability to speak for themselves (see Spivak 1988; Inoue 2006). Those social institutions and groups with greater access to the mechanisms of language distribution, through which to position their words, thus carry a special responsibility for the re-citation and re-production of material forms. We can here see the importance, as did Jürgen Habermas (1984; 1987), of a non-commercialized “public sphere,” where alternative citational resources have a place to take form. Having said this, it is also true that there is no predicting how any utterance will be recontextualized in the future, and therefore no predicting its political consequences. As Derrida has shown, language tends not to “stay put,” but rather disseminates into situations which cannot be controlled in advance.
Derrida has identified a certain “aporia of responsibility,” in that being responsible toward particular, singular others might mean being irresponsible toward “other others” (Derrida 1995)—including “generalized” others. In addition, we can identify a tension between political values based on reason, as in the Habermasian formulation of critical theory, and the more aesthetic formulations of Adorno, Benjamin, or Derrida. To dislocate known or seemingly rational political values through aesthetic configurations might indeed have disastrous political consequences for unknown others in future situations. There is a “radical” sense of responsibility in play here, where the dislocation of all value domains means that one takes on responsibility for unknown consequences; indeed, in a Derridean sense, it is not really “responsibility” if one can already anticipate the outcome. This type of “responsibility without insurance” is to be distinguished from mere recklessness or irresponsibility; that is, of putting others in known or likely danger. Rather, it involves taking a careful chance regarding the future; as Culler summarizes Derrida’s strategy in Dissemination, “Derrida is not playing with words, he is betting with words, employing them strategically with an eye on larger stakes” (Culler 1982, 146).
To be human is to struggle with this “aporia of responsibility”—that “responsible” political choices, relative to the known words (and values) of particular others may be “irresponsible” relative to other others, including unknown past or future others. Aesthetics moves the agency of subjects away from an anticipation of highly probable consequences, toward an anticipation of unknown consequences—in other words, away from known and identifiable social relationships between self and others. This “promise” of difference assumes material forms—as the entextualized forms of one generation become the citational resources of future generations. In this sense, to entextualize a promise of difference means to allow for the futurity of language, and thus the futurity of value—with unknown political consequences.
This aporia of responsibility, like any aporia, cannot be resolved. Social actors must take responsibility for normative (i.e., probable) political outcomes, as well as “bet” on unknown outcomes. Thus, there is also an unavoidable aporia of art and reason at play here. Both “rational” decision-making which anticipates probable political outcomes, as well as an “aesthetic” anticipation of the unknown, are necessary to responsible social action. While advocacy for a rational, just society necessarily speaks within the known discourses of value, aesthetic negativity dislocates these known discourses and thus opens a space for the values of unknown others.
Responsibility thus involves a stance toward temporality—a dislocation of the hegemony of “presence” in favor of an openness toward the future. In Specters of Marx (1994), Derrida means to show that the “present” is haunted by specters—both the ghosts from the past who seek justice, as well as the ghosts of those to come. Derrida “cites” the specters in his critique of presence—a strategy which can also be applied to the contemporary dislocation of those values and practices which re-produce inequality.
Words given to us from the past—and words issued by us to the future—must not be reduced to mere commodified resources for any “present” consumer. Both the past and the future haunt the presence of exchange value. Using Benjamin’s favored suffix (see Weber 2008), we might say that there is a “value-ability” to the words of others, which differs radically from the market-ability, or exchange value, of language. In this sense, following Derrida, we might speak of a “messianic structure of value.” The “value-ability” of the words of others, as the continuing importance of every voice into the future, takes the material form of a promise—the promise of a “value” never quite “present.”
This chapter began by suggesting that what is needed in developing a contemporary critical theory, informed by recent developments in poststructuralism, is not only an approach which advocates for equal access to the production and distribution of cultural commodities within the contemporary exchange value system, but also for the dislocation of the hegemonic frame of exchange value itself. If, as argued in chapters four and five, product and brand designers—as well as investors—attempt to anticipate and shape the future commodification of language in accordance with calculative economic planning, then the opening up of the future to “unknown” values becomes an important critical move. The work of the Frankfurt School on aesthetic theory, as well as that of Erving Goffman on frame-breaking, is particularly helpful in this regard—when moved into a theory of performative citationality.
For Goffman, frames can be disrupted through the employment of particular frame-breaking techniques, which generates a non-normative experience. Goffman gives examples of how works of art, as well as particular commodities, can exploit the vulnerabilities of frames. He notes that while the disruption of frames is often only temporary, repeated violations can alter the frame itself. Applied to value frames, we can see how oppositional or subversive re-citations can dislocate normative subcultural values, or exchange value. For example, the work of Gates (1988) on “Signifyin(g)” within African-American communities shows that aesthetic configurations can challenge the norms and identities of hegemonic racial discourses. In other words, aesthetic configurations of the materiality of language can disrupt normative value interpellations.
Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, as interpreted by Christoph Menke (1998), shows how the materiality of aesthetic forms can disrupt normative meanings. This book extends this thesis to the aesthetic disruption of the “meaning of value”—and thus argues that aesthetically configured material forms have the potential to disrupt the interpretive context, or frame, of exchange value. Because the realm of aesthetics, for Adorno and Menke, can disrupt any normative meaning, it does not fall under the hegemonic control of the exchange value frame. Rather, as an “autonomous” and “sovereign” realm (Menke 1998, x-xi), the aesthetic arrangement of material forms can potentially disrupt the interpellation of any subcultural value frame—as well as the exchange value frame.
Adorno’s theory shows how aesthetic material forms can generate an experience of “aesthetic negativity” (xi), which confounds attempts to commodify the forms as having a known and measurable value. When constellations of material forms—including the materiality of language—cannot generate interpellations of known value, they simultaneously challenge the interpellation of normative identity categories for subjects positioned relative to those forms. In this situation, the “experiences” of Cartesian subjects are no longer measurable in terms of exchange value, and the alignment of individual identity with normative subcultural values becomes problematic.
Even commodities can enter into material constellations with aesthetic effect, just as today’s works of art can become commodities in future situations. Benjamin argued that the outdated commodities of capitalism, whose time of fashion had come and gone, had a potentially critical effect if brought into particular constellations with contemporary material forms. Such “quoting” from the past could potentially redeem the commodities, which represented the unfulfilled desires of past generations. Benjamin saw photography as a citational technology which could quote moments of the past into the present; in this sense, it was a potentially progressive technological development. On the other hand, modern technologies like photography or film could extend the hegemonic reach of capitalism into the lifeworlds of its subjects.
Works of art can be considered as “utterances” of the artist—syntactical forms combining the words and images of others with those of self in particular ways. Such utterances can generate aesthetic negativity when inserted into particular, situated, material constellations. These syntactical forms can generate this effect whether or not the “artist” who issued them is officially recognized as such; performance artists need not be officially recognized by institutions for their utterances to have aesthetic effect. Similarly, everyday interactions can produce strips of dialogue which have aesthetic effect when recontextualized into particular situations. In Bakhtinian terms, syntactical forms which incorporate the words and images of others—even in the dialogues of everyday life—have the potential for dislocating normative value frames and normative identities. As Butler (2000) recognized in a critique of Bourdieu, normative values and identities can be dislocated precisely because unauthorized speakers bring forth re-citations in non-normative ways.
If the aesthetic utterances of artists have the potential to dislocate normative identities and values within particular material configurations, then the questions of agency and intent return to the fore. Mead’s work is valuable in this regard, as it addresses these issues without slipping back into a Cartesian version of subjectivity. Mead’s pragmatic orientation toward behavioral practices allows performativity theory to better emphasize that citational practices can be anticipated and rehearsed, before their actualization. In fact, considering Schechner’s notion of “restored behavior” (1985), it is clear that rehearsals—including inner conversations with self—comprise part of the chain of re-citations by which meaning and value are stabilized. In addition, Mead’s approach allows for the distinction between the “I” of action and the “me” of social identity. The notion of role-taking—which involves taking the perspective of the other—also undermines any notion of a “self-present” subject.
One consequence of “returning” Mead to poststructuralist theory is that such a move reveals an aporia regarding the notion of “anticipation.” This aporia becomes particularly acute in the contemporary economy, given the increased commodification of language. On the one hand, investors and brand developers must calculate—or anticipate—the marketability of language in the future in order to maximize profits. On the other hand, as Derrida and Butler have shown, it is precisely the process of re-citationality which undermines the stability of anticipated meaning and value. At stake in the commodification of culture is thus the temporality of language—whether the words and images of others will be appropriated and marketed as delivering the “presence” of exchange value, or whether the more aesthetic play of language will dislocate that metaphysical frame, and “anticipate” a future with unknown values.
Hans Joas, in his book The Genesis of Values (2000), argues that “values arise in experiences of self-formation and self-transcendence”(1). Especially drawing on the “pragmatist ethics” (169) of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, Joas argues that it is through encounters with others—specifically, through the process of role-taking—that individual perspectives move toward “universalizing” principles of shared morals (169–71; see also 155–23). However, we have seen in this book that the increasing commodification of language affects the role-taking process itself, and thus the nature of the “universal” potential of encounters with others. When the materiality of the language of the other is shaped according to profit considerations, its re-citation does not encourage the emergence of a shared, universal morality; rather, role-taking becomes measured assessment as to the “worth” of the words and images of others for the experiences and utterences of self. On the other hand, the citationality required to re-enact the exchange value frame opens a space for a dislocation of its hegemonic presence, and the potential formulation of a (tentative) new hegemony (see also Laclau and Mouffee 1994; Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000).
Samuel Weber has noted that in the work of Walter Benjamin on epic theater, “To cite a text means to interrupt its context” (Benjamin, quoted in Weber 2008, 99). Weber argues that for Benjamin, the quality of “citability”—a defining characteristic of the art form of epic theater—contrasts with a calculative orientation toward the future (105). If, as Weber suggests, the nature of “citability” implies a future open to unknown or possible re-citations (105), then citability precisely works against the closed, contextual framing of calculative agency. Just as in Butler and Derrida’s version of “performative citationality”—where the iterability, or citability, of material forms potentially “breaks” the normative framing of meanings and identities—we find in Benjamin the aesthetic possibility of breaking the calculative frame of exchange value. Citational practices—particularly those involving aesthetic forms—can potentially contribute to the dislocation of that contemporary economic frame within which language is increasingly commodified.