Stanley Cavell
         Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now,_Voyager
         One quality of remarriage comedies is that, for all their
            ingratiating manners, and for all the ways in which they are among
            the most beloved of Hollywood films, a moral cloud remains at the
            end of each of them. And that moral cloud has to do with what is
            best about them. What is best are the conversations that go on in
            them, where conversation means of course talk, but means also an
            entire life of intimate exchange between the principal pair. We are
            bound to remember from these films, even years after viewing them,
            something of their sound: of conversation between Cary Grant and
            Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth,or between Grant and Rosalind
            Russell in His Girl Friday,or Grant and Katharine in Bringing up
            Baby,or those two together with James Stewart in The Philadelphia
            Story,or between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib.We
            feel that these people know one another, and they know how to play
            together (know and accept, you may say, the role of theater in
            their mutuality) in a way to make one happy and hope for the best.
            But the moral cloud has to do with what that conversation is meant
            to do, and what I say about those films is that the conversation is
            in service of the woman's sense of herself as in need of an
            education. Importantly for that reason, I call her a descendent of
            Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House,who in one of the
            most celebrated moments in modern theater, ends a play by closing a
            door behind her. She leaves the dollhouse saying to her husband
            that she requires an education and that he is not the man who can
            provide it for her. The implication is that since he is not this
            man, he cannot (in logic) be her husband. And implying the contrary
            as well: if he were, then he would be, and their relationship would
            accordingly "miracle of
            miracles" constitute a marriage.
             
            Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and
            the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent
            works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
            Romanticism (1989), This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989), and
            Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (forthcoming).
Stanley Cavell
         Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern
         Coming away from a first reading of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's
            "The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual
            Panic," my sense of its pertinence to what I have written on
            film melodrama is so urgent that I find myself unwilling to make
            public the foregoing latest installment of my thoughts on the
            subject without including some initial responses, however hurried
            and improvisatory they must be now, to the material she has so
            remarkably brought together. Her work, among other matters,
            proposes an understanding of James's "The Beast in the
            Jungle" that to my mind cannot sensibly be passed by in
            thinking further about James's achievement. Since in
            readdressing James's text in my preceding remarks about Now,
            Voyager,and specifying my reason in having adduced it at the end of
            my earlier account Letter from an Unknown Woman by describing that
            film's philosophical design relating the melodrama of
            the unknown woman to the woman's assignment (by whom?) to
            prove the man's existence, or preservation, to him, or for
            him, hence impossibly attempting to perform his cogito, the taking
            on of his subjectivity, overcoming his skepticism by accepting that
            subjectivity as undeniable I am understandably interested, to
            begin with, in tracing out the connection between things Sedgwick
            says about John Marcher's "two secrets" and
            things I have said about secrecy as a cover for the idea of
            "privacy" in Ludwig Wittgenstein's (skeptical)
            fantasy of a private language.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy
         The Nazi Myth
         What interests us and claims our attention in Nazism is,
            essentially, its ideology,in the definition Hannah Arendt has given
            of this term in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism.In this
            work, ideology is defined as the totally self-fulfilling (and
            willfully self-fulfilling) logic of an idea, an idea "by
            which the movement of history is explained as one consistent
            process." "The movement of history and the logical
            process of this notion," Arendt continues, "are
            supposed to correspond to each other, so that whatever happens,
            happens according to the logic of one &lsquo;idea.'"2
            Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention
            insofar as, on the one hand, it always proposes itself as a
            political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of
            history (or still further, if you wish, as an explanation of
            Weltgeschichte:not the "history of the world" but
            rather the "world-as-history," a world consisting only
            of a process, and the necessity of that process) on the basis of a
            single concept the concept of race, for example, or the
            concept of class and insofar as, on the other hand, this
            ideological explanation or conception of the world(Weltanschauung:
            vision, intuition, comprehensive grasp of the world a
            philosophical term of which National Socialism, as you will see,
            made great use) seeks to be a total explanation or conception. This
            totality signifies that the explanation is indisputable, leaving
            neither gaps nor remainders unlike philosophical thought,
            from which ideology shamelessly draws the greater part of its
            resources but which is characterized by a risky, problematic style,
            what Arendt calls the "insecurity" of philosophical
            questioning (OT,p. 470). (It follows, then, that philosophy is also
            rejected by the ideology that solicits it, and consigned to the
            incertitude and the timorous hesitations of
            "intellectuality.")
             
            2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York,
            1962), p. 469; hereafter abbreviated OT.
             
            Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy teach at the University
            of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, France, and are also visiting
            professors at the University of California, Berkeley. They are
            coauthors of The Literary Absolute (1988) and, related to the topic
            of politics, "The Jewish People Don't Dream"
            (Stanford Literary Review,Fall 1989). Lacoue-Labarthe is also the
            author of Typography (1989) and La Fiction du politique (1987;
            forthcoming in English). Nancy has written "Sharing
            Voices" in Transforming Hermeneutics (1989) and La Communauté
            désoeuvrée (1986; forthcoming in English). Brian Holmes is a
            doctoral candidate in romance languages and literatures at the
            University of California, Berkeley, and editor of the journal Qui
            Parle.He is currently at work on the parody of authorial identity
            in Cervantes and Flaubert.
Philip Fisher
         Jasper Johns: Strategies for Making and Effacing Art
         Within the strategy that we call avant-garde there are two sets of
            tactics, one immediate, the other long term. One set could be
            called a tactics of short-term attention, and it is this set that
            has been most often noticed. Shock, surprise, self-promotion, the
            baiting of middle-class solemnity, outrage, a subversive
            playfulness, a deliberate frustration of habitual expectations, an
            apparent difficult or refusal of communication, a banality where
            profundity and seriousness were earlier the norm: these are a few
            of the tactics that again and again appeared as part of the
            competitive marketplace strategy for advertising the new.
            To be a notorious artist was always halfway to becoming a famous
            one, and many were willing to take the chance that once conditions
            were right the slight move from notoriety to fame could be
            accomplished. These tactics made it clear that the problem for an
            artist within the modern period was first of all to stand out
            within a crowd, within a surplus of candidates for the few places
            available nationally or internationally. The rivalry for initial
            attention under modern conditions set every artist the question of
            how his own work might have clear identity and felt importance.
            This was, in an age of products and advertising, the problem of how
            to turn a style into a brand.
             
            Philip Fisher is professor of English at Harvard University and the
            author of Hard Facts (1985). The essay published here forms part of
            his forthcoming book Making and Effacing Art.He is currently at
            work on a book on the philosophical and literary history of the
            Passions.
Thomas McCarthy
         Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New_Pragmatism
         The hegemony of logical positivism was already on the wane in the
            1960s as a result of penetrating criticisms by thinkers both inside
            and outside the movement. But its legacy continued to exert a
            formative influence on the less doctrinaire and more diverse
            varieties of "analytic philosophy" that succeeded it.
            For one thing, occasional disclaimers to the contrary
            notwithstanding, the physical and formal sciences have continued to
            exercise a stranglehold on philosophical imagination. This has not
            excluded the development of more or less intimate relations with
            linguistics, especially formal linguistics, or a current love
            affair with cognitive science and artificial intelligence. But it
            has choked off any deep influence from the arts and humanities, as
            it has from history and the social sciences. And just because these
            latter domains have continued to be of central importance for
            Continental philosophy, we are left with the spectacle of
            "two philosophies" analytic and
            Continental mirroring the infamous split between the
            "two cultures." As part of the same syndrome, analytic
            philosophy has become increasingly professional and technical and,
            consequently, largely invisible to the wider culture; whereas
            Continental philosophy, largely invisible to the wider culture;
            whereas Continental philosophy, while far from popular, has
            nevertheless maintained its ties to culture and society at large.
            The public roles of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault in France,
            or of Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas in Germany, have had no
            equivalent in American philosophy since the death of Dewey.
            Philosophers here think of themselves as scientists rather than as
            public intellectuals.
             
            Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern
            University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen
            Habermas (1978). This essay is part of a work-in-progress on
            philosophy and critical theory.
Michael Ann Holly
         Past Looking
         The rest of this essay will contribute to the subversion of that
            distinction in the history of art, with the awareness that this
            would no longer be a timely issue in any other historical
            discipline. I engage in this task because of my sense that critical
            attention to the formal or rhetorical resonances between objects
            and the histories of art that inscribe them might provide an answer
            for the kind of historiographic experimentation that Burke and
            White have obliquely urged upon the historical profession in
            general.
            To be fair, the history of art is not exclusively what it once was:
            the conservator of elite objects and the preserver of a certain
            canon of values. A variety of critical challenges to this
            traditional role have animated the discipline during the last two
            decades, from the revisionism of feminist and Marxist readings to
            the interpretive paradigms of semiotics and psychoanalysis, and yet
            one certainly needs to acknowledge that, for the most part, these
            challenges have originated outside the confines of art history
            proper.
            The metahistorical task of discovering some theme or issue shared
            by this plurality of re-visions need not necessarily prove
            unilluminating. The concentration on the gaze as an interpretive
            principle cuts across a wide sampling of recent theoretical
            perspectives. Paintings are, after all, meant to be looked at, so
            it should come as no surprise that the investigation of who or what
            is presumed to be doing the looking is now viewed as a critically
            unsettling issue in post-structuralist writings on art.
             
            Michael Ann Holly is associate professor and chair of the
            department of art and art history at the University of Rochester.
            She is the author of Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History
            (1984) and co-editor, with Norman Bryson and Keith Moxey, of Visual
            Theory (1989).
Daniel Brudney
         Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl and Moral_Philosophy
         When literary texts are included in a course on moral philosophy
            they tend to be classical tragedies or existentialist novels: texts
            filled with major moral transgressions and agonized debates over
            rights, wrongs, and relativism. Recently, however, the focus of
            much discussion on literature and moral philosophy has been Henry
            James's last novel, The Golden Bowl.This ought to seem
            surprising. For The Golden Bowl is a quintessential Jamesian novel.
            Almost nothing happens.In the course of more than five hundred
            pages there are two marriages, one affair, and a single act of
            violence, the smashing of the golden bowl. The rest is reflection,
            nuance, detail: the creation and preservation of a
            "&lsquo;brilliant, perfect surface,'" one
            "scarcely more meant to be breathed upon, it would seem, than
            the cheek of royalty."1 There are no extreme actions or high-
            flown speculations. The moral issues among the four central
            characters either go unspoken or are raised expressly to be
            suppressed, banished from articulation. And what counts as the
            expression of the moral maturity and insight of the heroine, Maggie
            Verver, is her extraordinary ability to keep the truth silen00to
            put it precisely, to lie. If even there was a novel in which the
            protagonists shied away from moral debate,it is The Golden Bowl.
            The challenge for the philosophical critic, it seems to me, is to
            argue that it is just this stress on surface and silence that makes
            this novel of interest to moral philosophers, that makes it
            exemplary for how literature can do something philosophically
            important that philosophy cannot.
             
            1. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 445,
            172; hereafter cited by page number.
             
            Daniel Brudneyis an assistant professor of philosophy at the
            University of Chicago.
Jerome Christensen
         From Rhetoric to Corporate Populism: A Romantic Critique_of_the
            Academy in an Age of High Gossip
         If you are anything like me, you may feel yourself unsure of what,
            as a critic these days, you ought to be talking about whether
            literature qua literature, literature as rhetoric, literature as
            politics or as history, whether about the persistence of
            romanticism or the waxing of postmodernism, the decline of Yale or
            the rise of Duke. If, like me, you are puzzled by what we now ought
            to be about, you may also be like Paul de Man, who bespoke a
            similar concern: "In a manner that is more acute for
            theoreticians of literature than for theoreticians of the natural
            or the social world, it can be said that they do not quite know
            what it is they are talking about, … that, whenever one is supposed
            to speak of literature, one speaks of anything under the sun
            (including, of course, oneself) except literature. The need for
            determination," de Man concludes, "thus becomes all the
            stronger as a way to safeguard a discipline which constantly
            threatens to degenerate into gossip, trivia or self-
            obsession,"1
            De Man's wishes are rarely fulfilled, and this instance is no
            exception. Despite the critic's determinations, theory, it
            turns out, is the story of the failure of safeguards to do the job
            for which they are designed. There is no better instance of that
            ironic truth than the career of Paul de Man. No critic has fallen
            farther despite his determination; from a paragon of analytical
            rigor, he has become the most gossiped about critic of the late
            1980s
             
            1. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986), p.
            29; hereafter abbreviated RT.
             
            Jerome Christensen teaches English at The Johns Hopkins University.
            He is the author of Coleridge's Blessed Machine of language
            (1981) and Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a
            Literary Career (1987). This essay is part of a work in progress
            entitled Prefigurations: Romantic Theory and Romantic Practice.
Arnold I. Davidson
         Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy: An Introduction to
            Pierre Hadot
         Pierre Hadot, whose inaugural lecture to the chair of the History
            of Hellenistic and Roman Through at the Collège de France we are
            publishing here, is one of the most significant and wide-ranging
            historians of ancient philosophy writing today. His work, hardly
            known in the English-reading world except among specialists,
            exhibits that rare combination of prodigious historical scholarship
            and rigorous philosophical argumentation that upsets any
            preconceived distinction between the history of philosophy and
            philosophy proper. In addition to being the translator and author
            of monographs on Plotinus, Vitorinus, Porphyry, and many others,
            Hadot's most important general philosophical work is entitled
            Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.1 Combined with
            detailed studies of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, this work
            presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early
            Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and
            a discussion of the different conceptions of philosophy that have
            companied the trajectory and fate of the theory and practice of
            spiritual exercises. Hadot's "Forms of Life and Forms
            of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy" provides an overview of
            his major themes and preoccupations, and gives some indication of
            the historical scope of his work. This lecture also illuminates the
            methodological problems one faces in studying the history of
            thought, especially problems concerning the evolution,
            reinterpretation, and even misunderstanding of the meaning and
            significance of philosophical terminology. In this brief
            introduction, I can do no more than attempt to provide a context
            for Hadot's inaugural lecture, by way of summary of his major
            work, and, more specifically for reader's of Critical
            Inquiry,to sketch the profound importance that Hadot's
            writings had for the last works of Michel Foucault.
             
            Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of ,is
            associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on
            the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the
            Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited
            the "Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism" (Critical
            Inquiry15 [Winter 1989]). He is currently working on the history of
            horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations.
Pierre Hadot
         Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in_Ancient_Philosophy
         Here we are witness to the great cultural event of the West, the
            emergence of a Latin philosophical language translated from the
            Greek. Once again, it would be necessary to make a systematic study
            of the formation of this technical vocabulary that, thanks to
            Cicero, Seneca, Tertullian, Victorinus, Calcidius, Augustine, and
            Boethius, would leave its mark, by way of the Middle Ages, on the
            birth of modern thought. Can it be hoped that one day, with current
            technical means, it will be possible to compile a complete lexicon
            of the correspondences of philosophical terminology in Greek and
            Latin? Furthermore, lengthy commentaries would be needed, for the
            most interesting task would be to analyze the shifts in meaning
            that take place in the movement from one language to another. In
            the case of the ontological vocabulary the translation of ousia by
            substantia,for example, is justly famous and has again recently
            inspired some remarkable studies. This brings us once more to a
            phenomenon we discretely alluded to earlier with the word
            philosophia,and which we will encounter throughout the present
            discussion: the misunderstandings, shifts or losses in meaning, the
            reinterpretations, sometimes even to the point of misreading, that
            arise once tradition, translation, and exegesis coexist. So our
            history of the Hellenistic and Roman thought will consist above all
            of recognizing and analyzing the evolution of meanings and
            significance.
             
            Pierre Hadot holds the chair of the History of Hellenistic and
            Roman Thought at the Collège de France. He is the author of many
            books and articles on the history of ancient philosophy and
            theology. Among his works are Plotin et la simplicité du regard,
            Porphyre et Vitctorinus, Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie
            et ses oeuvres,and Exercises spirituels et philosophie
            antique.Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of ,is
            associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on
            the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the
            Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited
            the "Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism" (Critical
            Inquiry 15 [Winter 1989]). He is currently working on the history
            of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and
            deviations. Paula Wissing,a free-lance translator and editor, has
            recently translated Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant's
            The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks(1989). She also
            contributed translations of articles by Maurice Blanchot, Philippe
            Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas for the "Symposium on
            Heidegger and Nazism."
Mieke Bal
         De-Disciplining the Eye
         In this essay I will explore a mode of reading I call
            "reading for the text." A text is what we make of a
            work when reading it: roughly, a meaningful, well-structured whole
            with a beginning and an end. But as a mode of reading, textuality
            allows for constant activity, a continual shaping nd reshaping of
            sign-events. I will argue that reading for a sense of textuality,
            and for the wholeness this simple textuality entails, does not
            necessarily preclude awareness of a fundamental lack of unity,
            while reading for the effect of the real, in spite of the promotion
            of the "realistic detail," tends to do so. The two
            modes of reading are fundamentally different; yet the conflict
            between them is not necessarily obvious, nor should such conflict
            be avoided, ignored, or smoothed out.
            The goal of this confrontation is not to promote textual reading at
            the expense of realistic reading. It is the conflict between them I
            wish to promote. The two modes of reading can be brought to bear on
            the same work, although they are incompatible. As a result,
            activating both modes is in itself a critical endeavor: their very
            combination helps one to avoid the unifying fallacy. Textual and
            realist readings are a problematic and thereby productive
            combination.
             
            Mieke Bal is professor of comparative literature and Susan B.
            Anthony Professor of women's studies at the University of
            Rochester. The author of Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of
            Coherence in the Book of Judges (1988), her forthcoming book is
            Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition.
Daniel Boyarin
         The Eye in the Torah: Ocular Desire in_Midrashic_Hermeneutic
         My construction of the position of the eye in Rabbinic Judaism (and
            Christianity) represents almost a reversal of the roles
            "Hebraic" and "Hellenic." A powerful case
            can be made that only under Hellenic influence do Jewish cultures
            exhibit any anxiety about the corporeality of visibility of God;
            the biblical and Rabbinic religions were quite free of such
            influences and anxieties. Thus I would identify Greek influences on
            Judaism in the Middle Ages as being the force for repressing the
            visual. The Neoplatonic and Airstotelian revision of Judaism
            undertaken by the Jewish scholastics was so successful that it has
            resulted in the near-total forgetting of the biblical and Rabbinic
            traditions of God's visibility. W. J. T. Mitchell's
            characterization of the Rabbinic tradition is a perfect example of
            this "forgetting." In order to position Judaism in a
            typology of cultures, Mitchell cites Moses Maimonides.
            Mitchell's reading of Maimonides is well-founded; the problem
            lies rather in the identification of Maimonides as if he typified
            the old Rabbinic tradition. In my view, he represents a distinct
            departure from that tradition. This Platonic departure was indeed
            marked and condemned as such by many of his contemporaries, but it
            has become the almost unchallenged orthodoxy of later Judaism as
            well as of the critical tradition. The memory of having seen God in
            the Bible and the desire to have that experience again were a vital
            part of Rabbinic religion. They constituted, moreover, a key
            element in the study of Torah, the making of midrash.
             
            Daniel Boyarin,associate professor of Talmud and midrash at Bar-
            Ilan University, has published essays on midrash and literary
            theory. His book Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash is
            forthcoming. This essay is part of a larger project tentatively
            entitled Bodies of Torah: Language, Sex and God in Talmudic
            Judaism.
Cheryl Walker
         Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author
         The issues that Foucault raises about reception and reading are
            certainly part of the contemporary discussion of literature.
            However, they are not the only issues with which we, as
            today's readers, are concerned. Discussions about the role of
            the author persist and so we continue to have recourse to the
            notion of authorship.
            For instance, in her recent book Sexual / Textual Politics(1985),
            the feminist critic Toril Moi feels called on to return to these
            twenty-year-old issues in French theory to tell us what it has
            meant to speak of the author, when she says: "For the
            patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin and meaning of
            the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of
            authority,we must take one further step and proclaim with Roland
            Barthes the death of the author."3
            In the course of this essay I wish to reopen the (never fully
            closed) question of whether it is advisable to speak of the author,
            orof what Foucault calls "the author function," when
            querying a text, and I wish to reopen it precisely at the site
            where feminist criticism and post-structuralism are presently
            engaged in dialogue. Here in particular we might expect that
            reasons for rejecting author erasure would appear. However,
            theoretically informed feminist critics have recently found
            themselves tempted to agree with Barthes, Foucault, and the Edward
            Said of Beginnings that the authorial presence is best set aside in
            order to liberate the text for multiple uses.4
             
            4. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York,
            1975), p. 162.
             
            Cheryl Walker is professor of English and humanities at Scripps
            College. She is the author of The Nightingale's Burden: Women
            Poets and American Culture before 1900 (1982) and Masks Outrageous
            and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets
            (forthcoming). She is currently editing an anthology of nineteenth-
            century women poets and a book of essays about feminist criticism
            in the wake of post-structuralism.
Marilynn Desmond
         The Voice of Exile: Feminist Literary History and_the_Anonymous
            Anglo-Saxon Elegy
         In order to recuperate these two representatives of medieval
            frauenlieder, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer,a
            feminist poetics must acknowledge the medieval attitudes toward
            authority and authorship that allow the medievalist to privilege
            the voice of the text over the historical author or implied author.
            The modern concept of authorship, derived from a modern concept of
            the text as private property, valorizes the signature of the author
            and the author's presumed control over and legal
            responsibility for his or her text. With reference to modern
            literature, contemporary theory has interrogated this
            "author-function" quite aggressively in an attempt to
            pry the text away from the author and to valorize the functions of
            the reader, as Roland Barthes's "Death of the
            Author" illustrates,13 or to reconsider the privileges of the
            subject, in order to "seize its functions, its interventions
            in discourse, and its system of dependencies," as Michel
            Foucault's essay "What Is an Author?" propoes.14
            Foucault's proposals concerning the place of the subject and
            the author-function directly challenge modern assumptions about the
            text as the property of an author: "We can easily imagine a
            culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an
            author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value,
            regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a
            pervasive anonymity."15
             
            13. See Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author,"
            Image, Music, Text,trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 142-
            48.
            14. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" Language,
            Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,trans.
            Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.,
            1977), p. 137.
            15. Ibid., p. 138. Indeed, Foucault does press his argument to the
            limits of its implications for the subject, and he ends his essay
            with a question that challenges the voice of a text as well as its
            author: "&lsquo;What Matter who's
            speaking?'" (Foucault, "What Is an Author?"
            p. 138). Nancy K. Miller engages directly in the implications of
            this position for feminist theory. She states: "What matter
            who's speaking? I would answer it matters, for example, to
            women who have lost and still routinely lose their proper name in
            marriage, and whose signature not merely their
            voice has not been worth the paper it was written on"
            (Miller, "The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her
            Fictions," Diacritics 12 [Summer 1982]: 53).
             
            Marilynn Desmondis an assistant professor of English, general
            literature, and rhetoric at the State University of New
            York Binghamton. She is the author of Reading Dido:
            Textuality and Sexuality in the Late Medieval Reception of Aeneid 4
            (forthcoming); her current work is a study of ekphrasis in late
            medieval literature.
Vincente L. Rafael
         Nationalism, Imagery, and the Filipino Intelligentsia
         To see nationalism as a cultural artifact is to argue against
            attempts at essentializing it. Anderson claims that nationalism can
            be better understood as obliquely analogous to such categories as
            religion and kinship. Membership in a nation draws on the
            vocabulary of filiation whereby one comes to understand oneself in
            relation to ancestors long gone and generations yet to be born. In
            addressing pasts and futures, nationalism resituates identity with
            reference to death, one's own as well as others'.
            Herein lies nationalism's affective appeal, that which makes
            it possible to sacrifice oneself for the "motherland."
            It lends to the accident of birth the sense of continuity and
            converts mortality into something that is meant for as much as it
            is realized by one. By placing one in a certain relationship to
            death and generativity, nationalist discourse therefore frames the
            arbitrariness of existence. "It is the magic of nationalism
            to turn chance into destiny" (IC,p. 19).
            However, while nationalism tends to mine the idioms of kinship and
            religion, the historical conditions of its emergence undermine the
            logic and stability of these inherited categories. Thus Anderson
            defines nations as "imagined communities." Built on the
            rubble of traditional polities, the nation invokes a radically
            secular subjectivity that sets it apart from its predecessors.
            Dynastic states presumed power and privilege as functions of the
            purity of bloodlines guaranteed by a divine order. Colonial states
            as dynastic states in drag replicate the obsession with hierarchy
            by reorganizing social and epistemological categories according to
            a metaphysics of race and progress. By contrast, the nation
            envisions a more egalitarian community. "Regardless of the
            actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the
            nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship"
            (IC,p. 16). It thus reveals the mutability of all sorts of
            hierarchies. Rather than take power for granted as natural and
            inherited, nationalism asks about "rights" and thereby
            opens up the problem of representation: who has the right to speak
            for whom and under what circumstances?
             
            Vincente L. Rafael is assistant professor in the department of
            communication, University of California, San Diego. He is the
            author of Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian
            Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1988).
Gerald L. Bruns
         Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare
         "The Avoidance of Love" is Cavell's magic looking
            glass onto Shakespeare, where the idea of missing something, not
            getting what is obvious, is, on Cavell's reading, very close
            to a philosophical obsession. Shakespeare here means besides
            Lear Othello, Coriolanus, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale,and
            Antony and Cleopatra,and what Cavell finds in these plays is an
            attempt to think through what elsewhere, in the formation of the
            modern philosophical tradition, was getting formulated as the
            problem of skepticism, or not being able to know that we know (not
            being able to be certain). It is not easy to say what this means.
            As if executing a skeptical decorum, Cavell's writing does
            not try for transparency, nor does it always coincide with itself,
            and anyhow Shakespeare is not so much an object as a region of
            Cavell's thinking, so everyday (nonphilosophical) readers are
            apt to find themselves a bit at sea with him. Without claiming to
            match Cavell's views point for point, I would like to give
            something like a para-Cavellian commentary that tries to say what
            his thinking, with respect to Shakespeare, seems to be getting at,
            and also where it leaves us.
             
            Gerald L. Brunsis William and Hazel White Professor of English and
            Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most
            recent book is Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth,
            and Poetry in the Later Writings(1989).
Richard Rorty
         Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy
         McCarthy thinks truth more important than I do. Specifically, he
            thinks that " &lsquo;truth' … functions as an
            &lsquo;idea of reason' with respect to which we can criticize
            not only particular claims within our language but the very
            standards of truth we have inherited" (p. 369). By contrast,
            I think that what enables us to make such criticism is concrete
            alternative suggestions suggestions about how to redescribe
            what we are talking about. Some examples are Galileo's
            suggestions about how to redescribe the Aristotelian universe,
            Marx's suggestions about how to redescribe the nineteenth
            century, Heidegger's suggestions about how to redescribe the
            West as a whole, Dickens's suggestions about how to
            redescribe chancery law, Rabelais's suggestions about how to
            redescriibe monasteries, and Virginia Woolf's suggestions
            about how to redescribe women writing.
            Such fresh descriptions, such new suggestions of things to say,
            sentences to consider, vocabularies to employ, are what do the
            work. All that the idea of truth does is to say, "Bethink
            yourself that you might be mistaken; remember that your beliefs may
            be justified by your other belies in the area, but that the whole
            kit and caboodle might be misguided, and in particular that you
            might be using the wrong words for your purpose." But this
            admonition is empty and powerless without some concrete suggestion
            of an alternative set of beliefs, or of words. Moreover, if you
            have such a suggestion, you do not need the admonition. The only
            cash value of this regulative idea is to commend fallibilism, to
            remind us that lots of people have been as certain of, and as
            justified in believing, things that turned out to be false as we
            are certain of, and justified in holding, our present views. It is
            not, as McCarthy says, a "moment of unconditionality that
            opens us up to criticism from other points of view" (p. 370).
            It is the particular attractions of those other points of view.
             
            Richard Rorty is University Professor of Humanities at the
            University of Virginia. His most recent book is Contingency, Irony,
            and Solidarity (1989).
Thomas McCarthy
         Ironist Theory as a Vocation: A Response to_Rorty's_Reply
         I find myself in the odd position of trying to convince someone who
            had done as much as anyone to bring philosophy into the wider
            culture that he is wrong to urge now that its practice be consigned
            to the esoteric pursuits of "private ironists." The
            problem, I still believe, is Richard Rorty's all-or-nothing
            approach to philosophy ("Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas
            McCarthy," pp. 633-43): foundationalism or ironism; and this,
            I think, is encouraged by his selective reading of
            philosophy's history. On that reading, modern philosophy
            "centered around a discussion of truth" (p. 634); it
            was preoccupied with foundationalist claims of one sort or another.
            But that preoccupation was permanently discredited by Friedrich
            Nietzsche and his descendants, especially Martin Heidegger and
            Jacques Derrida, leaving philosophy with nothing to do but pick the
            bones of its own carcass. What is missing from this story is
            precisely the line of thought extending from the left
            Hegelians to Jürgen Habermas I sought to develop in my paper.
            That line is defined by, among other things, the primacy of
            practical reason and the rerouting of philosophical inquiry in
            sociohistorical directions. One of its high points is American
            pragmatism, which, pace Rorty, does not lie along the
            Nietzsche Heidegger Derrida line.
             
            Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern
            University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen
            Habermas(1978) and editor of the series Studies in Contemporary
            German Social Thought. His work-in-progress concerns the relation
            of philosophy to social theory.
Robert Lecker
         The Canonization of Canadian Literature: An Inquiry into_Value
         It is startling to realize that Canadian literature was canonized
            in fewer than twenty years. Here is how it happened.
            At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as
            an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon. In
            1957, the publishing firm McClelland and Stewart introduced its
            mass-market paperback reprint series entitled the New Canadian
            Library. It allowed teachers to discuss the work of many Canadian
            authors who had never been the subject of formal academic study.
            This New Canadian Library was truly "new": prior to its
            conception, there was no "library" in use. There were
            no Canadian classics. Northrop Frye recalls that at that time the
            notion of finding a classic Canadian writer remained but "a
            gleam in a paternal critic's eye."1
            Frye's comment must be placed in context: he was remembering
            the efforts that produced the first Literary History of Canadain
            1965. In T. D. MacLulich's words, its publication "gave
            a definitive imprimatur of respectability to the academic study of
            Canadian writing."2 It made a Canadian canon seem possible;
            to many, it made the canon seem real. With the advent of this
            history, the institution called Canadian literature was born.3
             
            1. Northrop Frye, "Conclusion," in Literary History of
            Canada: Canadian Literature in English,2d ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck
            et al., 3 vols. (Toronto, 1976), 3:319.
            2. T. D. MacLulich, "What Was Canadian Literature? Taking
            Stock of the Canlit Industry," Essays on Canadian Writing 30
            (Winter 1984-85): 19; hereafter abbreviated "WWCL."
            3. My use of the term "Canadian literature" applies to
            English-Canadian literature; the canonization of French-Canadian,
            or Québecois literature, invokes another story and another set of
            political imperatives that cannot be adequately treated within the
            scope of this discussion.
            4. John Guillory, "Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of
            the Current Debate," ELH 54 (Fall 1987): 483.
             
            Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is
            the author of several critical studies, including On the Line
            (1982), Robert Kroetsch (1986), and An Other I (1988), and coeditor
            of Essays on Canadian Writing,the multi-volume Canadian Writers and
            Their Works(1983  ), and the eight-volume Annotated
            Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors (1979  ). Lecker
            is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian
            canon.
Frank Davey
         Canadian Canons
         Although canon-formation is, as Lecker suggests, a product of
            rhetoric and textual choices of critics, it is also a product of
            economic forces, political conflicts, and cultural expectations of
            coherence, "order," and unitary explanation.
            Conditioned by some or all of these, an essay ostensibly skeptical
            of canons, as this one appears to be, can find itself nevertheless
            contributing to the thing it questions. In attempting to attribute
            the formation of a single national canon to a specific period
            ("since 1965" [p. 657]), to a specific and allegedly
            homogeneous group of actors ("Canadian academic
            critics" [p. 661]), and to a specific social phenomenon (the
            teaching of Canadian literature "as an independent subject in
            Canadian schools" [p. 656]), Lecker's essay becomes
            another constructor of canonical text and theory. Behind its
            arguments that a canon suddenly came into being are fairly precise
            assumptions not only about "Canadian critics" (p. 657)
            but also about what constitutes canonicity, and about the relative
            legitimacy of canonicity claims. "At the end of World War II,
            Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in
            Canadian schools. There was no canon," his essay begins (p.
            656). Is a school curriculum the only possible context for the
            attainment of literary "legitimacy"? Can there be no
            canon if a literature has no curriculum, education publishers, or
            "academic critics," or if it has not been
            institutionalized as an "independent" subject?
             
            Frank Davey,chair of the department of English at York University,
            is the author of From There to Here: A Guide to English Canadian
            Literature Since 1960 (1974), Surviving the Paraphrase (1983),
            Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (1984), and Reading Canadian
            Reading(1988). He is also the editor of Open Letter and the on-line
            magazine Swiftcurrent.He is currently working on a study of
            nationalist ideologies in Canadian fiction entitled National
            Arguments.
Robert Lecker
         Response to Frank Davey
         I know that my view offends those who would prefer a noncentrist,
            or antifederalist, notion of Canadian literature. Davey has
            repeatedly expressed such a preference in his own criticism. It
            similarly offends those who believe that new critical voices are
            beginning to change our perceptions of the canon. I recognize these
            voices and grant that they may eventually alter our values. So far,
            very little has changed. It is this assertion that troubles Davey
            and prompts his central objection: my concept of the canon is
            unitary, centralist, conservative, monolithic, distorted, and
            misleading. It is all of these, insofar as it represents my attempt
            to describe the concept as it has been transmitted in works of
            Canadian criticism that promote the idea of coherence by arguing
            the validity of tradition, influence, pattern, or literary
            solidarity among authors in different eras. Such criticism imagines
            a unified view of Canadian literature as the reflection of a
            unified country. It projects a dream of what Northrop Frye called
            "the peaceable kingdom."1 In my essay, I emphasize the
            fictiveness of this dream. Yet this is the fiction that seems to
            have inspired most Canadian criticism. Although Davey might object
            to the expression of this dream, the objection doesn't come
            to terms with my assertion that the dream of national unity remains
            the driving force behind the literary and critical values we seek
            out and support. This force is not rational or empirical, as Davey
            would have us believe. It is a matter of faith. We create the canon
            in order to embody a vision of something larger we want to sustain.
             
            Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is
            the author of several critical studies, including On the Line
            (1982), Robert Kroetsch (1986), and An Other I (1988), and coeditor
            of Essays on Canadian Writing,the multi-volume Canadian Writers and
            Their Works(1983  ), and the eight-volume Annotated
            Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors(1979  ). Lecker
            is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian
            canon.
Peter Galison
         Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism
         On 15 October 1959, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently
            founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau,
            southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The
            Logical Construction of the World,a book that immediately became
            the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical
            positivists. From a small group in Vienna, the movement soon
            expanded to include an international following, and in the sixty
            years since has exerted a powerful sway over the conduct of the
            philosophy of science as well as over wide branches of philosophy,
            economics, psychology, and physics. The site of Carnap's
            lecture that day, the Dessau Bauhaus, was a stunning building
            designed by Walter Gropius and dedicated just three years earlier.
            Protected by its flat roof and glass walls, the artists,
            architects, weavers, and furniture designers had made the school a
            citadel of high modernism. It was here that Carnap addressed an
            enthusiastic audience on "Science and Life." "I
            work in science," he began, "and you in visible forms;
            the two are only different sides of a single life."1 In this
            paper I will explore this "single life" of which the
            new philosophy and the new art were to be different facets; in the
            process, I hope to cast light on the shared modernist impulses that
            drove both disciplines in the interwar years.
             
            1. Rudolf Carnap, lecture notes for his Bauhaus lecture,
            "Wissenschaft und Leben," prepared 1 Oct. 1929 and
            delivered 15 Oct. 1929, transcription from shorthand by Gerald
            Heverly, Carnap Papers in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy,
            University of Pittsburgh Libraries, University of Pittsburgh
            (hereafter abbreviated CP, PASP), document RC 110-07-49. Quoted by
            permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved.
            Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
             
            Peter Galison is associate professor in the departments of
            philosophy and physics at Stanford University, where he co-chairs
            the program in the history of science. His primary interest is in
            the history and philosophy of experimentation, the subject of his
            How Experiments End (1987) and Big Science: The Growth of Large-
            Scale Research,edited with Bruce Hevly (forthcoming). His current
            project is entitled Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Modern
            Physics.
Johannes Fabian
         Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing
         Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies
            the prior assumption of a differencebetween reality and its
            "doubles." Things are paired with images, concepts, or
            symbols, acts with rules and norms, events with structures.
            Traditionally, the problem with representations has been their
            "accuracy," the degree of fit between reality and its
            reproductions in the mind. When philosophers lost the hope of ever
            determining accuracy (and thus attaining Truth), they found
            consolation in the test of usefulness: a good representation is one
            that works. The proof of its working is that it enables us to act
            on the world together.1 In such a frame, science, including
            anthropology, is conceived as the pursuit of privileged
            representations, privileged in that, by their nature of by their
            combination, they establish knowledge of a special kind. In the
            case of anthropology, "culture" has served as a sort of
            umbrella concept for representations. The strcuturalists have been
            most explicit about the need to think of representation in the
            plural, but their position is shared, in varying degrees, by all
            those who conceive of (cultural) knowledge as the selection and
            combination of signs in systems, patterns, or structures, in short,
            as some kind of conceptual order ruling perceptual chaos.
             
            1. Remember the connection between the Kantian quest for synthetic
            forms and Émile Durkheim's idea of collective representations
            sustained by the moral authority of a society. Durkheim certainly
            was one to look for the "ethic" in the
            "ethnic" primitive, and it makes me wonder whether
            Stephen A. Tyler's characterization of postmodern ethnography
            as a return to "an earlier and more powerful notion of the
            ethical character of all discourse, as captured in the ancient
            significance of the family of terms &lsquo;ethos,'
            &lsquo;ethnos,' &lsquo;ethics'" might not signal
            a return to the Durkheimian fold (Tyler, "Post-Modern
            Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document,"
            in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed.
            James Clifford and George E. Marcus [Berkeley and Los Angeles,
            1986], p. 126).
             
            Johannes Fabianis professor of cultural anthropology at the
            University of Amsterdam. His publications include Jamaa: A
            Charismatic Movement in Katanga (1971), Time and the Other: How
            Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), and Language and Colonial
            Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo,
            1880-1938 (1986). Two books will appear in 1990: History from
            Below: The Vocabulary of Elisabethville by André Yav,a commented
            edition-translation of a colonial history written in Swahili by the
            colonized for the colonized, and Power and Performance,a study of
            conceptions of power through popular wisdom and theater in Shaba/
            Zaire.
Annabel Patterson
         Couples, Canons, and the Uncouth: Spenser-and-Milton in Educational
            Theory
         Among the processes of canon-formation is the habit of coupling
            writers; and among the most powerful of couples in the traditional
            English literary canon is Spenser-and-Milton. Much of my own
            professional life has probably been determined by my first teaching
            assignment of 1963, which included "Spenser-and-
            Milton," in those days at Toronto a famous cornerstone course
            carrying the tamp of the stamp of the formidable Renaissance
            scholar A. S. P. Woodhouse, known affectionately if disrespectfully
            to his students as Professor Nature-and-Grace. For several years I
            labored mightily, though neither naturally nor, I suspect,
            gracefully, on Spenser-and-Milton, sensing all the time that the
            connections I made, the doctrines I was conveying, lacked
            persuasion; and no doubt the seed of this essay was sown in those
            days, although its angle of sight was not then available, obscured
            on all sides by institutional pillars.
            When we couple writers we usually imply a criterion of fit or at
            least explicable mating. While there is nothing to prohibit a
            merely comparativist curiosity, or coupling in the service of some
            other agenda, we presumably give greater authority to relationships
            that imply causality, even, or especially, if causality is defined
            as the influence of the one writer on the other. Most of such
            relationships are unidirectional, from the earlier to the later
            dead, and a plausible coupling requires either the
            successor's own testimony that the influence-relation
            existed, or other evidence that the influence-relation was strong
            enough to be formative; or, preferably, both.
             
            Annabel Patterson,professor of literature and English at Duke
            University, is the author of Hermogenes and the Renaissance (1970),
            Marvell and the Civic Crown (1978), Censorship and Interpretation
            (1984), Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (1987), and
            Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989).
Yves Bonnefoy
         Lifting Our Eyes from the Page
         For the past thirty years or so we have witnessed the greatest
            period at least for France in the history of thinking
            about literature; I want first of all to stress this point, adding,
            however, that despite this fact problems of fundamental
            significance still seem to me to have been poorly raised.
            Among these is the problem of how to read a work. And yet, it is
            not as though reading has not been the object of continual
            attention, from the American fascination after the war with
            "close reading" to the work of the deconstructionists:
            a revolution has taken place that has made reading the very center
            of its concern. Indeed, today, we think we can recognize in the
            structure of a text, in the relation between its words, a reality
            that is much more reliable and tangible than the meaning that runs
            along the surface, or than the author's intention, or even
            than the author's very being, the idea of which has been
            rendered problematical to the point of dissolution by the
            ambiguities inherent in his simplest utterances. It is not the
            writer who is real, it is his language which is neither true
            nor false, signifying only itself. What is more, it is infinite;
            its forms and effects are disseminated everywhere in a book without
            ever being able to be totalized: and because of this, reading has a
            more clearly creative function than ever before that is, of
            course, if readers make themselves attentive to all the levels in
            the depths of the text and bring them as much as they can into the
            various networks of their analyses. Reading has become a
            responsibility, a contribution, equal in its way to writing, and
            moreover it has now become an end in itself, since those who read
            need not judge themselves more real, more present in their relation
            to themselves, than the writer. And so, from this point of view, it
            would seem difficult to say that the problem of reading has been
            neglected by contemporary criticism.
             
            Yves Bonnefoy is professor of comparative poetics at the Collège de
            France in Paris. He is the author of five books of poetry,
            including the recent Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987). Bonnefoy is
            also a distinguished translator of English poets, such as Donne and
            Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats. His books of criticism include
            Rimbaud par lui-même(1961); Rome 1630: l'horizon du premier
            baroque (1970); Le Nuage rouge (1977); L'Improbable et autres
            essays (1980); La Verité de parole (1988). He is the editor of the
            Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des Religions des sociétés
            traditionelles et du monde antique (1981) and of the forthcoming
            Dictionnaire des poétiques.He received the French Prix Goncourt for
            poetry in 1987 and the Bennett Award in 1988. John Naughton is
            associate professor of romance literatures at Colgate University.
            He is the author of a critical study of Yves Bonnefoy called The
            Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (1984) and the editor of a volume of
            Bonnefoy's essays in translation entitled The Act and the
            Place of Poetry (1989). His translation of Bonnefoy's Ce qui
            fut sons lumière and his book on Louis-René des Forêts will appear
            in 1991.
Calvin Bedient
         Kristeva and Poetry as Shattered Signification
         We had thought that poetry was a grace beyond biology, except for
            the biomovements of dancers, athletes, or those we love most. We
            had thought it a contradictory "organic" perfection in
            the relatively staying realm of the symbolical. But, no, according
            to Kristeva's theory, poetry is essentially
            antiformal in fact, so profoundly antiaesthetic that the
            proper words for describing it are not beauty, inspiration, form,
            instinctive rightness, inevitability,or delicacy (to leave aside
            unaesthetic terms such as perception and truth,which the theory
            also renders inappropriate). Instead, it attracts terms drawn from
            politics and war: corruption, infiltration, disruption,
            shatterings, negation, supplantation,and murder. Poetry is the
            chora'sguerrilla war against culture.
            According to Kristeva, poetry reverses the ritualistic theological
            sacrifice of the soma, a sacrifice subsequently exacted, like a
            sales tax, through the "thetic" element of discourse,
            its determinate articulations. For Kristeva, the
            "theologization of the thetic" is what culture is
            (RPL,p. 78) and as such it has no fundamental right to be,
            since what is fundamental is the chora and not God. I refer here as
            throughout to the revolutionary Kristeva of the late sixties and
            early seventies, the Kristeva whose "we," as she says
            in "My Memory's Hyperbole," was a putatively
            communist Parisian party for "permanent revolution."4
            Revolution in Poetic Language is a monumental, late end product of
            this phase of Kristeva's thinking; indeed, there are signs
            that she had already surpassed it by the time the book was
            published.
             
            4. See Kristeva, "My Memory's Hyperbole," trans.
            Athena Viscusi, in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of
            Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century,ed. Domna C.
            Stanton (1984; Chicago, 1987), pp. 219-35.
             
            Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of
            California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police
            in Different Voices (1986), a study of The Waste Land.
Charles Bernstein
         Optimism and Critical Excess (Process)
         This is not a transcription. More like a reenactment of the
            possibilities of performative poetics as improvisatory, open-ended.
            As a way to engage the relation of poetics to poetry and by
            implication differentiate poetics from literary theory and
            philosophy, although not necessarily from poetry.
            As a way to extend the ideas about closure the rejection of
            closure into the discussion of essays and critical writing.
            To eject, that is, the idea that there is something containable to
            say: completed saying.
            So that poetics becomes an activity that is ongoing, that moves in
            different directions at the same time, and that tries to disrupt or
            make problematic any formulation that seems too final or
            preemptively restrictive.
            Speaking at the Buffalo conference, Linda Reinfeld pointed to the
            wedding that was being enacted (which is really always being
            enacted) between critical theory and poetry as a kind of subtext of
            that gathering. Hearing Rosmarie Waldrop read, in that context,
            from Reproduction of Profilessuggested something very much along
            these lines: Waldrop has created a literary wedding, in the sense
            of wedding together, or fusing, of philosophy and poetry. In this
            work, she has taken phrases from Elizabeth Anscombe's
            translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical
            Investigations and added weaved in phrases of her own
            making. The structure of Reproduction of Profiles provokes a number
            of questions, including the status of Wittgenstein's original
            text, which may itself be taken as a poetic work, and also the
            status of the Reproduction of Profiles what kind of a work is
            that?
             
            Charles Bernstein is the author of a number of books of poetry,
            including Rough Trades, The Nude Formalism, The Lives of the Toll
            Takers, The Sophist,and Controlling Interests.Other books include
            Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 and Artifice of
            Absorption.He coedited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and recently edited The
            Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy.
John Hallmark Neff
         Introduction: Daring to Dream
         In the absence of shared beliefs and even common interests, it
            should not be surprising that so much of the well-intentioned art
            acquired for public spaces has failed failed as art and as
            art for a civic site. The conventional wisdom of simply choosing
            "the best artist" and then turning him or her loose to
            create a work within time and budget guidelines lost much
            credibility with the drama of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc
            commission: the process of selection, erection, litigation,
            rejection, and removal of the sculpture from the Federal Building
            plaza in New York City. The new conventional wisdom? The jury, not
            the artist, was ultimately responsible. For Serra did precisely the
            kind of work for which he is respected worldwide but in a context
            and for a specific public whose requirements, in their view, were
            not met but even abrogated by what Serra had done so well: made a
            Serra.
            The issues raised by this particular controversy as well as by the
            very different response now accorded the once-controversial Vietnam
            Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin, together with firsthand frustration
            with the selection process for public commissions, were some of the
            specific reasons for organizing the day-long symposium held 16
            September 1989 in First Chicago Center under the auspices of
            Sculpture Chicago, a biennial exhibition and educational series.
             
            John Hallmark Neff,director of the First National Bank of
            Chicago's art program, is a former director of the Museum of
            Contemporary Art, Chicago. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer: Brüch
            und Einung(1988), and he is currently working on a book on Max
            Neuhaus and a catalogue essay for the forthcoming Agnes Denes
            retrospective exhibition.
Michael North
         The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to_Mass_Ornament
         The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty
            years has been the disappearance of the sculpture itself. Ever
            since Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York destroyed itself at
            the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to find new
            ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial, or
            remote. Where the sculpture did have some material presence, it
            often took unexpected forms. As Rosalind Krauss says, "Rather
            surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow
            corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs
            documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in
            ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the
            desert."
            However various these experiments may seem, they began with a
            single motive: to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the
            gallery, and finally of art itself. To prevent this new work from
            becoming just another commodity in the market, artists either
            produced works so intangible or remote they could not be bought and
            sold, or disseminated their ideas in so many reproducible forms
            they could not be monopolized. The political nature of these
            motives also meant that much of this "sculpture" could
            be considered "public." Changing the nature of the art
            meant changing the role of the audience as well, questioning the
            purely contemplative role the observer plays in the conventional
            setting of the museum or gallery. According to Henry Sayre,
            "As the avant-garde work of art denies its own autonomy, it
            implicates the audience in its workings."3 As the aesthetic
            focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the
            relationship of the two goes beyond mere implication: the public
            becomes the sculpture. Artists, like Richard Serra, whose goal is
            to illuminate the material nature of space and the often tenuous
            materiality of the observer's own body, have made "the
            viewer, in effect, the subject of the work," to quote Douglas
            Crimp.
             
            Michael North is associate professor of English at the University
            of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Final
            Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (1985) and is
            currently completing a study of the politics of Yeats, Eliot, and
            Pound.
W. J. T. Mitchell
         The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right_Thing
         The question naturally arises: Is public art inherently violent, or
            is it a provocation to violence? Is violence built into the
            monument in its very conception? Or is violence simply an accident
            that befalls some monuments, a matter of the fortunes of history?
            The historical record suggests that if violence is simply an
            accident that happens to public art, it is one that is always
            waiting to happen. The principal media and materials of public art
            are stone and metal sculpture not so much by choice as by
            necessity. "A public sculpture," says Lawrence Alloway,
            "should be invulnerable or inaccessible. It should have the
            material strength to resist attack or be easily cleanable, but it
            also needs a formal structure that is not wrecked by
            alterations."12 The violence that surrounds public art is
            more, however, than simply the ever-present possibility of an
            accident the natural disaster or random act of vandalism.
            Much of the world's public art memorials, monuments,
            triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, and statues has a rather
            direct reference to violence in the form of war or conquest. From
            Ozymandias to Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler, public art has served
            as a kind of monumentalizing of violence, and never more powerfully
            than when it presents the conqueror as a man of peace, imposing a
            Napoleonic code or a pax Romana on the world. Public sculpture that
            is too frank or explicit about this monumentalizing of violence,
            whether the Assyrian palace reliefs of the ninth century b.c., or
            Morris's bomb sculpture proposal of 1981, is likely to offend
            the sensibilities of a public committed to the repression of its
            own complicity in violence.13 The very notion of public art as we
            receive it is inseparable from what Jürgen Habermas has called
            "the liberal model of the public sphere," a dimension
            distinct from the economic, the private, and the political. This
            ideal realm provides the space in which disinterested citizens may
            contemplate a transparent emblem of their own inclusiveness and
            solidarity, and deliberate on the general good, free of coercion,
            violence, or private interests.14
             
            12. Lawrence Alloway, "The Public Sculpture Problem,"
            Studio International 184 (Oct. 1972): 124.
            13. See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, "The Forms of
            Violence," October,no. 8 (Spring 1979): 17-29, for an
            important critique of the "narrativization" of violence
            in Western art and an examination of the alternative suggested by
            the Assyrian palace reliefs.
            14. Habermas first introduced this concept in The Structural
            Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
            Bourgeois Society,trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence
            (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). First published in 1962, it has since
            become the focus of an extensive literature. See also
            Habermas's short encyclopedia article, "The Public
            Sphere," trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German
            Critique 1 (Fall 1974): 49-55, and the introduction to it by Peter
            Hohendahl in the same issue, pp. 45-48. I owe much to the guidance
            of Miriam Hansen and Lauren Berlant on this complex and crucial
            topic.
             
            W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of ,is Gaylord Donnelly
            Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the
            University of Chicago. His recent book is Iconology: Image, Text,
            Ideology (1986).
Vito Acconci
         Public Space in a Private Time
         2
            Public space is an old habit. The words public space are deceptive;
            when I hear the words, when I say the words, I'm forced to
            have an image of a physical place I can point to and be in. I
            should be thinking only of a condition; but, instead, I imagine an
            architectural type, and I think of a piazza, or a town square, or a
            city commons. Public space, I assume, without thinking about it, is
            a place where the public gathers. The public gathers in two kinds
            of spaces. The first is a space that ispublic, a place where the
            public gathers because it has a right to the place; the second is a
            space that is made public, a place where the public gathers
            precisely because it doesn't have the right a place
            made public by force.
            3
            In the space that is public, the public whose space this is has
            agreed to be a public; these are people "in the form of the
            city," they are public when they act "in the name of
            the city." They "own" the city only in quotes.
            The establishment of certain space in the city as
            "public" is a reminder, a warning, that the rest of the
            city isn't public. New York doesn't belong to us, and
            neither does Paris, and neither does Des Moines. Setting up a
            public space means setting asidea public space. Public space is a
            place in the middle of the city but isolated from the city. Public
            space is the piazza, an open space separated from the closure of
            alleys and dead ends; public space is the piazza, a space in the
            light, away from the plots and conspiracies in dark smokey rooms.
             
            Vit Acconci'slatest show, entitled "Public
            Places," was held in 1988 at the Museum of Modern Art, New
            York. He is currently at work on a park in Detroit, a pedestrian
            mall in Baltimore, and a housing project in Regensburg, Germany.
Agnes Denes
         The Dream
         The issues touched on in my work range between individual creation
            and social consciousness. We have entered an age of alienation
            brought on by specialization, a by-product of the Information Age.
            This is an age of complexity, when knowledge and ideas are coming
            in faster than can be assimilated, while disciplines become
            progressively alienated from each other through specialization. The
            hard-won knowledge that accumulates undigested, blocking meaningful
            communication. Clearly defined direction for mankind is lacking.
            The turn of the century and the next millennium will usher in a
            troubled environment and a troubled psyche.
            Making art today is synonymous with assuming responsibility for our
            fellow man. I am concerned with the fact that we have taken
            evolution into our own hands. We are the first species that has the
            ability to consciously alter its evolution, modify itself at will,
            even put an end to its existence. We have gotten hold of our
            destiny and our impact on earth is astounding. Because of our
            tremendous success we are overrunning the planet, squandering its
            resources. We are young as a species, even younger as a
            civilization, and like reckless children initiate processes we
            cannot control. We tend to overproduce, overuse, and quickly tire
            of things. We also overreact, panic, and self-correct in hindsight.
            The pluralistic nature of things creates too many variables,
            confusing the goals to be achieved. Sustained interest and
            effective action are diminished with the alienation of the
            individual who feels little potential to interact or identify
            effectively with society as a whole. Overview for mankind is
            lacking and as the momentum increases human values tend to decline.
             
            Agnes Denes has had over 250 solo and group exhibitions on four
            continents since 1965. She has participated in such major
            international exhibitions as Project '74, Cologne; the 1976
            Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany; and
            the Venice Biennales of 1978 and 1980. In 1989, she received her
            fourth National Endowment Individual Artist Fellowship. She has
            published four books, including The Book of Dust The
            Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter (1986).
Ben Nicholson
         Urban Poises
         The urban poise is dependent on a particular notion of urban
            planning: a myriad of actions that can adjust civic life in many
            places to provoke it towards greater self-esteem. Urban planning is
            not consecrated by a drawing in the shape of a plan alone, but it
            must respect the elevation of the stance of an urban spectacle as
            seen from the sidewalk. The coercion of civic indicators is
            reappraised by delighting in the figurative stance of the informant
            city. Small things are done in the city within its existing urban
            structure so that an edge is applied to what already exists. City
            blocks might be fractionally altered, holes in the skyline reamed
            out smooth, and points located strategically so that they can carry
            their attendant responsibilities. The method is marginally
            parasitic, for it exists by requiring something else to exist that
            it cannot readily harbor.
            Ten points and places of vulnerability have been chosen in the city
            that poke at its underbelly. Whilst the poises are given names and
            specific sites, their viability could be felt equally in a
            different city using changed names. The Appliance House franchises
            its intention to various matters of civic consequence, ranging from
            the weather to shopping to the monumental respect for the dead.
            Each poise is considered integrally related to the wholeness of the
            city. If any of the Poises becomes disassociated from the city or
            from other Poises, the prime tenet of urban existence will have
            been ignored: the over-exertion of one component of urban life will
            take place at the expense of somebody else.
             
            Ben Nicholson is studio professor of architecture at the Illinois
            Institute of Technology. His Appliance House will be published
            later this year.
Cheryl Herr
         The Erotics of Irishness
         Like all fields of inquiry, Irish studies has its own traditions,
            its own ways of organizing information. even the most adventurous
            of the native practitioners tend carefully to maintain disciplinary
            boundaries when presenting evidence to sustain a thesis, and
            American scholars have used Irish practice as their frame of
            reference. This essay, which engages with the time-honored and
            increasingly vexed enterprise of defining "Irishness,"
            introduces play into these traditions both in spirit and in
            methodology. An alternative approach to analyzing Ireland might
            foreground the underlying assumptions about social relations and
            historical patterns that link Irish art and writing across diverse
            fields of inquiry. Exploring the many rhetorics of Ireland might
            make it impossible, for example, for those involved in the
            essential task of historical and scientific inquiry to
            overlook the submessages of popular Irish representations.
            I begin, obliquely, with a contrast between American and Irish
            censorship of music videos. My inquiry targets some fundamental
            differences between American and Irish appropriations of the body,
            from which the essay suggests symmetries between the psychological
            development of individuals in Ireland and one stage in what might
            be termed the psychohistory of Irish culture. As an experimental,
            semidisruptive piece that challenges disciplinary lines in the
            field and introduces fresh theoretical categories, this essay
            reaches toward a new Irish studies.
             
            Cheryl Herr,associate professor of English at the University of
            Iowa, has published Joyce's Anatomy of Culture (1986) and For
            the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890-1925 (1990).
            Two of her current projects involve spatial organization in Ireland
            and the syntax of English modernism.
Arnold I. Davidson
         Introduction to Musil and Levinas
         During the last several years, we have witnessed a reopening of
            questions concerning National Socialism whose full scope and
            implications have yet to be determined. The Historikerstreit has
            provoked new discussions of the problem of the specificity or
            uniqueness of Auschwitz. While raising general methodological
            issues about the nature of historical explanation and
            understanding, the Historikerstreit has also revolved around
            specific questions concerning the role of moral concepts and memory
            in assessing National Socialism.1 Disclosures about Paul de
            Man's wartime writings and further examination of Martin
            Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism have led to
            broader consideration of the relations among philosophy, theory,
            and politics, and have forced us to rethink the problem of
            intellectual responsibility with renewed urgency.2 These and
            related topics were at the center of a major international
            conference, "Nazism and the Final Solution," organized
            by Saul Friedlånder last April, which took as its organizing theme
            the limits of ethical, aesthetic, and historical representation of
            the Final Solution.3
            In light of these continuing discussions, we are publishing two
            remarkable essays written during the early years of National
            Socialism. To the often-posed challenge, how could one be expected
            to respond lucidly to Nazism in the early 1930s?, these essays by
            Robert Musil and Emmanuel Levinas constitute, by the sheer power of
            their insights, decisive answers. Although significantly different
            in approach, these essays show not only that one could recognize
            the reality of National Socialism as it was coming to power, but
            indicate further that analyses of permanent value could be
            formulated virtually from the beginning. Musil and Levinas serve to
            remind us concretely of the capabilities of the human mind and of
            its responsibilities capabilities and responsibilities that
            even the most severe political circumstances need not overwhelm.
             
            1. For documents from and discussion of the Historikstreit,see the
            special issue of New German Critique44 (Spring/Summer 1988).
            2. On Paul de Man, see  14 (Spring 1988): 590-652,
            and  15 (Summer 1989): 704-44, 764-873. On Martin
            Heidegger, see  15 (Winter 1989): 407-88.
            3. The proceedings of this conference are forthcoming.
             
            Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of  and
            associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, is
            currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities
            Center.
Robert Musil
         Ruminations of a Slow-Witted Mind
         The orientation and leadership of the revolutionary "renewal
            of the German mind," whose witnesses and participants we are,
            point in two directions. On, after seizing power, would like to
            talk the mind into helping out with internal development and
            promises it a golden age if it joins up; indeed it even offers it
            the prospect of a certain voice in decision making. The other
            direction, on the contrary, attests its mistrust of the intellect
            by declaring that the revolutionary process will continue
            indefinitely, and (especially in the short run) has room for the
            mind in its task; or it might also assure the intellect that it is
            not needed at all because a new mind has already turned up, and
            that the old one might as well jump into the fire and either burn
            to ashes or purify itself into its elements. What has happened up
            to the moment these words are being written leaves no doubt that
            the second direction is on the march, the first its musical
            accompaniment. Nor can it be otherwise than that a Movement
            [National Socialism] that has manifested itself so powerfully
            demands above all that the intellect complete assimilate and
            subordinate itself to the Movement. But then again, it is possible
            that the intellect cannot do this without renouncing itself. Surely
            there must be some sort of boundary here, since nothing happens
            that is not contingent; so it is a good test for the intellect that
            today it has everywhere been saddled with a kind of kangaroo-court
            mentality that judges it not according to its own laws, but
            according to the law of the Movement.
             
            Robert Musil (1880-1942) made a decisive contribution to twentieth-
            century European literature. Among his works available in English
            are Young Törless, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author,and The Man
            Without Qualities.Burton Pike is professor of comparative
            literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New
            York. With Sophie Wilkins, he has edited and translated a new
            edition of Musil's novel The Man without Qualities,available
            in 199. He is the author of Robert Musil: An Introduction to His
            Work (1972) and The Image of the City in Modern Literature(1981).
            David S. Luftteaches modern European intellectual history at the
            University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Robert
            Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1912 (1980).
Emmanuel Levinas
         Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism
         The philosophy of Hitler is simplistic [primaire]. But the
            primitive powers that burn within it burst open its wretched
            phraseology under the pressure of an elementary force. They awaken
            the secret nostalgia within the German soul. Hitlerism is more than
            a contagion or a madness; it is an awakening of elementary
            feelings.
            But from this point on, this frighteningly dangerous phenomenon
            becomes philosophically interesting. For these elementary feelings
            harbor a philosophy. They express a soul's principal attitude
            towards the whole of reality and its own destiny. They predetermine
            or prefigure the meaning of the adventure that the soul will face
            in the world.
            The philosophy of Hitlerism therefore goes beyond the philosophy of
            Hitlerians. It questions the very principles of a civilization. The
            conflict is played out not only between liberalism and Hitlerism.
            Christianity itself is threatened in spite of the careful
            attentions or Concordats that the Christian churches took advantage
            of when Hitler's regime came to power.
            But it is not enough to follow certain journalists in
            distinguishing between Christian universalism and racist
            particularism: a logical contradiction cannot judge a concrete
            event. The meaning of a logical contradiction that opposes two
            forms of ideas only shows up fully if we go back to their source,
            to intuition, to the original decision that makes them possible. It
            is in this spirit that we are going to set forth the following
            reflections.
             
            Emmanuel Levinashas been professor of philosophy at the Ecole
            Normale Superieure Israelite de Paris and at the University of
            Paris I (Sorbonne). Among his books that have been translated into
            English are Totality and Infinity, Ethics and Infinity, Otherwise
            Than Being or Beyond Essence, and The Levinas Reader. His essay "As
            If Consenting to Horror" appeared in the Winter 1989 issue of
            . Sean Hand is lecturer in French at the University
            College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the editor of The Levinas
            Reader (1989) and the translator of Levinas's Difficult Freedom
            (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book on Michel Leiris.
Michael Camille
         The Très Riches Heures:An Illuminated Manscript in the_Age_of
            Mechanical Reproduction
         This new nonexistence of the Très Riches Heures is, I would argue,
            crucial to the existence of its replications. It is essential for
            each numbered copy of the limited facsimile edition that the
            original manuscript not be available for all to see. Most art
            historians, no matter how "contextual" or theoretical, would still
            emphasize the necessity of looking at the objects they study with
            that oddly singular, egocentrically well-trained "eye"/I. Left,
            however, with only the piles of reproductions I am forced to ask
            myself and my students not what is the Très Riches Heures (a
            nonentity hidden somewhere in a museum vault) but what are the
            books, pamphlets, postcards, facsimiles, and the laser discs that
            scholars working on the manuscript at Chantilly are now shown
            instead of the original? The manuscript now has the status of one
            of those hypothetical "lost prototypes," beloved of scholars of
            manuscript illumination, that can only be seen refracted in its
            subsequent copies. Just as hypothesizing on the influence of early
            medieval "lost models" on existing works has always seemed to me a
            futile approach to medieval book painting, and preferring to view
            every manuscript as an object in its own right, I am not concerned
            with the lost and now forever invisible Très Riches Heures itself
            but rather with the power of its many reproductions.
             
            Michael Camilleis associate professor of art history at the
            University of Chicago and the author of The Gothic Idol: Ideology
            and Image- Making in Medieval Art (1989). He is working on a study
            of medieval marginal images entitled Image on the Edge
            (forthcoming).
Jack Amariglio, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff
         Division and Difference in the "Discipline" of Economics
         The existence and unity of a discipline called economics reside in
            the eye and mind of the beholder. The perception of economics's
            unity and disciplinarity itself arises in some, but not all, of the
            different schools of thought that we would loosely categorize as
            economic. Indeed, as we hope to show, the presumption of unity and
            disciplinarity the idea that there is a center or
            "core" of propositions, procedures, and conclusions or
            a shared historical "object" of theory and
            practice is suggested in the concepts and methods of some
            schools of economic thought, but is opposed by others. Further, we
            argue that the portrayal of economics as a discipline with distinct
            boundaries is often a discursive strategy by one school or another
            to hegemonize the field of economic discourse. In this way, the
            issue of the existence of an economics discipline and its
            principles of unity or dispersion is in part a political question.
            Its effects are felt in the hiring and firing of economics
            professors and practitioners, the determination of what comprises
            an economics curriculum, the determination of what is a legitimate
            economic argument and what is not, the dispensation of public and
            private grant monies, and the differential entry into or exclusion
            from ideological, political, and economic centers of power and
            decision making.
            Our view is that no discipline of economics exists. Or, rather, no
            unified discipline exists. The "discipline" of
            economics is actually an agonistic and shifting field of
            fundamentally different and often conflicting discourses. The
            dispersion and divisions that exist between the schools of thought
            we discuss here as "economic" may have some
            regularities. But we do not see closer contiguity of these economic
            schools when placed on a horizontal scale than, to take just one
            example, among all of the many different "disciplinary" forms of
            Marxian thought. That is, in our view, Marxian economic thought
            shares more concepts, approaches, and methods may have more
            discursive regularity with Marxian literary theory than do
            Marxian economic thought and neoclassical economic theory.
             
            Jack Amarigliois associate professor of economics at Merrimack
            College and the editor of Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of
            Economics, Culture, and Society. He is working on a book entitled
            Modernism and Postmodernism in Economics with Arjo Klamer.Stephen
            ResnickandRichard Wolffare professors of economics at the
            University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Their recent coauthored books
            are Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy
            (1987) and Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical (1987).
Walter Frisch
         Music and Jugendstil
         The most common approach in writings on music and Jugendstil has
            been to isolate several aspects of the visual art, either of
            technique or of subject matter, and to seek parallels in music of
            the fin de siècle. Historians of art and design seem to agree on at
            least three basic elements of Jugendstil: the primacy of the
            dynamic, flowing line; flatness or two dimensionality (Jugendstil
            has been called a Flåchenkunst); and the profuseness of ornament.
            All these features are neatly embodied in a 1900 drawing by Theodor
            Heine (fig. 1), in which the ostensible subject matter, the dancing
            lady, is dissolved in the undulating linearity of her dress and the
            swirling smoke or incense. In this example, as in the celebrated
            "Cyclamen" tapestry by the Munich artist Hermann Obrist (fig. 2),
            line and ornament are largely liberated from their representational
            obligations and are manipulated in an almost abstract fashion. As
            Robert Schmutzler has remarked, the tapestry is "on the borderline
            dividing the symbol and the ornament, between abstract dynamism and
            the representation of a distinctive organism."4
            This aspect of Obrist's tapestry was realized as early as 1895 by
            the critic Georg Fuchs, who wrote in the journal Pan, "'These
            embroideries do not intend to "mean" anything, to say anything.'"
            Fuchs went on to describe the dynamic motion of the image in terms
            that have nothing to do with cyclamens per se: "'This racing
            movement seems like the abrupt, powerful convolution of the lash of
            a whip. One moment it appears as the image of a forceful outburst
            of natural elements; it is a lightning bolt. Another moment it
            resembles the defiant signature of a great man, a conqueror, an
            intellect who decrees new laws through new documents.''"5 Fuchs's
            metaphor of the whiplash or Peitschenhieb, has stuck; Obrist's
            tapestry is today known principally by that name.
             
            4. Robert Schmutzler, Art Nouveau (New York, 1962), p. 193.
            5. Georg Fuchs, quoted in Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The
            Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, N.J., 1979), p. 33;
            hereafter abbreviated KM; translation modified.
             
            Walter Frisch is associate professor of music at Columbia
            University and author of Brahms and the Principle of Developing
            Variation (1984). He is presently completing a book on the early
            tonal works of Arnold Schoenberg.
Bruce F. Murphy
         The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics_of_the_Other(s)
         The marginality of poetry in American culture has been taken for
            granted at least since the dawn of the modernist period, when Walt
            Whitman printed his first volume of poetry at his own expense. More
            recently, it has become an article of faith that there is a real
            popular audience for poetry, but somewhere else-in the East.
            Literary journals, the popular press, and publishers have made
            household names of a handful of Eastern European writers: Czeslaw
            Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert. One is regaled with
            chestnuts about ordinary people in the Eastern bloc who care about
            "the Word," manuscripts passed from hand to hand, even poems
            preserved orally. Inevitably, the questions are revived: Where are
            the great American poets? Has American poetry been reduced to
            private confessions and personal trivia? Why is it that our poetry
            lacks that public, political relevance? The answer to such
            questions is often that we do not have the weight of History on our
            backs, the state oppression under which, as Milosz says, "poetry is
            no longer alienated," no longer "a foreigner in society," and can
            become more important than bread.1 But what has not surfaced in the
            vaunted "poetry and politics" debate is the extent to which our
            homage to victims of censorship everywhere has become a
            fetishization of totalitarianism, and a self-serving one at that.
            The mythology of our freedom, unbounded and unmediated, depends
            precisely on this other world, on what happens over there.
             
            1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1983),
            p. 95; hereafter abbreviated WP.
             
            Bruce F. Murphy's work has appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod,
            and An Gael. He has completed a manuscript of poems and with
            Friedrich Ulfers is writing a study of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Lee Clark Mitchell
         Face, Race, and Disfiguration in Stephen Crane's "The_Monster"
         What does it mean to be black in America, to exist as a dark
            physical body, a "colored" voice, a stigmatized being in a society
            that sees, hears, and acts according to a set of bleaching
            assumptions? Versions of that question have echoed across our
            historical landscape ever since James-town, but rarely have they
            figured so forcibly as in the 1890s, when the Supreme Court upheld
            Ferguson over Plessy, Jim Crow laws spread through the South,
            degenerationists elaborated the "problem of the Negro,"
            imperialists hoisted the "white man's burden" of "little brown
            brothers" abroad, and racial lynching peaked at an all-time high
            that incited a national scandal. Any radical hopes for
            Reconstruction after the Civil War had long since vanished by the
            years of the fin de siècle. And a century later, the gains of a
            "Second Reconstruction" movement for civil rights have likewise
            eroded, with unparalleled "hypersegregation" accentuating new
            patterns of black poverty, unemployment, family disintegration,
            homelessness, and addiction.1 Being black, in other words, has
            meant and, to a considerable degree, continues to
            mean being excluded from white society, white prerogatives,
            even white discourse itself, in a process whose effects insidiously
            appear to legitimate the very causes that produce them.
             
            1. C. Vann Woodward first warned of this unsettling repetition of
            nineteenth-century patterns in his 1965 suggestion that the civil
            rights movement might constitute a "Second Reconstruction"
            (Woodward, "From the First Reconstruction to the Second," Harper's
            Magazine, Apr. 1965, pp. 127-33). In his recent reassessment of the
            troubling implications of that prediction, he notes how ghetto
            speech is growing more distinct from standard English: "The result
            is a vicious circle in which the longer blacks are made victims of
            the white stereotypes that foster hypersegregation, the more they
            appear to conform to the stereotypes that were used to justify
            segregation in the first place, and the deeper victims sink in
            isolation" (Woodward, "The Crisis of Caste," The New Republic, 6
            Nov. 1989, p. 44).
             
            Lee Clark Mitchell,professor of English at Princeton University, is
            the author of Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-
            Century Response (1981) and Determined Fictions: American Literary
            Naturalism (1989). He is currently working on the formula western
            in a book tentatively titled "Writing Westward: Imagining America
            beyond the Frontier."
Michael Fried
         Almayer's Face: On "Impressionism" in Conrad, Crane, and_Norris
         My basic supposition is that the destruction of the little Jew's
            face and hands in Vandover and the Brute images the irruption of
            mere (or brute) materiality within the scene of writing-that
            instead of Crane's double process of eliciting and repressing that
            materiality, what is figured in the shipwreck scene is a single,
            unstoppable process of materialization, involving both the act of
            representation (the beating of the helpless Jew) and the marking
            tool and actual page (the stump of the oar, the Jew's "white and
            writhing" face), the result of which can only be the defeat of the
            very possibility of writing (as embodied in the chilling phrase,
            "When his hands were gone").
            Here it might be objected that such a reading derives whatever
            plausibility it has from the comparison with Crane, and in a sense
            this is true: my claim is precisely that it's only against the
            background of Crane's seemingly bizarre but, in this regard,
            normative or centric enterprise that the wider problematic of late
            nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary "impressionism"
            can be made out. In another sense, however, the comparison with
            Crane involves an appeal to issues notably that of
            materialism which have long been basic to Norris criticism
            and which the recent work of Walter Benn Michaels has brought to a
            new level of conceptual sophistication and historical refinement.
            Specifically, the title essay in Michaels's book, The Gold Standard
            and the Logic of Naturalism, interprets both McTeague and Vandover
            and the Brute in terms of a conflict between materiality and
            representation that found contemporary expression both in the
            debates over the gold and silver standards versus paper money and
            in the vogue for trompe l'oeil painting (in which the objects that
            a given picture represents are as it were directly contrasted with
            the paint and canvas the picture is made of)." In this regard a
            crucial moment in Vandover's regression from man to beast is his
            discovery that, as a painter, he has lost the ability to represent
            nature three-dimensionally; Michaels treats this development as
            equivalent to "replac[ing] the painting with nature itself" (that
            is, with the shallowly three-dimensional canvas), and goes on to
            remark: "But this ... is ultimately a distinction without a
            difference. Vandover the artist can so easily devolve into Vandover
            the brute precisely because both artist and brute are already
            committed to a naturalist ontology in money, to precious
            metals; in art, to three-dimensionality. The moral of Vandover's
            regression, from this standpoint, is that it can only take place
            because . . . it has already taken place. Discovering that man is a
            brute, Norris repeats the discovery that paper money is just paper
            and that a painting of paper money is just paint" (GS, pp. 166-67).
            My reading of the shipwreck passage would thus be consistent with
            what Michaels calls Norris's "trompe l'oeil materialism" (GS, p.
            167), though the nearly sadomasochistic violence of that passage
            may be taken to imply that materialism's consequences for writing
            threaten to be even more disastrous than they are for painting. But
            rather than analyze the role of writing as such in Vandover, which
            would involve an intricate discussion not just of that novel and
            McTeague but also of Michaels's essay, I want to turn to another,
            lesser-known book by Norris, in which a thematic of writing plays a
            conspicuous and more nearly univocal role: A Man's Woman (1899).
             
            Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and
            director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University.
            His most recent book is Courbet's Realism (1990). He is currently
            at work on a book to be titled Manet's Modernism.
Ian Hacking
         The Making and Molding of Child Abuse
         Some evil actions are public. Maybe genocide is the most awful.
            Other evil actions are private, a matter of one person harming
            another or of self-inflicted injury. Child abuse, in our current
            reckoning, is the worst of private evils. We want to put a stop to
            it. We know we can't do that, not entirely. Human wickedness
            (or disease, if that's your picture of abuse) won't go
            away. But we must protect as many children as we can. We want also
            to discover and help those who have already been hurt. Anyone who
            feels differently is already something of a monster.
            We are so sure of these moral truths that we seldom pause to wonder
            what child abuse is. We know we don't understand it. We have
            little idea of what prompts people to harm children. But we do have
            the sense that what we mean by child abuse is something perfectly
            definite. So it comes as a surprise that the very idea of child
            abuse has been in constant flux the past thirty years. Previously
            our present conception of abusing a child did not even exist.
            People do many of the same vile things to children, for sure, that
            they did a century ago. But we've been almost unwittingly
            changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our values and
            our moral codes accordingly.
             
            Ian Hacking, a philosopher, teaches at the Institute for the
            History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in the University
            of Toronto. His latest book is entitled The Taming of Chance
            (1990).
Maynard Solomon
         Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: The Sense of an Ending
         The question of what constitutes a finished work is thrown open,
            reminding us that in certain of his completed autographs Beethoven
            continued the process that he normally reserved for the earlier
            stages of composition, setting out further choices, possibilities,
            and interchangeabilities, including radical alterations in goal as
            well as detail. In particular, the revision of movement endings was
            one of his long-standing preoccupations. In works of his middle
            period, Emil Platen observed, Beethoven continued to make essential
            alterations in the closing sections of movements after the works
            had already taken concrete notational form; for example, in the
            scores of the String Quartets, op. 59, "out of a total of
            seven movement endings, six were altered after the fact, four in
            essential ways."6 Indeed the relationship between sketches
            and compositional goals was always more problematical than
            traditional scholars were willing to allow. As Lewish Lockwood has
            shown, the closer one looks at the sketches the less one can
            continue to accept as an article of faith that "as a work
            progresses from first inklings to final realization it should pass
            through successive phases of growth and clarification of structure,
            and of complication of detail in relation to that structure,
            becoming progressively more definite en route to its goal."7
            To further thicken the issue, Janet Levy has pointed out that one
            "cannot assume that the goals of a completed work are
            necessarily the same as the goals of the sketches for it,"
            inasmuch as the composer's intentions may well have changed
            during the course of composition and we may be left with sketches
            made in connection with goals no longer reflected in the final
            work.8 Composition is only partly a teleological process whereby
            the composer eventually finds a lapidary form for a predetermined
            idea. With Beethoven, not only is there no prospective
            inevitability, there may even be no inevitability after the fact.
            His sketches and autographs may well be series of rough maps to the
            multiplicity of universes he glimpsed, to a plurality of
            possibilities, a jammed crossroads of paths taken and not taken.
             
            6. Emil Platen, "Beethovens Autographen als Ausgangspunkt
            morphologischer Untersuchungen," in Bericht über den
            internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress: Bonn 1970,ed.
            Carl Dahlhaus et al. (Kassel, 1971), p. 535. See also Lewis
            Lockwood, "Beethoven and the Problem of Closure: Some
            Examples from the Middle-Period Chamber Music," in Beitråge
            zu Beethovens Kammermusik,p. 270.
            7. Lockwood, "On Beethoven's Sketches and Autographs:
            Some Problems of Definition and Interpretation," Acta
            Musicologica42 (Jan.-June 1970): 34.
            8. Levy, Beethoven's Compositional Choices,p. 3.
             
            Maynard Solomon'sbooks include Beethoven(1977), Beethoven
            Essays (1988), and, most recently, Beethoven's Tagebuch
            (1990). He has also written on Schubert, Ives, and Freud, and has
            edited a standard work on Marxist aesthetics. He is currently
            writing a life of Mozart and a study of the origins of music. In
            1990 he was visiting professor of music at Columbia University.
Marc Shell
         Marranos (Pigs), or from Coexistence to Toleration
         For hundreds of years, Muslim Spain was the most tolerant place in
            Europe. Christians, Muslims, and Jews were able to live together
            there more or less peacefully. The three religious groups
            maintained a tolerant convivencia,or coexistence, thanks partly to
            a twofold distinction among kinds of people that was essential to
            the particularist doctrine of Islam influential in Spain. Islamic
            doctrine distinguishes first between Muslim and non-Muslim peoples
            and second between those non-Muslims who are, like Muslims
            themselves, "Peoples of the Book" (that is, Christians
            and Jews) and those non-Muslims who are "pagan." These
            two distinctions, taken together, could amount to the difference
            between life and death. For example, Muslim courts ruled on the
            basis of the Koran that those "others" who were Peoples
            of the Book could not legally be put to the sword for refusing to
            convert to Islam while those "others" who were pagan
            could be. Christians and Jews had to be put up with, and usually
            were.2
             
            1. Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth
            and Seventeenth Centuries (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), p. 264; my
            emphasis; hereafter abbreviated I.
            2. The Korangrounds the series of divisions outlined and is
            consistent with the well-known Pact of Umar I, which established
            special regulations for Christians and Jews living in Muslim lands:
            "'There is to be no compulsion in religion. Rectitude
            has been clearly distinguished from error. So whoever disbelieves
            in idols and believes in Allah has taken hold of the firmest
            handle. It cannot split. Allah is All-hearing and All-
            knowing'" (Sura 2:256; quoted in Norman A. Stillman,
            The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book[Philadelphia,
            1979], p. 149). See also Sura 109:6: "To you your religion,
            to me my religion."
             
            Marc Shell,a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow for 1990-95,
            is head of the department of comparative literature at the
            University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His books include The
            Economy of Literature(1978), Money, Language, and Thought: Literary
            and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era
            (1982), and The End of Kinship: "Measure for Measure,"
            Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (1988). Children of
            the Earth is forthcoming.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
         Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in_Postcolonial?
         Sara Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being
            treated as an "otherness machine"-and of being heartily sick of
            it.20 Perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is
            simply that as intellectuals-a category instituted in black Africa
            by colonialism-we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming
            otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our
            principal role. Our only distinction in the world of texts to which
            we are latecomers is that we can mediate it to our fellows. This is
            especially true when postcolonial meets postmodern; for what the
            postmodern reader seems to demand of Africa is all too close to
            what modernism-in the form of the postimpressionists-demanded of
            it. The role that Africa, like the rest of the Third World, plays
            for Euro-American postmodernism-like its better-documented
            significance for modernist art-must be distinguished from the role
            postmodernism might play in the Third World; what that might be it
            is, I think, too early to tell. What happens will happen not
            because we pronounce on the matter in theory, but will happen out
            of the changing everyday practices of African cultural life.
            For all the while, in Africa's cultures, there are those who will
            not see themselves as Other. Despite the overwhelming reality of
            economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars,
            malnutrition, disease, and political instability, African cultural
            productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and
            poetry, dance, drama, music, and visual art all thrive. The
            contemporary cultural production of many African societies, and the
            many traditions whose evidences so vigorously remain, is an
            antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonial novelist.
             
            20. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (Chicago, 1989), p. 105.
             
            Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and literature at
            Duke University, is the author of a number of books, including For
            Truth in Semantics (1986), Necessary Questions (1989), and In My
            Father's House (forthcoming), a collection of essays on African
            cultural politics. His first novel, Avenging Angel, was published
            in 1990.
Michael André Bernstein
         "These Children That Come at You with Knives":_"Ressentiment,"_Mass
            Culture, and the Saturnalia
         In what is probably the most arresting of all the textual
            developments of the Saturnalian dialogues, the reader's
            emotional identification with the voice of rage and thwarted
            rebellion is ever more thoroughly compelled by the structure and
            tone of succeeding works, at the same time that the dangers of that
            role, both for its bearer and for others, are ever more explicitly
            argued. Readers of Le Neveau de Rameau are not forced by the inner
            logic of the text to choose between Moi and Lui,and they can find
            in each a welcome counterbalance to and relief from the demands of
            the other. But in Notes from Underground the "gentlemen-
            readers" have nothing left to offer us, and the novel makes
            it impossible to feel anything less than the same contempt for
            their platitudes that the Underground Man himself flaunts. The
            clearest index of the development I am tracing is the formal shift
            from Diderot's dialogue proper to Dostoyevski's first-
            person novel, but this mutation is itself already a consequence of
            a more indirect and disturbing cause. Dostoyevski, in the famous
            cry of The Possessed,was certain that "&lsquo;the fire is in
            the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses'";9 he
            believed that only the prior corruption of Russia's
            intelligentsia, their eager surrender to the lure of conspiracy and
            violence, could have led so many of them to the acts of senseless
            catastrophe, fueled by ressentiment,false pride, and incoherent
            utopian fantasies, marks all of his most important post-Siberia
            political and cultural writings.10
             
            9. Dostoyevski, The Possessed,trans. Garnett (New York, 1961), p.
            533.
            10. In The Brothers Karamazov,Dostoyevski explicitly states that
            the future revolution will be made by the Smerdyakovs. In the
            chapter "Over the Brandy," for example, Ivan tells his
            father that Smerdyakov is "a prime candidate" to
            initiate a revolutionary uprising (BK,p. 120).
             
            Michael André Bernsteinis professor of English and comparative
            literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the
            author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse
            Epic (1980) and a book of poetry. His most recent contribution to
             is "&lsquo;O Totiens Servus':
            Saturnalia and Servitude in Augustan Rome" (Spring 1987).
John Barrell
         Subject and Sentence: The Poetry of Tom Raworth
         Towards the end of Percy Bysshe Shelley's fragment &lsquo;The
            Triumph of Life' there are some famous lines which raise most
            of the questions that will concern me in this essay. Never mind,
            for the moment, the context: the lines I have in mind are these:
                        "I rose; and, bending at her sweet command,
                                    Touched with faint lips the cup she raised,
                        And suddenly my brain became as sand
                                    "Where the first wave had more than
            half erased
                        The track of deer on desert Labrador,
                                    Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled
            amazed
             
                        "Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore
                                    Until the second bursts so on my
            sight
                        Burst a new Vision never seen before. 1
            […]
            Two kinds of things are happening here which I want to point out.
            The first is that even as the poem is attempting to represent the
            mind as passive and the experience of the mind as an empty
            succession of events, it is also making a quite contrary attempt to
            represent the mind as active and the succession as a structure. The
            lines dramatise how a play of mental events, as they are
            represented in language, may be reprocessed in such a way that some
            of them come to be classified as interruptions or breaks in the
            otherwise meaningful sequence composed by the others. As my first
            paraphrase suggested, it seems to make sense to recast
            Shelley's narrative into the story of deer chased by a wolf,
            a story which is then interrupted by the wave which bursts on the
            shore and which threatens the coherence of the story by threatening
            to efface all sin that the deer have passed across the beach, have
            crossed the mind.
             
            1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, &lsquo;The Triumph of Life,' in
            Shelley's Poetry and Prose,ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B.
            Powers (new York, 1977), II. 403-11. The most illuminating reading
            of these lines is Paul de Man's in The Rhetoric of
            Romanticism (New York, 1984), pp. 99-100.
             
            John Barrell is professor of English at the University of Sussex
            and author of a number of books on literature and the visual arts,
            most recently Poetry, Language and Politics (1988). The Infection
            of Thomas De Quincey and The Birth of Pandora will be published
            next year.
Andrew Ross
         Getting out of the Gernsback Continuum
         Pop and camp nostalgia for the lofty ziggurats, teardrop
            automobiles, sleek ships of the airstream, and even the alien BEMs
            (bug-eyed monsters) with imperiled women in their clutches, are one
            thing; the cyberpunk critique of "wrongheadedness,"
            whether in Gibson's elegant fiction or Sterling's flip
            criticism, is another. Each provides us with a stylized way of
            approaching SF's early formative years, years usually
            described as "uncritical" in their outlook on
            technological progress. But neither perspective can give us much
            sense of the sociohistorical landscape of the thirties on which
            these gleaming technofantasies were raised. To have some idea of
            the historical power of what Gibson calls the "Gernsback
            Continuum," we need to know more, for example, about the
            entrepreneurial activities and scientific convictions of Hugo
            Gernsback himself, a man often termed the "father" of
            science fiction because he presided over its market specialization
            as a cultural genre. In Gernsback's view, SF was more of a
            social than a literary movement. We need to know more about the
            hallowed place of engineers and scientists in public consciousness
            in the years of boom and crisis between the wars, the consolidation
            of industrial research science at the heart of corporate
            capitalism, and the redemptive role cast for technology in the
            drama of national recovery and growth. We also need to know about
            the traditions of progressive thought that stood behind the often
            radical technocratic philosophy of progressive futurism in the
            thirties. My description of North American SF's period of
            genre formation will show the crucial influence of the national
            cults of science, engineering, and invention as well as discuss the
            role of technocracy in the social thought of the day. I will also
            consider the ways in which pulp SF escaped or resisted the
            recruitist role allotted to it not only by shaping figures like
            Gernsback, who devoted himself directly to enlisting his readers in
            the cause of "science," but also by subsequent critics
            of early SF, including those writers, like Gibson and Sterling, who
            have lamented its naïve celebration of technological innovation.
             
            Andrew Ross teaches English at Princeton University and is the
            author of The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry
            (1986) and No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). He
            is also the editor of Universal Abandon?: The Politics of
            Postmodernism (1988) and the coeditor, with Constance Penley, of
            Technoculture (forthcoming).
W. J. T. Mitchell and Barbara Kruger
         An Interview with Barbara Kruger
         Mitchell: Could we begin by discussing the problem of public art?
            When we spoke a few weeks ago, you expressed some uneasiness with
            the notion of public art, and I wonder if you could expand on that
            a bit.
            Kruger: Well, you yourself lodged it as the "problem"
            of public art and I don't really find it problematic inasmuch
            as I really don't give it very much thought. I think on a
            broader level I could say that my "problem" is with
            categorization and naming: how does one constitute art and how does
            one constitute a public? Sometimes I think that if architecture is
            a slab of meat, then so-called public art is a piece of garnish
            laying next to it. It has a kind of decorative function. Now
            I'm not saying that it always has to be that way at
            all and I think perhaps that many of my colleagues are
            working to change that now. But all too often, it seems the case.
            Mitchell: Do you think of your own art, insofar as it's
            engaged with the commercial public sphere that is, with
            advertising, publicity, mass media, and other technologies for
            influencing a consumer public that it is automatically a form
            of public art? Or does it stand in opposition to public art?
            Kruger: I have a question for you: what is a public sphere which is
            an uncommercial public sphere?
             
            Barbara Krugeris an artist who works with words and pictures. W. J.
            T. Mitchell,editor of ,is Gaylord Donnelly
            Distinguished Professor of English and art at the University of
            Chicago.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         Critical Fanonism
         One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the
            past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial
            paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now
            been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those
            engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection
            centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion
            of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of
            Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open an attack on Stephen
            Greenblatt's reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary
            practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published
            interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the
            rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like
            Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1
            My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these
            others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of
            Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as
            both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through
            contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then,
            that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a
            prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task
            itself.2
             
            1. See Jerome McGann, "The Third World of Criticism,"
            in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic
            History,ed. Marjorie Levinson et al. (New York, 1989), pp. 85-107,
            and Donald Pease, "Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge:
            Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism," in
            Consequences of Theory,ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac
            (Baltimore, 1991).
            2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon's Black Skin,
            White Masks,the text to which I most frequently recur, should
            situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul
            Sartre's Réflexions sur la question Juive(Paris, 1946),
            Dominique O. Mannoni's Psychologie de la colonisation(Paris,
            1950), Germaine Guex's La Névrose d'abandon (Paris,
            1950), as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to
            begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon.
             
            Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is coeditor of Transition,a quarterly review,
            and the author of Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey
            (1988), which received an American Book Award.
Gilles Deleuze
         The Conditions of the Question: What Is Philosophy?
         Perhaps the question "What is philosophy?" can only be
            posed late in life, when old age has come, and with it the time to
            speak in concrete terms. It is a question one poses when one no
            longer has anything to ask for, but its consequences can be
            considerable. One was asking the question before, one never ceased
            asking it, but it was too artificial, too abstract; one expounded
            and dominated the question, more than being grabbed by it. There
            are cases in which old age bestows not an eternal youth, but on the
            contrary a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one enjoys a
            moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of
            the machine combine to dispatch into the future a trait that
            traverses the ages: Turner, Monet, Matisse. The elderly Turner
            acquired or conquered the right to lead painting down a deserted
            path from which there was no return, and that was no longer
            distinguishable from a final question. In the same way, in
            philosophy, Kant's Critique of Judgment is a work of old age,
            a wild work from which descendants will never cease to flow.
            We cannot lay claim to such a status. The time has simply come for
            us to ask what philosophy is. And we have never ceased to do this
            in the past, and we already had the response, which has not varied:
            philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating
            concepts. But it was not only necessary for the response to take
            note of the question; it also had to determine a time, an occasion,
            the circumstances, the landscapes and personae, the conditions and
            unknowns of the question. One had to be able to pose the question
            "between friends" as a confidence or a trust, or else,
            faced with an enemy, as a challenge, and at the same time one had
            to reach that moment, between dog and wolf, when one mistrusts even
            the friend.
             
            Gilles Deleuzewas professor of philosophy at the University of
            Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis, until his retirement in 1987.
            Among his books translated into English are the two-volume
            Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus [1983] and A Thousand
            Plateaus [1987]), the two-volume Cinema (The Movement-Image [1986]
            and The Time-Image [1989]), The Logic of Sense (1990), and
            Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990). Daniel W. Smith is a
            doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He
            is at work on a study of the philosophy of Deleuze, and is
            translating Deleuze's Francis Bacon: Logique de la
            sensation.Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical
            Inquiry,teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is
            currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities
            Center.
David Saunders and Ian Hunter
         Lessons from the 'Literatory': How to Historicise Authorship
         Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is
            now identified as an index of the current state of literary history
            and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a
            characteristic that literary criticism shared with the other human
            sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture
            towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on
            authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary
            phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions that
            make this phenomenon possible and thinkable.
            At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how
            historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical
            dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions,
            between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the
            unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being
            and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the
            &lsquo;formation of the subject.'. Our purpose is to provide
            a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of
            authorship and to outline an alternative approach.
             
            David Saundersand Ian Hunter teach in the Division of the
            Humanities, Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia. Saunders
            is the author of Law and Authorship (forthcoming), and is coauthor
            with Hunter and Dugald Williamson of Book Sex: Obscenity Law and
            the Policing of Pornography (also forthcoming). Hunter is the
            author of Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary
            Education (1988). His current project is a study of aesthetics as
            an ethos or way of life.
Brook Thomas
         Reflections on the Law and Literature Revival
         At a key moment in the 1988 presidential debates, Michael Dukakis
            claimed that the issue in the campaign was not ideology but
            competency. A major reason for Bush's victory was that
            Dukakis was most competent at creating the illusion that even
            George Bush was competent. Even so, a useful way to begin some
            reflections on the law and literature revival is to note that even
            a hardened political pragmatist like Bush felt that it was in his
            political interest to declare that the issue was indeed ideology.
            Bush's insistence on the importance of ideology is noteworthy
            for those interested in the humanities because it seems to much at
            odds with the conservative position in current cultural politics.
            Ideology might be the issue in political campaigns, but for the
            conservatives it has no role in the humanities, which properly
            understood are the repository of essential human values. As
            contradictory as this position might seem, it is actually quite
            consistent. The ideological function of government is to impart to
            its citizens the proper values, values that find expression in
            great humanistic documents. To turn the role of the humanities from
            that of guarding and defending these sacred documents to that of
            demystifying them as ideological products is to undermine the
            possibility of government performing its proper ideological
            function. Radicals in the current wars over culture thus stand
            accused of subverting the fundamental values that the country
            represents.
             
            Brook Thomas is professor of English at the University of
            California, Irvine. He is the author of Cross-Examinations of Law
            and Literature; Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987) and
            The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (forthcoming).
Barbara Hoffman
         Law for Art's Sake in the Public Realm
         Contemporary public art is still in the process of defining its
            artistic and legal identity. Indeed to juxtapose the terms public
            and art is a paradox. Art is often said to be the individual
            inquiry of the sculptor or painter, the epitome of self-expression
            and vision that may challenge conventional wisdom and values. The
            term public encompasses a reference to the community, the social
            order, self-negation: hence the paradox of linking the private and
            the public in a single concept. A goal of any general or
            jurisprudential theory concerning government sponsorship or
            ownership of art in the public context must reconcile, through
            state institutions and law, this tension between art's
            subjectivity with hits potential for controversy and
            government's need to promote the public good.
            This essay critically examines and discusses existing contemporary
            legal doctrine and its failure to accommodate or even adequately
            define the issues and competing values at stake in the public art
            context. Such failure may be attributed in part to the fact that
            neither legal theory nor art policy have been inspired by the
            vision of or located in the broader context of a sociopolitical
            public realm.
             
            Barbara Hoffman practices arts and entertainment law in New York
            and is counsel to the College Art Association. She is a former
            professor of constitutional law at the University of Puget Sound,
            and she has served as chair of the Public Art Committee of the Art
            Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New
            York, and president of the Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the
            Arts.
Richard Serra
         Art and Censorship
         In the United States, property rights are afforded protection, but
            moral rights are not. Up until 1989, the United States adamantly
            refused to join the Berne Copyright Convention, the first
            multilateral copyright treaty, now ratified by seventy-eight
            countries. The American government refused to comply because the
            Berne Convention grants moral rights to authors. This international
            policy was and is incompatible with United States
            copyright law, which recognizes only economic rights. Although ten
            states have enacted some form of moral rights legislation, federal
            copyright laws tend to prevail, and those are still wholly economic
            in their motivation. Indeed, the recent pressure for the United
            States to agree, at least in part, to the terms of the Berne
            Convention came only as a result of a dramatic increase in the
            international piracy of American records and films.
            In September 1986, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts first
            introduced a bill called the Visual Artists Rights Act. This bill
            attempts to amend federal copyright laws to incorporate some
            aspects of international moral rights protection. The Kennedy bill
            would prohibit the intentional distortion, mutilation, or
            destruction of works of art after they have been sold. Moreover,
            the act would empower artists to claim authorship, to receive
            royalties on subsequent sales, and to disclaim their authorship if
            the work were distorted.4 This legislation would have prevented
            Clement Greenburg and the other executors of David Smith's
            estate from authorizing the stripping of paint from Several of
            Smith's later sculptures so that they would resemble his
            earlier and more marketable unpainted sculptures. Such
            moral rights legislations would have prevented a Japanese bank in
            New York from removing and destroying a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi
            simply because the bank president did not like it. And such
            legislation would have prevented the United States government from
            destroying Tilted Arc.
             
            4. Although this section appeared in the original version of
            Kennedy's bill, the current version provides for a study of
            resale royalties.
             
            Richard Serra is known for his large-scale site-specific works in
            landscapes, urban environments, and museums.
Jerome Christensen
         Spike Lee, Corporate Populist
         [W. J. T.] Mitchell focuses on the exemplary status of the Wall of
            Fame in Sal's Pizzeria, "an array of signed publicity
            photos of Italian-American stars in sports, movies, and popular
            music" (p. 892). He argues that the Wall "exemplifies
            the central contradictions of public art" (p. 893).
            "The Wall," he writes, "is important to Sal not
            just because it displays famous Italians but because they are
            famous Americans … who have made it possible for Italians to think
            of themselves as Americans, full-fledged members of the general
            public sphere" (p. 894). For Buggin' Out, the young
            black customer who angrily objects to the absence of photos of
            black people, the Wall "signifies exclusion from the public
            sphere" (p. 894). Although the streets are saturated with
            images of "African-American heroes," those
            "tokens of self-respect" are not enough for
            Buggin' Out, who wants "the respect of whites, the
            acknowledgment that African-Americans are hyphenated Americans,
            too, just like Italians" (p. 894). Mitchell astutely
            interprets the desired integration of the Wall as merely a symptom
            of a larger struggle for "full economic participation. As
            long as blacks do not own private property in this society,"
            he states, "they remain in something like the status of
            public art, mere ornaments to the public place, entertaining
            statues and abstract caricatures rather than full human
            beings" (p. 895). By foregrounding the economic implications
            of the film, Mitchell has surely engaged one of the dominant goals
            of the man who formed Forty Acres and a Mule Productions and who
            recently opened the store called Spike's Joint in New York
            City. Yet Mitchell's sympathetic account belies the
            countercurrents that trouble the ostensible progressiveness of
            Spike Lee's ambitious art.
             
            Jerome Christensen teaches in the English department at Johns
            Hopkins University. He is the author of books on Coleridge and Hume
            and one forthcoming on Byron. Currently, he is completing a study
            of the continued pertinence of the romantic turn of mind called
            Romantic Theory, Romantic Practice.
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Seeing Do the Right Thing
         I might as well say at the outset that, although I can return
            Christensen's compliment, and call his response
            "thoughtful," I am most interested in those places
            where the fullness of his thought, and particularly of his own
            language, has paralyzed his thought in compulsively repetitious
            patterns, and led him into interpretive maneuvers (the reduction of
            the film to a single "message"; the equation of this
            message with the views of particular characters in the film) that
            he would surely be skeptical about in the reading of a literary
            text. Even more interesting is the way Christensen's
            antipathy to the film, and the violence of the language in which eh
            expresses the antipathy, has prevented him from registering the
            plainest sensory and perceptual elements of the film text. In a
            rather straightforward and literal sense, Christensen has neither
            seen nor heard Do the Right Thing,but has screened a fantasy film
            of his own projection. To say Christensen has projected a fantasy,
            however, is not to say that his response is eccentric or merely
            private. On the contrary, it is a shared and shareable response, a
            reflex in the public imaginary of American culture at the present
            time. As such, it deserves patient and detailed examination.
             
            W. J. T. Mithcell,editor of ,is Gaylord Donnelly
            Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the
            University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image,
            Text, Ideology (1986).
Jonathan Crewe
         Gerald Bruns's Cavell
         Years ago, before Arnoldian poetic touchstones had become quite as
            unpopular as they are now, I and my fellow college undergraduates
            found a touchstone of sorts in a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
            The cherished line read:
                           Plato alone looked upon beauty bare.
            For us, this line became the touchstone, not of poetic sublimity
            but of being poetic, which is to say of attaining a consummate
            inane pretentiousness in poetic diction and intellectual attitude
            alike. Millay, we thought, had done it once and for all.
            Today, of course, nobody has any use for touchstones, and if we
            erstwhile undergraduates were to reread Millay we might well come
            away feeling ashamed of our former arrogance, juvenile conceit, and
            no doubt sexism. Still, Millay's line has a memorably
            vacuous, oracular ring to it. That is the ring I keep hearing in
            Gerald Bruns's "Stanley Cavell's
            Shakespeare" ( 16 [Spring 1990]: 612-32).
            "Cavell … alone perhaps with Martin Heidegger, has a sense of
            what is at stake in this quarrel [between philosophy and
            poetry]" (p. 612). "Exposure to reality is what happens
            in Hamlet,although it occurs nowhere (anywhere, in any literature)
            so powerfully as in Lear" (p. 615). "This was the later
            Heidegger's idea: poetry … puts everything out of the
            question" (p. 615). "The face, like the world (as the
            world), requires me to forego knowing" (p. 620).
            "Proving the existence of the human proved to be a separate
            problem that did not get clearly formulated until Mary
            Shelley's Frankenstein and E. T. A. Hoffmann's
            &lsquo;The Sandman'" (p. 614). Philosophers and
            cultural historians may make what they will of these vatic
            disclosures, but it may strike those who study Shakespeare that
            Bruns is recycling lugubrious clichés (of the type currently
            favored by the National Endowment for the Humanities) about Hamlet
            and Lear while simultaneously upping the philosophical ante for
            them. This, however, is roughly the procedure that Bruns wants to
            pass off as Cavell's.
             
            Jonathan Crewe,professor of English at Dartmouth College, is the
            author of Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic
            Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (1990).
James Conant
         On Bruns, on Cavell
         Gerald Bruns's "Stanley Cavell's
            Shakespeare" ( 16 [Spring 1990]:612-32) is a
            consistently sympathetic and thoughtful response to Cavell's
            difficult essays on Shakespeare.1 Nevertheless, while Bruns's
            exposition of Cavell's thought places it in a pertinently
            complex region of philosophical and literary concerns, it is
            hampered by its relative isolation from much of Cavell's
            other work and from certain abiding conflicts within contemporary
            philosophy which inform that work. The resultant misunderstandings
            of Cavell's thought are perhaps as inevitable as they are
            widespread a function of the way in which the modern American
            university carves up and compartmentalizes the world of humanistic
            learning and are on the verge of becoming entrenched among
            commentators on his work. Much of Cavell's work has been
            concerned (as has Bruns's, I gather) to resist some of the
            costs of this process of compartmentalization or
            professionalization. The problems this resistance poses for the
            reception of the work are perhaps nowhere more pervasive than in
            the case of Cavell's collection of essays on Shakespeare,
            Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare,in part because of
            Cavell's sense of the figure of Shakespeare, of what this
            corpus of writing represents. In light of, and in appreciation of,
            Bruns's serious and resourceful effort to get Cavell's
            thought on these matters straight, it is worth trying to get it
            clearer.
             
            James Conant,assistant professor of philosophy at the University of
            Pittsburgh, is currently a fellow at the Michigan Society of
            Fellows. His "Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense"
            is included in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley
            Cavell (1991).
Gerald L. Bruns
         Reply to Crewe and Conant
         I am impressed by how angry Jonathan Crewe is, but I found his
            remarks confused and unclear and so I'm uncertain how to
            reply. Whatever the matter it, he wants "to forestall a sense
            of academic obligation on anyone's part (for example, on the
            part of students) to work back to Cavell through Bruns" (p.
            612). God knows this might be a good idea, judging from what James
            Conant says.
            Conant's criticisms are directed at the section of my paper
            called "The Moral of Skepticism," which he cannot help
            wanting to rewrite, since he has a much more intimate grasp of
            Cavell's thinking than I have. I imagined myself on the
            outside of Cavell's texts, trying to characterize them in a
            certain way, not on the inside, giving an account of their genesis.
            Obviously my paper is neither philosophy nor literary criticism but
            a crossdressing of the two that is bound to make someone like Crewe
            bite his teeth. I appreciate Conant's forbearance.
             
            Gerald L. Bruns is William and Hazel White Professor of English and
            Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most
            recent book is Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth,
            and Poetry in the Later Writings(1989).
Toril Moi
         Reading Kristeva: A Response to Calvin Bedient
         I must confess that I found [Calvin] Bedient's account of
            Kristeva's theories quite shocking. Since, on the whole,
            critical essays rarely upset me, my own reaction was quite puzzling
            to me. What is there in Bedient's prose to unsettle me so? It
            certainly can't be his style or tone: he has produced a
            perfectly even-tempered essay. Refraining from imputing selfish or
            dishonest motives to the theorist he wants to disagree with,
            Bedient never argues ad feminam,and takes much trouble lucidly to
            explain why he disagrees with Kristeva. There is every reason to
            commend him for his honest style of argumentation. There can be no
            doubt that his essay is produced purely by his concern to take
            issue with a theory he truly believes to be incapable of accounting
            for the way in which poetry and particularly modern
            poetry actually works.
            What causes my unease must therefore be something else. It may of
            course be the fact that Bedient's account of Kristeva's
            theory of language in Revolution of Poetic Language is wrong. His
            is not a somewhat skewed, or slanted, or one-sided presentation of
            her views, but as far as I can see a total misreading.
            Briefly put, Bedient's mistake consists in taking
            Kristeva's account of the sentence process in language for a
            complete theory of poetic language.He does not seem to have noticed
            Kristeva's account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence
            that language the signifying process is the product of
            a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the semiotic, or
            even her definition of the "thetic."
             
            Toril Moi,professor of comparative literature at the University of
            Bergen and professor (adjunct) at Duke University, is the editor of
            The Kristeva Reader (1986) and the author of Sexual/Textual
            Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985). Her most recent book is
            Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (1990).
Calvin Bedient
         How I Slugged It out with Toril Moi_and_Stayed_Awake
         [Toril] Moi says that my misunderstanding of Kristeva lies in
            taking the "semiotic process" (more specifically, what
            Kristeva calls "the drives borne by vocalic or kinetic
            differences")1 for the whole of "poetic
            language": "He does not seem to have noticed
            Kristeva's account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence
            that language the signifying process is the product of
            a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the
            semiotic" (p. 639). But how could I not notice what Kristeva
            herself reiterates over and over? Not notice that "textual
            practice is that most intense struggle toward death, which runs
            alongside and is inseparable from the differentiated binding of its
            charge in a symbolictexture" words I quoted on page 814
            (emphasis added)? The reader will find in my essay many other
            statements (both mine and Kristeva's) to the same effect. I
            noticed, I noticed, but Moi did not notice I noticed. She's
            so certain Kristeva's book is difficult that she may
            underestimate the ability of others to grasp its essential points.
            But despite the pine-knot paroxysms of grotesqueness in the
            Englished version (samples of which so repulsed the editor who
            commissioned the essay that he rejected it), Kristeva makes herself
            understood well enough through her sharp logicality and by dint of
            repetition.
             
            Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of
            California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police
            in Different Voices (1986), a study of The Waste Land.
Heinz Ickstadt
         A Letter from Berlin
         The last kilometers of the Berlin Wall were finally torn down
            during this last week before Christmas, but mentally, socially,
            economically it continues to exist, and for some in what used to be
            East Berlin (and I am not even thinking of hard-liners and former
            party members) it isn't so clear anymore whether the actual
            wall made of concrete wasn't easier to bear. To be sure, the
            wall that once separated the largest cities in each of the two
            Germanys is still present as a scar of empty space; but distances
            have shrunk, and old views of the city have been
            reestablished at least geographically, Berlin, no doubt, is
            slowly becoming one again. However, the social and economic
            differences as well as the mental walls erected in forty years of
            separate existence still divide the eastern from the western part.
            Now that the euphoria of unification has finally subsided, gains
            and losses are being counted, and many East Germans are beginning
            to ask themselves whether the price they paid for political freedom
            was not too high after all. The moral and economic bankruptcy of
            the old regime daily becomes more apparent: its structures of
            corruption and repression, its system of total surveillance that
            had become a part of everyday life and made use of even those whom
            the state had marginalized. And yet that system, corrupt as it was,
            had also provided a measure of stability, a predictable life that,
            although it had restricted individual choice, can now evoke
            nostalgic memories of warmth and security.
             
            Heinz Ickstadt is professor of American literature at the John F.
            Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University
            in Berlin. He has written and edited books on Hart Crane, Thomas
            Pynchon, and the 1930s, and has published widely on American
            literature and culture in the late nineteenth century, American
            modernism, postmodern fiction, and on the relation of literature
            and painting. A book on the changing functions of the American
            novel, coauthored with Winfried Fluck, is forthcoming.
Vicki Mahafffey
         The Case against Art: Wunderlich on Joyce
         Much has been written over the last decade on the urgency of
            expanding the canon, although the imperialist overtones of such a
            movement (which itself rallied under an anti-imperialist banner
            resisting the hegemony of white, male, Western writers) have not
            always been registered. A great deal of attention has pooled at the
            borders of the canon, as we aim to erode or extend those borders,
            but crucial assumptions about the privileged status of the subject
            matter that we as critics choose, whatever that subject matter may
            be, canonical or extracanonical,have not been questioned with
            comparable intensity. Although the hegemony of the subject and the
            concomitant transformation of the "other" into an
            object have been attacked theoretically from several different
            directions (deconstructive, feminist, Marxist), we nevertheless
            lack a widespread practical, professional awareness of the extent
            to which the status of what we "criticize" and teach
            silently reproduces a subject/object economy of privilege. In the
            pages that follow, my contribution to the case against the
            sacralized status of art (a case that several avant-garde modernist
            writers committed themselves to building) emerges out of the
            implicit dialogue that Paul Wunderlich initiates with James Joyce
            on the "subjects" of sexism, anti-Semitism, art, and
            politics, set against the background of the Holocaust. My target is
            neither Wunderlich nor Joyce nor is it any of the groups that
            they might be said to represent but the political
            implications of artistic privilege, a priveilege that criticism,
            even "resistant" criticism, may seek to redistribute
            but not to challenge. My aim is not to desecrate Joyce's
            authority nor to objectify him (from a subjective elevation of my
            own) as a stereotypical sexist or anti-Semite, but to deauthorize
            and rehumanize his monumental status by recontextualizing the
            grounds of his achievement, climbing down to (where all the ladders
            start," the "foul rag-and-bone shop" of
            vulnerability.
             
            Vicki Mahaffey,associate professor of English at the University of
            Pennsylvania, is the author of Reauthorizing Joyce (1988). She is
            currently working on a book about the politics of representation.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
         Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama
         We'd like to do a little hypnosis on you. Imagine that
            you're ensconced in your own family room, your study, or your
            queen-sized bed. Settling back, you pick up the remote, flick on
            the TV, and naturally you turn to PBS. This is what you hear:
            Host 1:Good evening. Welcome to Masterpiece Theatre. Because
            Alistair Cooke is away on assignment in Alaska, we've agreed
            to host the show tonight, and that's both a pleasure and a
            privilege because our program this evening marks the beginning of a
            fascinating new series, a first on television: Masterpiece Theatre
            will present you with a docudrama entitled "Masterpiece
            Theatre."
            Host 2:Like "The First Churchills," this show analyzes
            the situation of real-life people tonight, people in the
            academy. Names have not been changed to protect either the innocent
            or the guilty, but all the situations are fictive and at times
            words that may never have been spoken are put into the mouths of
            people who did not speak them. Other lines, however, are direct
            quotations from various written sources, although none of the
            characters, as we depict them, should be confused with any
            "actual" persons, whether or not those persons would
            scribe to the idea of their own reality. Like "Upstairs/
            Downstairs," this program will introduce you to a spectrum of
            characters from many walks of life. What's different about
            tonight's episode, though, is that all these characters have
            passionate opinions about the show itself. Why, the very idea of
            Masterpiece Theatre drives some of them to Guerrilla Theatre,
            others to Theatre of the Absurd. Yes, you've always already
            guessed it: we focus tonight on a drama involving what we used to
            call humanists now for some a dirty word and most of
            our characters are in deep trouble.
             
            Sandra M. Gilbert,professor of English at the University of
            California, Davis, and Susan Gubar,professor of English at Indiana
            University, are coauthors of No Man's Land: The Place of the
            Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the
            Words (1987) and Volume II: Sexchanges (1988), the first
            installments of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the Attic:
            The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
            (1979). They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of Literature
            by Women: The Tradition in English (1985).
Marie-Hélène Huet
         Monstrous Imagination: Progeny as Art in French Classicism
         The monster and the woman thus find themselves on the same side,
            the side of dissimilarity."The female is as it were a
            deformed male," added Aristotle (GA,p. 175). As she belongs
            to the category of the different, the female can only contribute
            more figures of dissimilarities, if not creatures even more
            monstrous. But the female is a necessary departure from the norm, a
            useful monstrosity. The monster is gratuitous and useless for
            future generations. Aristotle's seminal work on the
            generation of monsters posited a rigorously physical definition
            that was not necessarily linked to deformities:
            "Monstrosities," he wrote, "come under the class
            of offspring which is unlike its parents" (GA,p. 425).
            Further, while a "monstrosity, of course, belongs to the
            class of &lsquo;things contrary to Nature,' … it is contrary
            not to Nature in her entirety but only to Nature in the generality
            of cases" (GA,p. 425).
            The monster, defined repeatedly by its lack of resemblance to its
            legitimate parents, is also monstrous in another important way, one
            that Aristotle described as a false resemblance to different
            species: "People say that the offspring which is formed has
            the head of a ram or an ox; and similarly with other creatures,
            that one has the head of another.… at the same time, in no case are
            they what they are alleged to be, but resemblances only"
            (GA,pp. 417-19; emphasis added). The monster is thus a double
            imposture. Its strange appearance a misleading likeness to
            another species, for example belies the otherwise rigorous
            law that children should resemble their parents. Further, monsters
            offer striking similarities to categories to which they are not
            related, blurring the differences between genres, and disrupting
            the rigorous order of nature. Thus, if the monster were defined in
            the first place as that which did not resemble him who engendered
            it, it nevertheless displayed some sort of resemblance, albeit a
            false resemblance to an object external to its conception.
             
            Marie-Hélène Huet is William R. Kenan Professor of Romance
            Languages at Amherst College. She is the author of Rehearsing the
            Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death, 1793-1797 (1982)
            and is currently completing a book on literature and tetratology.
James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian
         Editor's Introduction: Questions of Evidence
         We think the present moment is a timely one for debating the
            relation between evidentiary protocols and academic disciplines.
            Since academic practices for constituting and deploying evidence
            tend to be discipline-specific, the much-discussed crisis of the
            disciplines in recent years (the so-called blurring of the
            disciplinary genres) has given rise to a series of controversies
            about the status of evidence in current modes of investigation and
            argument: deconstruction, gender studies, new historicism, cultural
            studies, new approaches to the history and philosophy of science,
            the critical legal studies movement, and so on. Unfortunately,
            these controversies too often devolve into oversimplified debates
            about who has the evidence and who does not, who did their homework
            and who did not, or about the dangers of an ill-defined academic
            relativism. Attention needs to be better and otherwise directed: at
            the configuration of the fact-evidence distinction in different
            disciplines and historical moments, for example; or at the relative
            function of such notions as "self-evidence,"
            "experience," "test,"
            "testimony," and "textuality" in various
            academic discourses; or at the ways in which the invoked
            "rules of evidence" are themselves the products of
            historical developments, and themselves undergo redifferentiation
            and reformulation.
             
            James Chandler,professor of English at the University of Chicago,
            is the author of Wordsworth's Second Nature (1984). He is
            currently completing England in 1819,studies in and of romantic
            case history. Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of Critical
            Inquiry,teaches philosophy and the history of science at the
            University of Chicago. He is currently working on the history of
            horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations
            and is editing a collection of essays on Heidegger, philosophy, and
            National Socialism. Harry Harootunian,a coeditor of Critical
            Inquiry and professor of history and East Asian languages and
            civilizations at the University of Chicago, is the author of Things
            Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokigawa (1988) and
            editor, with Masao Miyoshi, of Postmodernism and Japan (1989).
Terry Castle
         Contagious Folly: "An Adventure" and Its Skeptics
         The question of the so-called collective hallucination (as it has
            come to be known to psychical researchers) is neither as arcane nor
            as irrelevant to everyday life as it might first appear. On the
            contrary, it illuminates a much larger philosophical issue. In
            Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,his 1921 book devoted
            to the relationship between individual and group psychology,
            Sigmund Freud lamented that there was still "no explanation
            of the nature of suggestion, that is, of the conditions under which
            influence without adequate logical foundation takes place."2
            What the science of psychology lacked, in other words, was an
            understanding of ideological transference the process by
            which one individual imposed his or her beliefs and convictions on
            another. How did an idea spread, so to speak, from one person to
            the next, resulting in the formation of a group consciousness? The
            phenomenon of the collective hallucination puts the issue
            starkly if ambiguously in relief. If a ghost or
            apparition can be said to represent, in Freud's terms, an
            idea "without adequate logical foundation," a
            delusion,then the process by which two people convince each other
            that they have seen one and in turn attempt to convince
            others might be taken to epitomize the formation of ideology
            itself.
            In what follows I shall examine a case of collective
            hallucination certainly the most notorious and well
            documented in the annals of modern psychical
            research precisely as a way of spotlighting this larger
            problem. My goal in so doing is not so much to expose the folly of
            people who claim to see ghosts (though the notion of folly will
            play a crucial part in what I have to say) but the difficulty that
            inevitably besets anyone who attempts to debunk such claims on
            supposedly rationalist grounds. For in the absence of any
            satisfying explanation of how such "folly"
            spreads how a private delusion becomes a folie à deux (or
            troisor quatre) the labors of the skeptic are doomed to
            result only in a peculiar rhetorical and epistemological impasse.
             
            2. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
            Ego,trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1959), p. 22.
             
            Terry Castle is professor of English at Stanford University and the
            author of Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in
            Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (1986). She is
            currently working on a new study entitled Lesbians and Other
            Ghosts: Essays on Literature and Sexuality.
Joan W. Scott
         The Evidence of Experience
         There is a section in Samuel Delany's magnificent
            autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water,that
            dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of
            difference, the history, that is, of the designation of
            "other," of the attribution of characteristics that
            distinguish categories of people from some presumed (and usually
            unstated) norm.1 Delany (a gay man, a black man, a writer of
            science fiction) recounts his reaction to his first visit to the
            St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold
            of a "gym-sized room" dimly lit by blue bulbs. The room
            was full of people, some standing, the rest
                        an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall
            to wall.
                                    My first response was a kind of heart-
            thudding astonishment very close to fear.
                        I have written of a space at certain libidinal
            saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather
            that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2
            Watching the scene establishes for Delany a "fact that flew
            in the face" of the prevailing representation of homosexuals
            in the 1950s as "isolated perverts," as subjects
            "gone awry." The "apprehension of massed
            bodies" gave him (as it does, he argues, anyone, "male,
            female, working or middle class") a "sense of political
            power":
            what this experience said was that there was a population not
            of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but
            rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and
            already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and
            bad, to accommodate our sex. [M,p. 174]
             
            2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science
            Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 (New York, 1988), p.
            173; hereafter abbreviated M.
             
            Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for
            Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most
            recently, of Gender and the Politics of History (1988) and is
            currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political
            rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring
            arguments about equality and difference.
Mark Kelman
         Reasonable Evidence of Reasonableness
         Questions of how we claim to know the things that we know and whose
            claims to knowledge are treated as authoritative are inescapable in
            reaching legal judgments. I want to illustrate this generalization
            by referring to a pair of hypothetical self-defense cases that, I
            argue, require fact finders to judge both how
            "accurately" each defendant understood the situation in
            which he found himself and how accurately policymakers can assess
            the consequences of alternative legal rules.
            The first case I will deal with is one in which the defendant
            shoots and kills her sleeping husband. The husband had physically
            abused her over a long period. While the defendant will of course
            acknowledge that she was in no immediate danger at the moment she
            killed the man, her preliminary claim (we will explore variations
            as well) is that she needed to act self-defensively at that moment
            for fear that she subsequently would be incapable of defending
            herself against life-threatening attacks that she was convinced
            would inevitably be made.
            The second case is one in which a white defendant shoots and kills
            a black teenager who has confronted him on the subway, in a
            situation in which the teenager's "threats" were
            ambiguous. The shooting victim had brandished no weapon and made no
            physical contact with the defendant, but he had "asked"
            the defendant for money and, in the defendant's mind,
            displayed a generally threatening demeanor. I will presuppose that
            this defendant unlike Bernhard Goetz, the defendant in the
            notorious New York subway vigilante case on which I partly base
            this hypothetical model overtly acknowledges that the race of
            the victim played a substantial role in his assessment of the
            danger of the situation. (It is important to note as well that the
            defendant in my model shoots the victim only once and does not
            shoot while his victim is retreating from the scene, as Goetz
            almost surely did.)
             
            Mark Kelman,professor of law at Stanford University, is the author
            of A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (1987) as well as a number of
            articles on law and economics, taxation, criminal law, and legal
            theory.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
         Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl
         There seems to be something self-evident irresistibly so, to
            judge from its gleeful propagation about the use of the
            phrase, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," as the
            Q.E.D. of phobic narratives about the degeneracy of academic
            discourse in the humanities. But what? The narrative link between
            masturbation itself and degeneracy, though a staple of pre-1920s
            medical and racial science, no longer has any respectable currency.
            To the contrary: modern views of masturbation tend to place it
            firmly in the framework of optimistic, hygienic narratives of all-
            too-normative individual development. When Jane E. Brody, in a
            recent "Personal Health" column in the NewYork
            Times,reassures her readers that, according to experts, it is
            actually entirely possible for people to be healthy without
            masturbating; "that the practice is not essential to normal
            development and that no one who thinks it is wrong or sinful should
            feel he or she must try it"; and that even
            "'those who have not masturbated … can have perfectly
            normal sex lives as adults,'" the all but perfectly
            normal Victorianist may be forgiven for feeling just a
            little out of breath.3 In this altered context, the self-
            evidence of a polemical link between autoeroticism and narratives
            of wholesale degeneracy (or, in one journalist's historically
            redolent term, "idiocy")4 draws on a very widely
            discredited body of psychiatric and eugenic expertise whose only
            direct historical continuity with late twentieth-century thought
            has been routed straight through the rhetoric and practice of
            fascism. But it now draws on this body of expertise under the more
            acceptable gloss of the modern, trivializing, hygienic-
            developmental discourse, according to which autoeroticism not only
            is funny any sexuality of any power is likely to hover near
            the threshold of hilarity but also must be relegated to the
            inarticulable space of (a barely superceded) infantility.
             
            3. Jane E. Brody, "Personal Health," New York Times,4
            Nov. 1987.
            4. Rosenblatt, "The Universities," p. 3.
             
            Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is professor of English at Duke University
            and the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male
            Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990).
Ian Hacking
         Two Souls in One Body
         Bernice R. broke down so badly, when she turned nineteen, and
            behaved so much like a retarded child that she was committed to the
            Ohio State Bureau of Juvenile Research. Its director, Henry Herbert
            Goddard, a psychologist of some distinction, recognized that she
            suffered from multiple personality disorder. She underwent a course
            of treatment lasting nearly five years, after which "the
            dissociation seems to be overcome and replaced by a complete
            synthesis. [She] is working regularly a half day and seems
            reasonably happy in her reactions to her environment."1
            Therapy enabled her core personality and her main alter to make
            contact with each other, and for her to understand her past and, to
            some extent, why she had split.
            Her story prompts questions about evidence, objectivity, historical
            truth, psychological reality, self-knowledge, and the soul. It
            involves that powerful intersection of morality and metaphysics:
            why is it of value to have a self-understanding founded on true
            beliefs about ourselves and our past, or at any rate on memories
            that are not strictly false? To what extent is such self=knowledge
            based on evidence? To what extent is it knowledge at all?
             
            Ian Hacking,a philosopher, teaches at the Institute for the History
            and Philosophy of Science and Technology in the University of
            Toronto, and he is the author of Taming Chance (1990). His most
            recent contribution to  is "The Making and
            Molding of Child Abuse" (Winter 1991).
Charles Bernheimer
         Response to Peter Brooks
         In his article "Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last
            Unveil'd" ( 16 [Autumn 1989]: 1-32),
            Peter Brooks makes the claim that, for a certain dominant mode of
            nineteenth-century narrative, the female sexual organ is the occult
            source of the narrative dynamic. On a superficial reading,
            Brooks's piece might appear to empower women by putting their
            sexuality at the generative origin of the story. But the opposite
            is the case: his argument reflects rather than critiques the
            misogynist strategies of the texts he discusses. I will begin my
            analysis of his article with a brief return to the story by Barbey
            d'Aurevilly whose climactic scene Brooks offers as "a
            kind of allegory of the cultural story [he has] been
            delineating" (p. 29).
             
            Charles Bernheimeris professor of romance languages and chair of
            the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the
            University of Pennsylvania. The author of Flaubert and Kafka(1982)
            and Figures of Ill Repute (1989), he is currently working on a
            study of fin-de-siècle literature and art, The Decadent Subject.
Peter Brooks
         Response to Charles Bernheimer
         I suppose I should be grateful to Charles Bernheimer for setting me
            back on the path of righteousness from which I appear to have so
            grievously strayed. But I think Bernheimer and I are in deep
            disagreement about the purposes of literary criticism, and this may
            make me, in his perspective, a hopeless case. Bernheimer reads my
            article, "Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last
            Unveil'd," as intending "to empower women by
            putting their sexuality at the generative origin of story"
            (p. 868). He ascribes to me the motive of "offering feminists
            a gift" (p. 873). He even suggests, in a particularly
            offensive move: "This offer, I would guess, provides the
            generative energy for Brooks's critical story" (p.
            873). I can do without such attributions of motive. My intent, far
            less ambitious, was to describe some attitudes toward the nude
            female body that I found in novels and paintings of the later
            nineteenth century. I don't believe that criticism need be
            harnessed to the "empowerment" of anyone in particular,
            nor that it need denounce what Bernheimer identifies as
            "patriarchal oppression" (p. 874), "misogynist
            strategies" (p. 868), and the "hegemonic
            privileges" (p. 873) of the male gaze everywhere they are to
            be found (and they are to be found pretty much everywhere in the
            Western tradition). Does criticism really need to burden itself
            with this litany of clichés? Do they tell us anything new?
             
            Peter Brooksis Tripp Professor of Humanities and director of the
            Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. He is nearing
            completion of a book tentatively entitled Storied Bodies.
Jerome Bruner
         The Narrative Construction of Reality
         Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind
            has centered principally on how man achieves a "true"
            knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of
            course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind's interplay
            with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the
            association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked
            inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right
            reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we
            achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a
            reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to
            be immutable and, as it were, "there to be observed."
            This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development
            of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have
            dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its
            grasp on the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury
            Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise
            and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of
            mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and
            uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to
            a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of
            internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some
            unspecified principle of reflection by which whether through
            reinforcement, association, or conditioning we came to
            respond to the world "as it is." There have always been
            dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human
            mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian
            rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices.
             
            Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York
            University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of
            Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning,appeared in 1990. In
            1987 he received the Balzan Prize for "a lifetime
            contribution to the study of human psychology."
Nina Baym
         Between Enlightenment and Victorian: Toward a Narrative of_American
            Women Writers Writing History
         All the early advocates of women's education, male and
            female, had proposed history as a central subject in women's
            education perhaps as the central subject. They envisaged it
            as a substitute for novel reading, which they viewed as
            strengthening women's mental weakness (if the oxymoron may be
            permitted) and encouraging them in unrepublican habits of idleness,
            extravagance, and daydreaming.6 Many prominent women educators
            wrote history, among them Pierce, Rowson, and Willard. But besides
            such history writing and history advocacy by materialist
            educational reformers, American women wrote history in other modes
            and contexts, and it is on these that I want to focus now.
            Speculating on history as a woman's writing practice from the
            earliest years of the republic, my approach is purely literary in
            taking for granted, but considering it unimportant, that by
            present-day standards none of these women could have been
            "good" historians. More generally, I supposed that
            insofar as our present-day definition of literature or, more
            generally, of writing, invokes such forms as poem, play, story, and
            novel and insofar as the feminist enterprise of recovering
            women's writing further emphasizes such private, putatively
            unpublished forms as journal, diary, and letters we have been
            instructed to perceive women writers as largely sealed off from
            public discourse, writing (if they wrote at all) from somewhere
            outside the public sphere. This currently dominant view of
            women's writing may be an inadvertent artifact of an unself-
            conscious, individualistic, curiously romantic definition of
            writing even among postmodernist critics; or, it may be a strategic
            view designed to focus attention on and valorize previously
            silenced or presently new forms of utterance. In contrast, to
            encompass diverse, already published, programmatically public
            instances of women's writing in our definition is to begin to
            see how often and how openly (albeit from certain ideological
            positions but manifestly not the one taken here how
            unsatisfactorily) American women have written in such forms. We
            then begin to recover a different sort of writing woman from the
            madwoman in the attic and acquire materials with which to begin
            constructing a different narrative of American women's
            literary history.
             
            Nina Baym is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the
            University of Illinois, Urbana. She is the author of many books and
            articles on American and feminist literary topics.
William Flesch
         Quoting Poetry
         A tension between content and form can even be said to be essential
            to the effect of a great deal of rhymed poetry in English. William
            Wimsatt's wonderful essay on "One Relation of Rhyme to
            Reason" argues precisely that rhymes in English poetry work
            when differences of meaning and of part of speech tend to
            counterpoint similarities of sound.3 Rhyming nouns together, for
            example, ought to be avoided, since the salutory tension will arise
            from the fact that a difference in grammatical function will
            coexist with sameness of sound. This means that prosodical
            structure does not mirror content, and that even in rhymed poetry
            the sense may be variously drawn out. Empson makes the
            complementary remark that English is blessed with the fact that
            subjects and verbs cannot in general rhyme:
            The crucial thing about English, as a language for poetry, is that
            you cannot rhyme the subject with the verb, because either
            &lsquo;the cat distracts' and &lsquo;the nerves swerve'
            or &lsquo;the cats distract' and &lsquo;the nerve
            swerves'; this bit of grammar has been enormously helpful to
            English poetry by forcing it away from platitude.4
            This means that the grammar of rhymed poems will not simply be
            determined by the rhyme scheme but will tend to be a kind of
            counterpoint to that scheme, since the predicate is kept from
            rhyming with the subject.
             
            3. William Wimsatt, "On Relation of Rhyme to Reason,"
            The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky.,
            1954), pp. 152-66. In this essay, anticipating some of the
            deconstructive claims he came to find too extreme at the end of his
            life, Wimsatt writes that "verse in general, and more
            particularly rhyme, make their special contribution to poetic
            structure … [by imposing] upon the logical pattern of expressed
            argument a kind of fixative counterpattern of alogical
            implication" (p. 153). See also Wimsatt, "Verbal Style:
            Logical and Counterlogical," The Verbal Icon,pp. 200-217.
            4. Empson, "Rhyme," Argufying,p. 136.
             
            William Flesch teaches English at Brandeis University and is the
            author of The Heart of Generosity: Largess and Loss in Herbert,
            Shakespeare, and Milton (forthcoming).
John Koethe
         Contrary Impulses: The Tension between Poetry and Theory
         A striking fact of our current literary culture is the estrangement
            between poets and critics and reviewers of contemporary poetry on
            the one hand, and proponents of that loosely defined set of
            doctrines, methodologies, and interests that goes by the name of
            "theory" on the other. There are individual exceptions
            to this on both sides, and one can find counterexamples to every
            generalization I shall suggest here. Nevertheless, anyone familiar
            with the climates of opinion to be found in English and philosophy
            departments, poetry workshops and critical symposia, creative
            writing and cultural studies programs, and the (dwindling)&shy;
            nonacademic counterparts of these especially among people in
            their twenties and thirties has to acknowledge the lack of
            acquaintance and interest and often even the disdain and
            contempt that characterizes the relations between poets and
            those engaged in the kind of high-level, quasi-philosophical
            reflective activity that literature, and poetry in particular, used
            to occasion. Illustrations are easy to come by. References to
            modern poetry by younger theorists are typically confined to the
            high modernists and to poets canonized twenty or thirty years ago
            in books like Donald Allen's New American Poetry or Richard
            Howard's Alone with American;and their rare allusions to the
            poetry of their contemporaries often betray a striking lack of
            familiarity and taste. Conversely, the fact that eighty years after
            Ezra Pound called for the breaking of everything breakable, a poet
            as intelligent and conceptually ambitious as Jorie Graham should
            title a book The End of Beauty,and have the theoretical outlook
            evoked by the title hailed as radical by as informed a critic as
            Helen Vendler, surely suggests that the level of reflective
            awareness in the poetry community is not what it might be.2
             
            1. Quoted in Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens
            Remembered An Oral Biography (New York, 1983), p. 43.
            2. See Helen Vendler, "Married to Hurry and Grim Song,"
            The New Yorker,27 July 1987, pp. 74-77.
             
            John Koethe is professor of philosophy at the University of
            Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His most recent book of poetry is The Late
            Wisconsin Spring (1984).
Carlo Ginzburg
         Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian
         In the last 2500 years, since the beginnings in ancient Greece of
            the literary genre we call "history," the relationship
            between history and law has been very close. True, the Greek word
            historia is derived from medical language, but the argumentative
            ability it implied was related to the judicial sphere. History, as
            Arnaldo Momigliano emphasized some years ago, emerged as an
            independent intellectual activity at the intersection of medicine
            and rhetoric. Following the example of the former, the historian
            analyzed specific cases and situations looking for their natural
            causes; following the prescriptions of the latter a
            technique, or an art, born in tribunals he communicated the
            results of his inquiry.2
            Within the classical tradition, historical writing (and poetry as
            well) had to display a feature the Greeks called enargeia,and the
            Romans, evidential in narrtatione:the ability to convey a vivid
            representation of characters and situations. The historian, like
            the lawyer, was expected to make a convincing argument by
            communicating the illusion of reality, not by exhibiting proofs
            collected either by himself or by others.3 Collecting proofs was,
            until the mid-eighteenth century, an activity practiced by
            antiquarians and erudite, not by historians.4 When, in his Traité
            des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité
            he l'histoire  (1769), the erudite Jesuit Henri Griffet
            compared the historian to a judge who carefully evaluates proofs
            and witnesses, he was expressing a still-unaddressed intellectual
            need. Only a few years later Edward Gibbon published his Decline
            and Fall of the Roman Empire,the first work that effectively
            combined historical narrative with an antiquarian approach.5
             
            2. See Arnaldo Momigliano, "History between Medicine and
            Rhetoric," Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici
            e del mondo antico, trans. Riccardo Di Donato (Rome, 1987), pp. 14-
            25.
            3. See Ginzburg, "Montrer et citer."
            4. See Momigliano, "Ancient History and the
            Antiquarian," Contributo alla storia degli studi classici
            (Rome, 1955), pp. 67-106.
            5. See Henri Griffet, Traité des differentes sortes de preuves qui
            servent à établir la vérité de l'histoire,2d ed. (Liège,
            1770). Allen Johnson, in his Historian and Historical Evidence(New
            York, 1926), speaks of the Traité as "the most significant
            book on method after Mabillon's De re diplomatic" (p.
            114). See also Momigliano, "Ancient History and the
            Antiquarian," p. 81, and Ginzburg, "Just One
            Witness." On Gibbon, see Momilgiano, Sesto contributo alla
            storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1980), pp.
            231-84.
             
            Carlo Ginzburgis Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian
            Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
            His two most recent books are Ecstasies: Deciphering the
            Witches' Sabbath and Il giudice e lo storico.
Lorraine Daston
         Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern_Europe
         I have sketched the well-known distinction between facts and
            evidence not to defend or attack it (as does a vast literature in
            the history and philosophy of science), but rather as a preface to
            a key episode in the history of the conceptual categories of fact
            and evidence. My question is neither, "Do neutral facts
            exist?" nor "How does evidence prove or
            disprove?" but rather, "How did our current conceptions
            of neutral facts and enlisted evidence, and the distinction between
            them, come to be?" How did evidence come to be incompatible
            with intention, and is it possible to imagine a kind of evidence
            that is intention-laden?
            It is my claim that partial answers to these questions lie buried
            in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature on prodigies
            and miracles. I shall argue that during this period prodigies
            briefly became the prototype for a new kind of scientific fact, and
            that miracles briefly exemplified a form of evidence patent to the
            senses and crucially dependent on intention. Both conceptions
            diverge sharply not only from current notions of facts and
            evidence, but also from medieval views on the nature of prodigies
            and miracles. Prodigies were originally closely akin to portent,
            divine signs revealing God's will and things to come;
            miracles were more intimately associated with the private
            experience of grace than with the public evidence of the senses.
            Prodigies were transformed from signs into nonsignifying facts, and
            miracles into compelling evidence, as part of more sweeping changes
            in natural philosophy and theology in the mid-seventeenth century.
             
            Lorraine Daston is professor of history of science at the
            University of Göttingen, Federal Republic of Germany. She is the
            author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988) and is
            currently at work on a history of scientific objectivity.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
         Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account
         Questions of evidence including the idea, still central to
            what could be called informal epistemology, that our beliefs and
            claims are duly corrected by our encounters with autonomously
            resistant objects (for example, fact, rocks, bricks, and texts-
            themselves) are inevitably caught up in views of how beliefs,
            generally, are produced, maintained, and transformed. In recent
            years, substantially new accounts of these cognitive
            dynamics and, with them, more or less novel conceptions of
            what we might mean by "beliefs" have been
            emerging from various nonphilosophical fields (for example,
            theoretical biology, cognitive science, and the sociology of
            knowledge) as well as from within disciplinary epistemology.
            Because of the distinctly reflexive nature of these
            developments that is, new conceptions of concepts, revised
            beliefs about belief, invocations of evidence said to challenge the
            operation of evidence, quasi-logical refutations of the authority
            of logic, and so on the deployment of positions and arguments
            becomes extremely difficult here, as does even the description of
            the relevant events in intellectual history. Indeed, since we are
            dealing here not merely with shifts of, as it is sometimes put,
            "vocabulary," but, often enough, with clashes of
            profoundly divergent conceptual idiom and syntax,every major term
            and discursive move is potentially implicated in the problematic
            itself, and, thereby, open to radical questioning and liable to
            charges of question-begging.
            The aim of the present essay is twofold: first, to suggest the more
            general interest and significance, beyond the fields in which they
            are being developed, of these emerging reconceptions of belief;
            and, second, to frame that suggestion in an account which, since it
            cannot escape the rhetorical difficulties just mentioned,
            foregrounds them. A number of related themes notably,
            symmetry, circularity, reciprocality, and ambivalence recur
            throughout and, at various points, are drawn together in accord
            with the account itself.
             
            Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative
            Literature and English at Duke University, and director of its
            Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and Cultural Theory. Her
            current work examines contemporary models of cognition and
            communication.
R. C. Lewontin
         Facts and the Factitious in Natural Sciences
         The problem that confronts us when we try to compare the structure
            of discourse and explanation in different domains of knowledge is
            that no one is an insider in more than one field, and insider
            information is essential. An observer who is not immersed in the
            practice of a particular scholarship and who wants to understand it
            is at the mercy of the practitioners. Yet those practitioners are
            themselves mystified by a largely unexamined communal myth of how
            scholarship is carried on. R. G. Collingwood, although primarily a
            philosopher, was immersed in the community of historians and
            understood how history is done, so that he has had an immense
            influence on our ideas about historiography. Every historian knows
            The Idea of History.1 He was also a metaphysician, yet his
            influence on scientists' understanding of nature, and of
            science, has been nil, and it is a rare scientist indeed who has
            ever heard of Collingwood or read The Idea of Nature.2
            Collingwood's views of the structure of science had to be
            constructed in large part from the elaborate fictions created by
            scientists and by an earlier generation of philosophers and
            historians of science who participated in the Baconian myth of the
            hypothetical-deductive scheme.
             
            1. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946).
            2. See Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1945).
             
            R. C. Lewontinis Alexander Agassiz Professor at Harvard University.
            He is an experimental and theoretical evolutionary geneticist who
            has also worked extensively on epistemological issues in biology.
            He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (1974)
            and, with Richard Levins, of The Dialectical Biologist (1985). His
            current research concerns the nature of genetic variation among
            individuals within species.
Jacques Derrida
         Given Time: The Time of the King
         One could accuse me here of making a big deal and a whole history
            out of words and gestures that remain very clear. When Madame de
            Mainternon says that the King takes her time, it is because she is
            glad to give it to him and takes pleasure from it: the King takes
            nothing from her and gives her as much as he takes. And when she
            says, "I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to
            give all," she is confiding in her correspondent about a
            daily economy concerning the leisures and charities, the works and
            days of a "grande dame" somewhat overwhelmed by her
            obligations. None of the words she writes has the sense of the
            unthinkable and the impossible toward which my reading would have
            pulled them, in the direction of giving-taking, of time and the
            rest. She did not mean to say that, you will say.
            What if … yes she did [Et si].
            And if what she wrote meant to say that, then what would that
            suppose? How, where, on the basis of what and when can we read this
            letter fragment as I have done? How could we even hijack it as I
            have done, while still respecting its literality and its language?
            End of the epigraph.
             
             
            Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes
            Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and professor of French,
            University of California, Irvine. In the past year, he has
            published Le Problème de la genèse chez Husserl (1990), Mémoires
            d'aveugle, l'autoportrait et autres ruines(1990),
            L'Autre Cap (1991), and Circonfessionin Jacques Derrida,with
            Geoffrey Bennington (1991). Peggy Kamufis professor of French at
            the University of Southern California and Directeur de Programme,
            Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She is the author of
            Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988) and most
            recently has edited A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (1991).
Naomi Schor
         "Cartes Postales": Representing Paris 1900
         Two widely shared but diametrically opposed views inform what
            theories we have on the everyday: one, which we might call the
            feminine or feminist, though it is not necessarily held by women or
            self-described feminists, links the everyday with the daily rituals
            of private life carried out within the domestic sphere
            traditionally presided over by women; the other, the masculine or
            masculinist, sites the everyday in the public spaces and spheres
            dominated especially, but not exclusively, in modern Western
            bourgeois societies by men. According to the one, the everyday is
            made up of the countless repetitive gestures and small practices
            that fall under the heading of what the existentialists called the
            contingent. According to the other, the everyday is made up of the
            chance encounters of the streets; its hero is not the housewife but
            the flâneur.In the word of Maurice Blanchot:
            The everyday is human. The earth, the sea, forest, light, night, do
            not represent everydayness, which belongs first of all to the dense
            presence of great urban centers. We need these admirable deserts
            that are the world's cities for the experience of the
            everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday is not at home in
            our dwelling-places, it is not in offices or churches, any more
            than in libraries or museums. It is in the street if it is
            anywhere.1
             
            1. Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," trans. Susan
            Hanson, in "Everyday Life," ed. Alice Kaplan and
            Kristin Ross, special issue of Yale French Studies,no. 73 (1987):
            17.
             
            Naomi Schor is the William Hanes Wannamaker Professor Romance
            Studies at Duke University and coeditor of differences: A Journal
            of Feminist Cultural Studies. Her most recent book is Reading in
            Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987). She is currently
            completing a book entitled George Sand and Idealism.
Kofi Agawn
         Representing African Music
         Among the fields of music study, ethnomusicology has wrestled most
            self-consciously with matters of representation. Since its
            inception in the late nineteenth century as vergleischende
            Musikwissenschaft [comparative musicology] and throughout its
            turbulent history, ethnomusicology has been centrally and vitally
            concerned with at least three basic issues and their numerous
            ramifications. First is the problem of locating disciplinary
            boundaries: is ethnomusicology a subfield of musicology, does it
            belong under anthropology or ethnology, or is it an autonomous
            discipline?1 Second is the problem of translation: what factors
            influence the attempt to translate the reality of other musical
            cultures into audio and visual recordings, verbal accounts, and
            transcriptions in musical notation? Is there a viable "theory
            of translatability"?2 Third is a network of political and
            ideological matters: what sorts of ethical issues constrain the
            practical effort to understand another culture? What is the
            relation between empire and ethnomusicological representation? Can
            we that is, is it a good thing to study any music
            without taking note of the social, economic, political, and
            technological circumstances of its producers?
             
            1. A concise introduction to the field of ethnomusicology, its
            history, personalities, and method may be found in Barbara Krader,
            "Ethnomusicology," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music
            and Musicians,ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London, 1980), 6:275-82.
            The most comprehensive recent discussion of key issues in
            ethnomusicological research is Bruno Nettl, The Study of
            Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, Ill.,
            1983).
            2. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes
            Its Object (New York, 1983), p. 43.
             
            Kofi Agawu teaches at Cornell University and is the author of
            Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music
            (1991).
James E. Young
         The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today
         One of the contemporary results of Germany's memorial
            conundrum is the rise of its "counter-monuments":
            brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to
            challenge the very premises of their being. On the former site of
            Hamburg's greatest synagogue, at Bornplatz, Margrit Kahl has
            assembled an intricate mosaic tracing the complex lines of the
            synagogue's roof construction: a palimpsest for a building
            and community that no longer exist. Norbert Radermacher bathes a
            guilty landscape in Berlin's Neukölln neighborhood with the
            inscribed light of its past. Alfred Hrdlicka began (but never
            finished) a monument in Hamburg to counter and thereby
            neutralize an indestructible Nazi monument nearby. In a
            suburb of Hamburg, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz have erected
            a black pillar against fascism and for peace designed to disappear
            altogether over time. The very heart of Berlin, former site of the
            gestapo headquarters, remains a great, gaping wound as politicians,
            artists, and various committees forever debate the most appropriate
            memorial for this site.4
             
            4. The long-burning debate surrounding projected memorials, to the
            Gestapo-Gelånde in particular, continues to exemplify both the
            German memorial conundrum and the state's painstaking
            attempts to articulate it. For an excellent documentation of the
            process, see Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und
            Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem "Prinz-Albrecht-
            Gelånde," ed. Reinhard Rürup (Berlin, 1987). For a shorter
            account, see James E. Young, "The Topography of German
            Memory," The Journal of Art 1 (Mar. 1991): 30.
             
            James E. Young is assistant professor of English and Judaic studies
            at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of
            Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences
            of Interpretation(1988) and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust
            Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America(forthcoming),
            from which this essay is drawn. He is also the curator of
            "The Art of Memory," an exhibition at the Jewish Museum
            of New York (forthcoming).
Pierre Vidal-Naquet
         Atlantis and the Nations
         I will not dwell overlong on the "meaning" of this
            story. But let me make two essential points. Plato tells us this
            story as though it were true: it is "a tale which, though
            passing strange, is yet wholly true." Those words were to be
            translated into every language in the world and used to justify the
            most realistic fantasies. That is quite understandable, for
            Plato's story started something new. With a perversity that
            was to ensure him great success, Plato had laid the foundations for
            the historical novel, that is to say, the novel set in a particular
            place and a particular time. We are now quite accustomed to
            historical novels, and we also know that in every detective story
            there comes a moment when the detective declares that real life is
            not much like what happens in detective stories; it is far more
            complicated. But that was not the case in the fourth century B.C.
            Plat's words were taken seriously, not by everyone, but by
            many, down through the centuries. And it is not too hard to see
            that some people continue to take them seriously today.
            As for the "meaning," following others and together
            with others, I have tried elsewhere to show that essentially it is
            quite clear: the Athens and Atlantis of ancient lore represent the
            two faces of Plato's own Athens. The former, the old
            primordial Athens, is what Plato would have liked the city of which
            he was a citizen to be; the latter is what Athens was in the age of
            Pericles and Cleon, an imperialistic power whose very existence
            constituted a threat to other Greek cities.
             
            Pierre Vidal-Naquet is director of the Centre Louis Gernet de
            Recherches Comparées sure les Sociétés Anciennes at the École des
            Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His most recent
            publications are the second volume of Les Juifs, la mémoire et le
            present (1991), La Grèce ancienne 1: Du mythe à la raison,with
            Jean-Pierre Vernant (1990), and La Démocratie grecque vue
            d'ailleurs (1990). Among his works to have appeared in
            English are Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,with Jean-Pierre
            Vernant (1988), and The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of
            Society in the Greek World (1986). Janet Lloyd is a supervisor for
            a number of colleges in Cambridge University, where she gives
            classes in French language and literature. Among her more recent
            translations are Yves Mény's Government and Politics in
            Western Europe: Britain, France, Italy, West Germany (1990) and
            Marie-Claire Bergère's Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie,
            1911-1937 (1989). In progress are translations of works on
            Shakespeare, Pericles' Athens, and a historical geography of
            France.
Simon Schaffer
         Self Evidence
         There seems to be an important historical connexion between changes
            in the concept of evidence and that of the person capable of giving
            evidence. Michel Foucault urged that during the classical age the
            relationship between evidence and the person was reversed:
            scholasticism derived statements' authority from that of
            their authors, while scientists now hold that matters of fact are
            the most impersonal of statements.1 In a similar vein, Ian Hacking
            defines a kind of evidence which &lsquo;consists in one thing
            pointing beyond itself', and claims that until the early
            modern period &lsquo;testimony and authority were primary, and
            things could count as evidence only insofar as they resembled the
            witness of observers and the authority of books'.2 This
            captures a rather familiar theme of the ideology of early modern
            natural philosophy. Nullius in verba was the Royal Society of
            London's motto. Robert Boyle, doyen of the Society's
            experimental philosophers, tried to build up the credit of
            laboratory objects at the expense of untrustworthy humans. He
            reckoned that &lsquo;inanimate bodies … are not capable of
            prepossessions, or giving us partial informations', while
            vulgar men may be influenced by predispositions, and so many other
            circumstances, that they may easily give occasion to
            mistakes'. So an inanimate body's deeds could function
            as signs of some other state of affairs in a way that the stories
            of vulgar humans could not.3
             
            1. See Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale
            au Collêge de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris, 1971).
            2. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study
            of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical
            Inference(Cambridge, 1975), pp. 34, 33.
            3. Quoted in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the
            Air Pump (Princeton, N.J., 1985), p. 218. See also Peter Dear,
            &lsquo;Totius in verba:' Rhetoric and Authority in the Early
            Royal Society', Isis 76 (June 1985): 145-61.
             
            Simon Schaffer lectures in history and philosophy at the University
            of Cambridge. He is the coauthor (with Steven Shapin) of Leviathan
            and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life(1985)
            and coauthors (with David Gooding and Trevor Pinch) of The Uses of
            Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (1989).
Donald Preziosi
         The Question of Art History
         Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and
            others in these debates has been paid to differences among the
            partisans of various disciplinary methodologies, or to the
            differential benefits of one or another school of thought or
            theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social
            sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art
            historical practice.1 Yet there has also come about among art
            historians a renewed interest in the historical origins of the
            academic discipline itself, and in the relationships of its
            institutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing
            of other historical and critical disciplines in the latter part of
            the nineteenth century. These interests have led increasingly to
            wider discussion by art historians of the particular nature of
            disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic
            practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern
            discourse on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism,
            aesthetic philosophy, the art market, exhibitions, and musicology.2
            What follows does not aim to summarize or characterize these
            developments but is more simply an attempt to delineate some of the
            principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary
            institution in the light of the material conditions of academic
            practice that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century in
            relation to the history of mueological display. In brief, this
            essay is concerned with the circumstances of art history's
            foundations as a systematic and "scientific" practice,
            and its focus is limited to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American
            example.
             
            1. An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald
            Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New
            Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 80-121. See also The New Art History,ed.
            A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1988).
            2. One important sign off these discussions has been a series of
            "Views and Overviews" of the discipline appearing in
            The Art Bulletin in recent years, of which the most recent has been
            perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive: Mieke Bal and Norman
            Byrson, "Semiotics and Art History," The Art Bulletin
            73 (June 1991): 174-208.
             
            Donald Preziosiis professor of art history at the University of
            California, Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1992, at the École des
            Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of
            Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (1989) and is
            currently completing a book on the history of museums entitled
            Framing Modernity.
Bill Brown
         Writing, Race, and Erasure: Michael Fried and the_Scene_of_Reading
         … [T]o trace the problematic of writing (however various) in the
            Norris canon is foremost to confirm Fried's claims about its
            pervasiveness. Indeed, he now intimates that the problematic
            pervades the fiction of "other important writers of the 1890s
            and early 1900s," work by Jack London, Harold Frederic, and
            Henry James (predictably, the "unresolved borderline
            case" [p. 199]). On the one hand, this pervasiveness muddies
            an already ambivalent use of the term impressionism (emptied of its
            traditional content, yet clung to as a heuristic means of grouping
            writers);10 on the other hand, it augments Fried's sense that
            the thematization of writing attained particular moment in the late
            nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To my eye, nonetheless,
            the moment dissolves once its historical isolationism confronts
            "literary history."
             
            10. Fried explicitly addresses this ambivalence, explaining that
            "I am unpersuaded by the many attempts that have been made to
            define that concept either in relation to French impressionist
            painting or in terms of a fidelity to or evocation of the
            &lsquo;impressions' of one or more characters (including the
            implied narrator), but I see no comparably useful designation for
            the global tendency that Crane, Norris, and Conrad all
            instantiate" (p. 197 n. 6). The term, as I see it however,
            serves precisely to exclude the global tendency as it is
            instantiated elsewhere. And yet, to the degree that
            "impressionism" can now designate a confrontation
            between the sight of writing and the impressionist emphasis on
            sight as traditionally understood, Fried, despite all disclaimers,
            revivifies that tradition (which has had scant attention in the
            last two decades).
             
            Bill Brown,assistant professor of English at the University of
            Chicago, is presently completing a book on the "economy of
            play" in the work of Stephen Crane.
Michael Fried
         Response to Bill Brown
         So there will be no mistake, I don't deny, why would I wish
            to, that a thematic of racial difference is crucial to the overall
            plot of Almayer's Folly.What I claim is that that thematic
            falls short of significantly determining or even, to use
            Brown's word, appreciably "complicating" the
            problematic of erasure that surfaces in the closing chapters.
            It's as though the rest of the novel is there chiefly to
            stage those chapters and their dramatization of erasure; something
            similar takes place in Powell's narrative of spying into
            Captain Anthony's cabin toward the end of Chance and even, to
            a lesser degree, in the climactic encounter between Winnie Verloc
            and her husband in chapter 11 of The Secret Agent. It's worth
            noting, too, that the opening paragraphs of A Personal
            Record,Conrad's autobiographical account of the beginnings
            and origins of his "writing life," describe the
            circumstances under which "the tenth chapterof
            &lsquo;Almayer's Folly' was begun."8 This in
            itself suggests that Conrad has a special stake in the last three
            chapters of his first novel, and one of my aims in
            "Almayer's Face" was to discover (think of the
            neutrino) what that stake may have been.9
             
            8. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (1912; Marlboro, Vt., 1988),
            pp. 72: my emphasis.
            9. Again, so there will be no mistake, I would distinguish
            Almayer's Follysharply in this respect from, for example, The
            Nigger of the "Narcissus," in which effects of erasure
            are disseminated throughout the text and in which the title
            character's blackness is crucial to their production.
             
            Michael Fried,J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at the
            Johns Hopkins University, is currently at work on books on Manet
            and on literary "impressionism." His most recent book
            is Courbet's Realism (1990).
Michael Rogin
         Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds_His_Voice
         Birth and The Jazz Singer ostensibly exploit blacks in opposite
            ways. Birth makes war on blacks in the name of the fathers; The
            Jazz Singer's protagonist adopts a black mask and kills his
            father. The Birth of a Nation,climaxing the worst period of
            violence against blacks in southern history, lynches the black; the
            jazz singer, ventriloquizing the black, sings through his mouth.
            Birth,a product of the progressive movement, has national political
            purpose. The Jazz Singer, marking the retreat from public to
            private life in the jazz age, and the perceived pacification of the
            fantasized southern black threat, celebrates not political
            regeneration but urban entertainment.
            [ … ]
            Celebrating the blackface identification that Birth of a Nation
            denies, The Jazz Singer does no favor to blacks. The blackface jazz
            singer is neither a jazz singer nor black. Blackface marries
            ancient rivals in both movies; black and white marry in neither.
            Just as Birth offers a regeneration through violence, so the
            grinning, Jazz Singer, minstrelsy mask kills blacks with kindness.
             
            Michael Rogin teaches political science at the University of
            California, Berkeley. His books include Fathers and Children:
            Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975),
            Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville
            (1983), "Ronald Reagan," the Movie and Other Episodes
            in Political Demonology (1987).
Jerome J. McGann
         Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Literal Truth
         Can poetry tell the truth? This question has embarrassed and
            challenged writers for a long time. While the question may be
            addressed at both an ethical and an epistemological level, its
            resonance is strongest when the ethico-political issues become
            paramount as they were for both Socrates and Plato.
            Today the question appears most pressing not among poets but among
            their custodians, the critics and academicians.1 Whether or not
            poetry can tell the truth whether or not it can establish an
            identity between thought and its object has become an acute
            problem for those who are asked to bring critical judgment to the
            matter. To the extent that a consensus has been reached, the
            judgment has been negative. That poetry develops only a
            metaphorical and nonidentical relation between thought and its
            object is the current general view.
             
            1. This crisis has been widely debated; my own contribution to the
            discussion may be found in Social Values and Poetics Acts: The
            Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). The
            critique of Plato in the early sections of this work is
            particularly relevant to the question of poetry's truth-
            functions. The same subject is pursued further in the sequel,
            Toward a Literature of Knowledge (Chicago, 1989).
             
            Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English at the
            University of Virginia. The Textual Condition (1991) is his most
            recent critical work, and he is the editor of the New Oxford Book
            of Romantic Period Verse (forthcoming).
Daniel Boyarin
         "This We Know to Be the Carnal Israel":_Circumcision_and_the_Erotic
            Life of God and Israel
         When Augustine condemns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a
            direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because
            the Jews reject reading "in the spirit," they are
            therefore condemned to remain "Israel in the flesh."
            Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In
            another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the
            failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one that
            is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language and
            discover its immaterial spirit.1 This way of thinking about
            language has been initially stimulated in the Fathers by
            Paul's usage of "in the flesh" and "in the
            spirit" respectively to mean literal and figurative. Romans
            7:5-6 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure:
            "For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions,
            stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit
            for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in
            which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the
            Spirit and not the old one of the letter." In fact, the exact
            same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, who writes
            that his interest is in "the hidden and inward meaning which
            appeals to the few who study soul characteristics rather than
            bodily forms."2 For both, hermeneutics becomes anthropology.
             
            1. See Henri Crouzel, Origen,trans. A. S. Worrall (San Francisco,
            1989), pp. 107-12.
            2. Philo, On Abraham,sec. 147, in vol. 6 of Philo,trans. and ed. F.
            H. Colson (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 75. It is very important to
            note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of
            an entire school of people who understood the Bible, and indeed the
            philosophy of language, as he did. On this see David Winston,
            "Philo and the Contemplative Life," in Jewish
            Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages,ed. Arthur
            Green (New York, 1986-87), pp. 198-231, esp. p. 211.
             
            Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the
            department of Near-Eastern studies at the University of California,
            Berkeley. He is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of
            Midrash (1990), as well as the forthcoming Carnal Israel: Reading
            Sex in Talmudic Culture,from which the present essay is drawn. He
            is currently engaged in a project entitled The Politics of the
            Spirit: Paul as a Jewish Cultural Critic.
Warwick Anderson
         "Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man Is_Vile":_Laboratory
            Medicine as Colonial Discourse
         My concern here is with the way a new American medical discourse in
            the Philippines fabricated and rationalized images of the bodies of
            the colonized and the subordinate colonizers. I am interested in
            reading the reports of biological (and in particular,
            physiological) experiments as discursive constructions of the
            American colonial project, as attempts to naturalize the power of
            foreign bodies to appropriate and command the Islands. The origin
            of the American colonial enterprise at a time when science lent
            novel force and legitimacy to public policy gave scientists and
            doctors an opportunity to construct a new physiology and pathology
            of colonialism. The medical laboratory thus became an important
            site for the construction of the social space of interaction
            between American and Filipino bodies.5 The Filipino emerged in this
            period as a potentially dangerous part of the zoological realm,
            while the American colonizer became a resilient racial type, no
            longer inevitably susceptible to the tropical climate but
            vulnerable to the crowd of invisible, alien parasites newly
            associated with native bodies. This new medical discourse in the
            tropics accorded with a broad shift in the language and practices
            of medical science that occurred at the end of the nineteenth
            century. Generally, the medical concern with constitutions and
            climate gave way to a greater interest in the specific microbial
            causation of individual disease. At the same time, the colonial
            doctor's anecdotes and clinical impressions seemed less
            convincing, and increasingly the laboratory was called on to
            authenticate knowledge.
             
            Warwick Andersonis a medical doctor who is completing his doctorate
            in the history and sociology of science at the University of
            Pennsylvania. His current project is the politics of disease theory
            in southeastern Asia.
Chicago Cultural Studies Group
         Critical Multiculturalism
         We would like to open some questions here about the institutional
            and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural
            studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and
            multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic
            culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like
            to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism
            require: (a) a more international model of cultural studies than
            the dominant Anglo-American versions; (b) renewed attention to the
            institutional environments of cultural studies; and (c) a
            questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity
            politics. We seek less to "fix" these problems than to
            provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of
            criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and
            politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets
            entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply
            rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our
            own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other
            contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by
            considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our
            group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose
            experience the following section is largely based.
             
            The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It
            includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field,
            Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin
            Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban,
            Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou.
Mieke Bal
         Telling, Showing, Showing off
         The American Museum of Natural History is monumental not only in
            its architecture and design but also in its size, scope, and
            content. This monumental quality suggests in and of itself the
            primary meaning of the museum inherited from itshistory:
            comprehensive collecting as a form of domination.8 In this respect
            museums belong to an era of scientific and colonial ambition, from
            the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, with its
            climactic moment in the second half of the nineteenth century. It
            belongs in the category of nineteenth-century endeavors such as
            experimental medicine (I'm thinking here of Claude Bernard),
            evolutionary biology (Charles Darwin), and the naturalistic novel
            (Émile Zola), all of which claimed to present a comprehensive
            social study. Such projects have been definitively compromised by
            postromantic critique, postcolonial protest, and postmodern
            disillusionment.9
            But in spite of its appearance, that prefix post- doesn't
            make things any easier. Any museum of this size and ambition is
            today saddled with a double status; it is necessarily also a museum
            of the museum, a preserve not for endangered species but for an
            endangered self, a "metamuseum": the museal
            preservation of a project ruthlessly dated and belonging to an age
            long gone whose ideological goals have been subjected to extensive
            critique.10 Willy-nilly, such a museum solicits reflections on and
            of its own ideological positions and history. It speaks to its own
            complicity with practices of domination while it continues to
            pursue an educational project that, having emerged out of those
            practices, has been adjusted to new conceptions and pedagogical
            needs. Indeed, the use of the museum in research and education is
            insisted on in its self-representations, including the Guide.
             
            9. For an example of the postmodern critique, see Michael M. J.
            Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory,"
            in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed.
            Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 194-233.
            10. The metamuseal function of a museum like the American Museum is
            analyzed in Ames, Museums, the Public, and Anthropology.
             
            Mieke Balis professor of the theory of literature at the University
            of Amsterdam and retains a visiting professorship in the
            comparative arts program at the University of Rochester. Her most
            recent book is Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-
            Image Opposition (1991).
Nancy Fraser
         Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections_on_the
            Confirmation of Clarence Thomas
         The recent struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and
            the credibility of Anita Hill raises in a dramatic and pointed way
            many of the issues at stake in theorizing the public sphere in
            contemporary society. At one level, the Senate Judiciary Committee
            hearings on Hill's claim that Thomas sexually harassed her
            constituted an exercise in democratic publicity as it has been
            understood in the classical liberal theory of the public sphere.
            The hearings opened to public scrutiny a function of government,
            namely, the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.
            They thus subjected a decision of state officials to the force of
            public opinion. Through the hearings, in fact, public opinion was
            constituted and brought to bear directly on the decision itself,
            affecting the process by which the decision was made as well as its
            substantive outcome. As a result, state officials were held
            accountable to the public by means of a discursive process of
            opinion and will formation.
            Yet that classical liberal view of the public sphere does not tell
            the whole story of these events.1 If were examine the Thomas
            confirmation struggle more closely, we see that the very meaning
            and boundaries of the concept of publicity was at stake. The way
            the struggle unfolded, moreover, depended at every point on who had
            the power to successfully and authoritatively define where the line
            between the public and the private would be drawn. It depended as
            well on who had the power to police and defend that boundary.
             
            1. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public
            Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,trans.
            Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
             
            Nancy Fraser is associate professor of philosophy and faculty
            fellow of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at
            Northwestern University, where she also teaches in the
            women's studies program. She is the author of Unruly
            Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social
            Theory (1989). She is currently working on Keywords of the Welfare
            State,a jointly authored book with Linda Gordon.
Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         Editors' Introduction: Multiplying Identities
         A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as
            the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of
            literary criticism. 's contribution to this
            shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues,
            "Writing and Sexual Difference," and
            "&lsquo;Race,' Writing and Difference." In the
            1990s, however, "race," "class," and
            "gender" threaten to become the regnant clichés of our
            critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help
            disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the
            formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.
            Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we
            might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the
            evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national,
            and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-
            structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of
            difference. The calls for a "post-essentialist"
            reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly
            common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe
            provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.
             
            Kwame Anthony Appiah,author of Assertion and Conditionals(1985),
            Truth in Semantics(1986), and Necessary Questions (1989), has also
            published a novel, Avenging Angel (1990), and a collection of
            essays, In My Father's House (1992). His most recent
            contribution to  was "Is the Post- in
            Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" (Winter 1991).
            Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,is coeditor of Transition,a quarterly
            review, and the author of Figures in Black (1987), The Signifying
            Monkey (1988), and Loose Canons (1992). His latest contribution to
             was "Critical Fanonism" (Spring 1991).
Gananath Obeyesekere
         "British Cannibals": Contemplation of an Event in the_Death_and
            Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer
         I have recently completed a work entitled The Apotheosis of Captain
            Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific.1 In it I present an
            alternative view of the events leading to the apotheosis of James
            Cook by the Hawaiians in 1779 when he first landed there, in effect
            making the case that the supposed deification of the white
            civilizer is a Western myth model foisted on the Hawaiians and
            having a long run in European culture and consciousness. As a
            result of reading the extensive logs and journals of Cook's
            voyages, I have become interested in the manner in which
            "cannibalism" got defined in these voyages. My reading
            of these texts suggests that statements about cannibalism reveal
            more about the relations between Europeans and Savages during early
            and late contact than, as ethnographic statements, about the nature
            of Savage anthropophagy.
             
            1. See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook:
            European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, N.J., forthcoming).
             
            Gananath Obeyesekere teaches anthropology at Princeton University.
            He is the author of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European
            Mythmaking in the Pacific (forthcoming).
Walter Benn Michaels
         Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural_Identity
         Our sense of culture is characteristically meant to displace race,
            but part of the argument of this essay has been that culture has
            turned out to be a way of continuing rather than repudiating racial
            thought. It is only the appeal to race that makes culture an object
            of affect and that gives notions like losing our culture,
            preserving it, stealing someone else's culture, restoring
            people's culture to them, and so on, their pathos. Our race
            identifies the culture to which we have a right, a right that may
            be violated or defended, repudiated or recovered. Race transforms
            people who learn to do what we do into the thieves of our culture
            and people who teach us to do what they do into the destroyers of
            our culture; it makes assimilation into a kind of betrayal and the
            refusal to assimilate into a form of heroism. Without race, losing
            our culture can mean no more than doing things differently from the
            way we now do them and preserving our culture can mean no more than
            doing things the same the melodrama of assimilation
            disappears.41 If, of course, doing things differently turns out to
            mean doing them worse, then the change will seem regrettable. But
            it's not the loss of our culture that will make it
            regrettable; it's the fact that the culture that will then be
            ours will be worse than the culture that used to be ours. It is, of
            course, always possible and often likely that things will get
            worse; abandoning our idea of culture, however, will not make them
            worse.
             
            Walter Benn Michaelsis professor of English and the humanities at
            The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Gold Standard
            and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) and of a monograph on American
            literature in the Progressive period, forthcoming in the Cambridge
            History of American Literature. His previous contributions to
             include "Against Theory" and
            "Against Theory 2," both written in collaboration with
            Steven Knapp.
Xiaomei Chen
         Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: "He Shang" in Post-Mao China
         In the years since its introduction, Edward Said's celebrated
            study Orientalism has acquired a near-paradigmatic status as a
            model of the relationships between Western and non-Western
            cultures. Said seeks to show how Western imperialist images of its
            colonial others images that, of course, are inevitably and
            sharply at odds with the self-understanding of the indigenous non-
            Western cultures they purport to represent not only govern
            the West's hegemonic policies, but were imported into the
            West's political and cultural colonies where they affected
            native points of view and thus served as instruments of domination
            themselves. Said's focus is on the Near East, but his critics
            and supporters alike have extended his model far beyond the
            confines of that part of the world. Despite the popularity of
            Said's model, however, comparatists and sinologists have yet
            to make extensive use of it in their attempts to define
            China's self-image or the nature of the Sino-Western social,
            cultural, and political relationships.
             
            Xiaomei Chen is assistant professor of Chinese and comparative
            literature at Ohio State University. She has recently completed a
            book on the politics of cross-cultural
            "misunderstanding" in modern China and the West, and is
            now working on a cultural study of post-Mao Chinese theater.
Diana Fuss
         Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look
Hazel V. Carby
         Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban_Context
Sara Suleri
         Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
         Acting Bits/Identity Talk
Saree S. Makdisi
         The Empire Renarrated: "Season of Migration to the_North"_and_the
            Reinvention of the Present
Akeel Bilgrami
         What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural_Identity
Katie Trumpener
         The Time of the Gypsies: A "People without_History"_in_the
            Narratives of the West
