Authors dead and undead: repetition and the event of Theory in

the US
Advisorship: Klaus Mladek

Vinicius Castro - MA Candidate Dartmouth College - 2013

1. WHAT TO DO WHEN SEXY THEORY BECOMES DOXA?

the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude - Kenneth Burke
how can we know the dancer from the dance? W.B. Yeats
tem que dancar dancando Jorge Ben
1.1.
In the United States, Theory constituted the most important group of
literary works for those college-educated in the liberal arts in the last couple of
decades of the last century. A few of these critical works now provide the
humanities not only with a globally-recognizable cultural voice, but even, at
times, with something remarkably similar to a metadiscourse (even if a rather
self-dismantling one, at that).
This is just another way of saying that a particular kind of dense and
elusive critical writing (mostly written in french) seems to have substituted the
conventional forms of poetry, fiction and conventional philosophy, not only as
the books providing an urgent imaginative vocabulary for a particular cultural
demographic to share, but also as the discoursive background (or narrative)
around which a great variety of textual identities could be most expressively
produced.
Even if you were to agree with the general sense of my last paragraph,
the decision to call them literary may still seem rather incongruous. Arent
most of these works closer to philosophy, literary studies or some subfield of
the social sciences? Why call them literary?
Style has always been a controversial element of Theorys most
immediate and simplistic reverberations, both in the conservative backlash
that denounces their elusiveness as either obscurantist or simply nonsense,
and in the (usually lleftist) praise that fully identifies rhetorical deflection with
political subversion, or the critical creation of a logic of difference with the
political affirmation of a logic of difference. So there is a generally-felt sense
that their styles are important, and distinctive, but this does not usually come
with a desire to call them literary. It is also obvious to anyone who happens
to witness public appreciations and invocations of the ghosts of these authors
that some of them still carry a kind of symbolic weight that is not that
frequently bestowed upon critical writers, and if you happen to read them
directly you will probably realize that their style is a significant part of whatever
it is that they are doing. That their expressiveness lies not only in the advance
of their arguments and in what ideas we are able to articulate from them, in
the detachable concepts and perspectives that one can take from their books
and repeat in dififerent contexts, but also from the stylistic performances of
those perspectives.
We can not only get a poetic sense of Derridas endless deferral of
meaning through the seemingly endless deflections of his own playful
rhetorical presence, or understand the subversive quality of Judith Butlers style
as expressively performing a political gesture that is not unlike the one that she

critically advocates. But we can also repeat these gestures in a reconstruction

(or actualization) of its understood political context, and constitute our own
personal narratives around those repetitions.
Of course, the conflation of a philosophy with its style, or of a
philosophical discourse with poiesis, can be easily found in writers like
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger. And literary criticism was written as a
primary literary activity by Schlegel, Pater and Wilde.
But in Theory there is frequentlly a different kind of expressive charge
given to that conflation. While largely operating inside the material logic of
Western discourse (to the extent that they participate in the academic midiatic
structure, with its usual mechanisms of authorship and intellectual
reverberation ) they are also presented as having offered, or created, very
original, sometimes politically relevant, expressive displacements of that selfsame mediatic logic.
What Im primarily interested in is the aesthetics of that displacement, as
well as the discoursive cultural interfaces that have seemingly grown out of it.
And by looking at Theorys style and its capacity for creating rituals of identity
and self-stylization we are also attempting to get at its aura, what kind of
cultural presences these texts and their authors have attained not only to
those that passionately read them, but also to those that only hear about their
voices distantly (and yet still sometimes find their figures charged with great
cultural powers).
To put it as directly as possible, I believe that to create a more productive
awareness of this extraordinary shadow that Theory casts over our collective
literary imagination, we need to turn our attentions to its aesthetic dimensions,
to the power of its rhetoric and its (usually difficult) style, as well as to some of
the dramatic aspects of the social narratives in which they are frequently
inscribed.
In part, this merely means regarding their concepts as tropes and their
theories as fictions, as Borges taught me to do as a teenager with Western
philosophy, but this is not meant as a reductive or ironic framing of whatever
powerful cultural claims Theory may have (as if I was saying that they are
merely literary, that their fictions are merely fictions) but rather as a critical
strategy that tries to grasp the pervasiveness of their imaginative influence by
the kind of reverberation that is given to their figures and voices, and the kind
of cultural scene that these reverberations entail.
This, in its turn, should hopefully give us an expressive sense of the
production of Theory as an Event in our collective sense-making, this treshold
that has been irrevocably crossed, and in light of which we should still
presently act.
It means looking for the scenes in which Theory takes place, not only as a
academic discourse, but also as a symbolic voice for producing political
practices and individual identities. The vast toolkit contained in a book like
Deleuzes A Thousand Plateaus (for example) is not only hermeneutic, but
expressive, it can shape not only how you look at the world (how you
interpret schizophrenia and the production of desiring bodies, say), but it
may also help change the way you talk to yourself, what magazines you read,
how to you relate to your own body, etc.

That is, books contain not only voices that can be repeated, but also the
expressive scenes in which these voices are to be produced. It is a matter of
style and rhetoric, but, following Kenneth Burke, style being understood in a
body-felt sense, the sense of affirming or inscribing symbolic action into the
social fabric, and rhetoric being understood in its social dimension of myth and
ritual, the pragmatic power of language to mobilize social forces. Its about the
symbolic act as a dancing of an attitude, both the literary act of creation and
its posterior collective reverberation as expressive responses to their particular
situations.

1.2.
But wait, what is Theory? As familiar as the event probably is to most
people engaged with literary studies in the US, the term seems yet loose
enough for an explanation to be made necessary. Francois Cusset describes
Theory as this weird textual object:
born between the two world wars or in the crazy 1970s, depending on
historical accounts, but definable today as a strange breed of American
academic market rules, French (and more generally Continental) detachable
concepts, campus-based identity politics, and trendy pop culture.
The french authors most frequently associated with the event of Theory
are: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Claude
Lvi-Strauss, Pierre Bordieu Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser, Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Lacan. In the US, the most influential and
distinguished practitioners of Theory are perhaps Judith Butler and Fredric
Jameson.
In a even larger sense, Theory can be understood as roughly any kind of
critical writing which enacts that which Ricouer, in his Freud and Interpretation,
thinking primarily of Marx and Freud, calls hermeneutics of suspicion (although
I would qualify that as a rhetoric of suspicion). Although the term Critical
Theory most immediately refers to the Frankfurt School, it its also used In a
loose sense to refer to any kind of critical thinking that makes overt reference
to Marxism or Psychoanalysis.
The assuming of a rhetorical figure which debunks and demystifies is the
strongest one to our present critical imagination, and is often directly upheld
and assumed as such in a movement that is itself a self-aware performance of
discoursivity as a political gesture (to be expressively understood as such in its
attendant mediatic reverberations).
Insofar as Theory can serve as a heraldic dennomination for those that
do it, they understand to be carrying with them the seemings of this voice.
But so if there are whole cultural narratives enclosed in that single capitalized
word Theory, what of them?
Most accounts agree that the event of Theory first started with the
American reception of some of these french thinkers in the late sixties, and the
subsequent grouping of these writers as a new wave of poststructuralist
thought (or, to make things a bit more confusing, French Theory).
This wave, then, started to break on literary departments throughout the
U.S. during the seventies, reveberating through political and artistic interfaces
and creating a cultural momentum that few could have antecipated for difficult
theoretic texts.
What followed is a bit harder to describe, for all the sound and fury it
contained, but it involved the turning of deconstruction into a pop cliche, a
conservative backlash that frequently understood posthumanism for nihilism
(and ended up at times painting the authors it was trying to debunk with
apocalyptic urgency), the sweeping rhetoric of the cultural wars, The Death of
the Author as a midiatic event and the amusing cameo of Baudrillards
Simulacres et Simulation in the movie The Matrix.

Perhaps this noise was just the usual borborygmi of cultural processing,
the usual spectacle of the forms of an avant-garde being digested by the Doxa
(of which the cases of Pop Art and Surrealism are two of the most embarassing
examples), but this wild reverberation of texts was also, to most accounts,
productive. And that is because, perhaps most importantly, the event of Theory
also provided the critical vocabulary and the cultural conditions for the
development and subsequent institutionalization of a number of fields of
identity studies and politically-charged discoursive practices (post- colonial,
hybridity, queer, environmental, animal, etc) which often are still labeled as
Theory.
Most analyses of Theory as a cultural event try to establish a narrative of
ideas. So we might go, say, from Saussure and Lvi Strauss (or the totem of
structuralism) to Foucault`s self-erasure of the humanities (with
poststructuralism as dissolution), or from Heidegger`s destruction of
metaphysics to Derrida`s deconstruction of Metaphysics, from a Western
fixation of logic of identity to a Deleuzian logic of difference, etc.
The narratives, while not always concordant, usually tend towards a logic
of rupture, of epochal shift. And that is both because most of these writers
largely participated in a rhetoric of rupture and paradigmal shift (never before
in the history of Western thinking did such and such...), and obviously because
of a midiatic environment in the United States in which a radical vocabulary of
critique (and one that self- consciously understood itself as such) had space to
fill, room to grow and interfaces to build.
Theory may well be dead, as many say, in the sense that is immediate
cultural urgency has been mostly spent. But its event is still defining us, both
by providing us with still-ongoing vocabularies and expressive scenes, as well
as by seeming, to a remarkable ammount of pople, like the last defining
moment of cultural thinking, the last moment in which it seemed conceivable
that critical writing could, in itself, organize forces and provide both criticism
and our social praxis with expressive imaginative terms.

1.3. Paranoia and Theory

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don`t have to worry
about the answers Pynchon, Gravity`s Rainbow
In an essay called `Why has Critique run out of Steam?`, published in
2004, Bruno Latour asks
What has become of critique when there is a whole in- dustry denying that the
Apollo program landed on the moon? What has become of critique when
DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan
Scientia est potentia? Didnt I read that some- where in Michel Foucault? Has
knowledge-slash-power been co- opted of late by the National Security
Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge
(fig. 1)? (P.228
The problem, according to Latour, is not only that your run-of-the-mill
critical stance has been apparentely co-opted by the mainstream ideological
rhetoric that it is supposed to unmask, but also that the absurd profusion of
paranoid texts to social reality can quickly amass to total noise, just an excess
of metacommentary that is only busy producing itself.
The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before dozens of
conspiracy theories begin revising the official account, adding even more ruins
to the ruins, adding even more smoke to the smoke. (p.227)
One can see scary, but all-too-real manifestations of what Latour means
simply by reading the comment section on any major Brazilian newspaper's
website. Essentially any news item can be promptly dissected by endless
hordes of commenters that are not only openly fascist and frequently violent in
their rhetoric, but all too frequently way too smart to trust any official story,
always trusting wholeheartedly that the news have probably been directly
manipulated by whichever caricature of a (mostly imaginary) political spectrum
the commenter happens to hate most attentively (PT, PSDB, the Illuminati, the
jews, etc).
The position of the critic as the one who won`t be fooled again is
parodied by Latour, who says that the promise to graduate students of critique
is essentially that after years of reading `turgid prose`, you will never be taken
in anymore, no one, no matter how powerful, will be able to accuse you of
naivete, that supreme sin (...) Better equipped than Zeus himself you rule
alone, striking from above with the salvo of antifetishism in one hand and the
solid causality of objectivity in the other. (p.239)
To those that might complain that conspiracy theories are merely
deformation of critique, and in no way an extension of their logic, as Latour
seems to suggest, he says that inspite of all deformations it is still easy to
discern the trademark Made in Criticalland (p.230).
While I wouldn`t disagree with Latour that you may find the imprint of
sophisticated hermeneutic tools in even the cheapest knock-off examples of
internet paranoia, it may make more sense to admit that Theory (understood
as this grammar of cultural critique to be taught to a cultural elite in its
generalized efforts of self- performance and social distinction) always had a
strong paranoid aspect to it.

Freud might not have been as excited about the writings of the judge
paranoid- schizophrenic Daniel-Paul Schreber as Deleuze would later seem to
be, but he already acknowledged not only that paranoia came from a creative
effort of reconstructing the psyche, but also that the paranoid could, himself,
have significant insight into his own delusions. Lacan later came to suggest
that our relationship to knowledge itself could be described as fundamentally
paranoid. In his Paranoia and Modernity, John Farrell demonstrates how modern
man has often understood himself to be arrested in vast systems outside of his
control, and how paranoid imagery can be traced throughout the works of
Cervantes, Luther, Kafka all the way to good old Pynchon. If we recognize the
paranoid potency that lies dormant in any modern vocabulary of suspicion, it`s
not that difficult to describe any of the many sophisticated vocabularies of
Critique as offering a sort of paranoid text to social reality.
We all know how U.S. popular culture the sixties and seventies were
progressively ingrained in paranoid narratives. First, the Kennedy
Assassination, then Watergate, together with countercultural movements of all
sorts, all seemed to heavily contribute to a general understanding in popular
culture that the official institutional narratives were not truly domminant
anymore, as they once were, or not to be immediately trusted. Theory came to
rise in US colleges roughly at the same period that works like Pynchon`s The
Crying of Lot 49, Don Delillo`s The Names and Francis Ford Coppola`s The
Conversation were coming out. The entertainment industry slowly caught on,
as it always does. This was also around the time Charles Manson supposedly
heard the Apocalypse in The Beatle`s White Album, understanding the song
Revolution 9 to mean that he should herald a full-blown political war through
murder and `Helter Skelter` (the Beatles would end not much later, and in
1980 another paranoid interpreter, this time, of recluse and pure, authentic
Salinger, would go after Lennon's life for being a phony*)
This is just to say that paranoia hasn`t necessarily gotten all that
stronger since the internet, or since the 911 attacks (there might just be way
more expressive outlets for it, of course). In 1996 Infinite Jest, the last great
American novel of the television age, as it might well someday be called, has a
character entirely obsessed with the TV show M*A*S*H*, convinced that it
houses secret signs of worldwide political relevance.
For Pynchon, throughout his work, the nightmare of history consistently
tells us how we are always enmeshed in vast systemic power structures about
which we fundamentally know very little. Although in a sense it is suggested
we are all powerless in `their` grasp, paranoia is still apparently encouraged as
a mode of gnosis, even if an unstable (or unreliable) one. In Gravity`s Rainbow,
it is said there is something comforting, almost religious, about paranoia, while
the opposite, anti-paranoia, the notion that nothing is connected to anything,
would not be a condition many of us could bear for long.
If critique understands itself to supply our culture with instruments of
self- awareness against our historical tendencies towards ideological selfdeception, we can also say popular culture now apparently supplies itself with
unserious, endless revisions of persistent paranoid paratexts, which are easily
fed into the machines of self- performance (in social media of all sorts), as
Steve Rushton calls them, and just as immediately dissipated.
The connections are so many, the archives so full and so immediately

replenished with hot air, that the tendency today is more towards a
powerlessness towards the absurd profusion of connections. But if that is the
case, the problem might lie with the archives themselves, or with how their
machinery is currently operated.

1.4.
My reading will focus on The Death of the Author as a sort of primal
scene for Theory to still operate as a master discourse (despite what it might
say it does). This is not say that this `death` actually happenned, part of my
point is exactly that it didn`t. But insofar as we are going to look at these
authors as fiction writers, and at Theory as a narrative inscribed as mediatic
event, we might look at Barthes Death of the Author and Foucault What is an
Author? as symbolic acts inside their expressive contexts.
In a sense, it can be said that what I am making is a caricature, or an
allegory. But I submit that might be exactly what you need to do when you are
dealing with myths.
Before going to Borges and Burke, however, I would like to briefly
mention the relation of Deleuze and Derrida to the event of Theory, which
might both help further illuminate what I mean by Theory as an event and
hopefuly justify a bit more the focus on Barthes and Foucault.
1.5. D&G and the event of Theory.
With psychotherapist and activist Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze wrote the
two volumes of Capitalism & Schizophrenia. These two works, LAnti-Oedipus
and A Thouasnd Plateaus, with their very unusual philosophical and political
rhetoric, its shifting style (and at times deliberately disorienting changes of
register) profusion of highly idiosyncratic terminology and rescuing or
promoting of many neglected or, at the time, somewhat ill-regarded thinkers or
writers (weird mavericks such as Gabriel Tarde, Gregory Bateson, Henri
Bergson and the great writer and schrizophrenic President Schreber). All of
these elements came to render the books with a particular kind of cultural
eminence, possibly read more often outside of philosophy departments and
making its home all across the humanities and the arts.
In a later interview about the first volume of Capitalism and
Schrizophrenia, Guattari says that their colaboration is not the simple result of
a meeting of two individuals, but rather an accumulation of incertanties, and of
the confusion following the turns of the events of May 68. (moins la mise em
commun dun savoir que du cumul de nos incertitudes, et meme dun certain
dsarroi devant la tournure quavaient prise les vnements apres Mai 68. (ID,
p.301)
There was a desire in the work to bridge the gaps between theoretical
thinking and political activity, believing that the travail thorique should no
longer be the affair of specialists, that the desire for a theory and its postulates
should be closely tending to the event and collective ennontiation of the
masses. (devraient coller au plus pres a lvnement et a lnonciation
collective des masses, ID, p.303)
It is slightly strange to hear this apparently less elitist political impetus
related to the writing of a book that is so dense and so dependent on very
specific and complex terminology, but its interesting to see, then, that the
books subversion of traditional philosophical style is not exactly meant in the
same avant-garde strand of a book like Derridas Glas (which is, like a lot of

very sophisticated high modernism, like sections of Pound's cantos, almost

illegible).
That is, if we can trust Deleuzes word (and he is not to be known as
deliberately deceptive about his rhetorical intentions), the highly stylized and
self-conscious, playful engaging with thinking as a tool to be politically
deployed is a serious, and in a way almost naive attempt to provide a cultural
momentum that was already installed in theoretical thinking with an expressive
medium, if not exactly a readymade practical political vocabulary
It perhaps can be described as its moment of greatest extravagance and
radicality, of most overtly artistic stylization and most overtly mythical political
discourse, blowing up Marx and Freud with the assigned help of that other huge
Godhead of suspicion, Nietzsche, the whole machine produced not by the
epistemologically-safe voice of a single author, instead written in a much more
disperse, more deterritorialized rhetoric.
The usage of deliberately vulgar language in Anti-Oedipus, which opens
with Ca fonctionne partout, tantot sans arret, tantot discontinu. Ca respire, ca
chauffe, ca mange. Ca chie, ca baise. (AO, p.7), (which was translated in the
US as It it at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times
in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks., AO, p.1), does
to traditional philosophical discourse that distinctly avant-gardish move Joyce
did to the novelistic when he introduced Leopold Bloom in Ulysses eating the
inner organs of beasts and fowls and then proceeding to take a dump.
When you consider that these books were being read in the US by young
college students, avant-garde artists, activists and thinkers, and that thus
these texts were usually presented inside larger, contextual interfaces of
rebellion and inconformity (sometimes highly aestheticized feeling of belonging
to a dynamically-charged, if usually flakily defined, political zeitgeist), we can
understand how these books were, at once, in a way, both exploded and
contained in the event of Theory.
Exploded because the expressive looseness of these interfaces between
critical thinking, art and activism made it possible for the books toolbox of
concepts andperspectives to be made by some into an expressive medium for
life itself. But then also contained, in a sense, because the obviously deliberate
radicality of these concepts in relation to common-sensical academical
discourse on reality also makes it easier for it to be wholly dismissed as too
naive or too radical (if certainly very idiosyncratic and amusing) moment of
over-excitement inside that cultural events expressive logic.
Thus the placing of the toolbox of Capitalism & Schizophrenia inside the
larger cultural event of Theory is able at once to give it a kind of mythical fullblown expression of social life (a persistent paratext to the doxa of common
sense) and an immediate self- mocking as that moments most highly stylized,
and in certain ways most naive, textual expression. Or, by something much like
the same token, to whom the symbolic political aura of may 68 can still hold
immediate aesthetic force, Capitalism & Schizophrenia can still seem like a stillliving, still ready-to-be actualized utopian displaced place for political
discourse.
The problem with presenting Deleuze as if he was just part of this larger
event of Theory, as some would, is that it can sometimes enframe his rhetoric
in a way which it does not usually frame itself, as this almost immediate

discourse of suspicion that should be put in place of another kind of academic

discourse in order to create the right kind of discoursive order. As if the
problem with the relation between power and discourse was merely a matter of
what values were being upheld by the midiatic systems responsible for
inscribing a hermeneutic culture, and not, largely, as writers like Derrida,
Deleuze, Spivak and so many others have demonstrated, also a matter of those
midiatic systems of discoursive inscsription themselves, with their archives and
forms, their conventions and institutions (one might say Foucault says the
same thing, but I don`t believe he performs it)
The Deleuze of Logique du Sens and Difference et Repetition, if read with
attention and consideration, can never be fully digested by this somewhat
simplistic understanding of critique. This is the deterritorialized thought that is
still, as late as 2010, being used as a direct and very urgent intellectual and
rhetorical reference for a writer as engaging as the anthropologist Viveiros de
Castro, whose Mtaphysiques Cannibales (Metafisicas Canibais) attempts to
do to the field of anthropology what Deleuze did to philosophy in the seventies
and eighties.
Deleuzes history as a thinker and as a activist is obviously inextricable
from the event of Theory, but its also true that in order to safely place him in
that event, as it is so frequently done, one needs either to blow it up from its
usual proportions or to see his thought as a strange hybrid, like Kafkas
Odradek, being in that strange placelessness of true nomadic thinking. The
other option is to lose much of what is still so urgent about his thought, his
style and his philosophy.

2. THE HUNTING OF THE AUTHOR

they sought with thimbles, they sought it with care, they pursued it with forks
and hope / they threatened its life with a railway share / they charmed it with
smiles and soap
Lewis Carrol
the custom concern for the people build up the monuments and steeples to
wear out our eyes Modest Mouse
"Enough expository banter! Now we fight like men! And ladies! And ladies who
dress like men! For Gilgamesh...it is morphing time!"
Gilgamesh, Final Fantasy V

There are a number of books already written on the history death of the
author as a critical concept, and some of them are quite illuminating. But that
is not exactly what I will be doing. What I want to do is to read the event of
the Death of the Author through the expressive rhetoric of Barthes and
Foucaults texts in its relation to the cultural processes in which they were
enclosed.
2.1 Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
There is very obvious irony in the fact that not only both these texts are
authored, but also that both of these author are now huge cultural figures
themselves. One can read Barthes essay, in fact, as an almost romantic desire
for an unmediated vision (the mirror of criticism turning into lamp) and one can
see in the affirmation of his voice, at the same time, the affirmation of the
depletion of the novel and of conventional fictional forms.
Roland Barthes published in 1967 a short essay called "The Death of the
Author" (first published in english, coming out in the original french as"La mort
de l'auteur" only on the following year). In it he very directly cries for the death
of the author as a necessary condition for a birth of the (politically
sophisticated) reader, saying that la naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la
mort de l'Auteur (OC, vol. III, p.45). Barthes also links very directly the
symbolic slaying of the author to the slaying of other bourgeois cultural
hypostasies.
Barthes gesture is stylized, already something of a caricature, and it
later became, in Antoine Compagnons words, the antihumanist slogan for the
sciences du texte. Although it is a very short text, of only slight theoretical
machinery, perhaps, compared to most of Barthes work, it is still clearly his
most immediate claim to fame, specially for people not all that immediately
invested in literary theory or semiotics, and is still generating fizzles of
theoretical controversy some decades after the initial bubbling up of polemics.
Not only was Barthes a writer that always seemed at least as interested
in the aesthetic results of his prose as he was with the possibility of
communicating interesting and important things about literature, society and
semiotic systems. He was also very straightforward about this rhetorical
tendency throughout his career, most of his books offering newly-formed,

sometimes strange and unexpected, but always very sly and deliberate,
possibilities of rhetorical and textual perversion (which were always politically
meant, if not always in the same direction).
Barthes was always, perhaps before anything else, an aesthete, a writer
who very deliberately and diversely affirmed the possibility of textual pleasure
as a subjective activity that affirms itself and its own values (sometimes
seriously held inside ethical or political constraints, at times played at with the
kind of ironic seriousness we can find in Wilde's most quotable characters). This
was partly what made Susan Sontag pick him distinctly out of the many french
theorists washing on American shores as her favorite (which makes a lot of
sense, considering she was also, after all, both a public intellectual and
politically-minded aesthete)
Which is obviously not to say he was not serious about the content of his
writings. Barthes's aesthetics, right from his first book, always contains
expressive gestures towards an ethics or politics of signs and their social
consumption (even if these expressive gestures are often vague, or at times
too flamboyantly mythical to be taken seriously outside an immediately
poetical context)
Besides the obvious and overwhelming rhetorical shadow of Saussure 1,
the early work of Roland Barthes is very much a part of the intellectual
ambiance of phenomenology, existentialism and structuralism not only as
philosophical or literary theories but also rhetorical (and stylistical) models.
Barthes voice is very much his own, even though he always seems to be
quoting some ghost (or at least hinting at the possibility of having done it), and
with a writer so immediately and seriously concerned with turning a phrase,
it`s difficult to judge who is a bigger rhetorical influence, Sartre (as a public
intellectual, fiction writer and phenomenologist attracted to paradoxes and the
theurgic properties of the word "nant"), Proust (as a neurasthenic novelist with
serious ideas about aesthetics and an obsession around one great novel that
would eventually be confused with his life), Blanchot (and his avant-gardish
negative literary rhetoric) or even wildcards like Michelet, Fourier, Sade and
Loyola (most immediately, of course, as stylists).
He said it himself he was a novelist in the age where the novel (as a
central cultural form, that is) was dead, and although he at times very
vehemently praised novelists like Robbe-Grillet and Butor, he also never
missed a chance of rhetorically suggesting that his position as a critic was quite
possibly more powerful, both in an aesthetic and political sense, than theirs,
almost as if any Nouveau Roman was only truly made great by his exegesis (by
him affirming that a watermelon in Robbe-Grillet is no longer a sign, and so
forth). He is, after all, much more widely read and deeply regarded by our
contemporary global cultural elites than perhaps any French novelist of his
time, conceivably since Proust.
His first major work was the short and enthusiastic "Le Degr zro de
l'criture" (1953), where a very knowledgeable and infinitely reflexive rhetoric
tries to grasp the infinitely (and we might as well say deliberately) vague
1 Whose positing of the arbitrariness of the sign as the first principle of his Course on
General Linguistics ("Cours de Linguistique Gnerale"seem to hang over the whole
canon of Theory, both as a rhetorical gesture and as a huge signpost in a grand
metanarrative of ideas.

political and aesthetic horizon of "l'criture". We are told criture develops like
a germ and not like a line, "manifesting itself (as) an essence and menace of a
secret, a counter-communication, intimidating" (my translation and italics, OC,
vol.1 p.185).
Whether or not you agree with that (or can find it expressive it or not,
rather), it is somewhat clear that Barthes language here is very deliberately
figurative and deceptive, pulling its own rugs from under itself, imploding any
easy possibility of rigid theoretical enframing and suggesting the very sly
concept of "criture" much more expressively by the sheer rhetorical virtuosity
of his conceptual syntax. He obviously won't present the concept in the manner
most people would perhaps most immediately associate with a straightforward
theoretical or conceptual presentation.
Of course there are moments in which he is a bit clearer about what he
means by "criture", sun as when he says that it is "la forme spectaculairement
engage de la parole", my point is simply that one is much more likely to feel
they understand what Barthes means by his own textual demonstration than
by any of the often self- contradicting formulations he offers throughout the
text (which is essentially what any poetic text does, it communicates mainly by
form).
Here in "Degr Zro" we can find already contained in elliptic suggestion
so many of his later notable theoretical formulations and polemics. The
verisimilute of the bourgeois realist novel, which he would famously decry as
an instrument of systemic cultural deception in later (and deeply influential)
essays such as "L'effet de rel" ("The Reality Effect"), is already singled out
here in comparison to the truth of History as essentially sophisticated forms of
systemic control of the imagination. ("La finalit commune du Roman et de
Histoire narre, c'est d'aliner les faits : le pass simple est l'acte meme de
possession de la socit sur son pass et son possible" OC, vol. 1, p.191).
On an early text on the classics of the French language, however, we get
a Barthes whose tone might seem unfamiliar to those used to thinking of his
flashy and overtly political stresses, praising the classics and saying that for
reading them "tous les mobiles sont bons, car ils ne trompent, n'abusent, ni ne
dcoivent ; on peut donc dja recommender de les lire par vanit." (OC Vl.1
p.57)
He also says we should read them personally, searching for the lost arrow
in history which will happen to find you. The essay ends with a profuse list of
classic quotations offered with no explanation, but in which we can perhaps still
trace the possibility of an intellectual argument progressing from the cultural
debris.
What is interesting is to see how recognizable his rhetoric is even here,
how seamlessly the same sort of highly aestheticized tone that treats texts as
imediatist, sensual surfaces pliable for so many effects can jump from this
praise of the classics to the mythologized slaying of the marble-busted author,
and how much, perhaps, of his sometimes direct political rhetoric cannot also
be traced to this intense desire to find expressive ways for texts to be rendered
personally expressive for the individual reader in ever-fluctuating systemic
contexts.

2.2 Lions (and tigers, and bears)

(...) la confusion meme du sujet et du langage, en sorte que la critique et
louvre disent toujours: je suis litterature, et que, par les voix conjugues, la
litterature nnonce jamais que labsence du sujet (OC, Vol. II, p.796)
"Racine, c'est Racine: scurit admirable du nant" (OC, Vol.1, p.746)
"tout ceci doit etre considr comme dit par un personnage de roman"
handwritten epigraph to Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975)
It turns out, then, that one of the most interesting aspects of a work like
Mythologies is seeing how Barthes deftly adopts a lot of the intellectual
tendencies of the time much to his own rhetorical ends. After getting through
the (certainly quite fancy, in a sense) theoretical machinery, one can perhaps
say that what he is doing, at the end of the day, is not all that different from
the kind of formalist-minded ideological analysis of culture that were sprouting
up everywhere at the time, but the set-up and the costumes are much more
lavishly produced, the rhetorical grandeur more extraordinary.
The sweeping and generous quality of his attention in this book (going
from the catch to the cinema, from detergents to the steak with frites) is much
like that of a socially-minded novelist taking the everyday and the minute
particulars of the bourgeoise (such as Flaubert had done in L'education
Sentimentale, in his own form, heralding generations of narrators-as-flaneurs)
and turning it into somewhat fixed and stylized aesthetic form for the care of
other sophisticated attentions.
You can easily find online a TV interview that Barthes gave at the time
the book first came out. The interviewer is as plump and satisfied with himself
as one might expect from a TV presenter from the fifties, and Barthes seems
slightly uneasy, answering elegantly and eloquently as he can but still fidgeting
a bit with his eyes while the presenter speaks. One might venture the guess
that one of the things that could be bothering him was that the presenter was
able to present his somewhat radical book with such good-natured matter-offactness, as just another very interesting book on our contemporary culture
(when Barthes seems to mean something much more bombastic, with his
rhetoric). This was a writer who dedicated most of his career to an imagined
effort of escaping common opinion, always picturing himself as a very tough
nut for the Doxa 2 to crack and digest.
Largely because of an intense desire to escape most of the immediate
critical truisms of his time, specially after these truisms came to be
symbolically confused with (what he sometimes apparently took to be
essentially) political evil, Barthes in his most often-read and celebrated works
wanted to give primacy to this nebulous, hazy world of fictionality, of literature
as a self-referential body where no single verse could ever be traced to a single
subject, of a liquid shifting of terms of engagement over any kind of discourse
that would like to pinpoint an easy or naively concretist relation between
literature and actual, factual reality.
2 The Doxa, for him, being understood at the same time both as the hardened and
automatic, knee-jerk conventional forms of aesthetic appreciation and the hardened
and automatic, mythologized social forms of bourgeois praxis (a conflation which was
given different kinds of political inflection throughout his career).

Thus when we read Prousts biography and find ourselves drawing

parallels between the writers life and the life of the narrator of La Recherche,
Barthes is adamant that it's not his life that informs the work, but the other
way around ce nest pas la vie que informe louvre, cest louvre qui irradie,
explose dans la vie et disperse en elle les mille fragments qui semblent lui
preexister. (OC, vol.2, p. 812)
Barthes can be understood here to be refusing an imagined dictum that
life creates literature, and insisting (defiantly!, as always) that literature, in
fact, creates life. But of course the distinction he makes is mostly poetic,
consistent with his rhetorical (and ethical, or political) sensibility of affirming
one thing in detriment of the other. One can just as easily say, of course, that
Proust's actual, material, historically-documented life and his literary work are
both available to us as narrative documents in different kinds of register,
mutually informing of one another.
In the author essay, Barthes conflates critical activity with a direct
symbolic engagement with the bourgeois norm as aesthetic norm. He explains
the difference of the contemporary reader in relation to the fixed forms of
tradition as a mixed urgency of historicity and material contingency. It is said
that there is no other time than that of enunciation, and that thus every text is
eternally written here and now ("et tout texte s'crit ternellement ici et
maintenant"). This highly-charged rhetoric, as political as it is, in its contextual
presentation, is obviously indebted to poetic rhetorical inflections (such as, for
example, Rilke in the ninth Duino elegy saying that "Hier ist des Saglichen Zeit,
hier seine Heimat", or, in a loose translation, here is the time of the tellable,
here is its home)
In 1970, in a re-edition of Mythologies, Barthes added a one-page
introduction in which the political tone is perhaps a bit more charged than it
initially was in the book itself:
"Cependant, ce qui demeure, outre l'ennemi capital (la Norme bourgeoise),
c'est la conjonction necessaire de ces deux gestes: pas de denonciation sans
son instrument d'analyse fine, pas de semiologie qui finalement ne s'assume
comme um semioclastie."
This introduction was written after may 1968, the period of civil unrest in
France which began with student protests and ended up involving a significant
part of the working population. As a midiatic event, this period are still,
decades later, passionately and obsessively retrieved symbolically as this
extraordinary material 'prise de parole' by both the workers and student youth,
this moment where it seemed entirely possible that those instruments of
discursive articulation could bring society to a halt and help it it to be rendered
somewhat less unintelligible to itself.
It makes a lot of contextual difference to be associating the marblebusted cultural status of the author to bourgeois hypostasies when you can
hear in the street and see in barricades a disperse agitation against those selfsame hypostasies (which are frequently called by that name, understood in
roughly this self-same symbolic terrain).
As Barthes says in 'L'criture de l'vnement' ("The Writing of the
Event"), "a symbolic field is not just a reunion (an antagonism) of symbols; it is
also formed by a homogenous game of rules, a consented and common
resource to these rules" (my translation, C, 1968, p.110).

It's entirely possible to imagine Barthes smirking at some of the most

naive reactions to his fantastic-sounding killing of the author (as if he didn't
well know you could have taken his rhetoric straight from Mallarm, Proust, or
even T.S. Eliot for that matter), but there is no reason to assume any of it
should surprise him. He had written a book on myths as semiotic system and
aesthetic surface, after all, he knew by name, presumably, at least most of the
strings which were being pulled. His killing of the author was a very deft move
made on a symbolic field already installed at the time.
The events offered whole new rhetorical configuration to the possibilities
of mixing ecriture and politics, and that would define not only how all of these
writers would be received in the following decades, but also how their critical
effigies would come to dominate the symbolic imagery of political utopias for at
a least a couple generations of left-leaning, Paris-loving college students,
writers and artists (a kind of still warm, if nostalgic, tenderness towards their
power which was directly stylized as recently as Bertolluci's The Dreamers).
The event is still so strong to our imagination that even the cultural
capital amassed by a writer as genuinely interesting and refreshing as Jacques
Rancire can be felt to be, at times, substantially derived from both his
material and symbolic participation in the aesthetic 'seemings' of that time (as
if they could bathe anybody, but specially critical thinkers, with an aura of
much-needed rhetorical authenticity).
May 1968 was lavishly, profusely and sophisticatedly post-analyzed by
both popular and theoretical efforts. Decades later, it is still continuously
reproduced by symbolic re- enactments of certain political sensibilities as the
mythical-seeming grandeur attached to the great valorous deeds of felled
elders, much like the animatronic gestures of a dead president in a Disney
theme park,
One might agree or disagree with the ideals, and also take or leave the
rhetoric, but what seems altogether hard to deny is that it makes very little
sense to suppose the contextual pungency of this kind of expressive context
can maintain itself pre-packaged and frozen to be immediately heated and
served to the same expected results.

2.3 Symbolic slayings and rituals of identity

Dtruire, dtruire: la tache de la schizo-analyse passe par la destruction, tout
un nettoyage, tout un curetage de linconscient. Dtruire Oedipe, lillusion du
moi, le fantoche du surmoi, la culpabilit, la loi, la castration... Gilles Deleuze
and Flix Guattari, (AO, p.371)
For Kenneth Burke (whose figure and work we will later try and relate to
the event of Theory) there are always ritual acts of identification taking place
in symbolic acts of slaying. People can at times slay certain kinds of evil in
ritualized form in order to constitute or enact important aspects of the
identities of their communities.
So we can say, in this light, that in the persistent repetition of the
symbolic slaying of the Author as sacred bourgeois cow there is always the
expressive possibility of an assumed cultural guilt being purged (or of certain
textual identities being ritually produced).
It is only natural that a voice that constitutes itself, at least partially, as a
contextual polemic should be rhetorically modulated to our attention after this
polemic has been not only swallowed up and thoroughly digested by a
hermeneutic community, but also handed down to a generation of
undergraduates, frequently as a fixed revolutionary critical gesture.
We can now count at least a couple of generations exposed to this
literary avant-garde-as-school-of-though. These graduates of both traditional
elite schools and smaller liberal arts colleges all filling in the cultural slots of
writing the novels, songs, TV shows, internet commentary and advertising
which constitute our most immediate mediatic culture.
Many recent US Novels that received a lot of enthusiastic critical praise,
like Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections", Jeffrey Eugenide`s "The Marriage
Plot", Ben Lerner`s "Leaving the Atocha Station", Sam Lypste`s "The Ask" and
Teju Cole`s "Open City" all show an uneasy rhetorical relationship to the
shadow of Theory as a cultural discourse of emancipation taught to a cultural
elite. This discourse may have had its moments of excitement, may even still
be counted by the characters as expressive or valid, but it's also somewhat
clear that this elite now does not seem to have the slightest collective idea of
what to do with themselves as political bodies, except, most of the time,
ironically complaint about the gross illegitimacy of having been so obscenely
well-educated about their own anxious cultural illegitimacy.
As Nicholas Dames put it in an insightful article called The Theory
Generation, published in the magazine N+1, there is something very
deliberately ironic about novelists using relatively straightforward techniques
to narrate the frustrations of a generation largely taught that realism was akin
to systemic deception. One can either frame this as the return of repressed
bourgeois sentiment slowly and carefully putting the cultural seams back
where they were, or, perhaps more directly, as creative artists responding to
strong creative predecessors. Putting it in another way: it no longer seems all
that quirky now that David Foster Wallace, a towering influence over his
compatriot contemporaries, should have written his first novel, the Pynchonian
pastiche that is The Broom of the System (at least partly) as a sort of
Wittgensteinian response to Derrida.

Barthes wanted to be a novelist, and this can be felt, and often directly
heard, all through the end of his work and life, in his very surprising and deeply
moving classes and notebooks on the Preparation du Roman, still obsessed
with a few lines by Proust, who now comes shadowed by Dante and the middle
of one`s life as the definitive, material imaginative lever of time and gravity
operating on one`s body.
His imagination here is no longer as interested in being flashy and
against the current (or rather it might as well just be a bit tired of swimming
against the same currents, all-too-rhetorically-familiar to him by now). Late
Barthes has a newly-felt passion for hai-cais, for the material thisness of
language, partially taken from his appreciation of haicais (as well as from all
the self-same expressive accidents of realism that he repeteadely decried as
both merely illusory and politically unhepful earlier in his career).
His tone in these late notebooks tends much more towards the
universality of literature being found in the concrete, or in the punctum.
Barthes was always desperately attempting to place his own erased figure on
the cardboard cutout of a voice he could present through all the deflections and
fragments. One is reminded of Donald Barthelme, whose tone is so different
from Barthes, but who was fraught with many of the same expressive problems
(depletion and absence of the material Archive, ironic tenderness towards
convention and stock- phrases). Barthelme`s Beckett-haunted novel The Dead
Father, with its absurd imagery of a huge, dead-and-alive giant being dragged
through a desert, is still a powerful figure of the Western Archive's inability (or
reluctancy) to imaginatively struggle with its own mythical revenants directly.
In a short story of his called The Explanation, we also get the following,
very amusing, exchange:
Q: Is the novel dead?
A: Oh yes. Very much so.
Q: What replaces it?
A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.
Q: The same thing?
A: The same sort of thing.
Novelists once were these bourgeois cultural staples which dictated,
through their little carefully-made social microcosms, not only whole narratives
of moral consciousness, but also rhetorical models of behavior and posture.
One reads Flaubert not only for the well-turned phrases, but also because of
the seriousness of that austere imagination collecting debris, and the figural
possibility of absorbing that voice, organizing your own identity around it, and
its imagined cultural place of issuance. In late Barthes there is the repeated
and painful suggestion that we addicted to reading (and to our imaginary roles
as readers) cannot help but repeat books and their scenes in order to make
ourselves possible.
Let me say it again: Barthes clearly wanted to be a novelist, and wanted
it bad. Depending on how loose your concept of a novel was, and on how
seriously you take the symbolic possibilities of mythical slayers taking on the
properties of the slayed, you might just say Barthes was as successful a
novelist as they could come, in his time.

2. 4 . Saint Michel and the Dragon

"La littrature a ses saints, ses pontifes, ses thologiens, ses indiffrents, ses
jansnistes, ses patronages, ses martyrs, ses dtracteurs, ses fous, ses dupes,
etc ; il n'est pas mauvais qu'elle ait aussi ses jsuites qui dsignent le paradis
classique par ses voies les plus faciles."
Roland Barthes (OC, vol.1 p. 65)
"L'honneur, c'est tres exactement notre mana, quelque chose comme une
place vide ou l'on dpose la collection entiere des sens inavouables et que l'on
sacralise comme un tabou."
Roland Barthes (OC, vol. 1, p.778)
Michel Foucaults text What is an Author? seems like the sketching of a
more thorough study that never came to fruition. Foucault doesnt assume
such a straightforward mythical position as Barthes does in his text, but rather
attempts to frame the historicity of the author-function and its connection to
social structures and instruments of power. Foucault explicitly says that one
cannot simply do away with the author, but he equally suggests a connection
between the author as limiting force on discoursivity, linking the function to the
judicial institutions that articulate and enframe the universe of public
discourse.
Here, as elsewhere in Foucault's ouvre, social institutions and their
procedural forms are described as primarily rule-enforcing, order-and-disordercreating formal systems. One only needs to assign names to texts, and to think
of texts as objects with proper names attached to them, when it becomes
possible or necessary for texts to be accounted for by some kind of institutional
authority.
Foucault, then, identifies the Author with the individuation (and thus
restraining, or controlling) of fictive discourse. The social means through which
the dangerous plurivocity of text is made to be amenable, yielded for control. If
that is really true (which certainly might be, or at least partially), shouldn't this
mean that the mere presentation of Foucault's work inside the traditional
mediatic constraints of authorship would necessarily be limiting the symbolic
reverberations of that act?
Of course, we can say, the Author created in conjunction with its
bourgeois reading public since the eighteen century is not the only figure of the
Author available in Western literary discourse. It does not seem immediately
possible to contain, say, Dante, St. Augustine, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and
Cervantes (all great marbled busts of Western cultural value) under the same
logic of authorship.
The author-function, then, is linked in modernity with the judicial
institutions that enframe and articulate the universe of discourse (la fonctionauteur est liee au systeme juridique et institutionnel qui enserre, determine,
articule l`univers des discours, p.803)
But since the author-function is described primarily as a limiting force on
discoursivity, Foucault also presents us with another image for the

reverberation and dissemination that writers (or, more specifically, theorists)

can have. Making direct reference to writers from the IXX century which were
not either literary authors, great scientists or religious leaders, Foucault
decides that these writers could be called transdiscoursive, or, perhaps a bit
arbitrarily, as he admits, "founders of discoursivity" ("fondateurs de
discoursivit", p.804).
When we consider that Foucault, the one that quotes Beckett to the
effect of "What does it matter who speaks?" was himself, in 2007, the most
often-quoted author in the humanities, (surpassing that other French Godhead
of Theory, Bourdieu), it seems almost obvious to point out that here Foucault
was (voluntarily or not) already preparing the terrain for us to deal with his
own very particular case of authorship. After all, few writers since Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud (as well as Heidegger, perhaps, one could add) have had
such powerful, and still-ongoing, rhetorical and conceptual influence on critical
writing.
Of course if we are to look seriously at his rhetoric in the "What is an
Author?" essay, we can find a number of problematic claims (or at least far too
easily placed puzzle-pieces). The suggestion that writing of his time (Blanchot,
Beckett, one assumes, for example) was finally getting rid of the dimension of
expression can hardly even be taken seriously, of course, unless poetically
understood. Whatever crazy hijinks were being done to the expressive
possibilities of textual self-effacement, it's also obvious that the machinery of
literary avant-garde, academia and journalism were still pumping up their
products to their assigned demographics. The most extreme kind of textual
erasure a distinguished author or a lofty academic can enact, of course, is
always still going to be tinged by the rhetorical roles that a community of
readers is able to assign to the forms of, say, "polemic playwright", "radical
critic", and so forth.
Even if one is to take Foucault for his word that in his writing the subject
is constantly disappearing (which I never really took to be even remotely close
to the actual experience of reading his work), it is obviously not the case that
mediatic reverberations of his voice, then (such as his name being quoted in an
undergraduate paper on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or on the grotesquerie of
Brazil's prison system) only contribute to his disappearance. Of course we can
think of amusing twists on the word "disappearance" in order to make his
statement work, if we're so inclined, but there's also the sheer brute fact of his
name in mandatory reading lists everywhere, of his picture, and the gestural
forms it contains, amassing the capital it seemed to have amassed.
It's interesting to see how Foucault can be understood to be, here, both
making rhetorical reference to Barthe's critical gesture towards the author as a
primal scene for continuing critical activity and also symbolically upping the
ante, so to speak, and bringing the overwhelming shadows of Marx, Nietzsche
and Freud to hang over his own rhetoric as directly as Deleuze & Guattari later
would in their Capitalism & Schizophrenia.
Of course, out of the three-(sometimes four)-headed Gorgon of Kritik, our
most immediate rhetorical template for critical theory as suspicion, Foucault
can be most immediately linked in his rhetoric to Nietzsche, whose textual
theatrics, preoccupation with metaphorical thinking and genealogical efforts
can all be easily traced throughout his work.

However, when we consider the liquid profusion of Nietzsche's text, his

position as a radical outsider to his time and the fact that he assumed the
'poiesis' aspect of critical thinking with such gusto and self-mockery as a writer
of aphorisms and poems, Foucault's apparent desire to be read as having the
same sort of roaring, manic laugh as Nietzsche's becomes a bit incongruent.
As radical as Foucault might imagine himself to be, it is also true that he
was able, as a public intellectual, to gain critical mass during his own lifetime,
yielding his own figure for its political expressiveness as much as he yielded
any other pliable discursive tool in his works. It might, then, make a lot more
sense to place him closer to Marx and Freud, those other creators of very
deliberate secular myths with corresponding theoretical steeples.

2.5 The Comedian as the letter F

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and
compare: my business is to create." William Blake
" I think that, in fact, the will not to be governed is always the will not to be
governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price." Michel Foucault
If we look at the footage of Foucault`s debate with Noam Chomsky (easily
available online in a myriad of differently-named files, many of them with
thousands and thousands of recorded viewings) it's clear that he could have in
person the same combative rhetorical posture his ghost is eager to show in
print. Even though Chomsky can be said to be fundamentally agreeing with a
significant part of what he is actually saying, or at least with many of its
underlying political values, Foucault's posture and general demeanor is to
repeatedly undermine any and every assumption that one can trace in
Chomsky's speech (and he does it quite automatically, too, it almost looks like
a reflex).
When it comes to laying down exactly his posture as a political or ethical
gesture, he directly says that we do not make political war because it is just,
but rather we do it to win ("on fait la guerre pour gagner et non parce qu'elle
est juste")
Elsewhere, Foucault also directly stated that what he did was write
historical fiction. Which naturally did not mean that he simply lied, but rather
that he willfully manipulated historical discourse (with its ingrained use of
narrative set-ups, props and costumes, as someone like Hayden White
demonstrates) for creating certain discursive scenes which he felt to be
expressive (or perhaps politically necessary).
Baudrillards Forget Foucault seems at time to loudly denounce Foucalts
figure as that of of another perverse master, saying that Foucaults discourse
is a mirror of the powers it describes (FF, p.10) He also directly compares the
levers of his discourse with that of myth, "right down to the symbolic
effectiveness described by Lvi-Strauss" (FF, p. 30)
This move of comparing Foucault's rhetoric to his disperse and aether-like
notion of social power can actually be heard both from his angry detractors and
the singers of his praise (it was also done by De Certeau; with a very different
tone, naturally).
Whether or not one agrees with its tone, or finds it theoretically useful or
not, his overwhelming rhetoric of discursive power is s important to our
current critical tradition that it can be taken as Bentham's Panopticon, one of
his most powerful figures for disciplinary societies (but turned either inside out
or outside in, depending on how demonic you figure the puppet master to be)
Derrida's early review of Histoire de La Folie can be said to anticipate this
kind of response to Foucault's authorial rhetoric, objecting to Foucault's
apparent impression that one can do away with the edifice of reason while still
operating inside it. As much as Foucault may have made with this work a very
impressive game of self-effacement regarding madness as the negative double
of reason inside the Western archive (which he manipulates as he sees fit, or

rather, perhaps, as he finds politically useful), and as kuh- razy as his rhetoric
may sound inside a doctoral dissertation, it is also true that to anyone familiar
with the works of Bataille, Artaud and Nietzsche the tone and the gesture he is
trying to acheive may seem all to clear and familiar.
And when the book already comes to us inside the plastic binding of a
familiar canon it is very difficult to understand from which one of the
proliferating fissures exactly is the Nietzschean laughter supposed to be
coming from (when all we hear is a surrealist version of Freudian or Marxist
rhetorical mythology turned to the self-conscious edifice of Western reason).
The strange double-bind of an author so directly concerned with social
power and so blatant about his own textual disappearance becoming perhaps
the most important and dominating critical author of the later part of the 20th
century (when we consider the very wide reach of his presence over the
humanities, literature and contemporary art) , then, comes not exactly from the
weirdness of his rhetoric, but rather from the contextual circumstances that
permitted a writer so distinctly emulating Nietzsche to have his eminence
sediment as quickly and pervasively as it did. Or, saying it in another way:
perhaps what distinguishes the midiatic event of Theory in the US with many
other moments of critically-minded (and leftist-bent) critical thinking was that it
was, in sheer material terms, so strangely successful. Of course one way of
describing it is a wild and paranoid misreading of obscurely-termed theoretical
texts, but the sheer fact that so many people could find in those tropes and
scenes the preparations and intimations of further dramatic acts, and could
enact those voices in manner which must have sounded convincing is,
naturally, not a bad thing, in and of itself. Myths should arguably always be
judged by the bodies and machinery they move, and not (or not primarily) by
their rhetoric.
But it does make it so much more amusing to see the tenure-holding,
book-tour- rocking practitioners of this discourse still thinking they sound as
radical as they must have thought old Michel did, forty years ago. It's quite
exactly like seeing a fifty-year old punk rocker buying pre-shredded jeans in an
upscale store. Theory was always literary, always had the trappings of an
avant-garde, but it was perhaps only the rhetoric of the cultural wars and other
moments of midiatic conservative backlash that could have made the cultural
momentum seem as dangerous and radical as it did.
Naturally there were a lot of things being agitated and put into question,
no doubt, but the machinery of academia, social distinction and cultural
production was never mediatically shaken to is very core as some seem to
describe it, at times. If it had been, we would not have this strange parade of
French critical godheads still treated as sacred cows for us to tread after in the
name of socially-important critique. It may have been, say, a change in media
like the one we get from mono to Stereo, but it was not like all of a sudden
having Pink Floyd play in your living room.
What is interesting about Foucault's position towards authorship in the
"What is an Author?" is that by describing something as perversely mythical
you are never only debunking it, but also attesting to its particular power, to its
expressive immediacy in some kind of production of presence. When you
single-out a myth to watch out for in a symbolic texture, you are also (in a
sense) creating it.

Foucaults most powerful rhetorical gesture may be, then, his (somewhat)
earnest attempt at producing historical truth through fiction. Of course one can
object to a whole number of conclusions he draws from picky examples out of
densely-presented textual histories, one can also complain that his paragraphs
are frequently much more convoluted than necessary, but the fact is that his
wordy presentations of biopolitics and systems of control, of all-pervasive social
discoursive power, of madness as a romanticized non-place for rational
discourse (and so on) all offer concrete imaginative interfaces of textual
politics, if not necessarily such a stricly-defined or entirely coherent narrative
succession of concepts or ideas.
If we consider any piece of writing to be instructions for performance, as
Burke did, the question then becomes whether any of his particular gestures in
these political directions can be considered sucessful rhetorical presentations
of their own conditions of performativity (or formal intelligibility). I guess the
jury on that one is still at least partially up for grabs, but the power of that
(largely incongruent) gesture is perhaps what keeps Foucaults voice so
distinctly delineated, his presence still so clearly, almost irrevocably, felt.
As much as I may dislike the flashy overzealousness of his voice (coming
from such a high-sounding mast), and as much as I have also heard it
mimicked by some of the worst college professors I've ever had, it is also
certainly true that you sometimes still find these old, crumpled textual tools
being used for very interesting, sometimes even politically relevant, conceptual
use.

2.6 Self-Effacing Ghosts with their own Mystery Machines

Of course it is not possible to make something apparent without also
concealing it, as both Carlyle and Heidegger diversely remind us. My own effort
at making particular mythical dimensions of this event cannot hope to rid itself
absolutely of the mythical aspect of the endeavor itself (a voice that punctures
the balloons it just happened to blow up).
Neither do I assume to be producing an image of Foucault or Barthes that
was not already available to our common critical vocabulary. I am mostly trying
to point to the absurd size of their balloons in the proverbial parade, and trying
not to destroy them all too quickly. Not out of respect (if one were to try and
respect Foucault, it would probably involve reducing him to a murmur, in the
same way that to respect Deleuze one might consider doing to him what he
said he liked to do to philosophers). When Theory is looked at as a mediatic
event, with its contextual presentations and practicioners, its sacred chants
and formulas, it does not seem outrageous to me to understand Foucault`s
rhetorical figure as the closest we get to the Godhead of Theory itself, to its
parousia.
The ridiculousness of proposing that any specific godhead or particular
discourse largely or loosely contained in Theory should be considered a
totalyzing or self-enclosed myth seems to dismantle quite immediately with
Theorys own almost self-evident (in the sense of tautological) tendency to
dismantle in bulbuous discoursivity instead of fixing in any Hegelian resolution
or synthesis.
As an example, take Derridas highly influential and, in its own way,
powerful invoking of Marx's revenant in Spectres du Marx. Its own very clever
hauntology did nothing like sprouting a single hermeneutic framework of
suspicion to be paranoically applied to reality by subsequent practicioners of
Theory . It didnt even create a single paranoid ghost on whose general
demeanor we can all hopefully agree, but, rather, its expressive terms
dissipated (or reverberated) in a volume like Ghosty Demarcations, years later,
a volume whose very existence in a way reiterates the figure of Derridas
inteligibility as a ghost (the ghostly demarcations of its presence) without
attempting to necessarily place him, or Marx, as the ghost in the metaphysical
machine of Theory (so to speak).
One can accuse Derrida of many things, at times even of been a bit too
glib about his own rhetoricity, the clearly aesthetic tinge to his self-effacement,
but he was also a generous ghost, and gentle mourner (later in his career, he
even became a friendly democratic ghost for some of his American lectures,
one a bit more pleasantly mystic and mysterious than the at times rhetorically
carbuncular, but ever so hopeful, Habermas)
Derridas rhetoric seems to come out of nowhere only if we forget not
only Blanchot and De Man, Adorno and Heidegger, but also Celan, Angelus
Silesius and Mallarm (even Valery, at times), as well as many distinct mystical
denominations and poetic traditions of apophatic philosophy and negative
theology of language. His rhetoric may well be something like the negative
embodiment of logos, but it never was an intelligible gesture of destruction.
The one thing that Derrida probably should not be convincingly accused of is of
pretending that he is completely demolishing the theater of metaphysics. He
(almost always) acknowledges, like the Ashbery of Three Poems, that

"The performance had ended, the audience streamed out; the applause still
echoed in the empty hall. But the idea of the spetacle as something to be
acted out and absorbed still hung in the air long after the last spectator had
gone home to sleep."
This is, conceivably, what makes Theory's mediatic presentation as an
event (an imaginative threshold irrevocably crossed by our elders and betters)
still seem, at times, distinctly convincing to so many people. Symbolic acts
always create their own scene, as cries always create their own occasions. As
always, it does not matter all that terribly what we are saying about authors,
but rather what we are doing with them.

2.7

HOW NOT TO BE GOVERNED THUSLY

La fleche que les uns ne voient pas partir, les autres la voient arriver
Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Outline of a General Theory of Magic (1904)
"He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword"
Revelation 13:10
"What else should I say / everyone is gay "
Nirvana
Throughout his work, Foucault displayed a constant anxiety about being
lumped with any groups larger than himself. Although many righty pointed out
the influence of structuralism on his "Les Mots et Les Choses", he also rejected
the label with vehemence, as he would later do with other labels. This figure of
the creative genius that spurns easy handholding and won't play nice with just
anyone that is interested in his yelling eventually turned, in his later work, into
a different kind of political inflection, one that embraced much more
straightforwardly the fictive side of his rhetoric, essentially coming to propose a
conflating of political discourse and our lives into a seamless artwork.
This is, perhaps, where his rhetoric has been most influential on the
american theorist Judith Butler, for example, who says:
Significantly, for Foucault, this exposure of the limit of the epistemological field is
linked with the practice of virtue, as if virtue is counter to regulation and order, as if
virtue itself is to be found in the risking of established order. He is not shy about the
relation here. He writes, there is something in critique that is akin to virtue. And
then he says something which might be considered even more surprising: this critical
attitude [is] virtue in general.

Out of the many collective bobble-heads we have of Foucault, this one,

beckoning us to treat politics as art, is quite possibly the one which will endure
the most. In Butler (considered as another critical figure inside the event of
Theory) this association of critique with virtue is usually given particular
cultural valence inside the narrative constraints of gender identity politics, her
most famous, and perhaps even politically- noteworthy book, still being Gender
Trouble (who was name-dropped, for example, by Brazilian virtuoso cartoonist
Laerte in a recent cartoon of his about his own cross- dressing habit and the
contextual interfaces which helped rendering the activity intelligible to him as a
political gesture)
Whatever one might think of Butler as a theorist, it's clear that her voice
would have never achieved the kind of eminence it did if there were not
contextual interfaces already installed in US culture which could render her
critical gestures intelligible and reverberate them as such and such. The very
fact that it did happen to reverberate so strongly, and with relative swiftness,
points to its formal intelligibility inside some mediatic ecologies.
But when you look at the discourse of Theory as an archive producing
other archives (the whole system of higher education as this Behemoth of
rituals involving the production of knowledge and their many levers of social

intelligiblity), entities like elite Universities are clearly, at least in some senses,
conservative mediatic systems. They may well uphold critical or revolutionary
values, at times, but most of them operate with the use of structures like
reading lists, syllabi and progressive or cumulative notion of informationgathering, as well as clearly-defined and rigidly-imposed hierarchical
structures. This isn't to say that they are evil, or anything like that, but simply
that it makes very little sense to assume machinery such as these are going to
yield revolutionary results just because some brave and serious political truths
are being said (brave and serious truths are almost always being said, which
means that what works and what doesn't is hardly ever only a question of
courage, or virtue).
It may well turn out o be that this double of critical discourse, this thing
that Theory so often circunvents, cannot grasp, and dare not ever directly
name, is almost precisely its own mythical dimension as the cultural grammar
of a disperse political body. Its own self-awareness as a rhetoric that can never
come to entire teleological fruition (the Aristotelian entelechy that Burke was
so obsessed with), because this would, in some cases, also have to mean the
very admittance of their expressive impossibility (if it is indeed true that all
pretense at rational discourse is logocentric, and possibly all logocentrism
politically harmful, maybe I should`t even be trying to open my mouth, then).
Even a book like Gender Trouble, still relatively recent and with a political
message (insofar as it has a 'message', of course) still far from being passively
ingrained in popular culture, may seem at times strangely fixed and stylized
already, as if what the book elicited us was a terminological certainty of all
these things we should hope never to say or even think about gender, all the
mistakes we should be able not to make to seem perfectly nice and respectful,
instead of serving as a discursive platform for engaging with those self-same
problems the book is thornily trying to express, or come to terms with.
Instead of taking the book's own possibilities as a vocabulary of suspicion
to show how, unbeknownst to Henry James, Ashbery and Nabokov, their
involuntary, almost jerky queerness was being everywhere flaunted by the
strange deflections of their rhetoric (as many like to do, and so triumphantly,
taking proverbial rabbits out of hats like so many fistfuls of air), could`t we
adopt the book's general ideas, as well as Butler's own rhetorical enactment of
Foucault's critique as the powerful rhetorical gesture it already is, without
trying to immediately mimic its self-same posture?
It's easy to see snarky (at times even ill-spirited) remarks linking
Foucault's saintlike posture to his tragic death (and the many powerful cultural
narratives surrounding HIV, specially in the eighties). Of course it's possible to
trace a very deliberate queer hagiography traced around some of these figures,
like Todd Haynes did to Kurt Cobain at the end of Velvet Goldmine (at least
partially because some of them started drawing the halo themselves), but after
a couple of decades of socially-mindful and vociferous identity politics have
given us relatively so little in return for all the noise it made, should`t we also
be looking for rhetorical terms of political engagement that are not that
immediately linked to this and that pre-assigned form of sexual, ethnic or
national identification?
To think that only certain political demographics are `entitled` to specific
modes of political discourse on gender, or that there is a pre-determined

political ethos that should govern all of our discursive dealings with our
sexuality is naturally as dangerous as thinking that the Western man/woman
dichotomy is as absolute as a color chart. This is the kind of almost totemic
political behavior which can frequently pass of as sophisticated cultural
activism, all the while re-enforcing strange and previously unsolicited measures
of epistemic violence and unhelpful flag-weaving.
Because of course the most deceptive thing about thinking about Theory
as an event is thinking that those aspects of our experience which we
eventually may find to be powerfully described by their rhetoric to be a selfenforcing guarantee of their larger claims about historic contingency and
metanarratives. As if we couldn't wrestle similar political philosophies of gender
from, say, Shakespeare's As you Like it (which is a text at least as sophisticated
about gender performativity as Butler's is), as if Tiresias never had his wrinkly
old female breasts, or as if gender performativity was this thing invented by
Judith Butler in this and that manner (instead of being a level of description or
conceptual tool for something we might easily place in any culture).
Just as we don't need Foucault to have Butler, exactly (and we might
even find her Foucault to be more convincing than his, at times, in the same
way some sequels or translations are better than the originals), there is also a
sense in which we may hardly even need Butler to have Butler (that is, in the
sense that her rhetorical figure can also come to you through the many forms
that she seem to have directly and indirectly influenced, the cartoonists,
guitarists and terracota-penis-yielding feminists her rhetoric has helped make
intelligible)

3.BURKE AS A TRICKSTER FIGURE

we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down
or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree,
the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a
flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician--
Marianne Moore
apparently describing the scene for the action of a drama, they are
themselves a dramatic act prodding to a further dramatic act
Kenneth Burke
deixa os cao se embarreirar que os coiote ja canta
Look

3.1 Burke and dramatism, language as symbolic action

The american philosopher and literary critic Kenneth Burke is an odd
figure, incredibly difficult to classify. He seems to have swallowed Marx, Freud
and Nietzsche, the classical and modern traditions of rhetoric, the anthropology
of myth and magic in Malinowski and Frazer, and some leftover I.A. Richards
and Bentham, only to come up with something that is not equal to sum of
these already odd enough parts. Language here, as in Theory, is everywhere,
its the main instrument through which the cultural fabric and the narratives of
power are created, but the framing here is not exactly familiar. Language in
Burke is not a logical map of reality, nor a system of negatively-constituted
differences, but more of the primary pragmatic means that man, who is for him
the typically symbol-using animal, has of collectively producing reality.
But his voice cant be said to be similar to any of these writers, the place
where it seems to be coming from not quite that of a debunker, nor of a
demystififer. Its a very self-aware, and, to me, often very funny, voice, that
seems to be slightly amazed by everything that he it tries to describe (as well
as with the very process of description itself).
Burke deeply influenced many well-regarded writers and intellectuals,
such as Susan Sontag, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Ellison and Harold Bloom, and
corresponded with poets like Hart Crane and Marianne Moore. But although his
eminence as a critic is quite secure, his figure perhaps never quite achieved
the stature it might deserve (in Brazil, for example, where I'm from, he is
practically unheard of), at least partly because of the fact that Burke`s thought
was never comfortably placed inside larger movements and schools.
Burke thought that rhetoric was rooted in an essential function of
language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew;
the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings
that by nature respond to language (SS, p.188)
His dramatism came from an understanding of all language as contextual

performance (which could be broken down into parts for anaylsis). The pentad
given in his Grammar of Motives, of Scene, Agent, Agency and Purpose, partly
derived from the scholastic hexameter, serves as a calculus for describing
symbolic acts and assigning them motive (which has been taken to mean not
only 'intent', but also a recurrent phrase or figure that is developed in a musical
composition, or motif).
Far from understanding that his critical tools were absolute or entirely
precise, Burke always admitted to the distortion that always comes from the
adoption of any particular set of terms, and throughout his work mutated his
understanding of symbolic action from a perspective by incongruity and a
comic corrective, largely centered around the ironic function of language, to
the pentad- dramatism and its many expressive possibilities of different
stresses and placements for different social contexts, coming finally to logology
(or studies in words-about-words, coming from the principle that regardless if
the entity God exists, humans talk about it, and this should mean studying
theological language means, in a sense, studying language itself).
For him, every way of seeing was also a way of not-seeing, in the same
way that any perspective is only made possible by the very limits it sets in our
field of vision. Instead of trying to escape or negate the symbolic dimensions of
language, Burke understood that in the very act of naming an object or a
situation there would be implicit a magical decree (PI, p.119).
The question then for the study of rhetoric would not be to eliminate
magic, which would entail eliminating any kind of vocabulary, but rather to
have what he calls correct magic, magic whose decrees about the naming of
real situations is the closest possible approximation to the situation named
(with the greater accuracy of approximation being supplied by the collective
revelation of testing and discussion) (PI, p.119)
This is in line with his understanding of literature and religion themselves
(and not only criticism, or philosophy) as equipment for living, the body of
imagination supplied by any imaginative tradition supplying, much like
proverbs, a wealth of strategies or attitudes for dealing with different
expressive situations. Or, as he says it:
Insofar as situations are typical and recurrent in a given social structure,
people develop names for them and strategies for handling them. (PI, p.103)
The symbolic act, he elsewhere said, was the dancing of an attitude.
Burke highlighted throughout his work, partly through Freud, partly through
Nietzsche, the much-neglected bodily aspect of thinking and speaking, the fact
that language is always inscribed by concrete gesture and bodily movement.
This is not wholly unlike phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty`s understanding
of conceptual signification being formed by a gestural signification that would
be immanent to speech ("une signification gestuelle, qui, elle, est immanent a
la parole" (MP, PP, p. 219). Since the experience of meaning is thus always
grounded in concrete texture, the difference (for example) in the mimics of
anger or love done by people from different cultures would entail actual
expressive difference in the emotions themselves (MP, PP, p.230).
All of this, in Burke, points back to the possibility of relating our social
praxis to their underlying symbolic structures. When he says in his Rhetoric of
Motives that:

The new equivalent of 'moral' or 'tropological' criticism would probably be

found in a concern with the poem as ritual that does things for the writer and
reader. (RM, p.219-20)
This understanding of ritual here need not be understood as a fixed social
structure ready to give the same kind of symbolic response to rigidlydetermined kinds of input (as if, say, the Divine Comedy was a fixed ritual
providing the same kind of spiritual anagogy for any kind of reader in any
context). Any particular local dialectic, for Burke, implies particular symbolic
contexts as well as particular material circumstances of reverberation.
In his reading of Keat`s Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example, Burke is
interested in laying out the symbolic structure of the poem as if it were carrying
out an argument (between him and Keats, between Keats and poetry itself, or
between the reader and Keats; it is not always clear). He ends up by
transforming the famous (if a bit worn-out) verse beauty is truth, truth
beauty into the following scheme:
beauty equals poetry equals act truth equals science equals scene
This is as succinct a formulation of his literary philosophy as any Burke
would ever give us. For him, then, act is scene, and scene is act. There is
nothing exactly behind the scene, because the scene (like a phenomenologist`s
appearances) is all there is.
This is somewhat similar to the rhetorical move done by the successive
layers of self-conscious evasion and deflection in so-called postmodern works
like Nabokov`s Pale Fire ("This was the sense, not text but texture") and John
Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, where the soul, from a depthless
abyss of representation, is eventually said to have no secret, and to "fit its
hollow perfectly / its room, our moment of attention".
Such as in Wallace Stevens "Add this to Rhetoric", where it is said that "it
is posed, and it is posed / but in nature it merely grows", in Burke, such as in
Merleau- Ponty, we are capable of language in the same sense that a lamp is
capable of glowing or a a dog of barking. Language, with all of its unending
realm of symbolic possibility, is contained as potentia within the human
program.
Which means that for Burke all possible and impossible use of rhetoric is
perfectly natural (which certainly does not mean it is `good`, or morally
positive, the distinct conviction that they are prone to demonic tendencies, in
fact, is where Burke's many hortatory pieces and moods came from) which
helps to make intelligible Burke`s initially curious sounding remark that every
living thing is a critic.

3.2 Burke and Jameson

In his essay The Symbolic Inference, Fredric Jameson frames Kenneth
Burke's thought in relation to 20th century critical thinking (or, more
specifically, Psychoanalysis and Marxism, his own pet monsters). From an initial
relative praise of Burke`s originality, Jameson goes on to decry a fundamental
insufficiency in Burke`s thought in relation to ideological analysis (of which
Jameson himself is, of course, one of the Godheads):
This is therefore the moment to characterize the ultimate structural distance
between Burkean dramatism and ideological analysis proper: Burke's system
has no place for an unconscious, it makes no room for genuine mystification,
let alone for the latter's analysis or for that task of decoding and hermeneutic
demystification which is increasingly the mission of culture workers in a society
as reified and as opaque as our own.
One of the reasons why Jameson think that Burke's thought is unhelpful
would be its focus on the notion of ritual, which, for Jameson, would no longer
have cultural valence, since it would essentially betray a misguided, or even
naive, understanding of Parsonian stability and functionality, while
contemporary social formations would have as inner logic a restless and
corrosive dissolution of traditional social relations into the atomized and
quantified aggregates of the market system (p.519)
It`s unclear from where exactly does Jameson take from Burke this
understanding of ritual as a stable, fixed symbolic structure with somewhat
rigidly-determined social forms, since this is in no way what Burke suggests
throughout his work.
But even if we might agree with Jameson that a ritual would have to be
essentially stable and repeat itself structurally over time (which seems at best
only partially true), how exactly can he say that contemporary democracies,
those entities with their dreadfully amusing rituals of reality TV contests for
Presidents and other elected officials, as well as strict symbolic pantomimes for
the production and maintenance of law, for instance, have no such thing as
ritual?
For Burke, modern rhetoric was a survival of 'primitive' magic, which he
came to understand should not be considered bad science, as Frazer did (much
to Wittgenstein`s irritation), but rather good rhetoric.
Which is obviously not to say he has no place for the unconscious, or for
historical dialectics. What seems to be the case, rather, is that for Burke both
the unconscious and something you might jut as well call historical
dialectics all happen through the medium of collective symbolic production.
Burke`s notion of terministic screens suggest that any particular set of
terms which we might use to anaylse social reality is always going to be
limited. Every way of seeing, including any of his own, is also a way of notseeing. One might certainly disagree with Burke`s vocabulary or methods, but
it makes very little sense to say that his symbolic act is always naively
transparent to itself.
There is nothing in Burke which would suggest this transparency to the
hidden dark undersides of language and history. The symbolic act really is what

it is, in Burke, because there is nothing behind it (they produce their own
reality, and thus are not, in this sense, `illusory`), but this does not mean that
the actors ever absolutely know what it is, any more than any character in a
Joyce novel (other than Stephen, of course) is supposed to know what the novel
is about. That is where criticism which for him was always a political activity steps in.
It's clear to anyone who has seriously attempted to deal with Burke`s
thought that he does not simply dismiss or digest Freud, Marx or Nietzsche.
Nietzche (as well as Vico) is clearly present in Burke`s understanding of
metaphor as perspective, Freud is everywhere in Burke's understanding of
symbolic displacement, and Marx may be the most immediate shadow behind
Burke`s understanding of cultural production and social dialectics.
But what is really strange (or maybe even dishonest) about Jameson`s
rhetoric is that he should act as if Burke was not always directly talking about
exactly that, facing very directly exactly the problems that Jameson supposes
his own discourse to be raising.
Of course one can accuse Burke of not really tackling all the endlessly
diverse deceptive possibilities of ideology and the unconscious (we can just as
easily do this to Jameson himself, or to anyone, for that matter, that is just how
these vocabularies work), but it makes very little sense to suppose, like
Jameson seems to suppose, that Burke simply wasn`t aware of what those
theories meant, and just naively relied on the transparency of language. This is
almost precisely what Theory, as a mediatic event (happening both in its
official emanations and as a more disperse cultural language that ones needs
to master to navigate in certain mediatic ecosystems) does to any discourse
that does not participate in its rhetoric.
Burke's sympathy to the political possibilities of Marxism as a critical
vocabulary never stopped him from acknowledging that Marxism had just as
much a tendency to turn into mythical narrative as any other political narrative.
In fact, it`s exactly because of its mythical qualities that Marxism could hope to
be useful (and should also be feared and taken seriously).
He is in fact dealing with the major ghosts of suspicion (M, N, F)
throughout his work, both directly and indirectly, and the only reason Jameson
is able to even pretend he doesn`t (or that he doesn`t do it seriously) is the
mere fact that he does it while being very funny and not positioning himself in
the usual position of ideological critique. The sophisticated cultural
gatekeeper that emmancipates through his difficult wordiness, like Mr Jameson
so likes to do. This text, as a medium (along with its immediate contexts of
reverberation), seems to say, like in Latour`s caricature:
You are still believing in a world of straightforward discoursive appearances,
not yet enlightnened by this or that grammar of emmancipation. If you do not
submit to this grammar, you are (unlike me) hopelessly lost in self-deception!
The only thing that is is made very clear in this essay is simply that
Jameson cannot accept or deal with a critical vocabulary that does not
participate in a rhetoric of suspicion. He can`t understand why Burke won`t just
play nice like everyone else interested in the relation between language and
cultural production, and has no interest to see what he has to say if it won`t
submit into the much-reduced scope of expressive possibilities of those large
and loose, baggy monsters of 20th century critical hermeneutics, Marxism and

Psychoanalysis. Or rather, perhaps, in Mr. Jameson`s personal actualizations of

those monsters, all-too-safely-placed in a few rhetorical magic tricks that
seemed to have ran out of mana a long time ago (that is, if they ever really had
any).

3.3 - Theory as God-term, Burke as a trickster figure.

To treat Theory as God-term would not mean that its narrative is theistic,
or anything of the kind, but rather to try and acknowledge the seemingly
absolute cultural terms which can be set by even faulty and leaky discursive
groupings. It it is not necessary for Theory to call itself a master discourse in
order for it to work as one, anymore than it is necessary for a President to truly
believe in democratic values to be able to enjoy his executive powers.
As Kolakowski says, the mythical consciousness is rooted as act affirming
values, which "can be fruitful to the extent that they satisfy the real need for
controlling the world of experience by a meaning-giving interpretation of it,
referring it to unconditioned Being" (PM, p.5).
In Burke's psychology of form, the creation of formal patterns in the work
and the recogniton of these patterns in the audience amounts to essentially the
same creative act. To try to grasp Theory as a midiatic Event, then, means not
only to look for the collective narratives around these texts, their authors and
their circumstances, but also the contextual presentation of these events in
patterns that suggests a guiding political or moral unity in their voices, and this
guiding political or moral unity as an event that once happened (like a battle or
a presidential election are understood to 'happen') and is now only available to
us in only symbolically depleted forms.
Burke understood that since apparently human beings already had
contained in them all of these fantastic linguistic machinery to deal with Gods
and Demons, it hardly mattered exactly if Gods and Demons actually existed or
not. The biological fact, for him, was that we could not help but deal with those
kinds of imaginative terms, figuring the universe in terms of order and cosmic
hierarchy, as well as collectively stablishing our own relationship towards these
orders in terms of ritual naming and changing of identity. What this also meant
was that essentially any vocabulary could be turned into an absolute cultural
matrix, any title (money, sex, history) could be turned into a God-title, any
term a God-term.
To live under Theory as a God-term would be to position yourself
imaginatively towards it a way similar than that suggested by Harold Bloom
with his term belatedness, to think of these particular critical writers as being
the Original Adams of cultural thinking, the felled elders which already did all
the naming and to which we must tend and refer to with either sardonic
irreverence or lofty respect. Or, much like Borges predecessors, already
creating and containing our late capitalist anxieties far too well for us to even
want to change the terms.
To understand, roughly, that some elements of the rhetorical terms that
they have set are irrevocable, and that even if we are not necessarily to use
their vocabulary, we are almost condemned to tread their terrain (perhaps
simply because there is no immediate other).
Lewis Hyde says the trickster is the "archetype who attacks all
archetypes", the character in myth "who threatens to take the myth apart (...),
an 'eternal state of mind' that is suspicious of all eternals, dragging them from
their heavenly preserves to see how they fare down here in this time-haunted
world." (TMW, p.14).

Although their conceptual characterization may shift greatly from

anthropologists to literary theorists and Jungian psychologists, the trickster is
nonetheless widely recognized as a sort of transcultural character-type,
diversely manifested in figures from disparate cultural origins like Exu, Coyote,
Ulysses, Loki, Hermes, Anansi and the great Monkey King. In internet culture,
both the figure of the hacker and the troll have been customarily assigned the
role of "trickster" in certain communities. Frequently understood to be a selfconscious metanarrator of his own narrative, the trickster is always a
mischievous figure, usually as destructive as he is creative, (which is why Exu
is still, in Brazil, frequently confused with the Christian Devil) always playing
with the possibilities of rhetorical identification and manipulation, treating
language games as interactive levers.
If criticism needs to account for both the aesthetic elements of the
rhetoric strategies that we choose to participate in as well as the media which
we agree to maintain and keep running by our mere phatic presence, it would
seem like taking Burke for the trickster he always (always willing to play with
language to see what it could give, willing to use and try everything at hand,
always distrustful of collective rituals of scapegoating and unnecessary selfboasting) could mean a much-needed change of rhetorical stress.

4. BORGES AS CRITIC
La novela Der Golem de Gustav Meyrink (1915) es la historia de un sueno: en
ese sueno hay suenos; en esos suenos (creo) otros suenos
Jorge Luis Borges (OC, vl.4 p.463)
Do they know that once upon a time, time itself was curled into reels and
stacked onto shelves? It`s impossible to convey how real those objects were,
how demonstrative a slither of tape, for instance, could be
Steve Rushton
In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and
rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him
belong to this production
Foucault
4.1 Borges and his predecessors
To explain my actual (by which I mean personal) reasons for wanting to
bring Borges into the picture would have to involve a description of first
discovering him when I was fifteen, and thinking he was the only person, to my
limited knowledge, that really seemed to understand what books were, and
what they apparently did to us. Years later, having read some literary criticism
and gaining a bit more familiarity with that distant marble-busted reality of the
Western tradition, Borges started to seem a bit obvious to me, a very clever,
but somewhat too immediate, too blatant, turner of literary tricks. A great
magician, sure, but uncapable of giving us the hard and true actuality of
existence like real writers (which at time to me meant essentially novelists).
It was only after reading a lot more criticism and some philosophy that I
went back to Borges and realized that, much like Goethe, Henry James, Joyce,
Poe, Mallarm or Flaubert, Borge`s extraordinary expressive force, and
apparently much-enduring contemporary influence on both literature and
criticism (like a Buddha of unbounded expanse, almost) lies in his power as a
writer-critic.
Borges is quoted by Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze and other
french theorists, and at times with considerable proeminence, almost as a
literary prophet or visionary, like Benjamin came to be regarded, roughly at the
same period, in the US, after the Hannah Arendt introduction and subsequent
hagiographical incantations (which were really inevitable, given Benjamin`s
powerful visionary rhetoric, even if this prophetic quality is most immediately
understood in an ironic, or tragic, sense).
His stories, truisms and allegories are all influential as self-conscious
forms commenting upon themselves, his expressive gestures made into
procedural movements readily available to our common literary sensibility like
disperse critical truisms (about memory, maps, archives, translation, mirrors,
etc)
One can also see the apparent influence of his encyclopedic imagination

and rhetorical gestures not only in the works of similarly-positioned writers like
Italo Calvino ("Invisible Cities", and "If on a winter's night a traveller", most
notably), Umberto Eco ("Foucault's Pendulum"), Danilo Kis ("The Encyclopedia
of the Dead"), Milorad Pavic ("The Dictionary of the Kazars"), Jos Saramago
("All the Names") and Ricardo Piglia (particularly in his nonfiction), but also in
comic book writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, science
fiction writers like Philip K. Dick and even the self-help-guru-mediatic
phenomenon of Paulo Coelho (who has a book called "The Zahir" that
apparently takes on Borges homonymous story as an imaginative template).
His voice is frequently quoted (both indirectly and directly) by
contemporary visual artists (such as Oliver Laric, for example), and his figure
can be felt behind a self-conscious artsy product like Mikko Kuorinki`s
alphabetical ordering of every word in "The Order of Things". The 2007 album
Rise Above by the band Dirty Projectors, a re-imagining of the Black Flag
classic, was straightforwardly described by the frontman, Dave Longstreth, as a
Pierre-Menard-type joke (even if seriously meant as a political gesture of some
sort, apparently).
Borges most influential rhetorical gesture would probably be that of
basing a piece of fiction on the act of pretending that an imaginary book
already exists, and then proceeding to talk about its existence quite naturally.
This has served in many manuals about postmodernism everywhere as a sort
of Duchamp-like inaugural gesture of formal self- consciousness, and has been
endlessly quoted by both literary artists and theorists (most recently by
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his wonderful Mtaphysiques Cannibales) as a
serious imaginative gesture towards admitting the material contingency of the
theoretical effort as well as the symbolic depletion of our expressive
imagination itself.
Shifting the imaginative act from a primary creation to (what was most
immediately understood) as a secondary act of commentary can be taken both
as a formally ironic gesture that points to a certain exhaustion of literary
convention or as a strategy to imaginatively get away from that depletion (in a
sense, transcend it).
This act of assuming the mediation and ironically transcending it, so to
speak, could be associated with a book like Nabokov`s Pale Fire, from about the
same time as Borges came into prominence (he first became globallyrecognized as an important author, I believe, in 1961 when he was awarded the
First Prix Internacional algonside Samuel Beckett) in which the fake paranoid
commentary to a long poem gives rise to a novel in hypertext in which ghosts
show up and paranoid allusions and quotations multiply self-consciously as
expressive texture.
Perhaps more than most writers, Borges was always quite candid about
his most immediate influences and predecessors. One can trace from his many
direct and indirect allusions the origins of his encyclopedic style not only to
Burton, but also to Thomas Browne`s Urn Burial, the device of writing about
fake books and fake writers to Carlyle`s Sartor Resartus, the device of treating
historical and imaginary figures as fictional playgrounds from Marcel Schwob`s
Vies Imaginaires, the tendency to entreat philosophical ideas as fictions from
Browning`s dramatic monologues, and a modern fantastic (or mythical) use of
caballist mystical imagery from Gustav Meyrink`s novel The Golem. Lewis

Carroll`s paradoxes, portmanteaus and deeply-meant puns are also a very

clear and enduring influence, specially through Sylvie and Bruno and The
Hunting of the Snark. Poe`s detective stories, as well as Chesterton`s
variations on them, are also frequent imaginative allusions, and Kafka may be
deemed his most immediate, but also depressed, younger brother.
Borges can be understood to be saying, with so many different words and
images, essentially, not only that every discoursive act is fiction, but that these
fictions are all equally wrought from the self-same materials, roughly the same
bodily metaphors ('unas cuantas metaforas'), built from our immediate
experience and diversely entonated by the material inscriptions we keep
making of them in our collective production of reality (`una diversa entonacion
de unas cuantas metaforas`)
In Borges, mimesis is production, the traditional mirror of representation
put in front of another mirror and creating a recursive, and infinite, expressive
loop (representation as a midiatic material repetition of reality).
In Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, this terrible force is able to eventually
create another universe, Borges is highly conscious of literature happening as a
material inscription in the world, the human actualization of mediatic archives.
After the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlon (the fictional world) is
unearthed in a library in Memphis, there is a explosion of texts around it.
Manuales, antologias, resumenes, versiones literales, reimpresiones
autorizadas y reimpresiones piraticas de la Obra Mayor de los Hombres
abarrotarony siguen abarrotando la tierra. (Borges, OC, p.473).
Borges is suggesting that Fictions can collectively and materially come to
produce reality. And that this production can get out of our control. El contacto
y el habito de Tlon han desintegrado este mundo. (Borges, OC, p.474). And
eventually, if the narrator's paranoid predictions are correct, in a hundred years
the hundred volumes of The Second Encyclopedia of Tlon will be discovered,
and then the whole world will be Tlon. A fictional system of equivalencies
collectively held up as reality.
As an immediate, almost archetypical symbol of representation, Mirrors
are a frequent, even haunting presence in Borges's work, and in this story
particularly. It begins: Debo a la conjuncin de un espejo y de una
enciclopedia el descubrimineto de Uqbar. (Borges, OC, p.461). And further on
he tells us that espejos tienem algo monstruoso. So figurality is a mirror
game, and a terrible one at that, we are but dreaming when we think of
existence in terms of tigers and labyrinths, but in Borges there is always also
the formal suggestion (and sometimes straightforward assertion) that if our
waking existence can be considered in terms of dreams, this should mean that
dreams can also be expressively conceived in terms of our waking existence.
Or, put in other terms, that there is no serious (in the sense of absolute)
difference between the mimesis of literature and the mimesis of reality
(considering that they are both, in a sense, very expressive illusions).
Borges use of myths and arguments out of ancient and medieval
philosophy as fictions to be yielded for expressive articulation is not, of course,
all that different from the romantic use of classical imagery as faded mythology
(as Schelling had it), or even Yeats half-serious, half-mocking turning of Irish
folklore into a seemingly absolute (or universal) cultural myth `half-dead at the
top`. What is happening is, in a sense, the expressive displacement of some

culture`s once living myth (The Western Canon as a symbol of cultural

distinction inside a vaguely-imagined, but all too concretely realized, Empire)
into poetic (or willfully aestheticized) imagery.
But unlike the high modernist tone that tries to restore mythical grandeur
to disinchanted modern reality with the help of some ultimate cultural ground
(Eliot`s tradition, Pound`s weirdly fascist classics), Borges is very ironic about
the archive itself, about the very material form of literature as it inscribes itself
in the fabric of social reality.
Instead of using certain romanticized figures out of an assumed tradition
(the pre-assigned heroes and gods of this or that mythical canon), Borges uses
not only the whole imagined repository of tropes and topoi that is available to
him (including the East, which he manipulates with the same respectful
distance and participation, if not with the same frequency, that he dedicates to
the imagined West, like a kind ethnographer, a Malinowski of sorts) but also
their very forms and machinery, always expressing the ironic contrast between
these seemingly ideal forms of universal experience being `housed` in material
books and libraries produced under the shadow of the heraldic dennominations
of countries and Empires, with all the unnecessary, bloated excess of mediocre
commentary and conventional repetition that comes trudging along with the
literary imagination.
He never adopts the voice that dismantles the illusion and seeks to gain
strength from that dissolution, but his is rather the voice that participates,
much like Proust, knowingly, and willingly (albeit tragically) in the illusion.
This is, in fact, where he located his cultural identity as a latin-american
writer. Distrustful of immediate and knee-jerk cultural terms of identity, Borges
felt that the imagined distance between Argentina and these great, lofty
cultural hypostasies did not mean an impoverished or diminished possibility of
symbolic participation in those cultural forms.
Rather, the sort of absent participation that the latin american has with
the Western tradition would in fact mean a more deliberate, or self-conscious,
cultural position (not wholly unlike that which our contemporary critical
sensibility has decided to call hybridity). Comparing himself with the Jews
and the Irish, as cultural placements that were always inside and outside the
Empires they found themselves housed in, Borges argues that his position is
wholly grounded in the particularities of his cultural situation, despite perhaps
seeming, at first, like his work is expressed in a strange, artificial cultural
vacuum of sorts.

4.2 Borges and memory.

For a man that built his entire life's image around books (not only as
abstractions, but as material objects), and that seemingly understood all of
existence from the standpoint of the reader, the possibility of not being able to
read seems necessarily tragic. The most often-quoted verses that Borges wrote
on that matter go as such:
Nadie rebaje a lagrima o reproche esta declaracion de la maestria de Dios, que
con magnifica ironia me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
For the blind, he would also say, every thought becomes a tool. The need
to still somehow wear the imaginative body of literature after losing the
mechanical ability to read somewhat mirrors his expressive use of the selfawareness of literature as a material archive not to dismantle its claim to truth
or ironically comment upon its contingency, but as a strangely self-confident
embodiment of that imagined whole of tradition as a living, organic, absolute
memory that, like the river (or tiger) of temporality, both destroys and
preserves.
In Pierre Menard, we are introduced by a very knowledgeable, infinitely
smart encyclopedic voice to an avart-gardish author interested in re-writing the
Quixote. His interest is not to make a copy, nor a forgery, nor a critical rendition
of any sort. What he wants to do is the seemingly impossible activity of
actually re-writing the Quixote. We may initially take the narrator to be ironic
when he says that this work was, of course, much superior to the original (since
it included within itself a whole range of quotations, allusions and
reverberations which the original could never have hoped to have), and of
course Borges, in a sense, means it as a joke. But elsewhere in Borge's fiction
and criticism there is the distinct conviction that the indirection of translation
and mediation does not always means just a trace of impurity and insufficiency.
We can trace literary works to their imagined original source (not only
their original language, but also their original contextual properties as a piece
of rhetorical performance), but the very persistent fact that all literary
imagination is always already mediated also points to the possibility of all
mediation being regarded as imaginative lever.
So when we read ten different translations of a work originally written in
a language we do not even come close to master, our experience of this
assumed original rhetorical emanation may be, at least in some sense, more
concretely embodied than the experience of a native speaker to the language
who reads the 'same' text with natural and unreflective immediacy of
reference.
In the story "The Immortal", Borges imagines Homer as an ageless being
who eventually forgets he ever was Homer. The voice seems to come from an
almost abstract rhetorical placement, as if literature itself, this material archive
of self-complicating metaphors, was doing the talking.
As long as there are people still learning to read classical Greek, and still
tending to some degree of scholarly effort to understand its supposed context,
Homer's works are going to be actualized and poetically embodied. But Borges
did not think the multinaturalism implied by treating any and every textual
translation of Homer as the real Homer meant an unnatural flooding and

erasure of textual authenticity. Homer may or not have existed, and may well
have been, before someone sitting and writing it down, a bunch of men
shouting about how awesome they and their crews were, and giving shout-outs
to all the right names of Gods, places and predecessors which would elicit the
mediatic maintenance of both that text and the discursive bodies it instantiated
(much like hip-hop, in fact).
Possibly because of the long-held prejudice against orality in Western
graphocentric culture, for centuries Homer's European readership had difficulty
understanding how could such a deliberate and sophisticated poet waste all of
that time repeating metaphors and epithets so stubbornly, as well as listing all
those ships so profusely. Whether or not those lists had concrete, immediate
referents in an oral performance, it's also evident that meaning can be given by
sheer contextual presentation (such as when you read me a list of names in a
language I cannot understand, but telling me before that these are names of
people that have just died in a bombing halfway across the world).
There are many instances of magic chants in primitive cultures which list
names (generally understood to be of dead ancestors) whose meaning or
reference needn`t be immediate for the practitioner for the magic to be
understood to `work`. The mere act of ennumerating the names is understood
to be a meaningful symbolic act in itself, inside the particular expresive
features of that contextual performance. This is true not only of names and all
their cloudy and thunderous heraldic and totemic possibilities ("Marx",
"Nietzsche", "De Man", "Heidegger"), but also of certain words (such as, in our
community: "power", "dispositif", "performativity", "diffrance", "democracy")
can be understood to have power in themselves, either because they come
from important dead ancestors or from the testimony of a mystic predecessor,
one which may encountered them in dreams or visions and whose expressive
vocabulary is still constitutive of a local dialectic.
It does not seem absurd to suppose that something similar could be
taking place for the practitoners of the Shiur Komah when they say the
seventy names that are in God`s Heart. They may or may not understand the
names (in the sense of attributing some sort of outside referent to them), but if
the expressive context makes them believe they are the names in God`s Heart,
they certainly are going to experience a great deal of meaning either way.
Whenever excess is so deliberate, it makes an explicit expressive point in
itself. You obviously don`t need to qualify `God is King` with forty different
epitets to pass the essential idea across, and Foucault didn't need to bring out
all of those erudite examples and distinctions he makes at the beginning of the
"What is an Author?" essay to say what he eventually said, but when you do
qualify a situation or an object so thoroughly you may well create in those that
practice the text religiously a sense of `completeness` that would not be
gotten otherwise. We should not underestimate the symbolic power that the
sheer act of material ennuntiation of words can assume in any expressive
tradition that understands the World as being created in speech acts (which
can also be said not only of most discursive communities as such, but also of
the mythical language of modern constitutions, based as they are on the
political possibilities of a canonized text producing social praxis)
It may be difficult for a contemporary reader to understand how and why
exactly did Homer seemed like Nature itself to generations of its European

readership (as it apparently did to Pope). But what is certain is that as long as
anything even remotely close to the Western Archive (as we know it) remains
running, Homer is still going to be referred to, in the very least as this excess of
multi-lingual Natures, a dead sun for lesser narrative stars to keep falling into.

4.3 Poetry and orality

"Yo he sido Homero; en breve, ser Nadie, como Ulises; en breve, ser todos:
estar muerto."
Jorge Luis Borges
"What do the poets 'say'? They say that everything is everywhere at once.
They say that all nature is alive. They wall that all creation is dialectic,
separating heaven and hell. They say that the material world neither is nor
isn't, but disappears. They say that the created world neither is nor isn't, but
appears. They say that the containing form of real experience is myth. They
say that time & space are disappearing categories. "
"One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized
phoenix"
Northrop Frye, notebooks
The closest 20th century critical equivalent I can find to Borges multi
naturalist textual universe is the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. If Kenneth
Burke says that in art every means has the tendency to become an end, insofar
as to him every living thing is a critic, it doesn`t seem outrageous to arrive at
the conclusion that any living thing, considered as an expressive medium.
would tend to become an end in itself.
In Northrop Frye's terms, this comes to signify (most prominently in his
Anatomy of Criticism, but also very strongly in his later essays) an
understanding of literature as an autonomous, almost self-organizing, order of
words.
This has been frequently taken to mean an hypostasy, as if the
Logocentric (or, gasp, worse, Christian-centric!) Frye was trying to get away
here with his beliefs while pretending to be very objective and critical about the
literary imagination.
But of course if one looks at Frye`s very material understanding of the
symbolic patterns created by words, the visual patterns created by our
picturing of narrative structures, and the conceptual motifs sustained by
deliberate use of metaphorical imagery, his notion of an order of words'need
not be as fantastical as it may seem at first to our most immediate, almost
knee-jerk materialistic conceptual machinery (or only as fantastical as thinking
of the whole human cultural endeavor as a huge, self-replicating meme looking
for homeostasis, as some apparently do).
One way of framing the originality of Frye's order of words is to look at his
matter-of-fact acceptance (and sort of sly dismissal) of Derrida and Mcluhan as
very smart fellows who are making a lot of fuss about something that turns out
to be not so fantastical, after all, apparently (for him, that is).
Although it might not be immediately apparent, Mcluhan and Frye share
more than their immediate accidental absent-participation from American
letters as Canadians, both of their careers are similarly tinged by very sharp
and rhetorically twisted (in the sense that Cervantes, Gngora or Machado are
twisted), Christian-oriented understanding of Western society as a material
archive. In Frye's case, of the Word, and in Mcluhan's case, after Joyce, of the

World (if you`ll excuse the pun).

Mcluhan can get certainly get really excited with his Joyce and his gongbeating, but his apocalyptic tone should`t be understood as heralding an
impeding period of doom, as someone like Merquior seemed to understand it
(and, understandably, I guess, fear it).
Like Eliot and Benjamin, they were both critics who deeply understood
the implications of living in a graphocentric culture progressively being
engulfed by other media, but while Frye tried to erect a strangely selfcontained summa of criticism that would guard against at least some of the
floods with his Anatomy, Mcluhan willfully engaged with the mediatic explosion
that was already taking place, becoming, in time, a sort of prophet for some
strands of media-theory minded people or just information technology nerds.
As deftly as Frye manipulated mythical imagery from many different (but
mostly Western, as he himself admitted) literary sources, it`s somewhat clear
that he tended more towards poetry and romanticism as the cultural locus (or
local dialectic) where his thinking should be read as taking place. Beside
Aristotle (to which Frye usually refers as the narrative beginning of Western
criticism, which allows him to essentially put up his skeleton wherever he sees
fit, much like Burke is used to doing with his notion of entelechy), perhaps the
most immediate critical precursor to Frye would be William Blake, as a romantic
poet and critical prophet.
Fearful Symmetry, his early, long and extraordinarily outrageous work on
Blake, which turns out to be a powerful and, at times, elusive treatise on
human imagination, nature and politics, already contains most of Frye`s
thinking in strange, densely metaphoric format (in a similar sense in which
Bloom, who is so rhetorically indebted to Frye, already had his later profuselytermed theory of influence imaginatively laid out in his earlier books on Shelley
and Yeats)
This focus on the mediatic aspect of literature, on the materiality of its
communication, which recently came to the foreground through the work of
theorists like Kittler and Gumbrecht, does not come across too immediately
from Frye`s language, perhaps, even though he is so clear about words
materially put on a page creating sequential narratives in politically-built
symbolic orders. One of the reasons for that might be that Frye`s move is
exactly to try and redeem at all times the seemingly tragic material
contingency of his lofty order of words through his encyclopedic imagination
and virtuoso abilities as a reader (able to draw at all times extraordinary links
between seemingly disparaged authors and works).
But of course when our critical imagination is exactly concerned with
proving as much falsehood as possible (the disenchantment or enlightenment
that Adorno so long ago, it seems like, already told us was as mythical as the
myths it tries to dismantle), Frye`s attempt, which obviously does not work all
the time can seem awkward and strangely defensive of his particular tradition
(and like any magic trick, it can fail and embarrass3)
3Saying, for example, that the Bible clearly just isn`t another work of literature,
and then laying out as an argument essentially the extraordinary symbolic
dependency of the Western material archive on the Christian narrative. Which
'works' in the same way that Yeats mock-narrative of Irish culture as an
absolute ground (that is, it works great poetically, but not scientifically, as he

Of course it`s generous of him to say that the center of the order of
words is any poem that you happens to be reading, but when we commonly,
even banally, agree that culture is essentially a document of barbarity and
political grotesquerie, this can easily make any poem seem like an impossibly
dense heralding of demons (any Wordsworth ballad or Balzac short story a
profusely-annotated compendium of imperialism and epistemic violence, and
so on).
But of course that does`t have to be such a bad thing. Daemonic agency,
when expressively grasped, is one of the most expressive and recurrent images
of the imagination in Frye`s own cherished Western tradition, after all. And
even inside his own local dialectic (the English language) it was given great
canonical expression not only in Blake, but also in Milton's Satan and in
Hamlet`s still-echoing "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes
it so".
There is no culture primordially evil or not, but our thinking it makes it so.
Of course we should be made continually mindful of the absurdity of Empires
and their heraldic denominations. But to still beat long-dead corpses decades
after the cultural wars as if they were the ones still operating the machinery is
as amusingly unnecessary as the maintenance of any symbolic ritual that
outstays its contextual reverberations.

seems to mean it)

5. Metaphors, myths and archives (heads and bodies)

"Les mythes sont les ames de nos actions et de nos amours. Nous ne pouvons
agir quen nous mouvant vers un fantome. Nous ne pouvons aimer que ce que
nous creons."
Valery
"(...) la ressemblance, ce canevas commun"
Bergson
Our most ancient and influential systematic formulation on metaphor can
be found in the Poetics, where Aristotle states that a metaphor is the
application [to something] of a name belonging to something else, either (a)
from the genus to the species, or (b) from the species to the genus, or ( c) from
a species to [another] species, or (d) according to analogy. (Aristotle, P, p.28).
This process allows us to understand a thing (or experience) in light of another
thing (or experience). So when we say Ajax is a lion, we are using certain
features associated with lions (such as their ferocity) to express certain
elements of Ajaxs character (such as his courage).
Northrop Frye says the metaphor is usually presented in some variant of
the grammatical model A is B (Frye, MM, p.111). But this structure it is not
meant as a straightforward identity statement (such as a dog is an animal),
but as a self-contained poetic gesture contained in an elyptic form. When the
resemblance is spelled out as resemblance (Ajax is like a lion), the metaphor
turns into simile.
Metaphor is frequently considered to be the most basic figure of speech
and is not infrequently used as a stand-in for all linguistic figuration. But we
tend to distrust metaphors, because they posit resemblances, and to rely on
them too heavily without bracketing them as fictions is to be fooled by the
puppet theather, like Don Quijote. Thus a significant chunk of the study of
metaphorical expression tends to consist of unmasking metaphors that are
hidden (or otherwise unaccounted for) in our thoughts and expressions. This is
the case, for example, of Derrida saying that Metaphysics is a mythologie
blanche trying to cover up its traces of metaphoric imagery (Derrida, MP, p.
254), as well as in other instances throughout his work where he recurrently
frames what he calls logocentric discourse as the constant iteration of a
metaphorical Presence serving as the origin for all meaning.
Lakoffs and Johnsons seminal Metaphors we Live By tries to be
thorough as possible in laying bare the many metaphors embedded in our
conceptual schemes, as well as in in relating these metaphors to to our
immediate bodily experience and their interactional (or contextual) properties.
This realization that we shape much of our conceptual and narrative
apparatuses through the use of metaphoric expression grounded in our bodily
experience was present to the study of metaphor at least since Vico, who says:
It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions
relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and
its parts. (Vico, NS, 405) Vico agreed that Metaphor was the most luminous
and present figure of speech, and supposed that its occurence in language

must have happened when philosophies were taking shape (Vico, NS, 404).
He also acknowledges with rare acuity the importance of metaphoric
expression to mythic thinking, a connection which the romantics and early 19th
century anthropologists were all aware of, but which perhaps would not
become thoroughly systematized until Claude Levi Strauss structuralist
approach to the study of myth (laid out, for example, in his works
Anthropologie Structurale and La Pensee Sauvage).
For the purpose of abstraction, we frequently reduce metaphors to a
linguistic play on resemblance or a figure of speech, as if it were the selfsame linguistic process (or the same figure of thought) taking place whenever
a figure is understood in terms of another figure (or whenever meaning is
carried over somewhere else than it immediately should be).
We may well abstract the metaphoric process to its bare minimal
structure of A is B, and this reduction is certainly useful for a number of
purposes, but the problem with it is the implicit suggestion that the same kind
of is is always taking place in the process, when that is certainly not the case.
Nietzsche famously thought that when metaphors get killed of their
expressive immediacy they turn into concepts, a molten core of unstable
metaphoricity being hardened into identities and differences. We can then say
that when a metaphors expressive immediacy is naturalized (rendered
automatic, so to speak, to a particular community, or local dialectic), it turns
into myth. When used in a mythical context, then, metaphors are usually best
understood as simple and almost straightforward statements of identity. Thus
My father is the brown river that floods in the spring, The Jaguar owns fire,
This bread is my body or "Washington is a founding father to our country" are
not meant as poetic plays on resemblance, but as literal expressions of some
kind of natural (or, of course, supernatural) reality*. This should point us to the
fact that while these statements are examples of the metaphoric process, they
are not exactly metaphors to those that utter and believe in them (if we
understand metaphors to be poetic plays on resemblance, that is).
In a sense, much of the romantic ethos in literature can be expressivelly
understood through its recurrent attempt to allow for a modern,
demythologized imagination to use poetic resemblances as statements of
identity. Under the terms of its own rhetorical (or formal) intelligibility, what
Burke shows us through his scheme is that, at the end, Keats can be
understood to be perfectly serious when he says that truth`s beauty, and
beauty`s truth (and not because he is saying it in such a flashy voice)
As Ricoeur teaches us, the creation of a 'new' metaphor is always a
heuristic fiction for the sake of redescribing reality, and as such it not only
operating a mere shuffling of signs, but actually creating a particular
expressive relation between things which were not immediately conjoined in
our imagination. Since Aristotle metaphors have been connected to an
imaginative capacity to render disparate or distant imaginative objects into
animate and vivid articulations (such as when he says that Homer makes
everything come alive before our eyes) Of course, in a way, we are alway
essentially giving airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but what is
culture if not the materially convincing production of localities and identities?
In the same way that the abstract lexicographical entity of a word only
has actual meaning in concrete usage, any actual metaphor will only make

sense inside a specific context. What may seem like essentially the same
metaphor can yet have wildly different contextualizations, and thus come to
mean wildly different things (such as life as labyrinth for Borges and Benjamin,
or life as a book for St.Augustine and Proust).
And that is made possible because any metaphor, in order to be
intelligible, expresses not only a particular semblance or identity, but also the
very figural possibility of that expression, or the very medium of its
expressiveness (as Coleridge puts it in his description of how symbols work: "it
always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible").
The tautological terms of any production of presence are the material
archives themselves, the scenes which they set, the voices they organize.
Stock-figures and stock- phrases may seem unconvincing when read in
manuals or encyclopedias of religion, but when repeated inside their specific
narrative constraints, in the conditions of their expressive contexts, they can
seem as natural and true as any fact produced by science.
One of the many things that Kafka made so concretely and grotesquely
expressive in his Process is how tragic and absurd is the material midiatic
affirmation of the law, conjoined with the 'natural' tautological fact of its verity
as social reality. What is tragic in the book`s universe is that no other order
seems possible but the grotesque one, those terms are laid out to be the only
available, the only thing keeping that state of radical disorder even seemingly
organized .
The mere possibility of saying that something is something else
(something, which, at least immediately, or before the metaphor, it was not)
hints at the formal possibility of anything being anything else, and thus of
everything, any particular of reality, being rendered here, in the same
absolute and somewhat impossible non-place of figuration, such as in Goethe`s
'everything is a symbol' (which Gadamer so took to heart for his hermeneutics).
This understanding that the metaphorical process, when regarded as a
structure, can essentially mean the positing of an expressive connection
between any distinct entity from the vast available arsenal of things that are
the case was powerfully turned by Mallarm into a poetics where any
expressive identity is accidental, and thus all figural expression a sort of blank,
depthless game of chance. In Proust, there is also a tragic sense of the material
contingency of any aesthetic experience, our high-held expectations always
frustrated by the pores of actresses and conventionality of people of highranked and lofty-sounding names. But partially through the influence of
Bergson's philosophy of memory and time-perception, Baudelaire's romantic
poetics of correspondences, partially through his own breed of Ruskin and
Pater-influenced aestheticism, the structural possibility of metaphor in the
Recherche is laid out in its very bones as the very bare figural possibility of
resemblance and contiguity in our memories, eventually turning out to be the
very machinery which sets forth the radical recognition scene in which Marcel`s
vocation as a writer is, in so many different narrative levels, explained and
actualized, giving that strangely displaced and endlessly seamed voice a
newly-felt kind of rhetorical concreteness. The same kind of accidental
concreteness of expressivity that is so quickly set up by Borges Aleph, in its
impossible-seeming ideality, another absolute non-place of figuration where
everything and everywhere is here being housed in the banal-seeming

basement of a mediocre poet living in Argentina.

In Kierkegaard`s thorny and endlessly surprising spiritual and authorial
rhetoric, traceable throughout his work, but perhaps most directly and
expressively engaged with in the works Either/Or and Repetition, we always get
a writing self that tries to actualize a presence and instead actualizes the
attempt of producing that presence (the show itself, the performance). We are
never the assumed whole of ourselves, at least partly because we are always
repeating the voices of others in an attempt to repeat part of ourselves.
Kierkegaard's ghost, another important influence on Borges and many of
the writers associated with theory (Derrida having written powerful texts about
him), has been many times retrieved during the 20th century for its very
powerful discourse on subjectivity and belief as the expressive result of a sort
of deliberate textual performance (which has been most often linked to his
figure of the "leap", dramatized by Barthelme's cartoonish imagination in a
short story by the same name), but what makes him particularly interesting for
a time which still at times pretends to have solemnly killed the figure of author
is to see how his strange and deeply idiosyncratic authorial rhetoric already
included and exploded so many of the systemic limits we can associate with
the "author-function".
In "Skrift-Prover" (or, A Preface to Writing Samples, An example of writing
by A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.J.K.L Martin, a Would-be-Author)", Kierkegaard describes an
author as someone who gets paid to write, and pleads to the reading public to
make him into one (with him being, as of that moment, still only a would-beAuthor). The text itself, besides the ludicrous author and set-up, is also a
preface to a preface (containing its own preface: "-> Please read the following
preface, because it includes matters of the very greatest importance)".
Kierkegaard`s expressive displacement of his authority as a rhetorical
presence by writing under all kinds of different names (often inside a single
work) obviously shouldn't be understood as the same kind of avant-gardism
move enacted by a critical writer who wants to imitate surrealist poets and
erase himself from an academic text. In his "The Point of View for my Work as
an Author" Kierkegaard lays out the incredibly insane schemes with which he
apparently tried to organize his books in their rhetorical contexts (the literary
community in Denmark), publishing with a pseudonym an article destined to
repel certain readers from one of his texts and encourage others to engage
with it, and how all of this aesthetic pyrotechny supposedly came from his
religious commitment and, as far as we can tell, dead serious attempt to be a
Christian writer (which he understood to be an endlessly serious task,
seemingly impossible thing).
Which is not to say Kierkegaard had already killed the author, or anything
like that (because we could just as easily say that about Machado de Assis,
Mallarm or Eliot, besides Borges), but just that since modernity we have
always had many different radical literary examples of this kind of outlandish
formal and philosophical self-consciousness around which the notion of Theory
was largely defined.
But his theatrics, much like Nietzsche's, with some different values under
the masks, elicits the rational recognition that any performance, as a
performance, creates the terms for their own expressive intelligibility (and
should't be primarily judged from the outside in, so to speak).

This possibility of involuntary imaginative pairings essentially allowing

you to relive the past (and tragically redeem it, in a sense, expressively,
through fiction) and to constitute foreign word orders and distant local
dialectics inside your own is essentially what Frye seems to mean when he
cryptically says, making reference to Baudelaire and Stevens, that a world of
total metaphor is the formal cause of poetry, and that the reader has, through
a Kierkegaardian effort of imaginative repetition, or textual performance, to
make it new as much as the writer did, when he or she wrote it.
As universal and lofty as we might make an order of words sound, any
particular instantiation of a poem or any kind of text is only going to be given
concrete expression by an articulation with local dialectics and concrete (by
which I mean personal) referents of experience. This also means that, since we
can only build the many others'of culture and art through self- relations,
through shards and tesserae of ourselves, we can all, in a sense, become the
artworks which we are taught to repeat inside their expressive grammars. Like
in Dante's anagogical structure of ascension, Proust's strange and tragic
aesthetic comedy of death- in-life and Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo all telling
us to change our lives. Not because we have become Christians, actually
travelled through time or necessarily witnessed Old Apollo coming back to that
piece of stone, but because through our endless expressive capacity to
understand the world through our bodily experience and personal symbolic
matrixes, other worlds and cultures can also come to offer seemingly absolute
negative carvings of ourselves. Tat tvam asi. Thou art that. De te fabula
narratur.
Far from being just an arbitrary frame imposed on the chaos of nature,
narrative is our primary way of organizing and giving coherence to our
experience. (Carr, TNC, p. 65). And thus we are not inside time, je suis moimeme le temps (Merleau-Ponty, PP, p. 483). Like Borges says El tiempo es un
rio que me arrebata, pero yo soy el rio; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo
soy el tigre (Borges, OC, p. 317). We are this flow of narrative, the figure, the
background and the relation betwen the two. This relation is always some sort
of self-reflective representation, an acting out of reality, of its meaning and its
lack of meaning (the lack needing to be represented just as much as the
presence). Both Ricoeur and Costa Lima suggest that the Aristotelian mimesis praxeos should be
most expressively read as an act, or as production.
No symbol or metaphor exists without a universe in which it can stand on. As Valery
reminds us: Celui qui se represente un arbre est force de se representer un ciel ou un fond pour l'y
voir s'y tenir. (Valery, IMLV, p.48)
Our experiences of fiction and narrative are always concrete gestures
contained in the larger contextual patterns of our experience. We always act
out fictions inside the narrative flow of our own lives, and to strictly dismantle it
as self- deception would entail dismantling our sense of self, with all of its
fictional identities and the practical interfaces they yield us.
The voices we deliberately try to enact might install themselves over
time, come to be repeated without conscious volition, the sins of the fathers
twisting a succession of son's arms like a child would a doll. If all problems of
criticism are problems of comparative literature, as Frye thought, and if
literature itself can be understood as either a self-complicating order (enacted
by human material agents) or equipment for living, as Burke had it, then our

endlessly diverse and strange repository of myths, poems, popular music, tales
and legends, folklore, prophecies, mystical treatises, alchemical texts and
transcripts from shamans and other forms of verbal artists (as well as highly
sophisticated, erudite works of literature, of course) all can serve to our
attention as examples of natural criticism, human beings expressing their
material contingencies, extending themselves through the possibilities of the
metaphoric process.
In Deleuze's Logique du Sens, he speaks of the 'univocit' of being, which
does not mean that there is just the one simple being, but rather that there is a
multiplicity produced by a disjunctive synthesis (L'univocit de l'etre ne veut
pas dire qu'il y ait un seul et meme etre : au contraire, les tants sont multiples
et diffrents, toujours produits par une synthese disjonctive, eux-memes
disjoints et divergents, membra disjoncta, LS, p.210).
This univocity means that being is voice, that it is said, and it is said in
one and the same sense, (qu'il se dit, et se dit en un seul et meme sens de
tout ce dont il se dit). Its not that the same thing is always said,, but that it is
the same thing that happens for all that is said. (Ce dont il se dit n'est pas du
tout le meme. Mais lui est le meme pour tout ce dont il se dit). Reading truly is
a prosopopeia of the dead, as De Man described it. when we come to see how
completely and thoroughly our daily sense-making of the world are made from
the words and gestures of the dead, in all of the material furnishings and fixed
imaginative rotes we get from habit and example (the movement of the Sun
which most of us cannot help but see as a rising and falling, the dark that many
cannot help but see as housing some sort of abstract evil, despite our best
knowledge). And since most of us we so freely that our own personal and local
identities are constituted as expressive fictions, it becomes rather unclear what
exactly is the absolute difference between the animate life we assign to our
imagined whole sense of ourselves ("our identities", personal and local) and the
expressive life we are able to assign to the words left by the dead in poetry and
fiction.
Neuroscience can now shed progressive light on our mirror-neurons and other triggers of an
apparent general hardwired and even involuntary capacity for understanding the world through our
own bodily experience (each person's body as his or her own central metaphor, without which
empathy or intersubjectivity would hardly be possible).
We are not only always condemned to narrative, to the flow of temporality, but we are also
always embodied music and rhythm, and perhaps the need to "repeat" the dead and their figural
gestures (or instructions for performance) in the end, would simply consist of attending to their
words and reconstructing their imagined expressive contexts as ourselves. Not as if we were the
author, who is only ever available as a ghost, but as if we were the work itself (stop trying to be the
pure sound coming out of the hi-fi, and instead try to be the needle, as if it could extend itself to
comprehend the whole system, taking in the music that it is playing plus the noise, the music plus
its own very material medium). It is always merely, but also magically, a matter of stress and
placement, of timing, knowing which voice to set up at which stage, which scenarios to make for
the representations we always desperately need to make of our own localities and of our own
choices.
Such as in Cabral's Cemitrio Pernambucano:
Mortos ao ar-livre qu'eram,
hoje a terra livre estao.

Sao tao da terra que a terra nem sente

a sua intrusao.

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