RHIZOMES, NEWNESS, AND THE CONDITION OF OUR POSTMODERNITY:
AN EDITORIAL AND A DIALOGUE
Ellen E. Berry and Carol Siegel
Discontinuous
histories and multiple temporalities surely co-exist within
the restless landscapes of the global postmodern. Yet the
term postmodernism itself, and therefore its critical
temper, remain curiously static. It is forever mired in
definition by negation, in belatedness (as an afterthought
to modernism) or in "an eternal present and much further
away an inevitable catastrophe," as Fredric Jameson
memorably puts it (Jameson 72). We find ourselves alive
after the end of history, philosophy, and metaphysics; the
death of the subject, the author, and the book; the waning
of the historical avant gardes, the bankruptcy of
Enlightenment promises of progress through rationality. We
affirm our suspicion of metanarratives, foundational
assumptions, totalizing theories, utopian ambitions,
large-scale pronouncements of any kind. Art speaks in
pastiche, repeating the forms of the past since, as Raymond
Federman puts it, "imagination does not invent the
SOMETHING-NEW we often attribute to it but rather now. . .
merely imitates, copies, repeats proliferates, plagiarizes.
. . what has always been there" (Federman, 565). We find it
difficult to believe in the progressive possibilities
arising from our "new" world order and we lack a sense of
agency; therefore the desire to pursue what might be
genuinely new becomes more and more difficult to actualize.
Within the condition of postmodernity, the future presents
itself as foreclosed if it presents itself at all; to update
Baudrillard, the year 2050 has already happened..
In
pointing to this postmodern sense of an ending, of living
after the future or suspended in a perpetual present, I
don't mean to suggest the fundamental illegitimacy of any of
the positions characterized above. Postmodern critiques have
been vitally necessary and, arguably, socially
transformative (at least in their intentions). But I do want
to suggest why it has become so difficult for contemporary
progressive thinkers to posit the new--in exact inversion of
their modernist counterparts and in absolute contradiction
to a self-identity as progressive--and, perhaps more
importantly, to speculate on some of the consequences
arising from this refusal. First,
postmodern
challenges to the Western rationalist universalist paradigm
have been widespread--affecting virtually all branches of
knowledge--,broadly-based, and impossible to ignore if not
utterly devastating. Whether such critiques emerge from
post-structuralist, feminist, queer, neo-Marxist, ethnic or
postcolonial critics, and whether or not they have
materially altered the negative consequences of Western
logics, the radical critical and political analyses of the
last 30 years have fundamentally redefined the intellectual
project of Western critical thinkers. They have succeeded
only too well in demonstrating that we are blocked by
ethically bankrupt systems whose horizons we cannot think
beyond, systems that have failed but perhaps cannot be
overcome. In part, these critiques have emerged from a
recognition that some of the bloodiest carnage of the 20th C
was carried out in the name of bringing newness into the
world. This disastrous legacy of "utopian" ambitions has
rendered the term itself highly suspect, simply a synonym
for the will to power, the intellectual fantasy of total
control, or the desire to escape history itself.
Secondly,
the
very concept of newness has been commodified by postmodern
consumer culture to such an extent that genuine innovation
seems increasingly difficult to imagine. In the face of a
steady supply of new and improved cars, dish detergents,
(fill in the blank), newness itself becomes a ruined word,
only a repetition of the idea of newness in which nothing
actually is novel. Fredric Jameson considers this one of the
fundamental paradoxes of postmodernism and one of the
greatest problems for contemporary thinkers: "the
equivalence between an unparalleled rate of change on all
levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of
everything. . . that would seem incompatible with just such
mutability. . . . The supreme value of the New and of
innovation. . . fades away against the steady stream of
momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable
and motionless. . . .[W]here everything now submits
to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing
can change any longer. . . . [T]he persistence of
the Same through absolute Difference. . . discredits change.
. . absolute change equals stasis. . . .a disorder after the
end of history" (Jameson, 15-19). Our current cultural
preoccupation with difference--manifested in everything from
Benneton ads to identity politics--masks the fact of a
"universal weakening and sapping of difference on a global
scale," according to Jameson. Despite
what
may be its ultimate homogeneity, however, the bewildering
surface complexity of the postmodern landscape makes any
meaningful intervention within it, any real alternatives to
it, difficult to imagine, let alone act upon. Thus, as Ernst
Bloch writes of his own historical moment, "this world is a
world of repetition or of the great Time-And-Again. . . .
What-Has-Been overwhelms what is approaching, the collection
of things that have become totally obstructs the categories
Future, Front, Novum" (Bloch 6-8). As a consequence, we lose
a sense of "anticipatory consciousness," the spirit of
"venturing beyond" what currently exists, a spirit without
which, as Bloch says, "the New is inconceivable" and the
desire for an encounter with genuine difference, with
unassimilated otherness, is blocked. The same and the
different remain in a state of non-recognition or static
polarization rather than of mutual interaction in the
absence of any imaginable change, in the absence of what
Jameson calls "the immense unthinkable Difference of an
impossible future" since being able to encounter difference
as different, rather than as a version of what one already
knows, is predicated upon the assumption that newness may
enter the world. Perhaps
contemporary
intellectuals experience anxiety in the face of the idea of
radical change because we fear projecting only a repetition
of our own sullied world under the guise of the new or
because we cannot distinguish between the rhythms of change
inherent in the system of late capitalism and changes that
might actually displace this system by a new one altogether.
Whatever the reasons, we remain&emdash;for the most
part--stuck either celebrating the products of postmodern
culture, thereby replicating the giddy rhythms of postmodern
"change" itself; endlessly diagnosing the problem, thereby
critiquing a system whose failures are by now well known; or
enclosing genuinely new situations in past narratives or
paradigms of understanding, thereby failing to understand
accurately their uniqueness.
RHIZOMES... exists to suggest ways out of this all-too-common paralysis of our critical imaginations by providing sites for the emergence of new thinking, the not-yet-conceived. We see speculative impulses and experimental strategies as vital components of the political agenda of contemporary cultural studies: Today more than ever we require acts of radical imagination and psychic mobility as preludes to the invention of historically new modes of relationship. |
Carol
Siegel: Your analysis of some of the forces that discourage
new thinking is necessarily rather grim, and perhaps
overshadows the hopefulness at the end of your remarks.
Could you say a little more about how we might encourage
pursuit of the new?
Ellen
Berry: Well, one way is to solicit it directly; as we're
doing with the Rhizomes project, create a space for it to
emerge. Another way might be to adopt modes of analysis that
would allow us to read any statement or theory for what it
implicitly hypothesizes about new thinking. For instance,
the resistance to closure in many contemporary theories, the
insistence on partiality and provisionality of definitions
(as in say Judith Butler's desire to leave open the term
feminist) could be considered part of a commitment to
opening multiple paths to the future so as not to foreclose
it in advance. Perhaps we need to evaluate ideas according
to their generative capacity and learn to read through
extrapolation, by which I mean carrying an idea beyond its
own framework, its own implied limits.
CS: One
thing your comments suggest to me is that new thinking might
best be accomplished through incremental change (the old
small changes we liked as early feminists) rather than
dramatic ruptures which have, as you point out, caused so
much horror in the past. What do you think about the
possibilities for change created through academic
discussion? Academics always get slammed for how slowly our
ideas trickle into the rest of the population's discourses
but from the perspective of small changes this is not such a
bad thing. It gives us a chance to test ideas out; it's
conducive to peaceful revolution!
EB:
Within the U.S. academy we are theoretically free to write
and publish whatever we wish, and academic freedom is a
value we vigorously defend (rightly so) as the very essence
of our professional lives. However, our intellectual labor
also is traded for profit, whether it be in the form of an
annual merit raise, publication in a prestigious journal
(the precondition for the raise), or for the very few, a
chance to compete in the academic star system (where bidding
wars for hot "properties" sometimes begin to rival those
involving professional athletes). At the very least, the
growing corporatization of the academy and the
knowledge-for-profit model make it less likely that we
actually will produce new ideas that stray outside dominant
paradigms of what sells in the knowledge industry. It might
be argued that the mechanisms I describe have always been in
operation. While this may be true, I would claim that never
has the gap between our ideals (what we say we profess) and
the reality of our daily lives in the academy been more
nakedly transparent. Never has the knowledge industry
functioned more vigorously or efficiently, and never has the
academy operated more as a hierarchized class system.
I think
in order for academic discussion to become a source of
genuinely new thinking we would have to devise new
"wasteful" or deliberately nonproductive ways of
interacting, modes that would introduce unexpectedness into
the academic setting--a kind of distance or estrangement
from business as usual. We would need to find different ways
of developing our intellectual identities as well as new
models of community. Or, to paraphrase deCerteau we need a
whole "therapeutics" for what I see as the deteriorating
social relations within our intellectual communities. But I
see I've ended on a less-than-hopeful note again!
EB: I
also think that in order to theorize a productive desire for
difference on an individual level it would be necessary to
rethink Lacan's notion of the imaginary as a space only of
misrecognized selfhood that hides the alienation and absence
at our core. Anthony Elliot, for instance, emphasizes the
creative capacity of the imaginary and its constitutive role
in establishing dynamic interpersonal spaces between self
and other. For Elliot, the imaginary is basic to a
recognition of another's difference and independence from
the self. It is fundamental to the very acceptance of
difference as such and is one source for the creation of new
relations between self and others ("it is in seeking to
understand the relative other of the unconscious;what is
nonidentical in ourselves and others&emdash;that
subjectivity, autonomy, and desire may be more fully
realized and transformed"). Elliot's
ideas resonate strongly with Julia Kristeva's meditations on
the psychocultural role played by foreigners and foreignness
in Strangers to Ourselves. She points out that historically
foreigners have provoked radical destabilizations in our own
cultural and psychic identities because they dramatically
remind us by their very existence of our own fundamental
incompleteness, our own non-knowledge. Confronted with the
radical difference of foreigners, we historically have
either domesticated them (as in models of cultural
assimilation) or we have sought to exorcise them by
destroying them completely (the Holocaust, contemporary
ethnic cleansings). Both responses betray the fundamental
difference of the foreigner (though of course these two
responses are by no means materially equivalent in their
effect on him/her). EB:
Thank god Prozac wasn't available then! The forces of
normalization and containment of difference just keep
marching on. Foucault and Deleuze almost sound quaintly
romantic in this era of so-called designer personalities
(for the privileged). I think your comments point to one of
the problems of any avant-garde, especially one existing at
this historical moment:: How to preserve radical difference
from the forces of commodification including academic
forces.
CS:
Don't you think that part of desiring difference entails not
only taking in new information but assimilating it in new
ways?
EB: I
think one thing we'd probably need to do is to change first
the ways in which academic discussion currently goes on, in
journal articles, at conferences, in our own home
departments. I like what Michel deCerteau says about the
need for us all, whatever our institutional location, to
become tricksters and les perruques (those who disguise
their own activities as work for their employer, who "put
one over" on the established order on its home ground). This
seems especially important given that the US academy is
moving ever more toward a model of commodification (of our
knowledge, of our time). As Steven Connor puts it
(paraphrasing Lyotard): "In the economic structure of
thought which dominates the world [including the world
of the academy], any activity, or event. . in the
present is considered as a form of loan, or investment,
which must be paid back, or include within itself the fact
of its economic return. . . .Value, therefore, comes to
consist. . .not in specific yields or products but in the
very speed of the economic process itself, literally the
rate [time] of exchange rather than the objects of
exchange." Anything that interrupts smooth operation of this
principle of reason--"to rush to its goal with a minimum of
delay"--is considered wasteful, nonproductive, a space in
which "time remains uncontrolled, does not give rise to
work, or at least not in the customary sense of the verb 'to
work.'"
CS:
I like what you say at the end of your remarks about
training ourselves actively to desire difference. Perhaps
American professors, especially, need to cultivate an
intellectual culture in which the value of ideas isn't so
closely tied to the institutional status of the person
voicing them. One way that I can see to do this would be to
treat the intellectual work of people outside academe with
respect. So long as we say implicitly, through our
practices, that the authority to speak can only come through
being certified within our system then the parts of the
system most of us cannot control will carefully control the
amount of difference that's permissible. How can we insist
on our right to speak outside discourses already
academically legitimated, if we are also insisting that no
one without, say, a doctorate has any right to speak on
certain issues and be taken seriously? This is an important
issue for me because of my work with youth cultures where
often the best informed people have little formal education
and no academic positions. Just as
I feel that I can usefully assert my own anti-psychoanalytic
views within academic discussions of sexuality that are
dominated by psychoanalytic theorists, I feel that rock and
roll singers can usefully assert their views on the role of
popular culture in forming new genders and sexualities in
such discussions. I don't see one set of views as a
replacement for the others, but rather I am drawn to the
idea of an exchange that continues opening up more areas of
difference, reminding us all that we do not always share the
same assumptions. I SUPPOSE THAT'S THE KIND OF SPACE AND THE
TYPES OF EXCHANGES THAT WE'RE TRYING TO CREATE WITH
RHIZOMES. I WANTED TO ASK YOU A LITTLE MORE ABOUT YOUR
UNDERSTANDINGS OF DIFFERENCE. YOU SEEM TO BE TREATING IT AS
A GIVEN THAT DESIRING DIFFERENCE CAN BE A FORCE FOR CULTURAL
CHANGE. IF SO, THIS IS AN ASSUMPTION I SHARE. BUT I'M
CURIOUS ABOUT WHY YOU THINK LEARNING TO WANT DIFFERENCE
could bring about cultural renewal.
EB: My
thinking on this subject has been influenced in part by
Mikhail Epstein's observations on difference. He points out
that the models underlying identity politics and
multiculturalism in the US posit aggregates of discrete
subcultures (based on racial, ethnic, sexual or other
differences) each of which seeks to promote and maintain its
cultural specificity and self-sufficiency in the face of a
homogenizing dominant culture. These models have, in fact,
led to a relativistic and cynical indifference. This is so
because within a multicultural framework, one culture's
difference from all others becomes the sole key to one's
identity; thus differences are often promoted for their own
sakes which results in a multiplicity of self-contained and
disconnected cultural worlds with no spaces available for
exchange and interaction. In Epstein's view, all cultures
and subcultures are fundamentally incomplete and
insufficient; all cultures therefore have a need for radical
openness to all others. It is this space of permeability
where cultural ex-change might produce cultural
change. If we
are to move beyond either assimilation or annihilation of
any difference, Kristeva argues, we must recognize and
accept that essentially we all are foreigners, all
"strangers to ourselves." "Freud brings us the courage to
call ourselves disintegrated in order not to integrate
foreigners and even less so to hunt them down, but rather to
welcome them to that uncanny strangeness which is as much
theirs as it is ours. . . .It is with the help of that sole
support that we can attempt to live with others." Needless
to say I think we have a very long way to go before we're
able to confront&emdash;let alone embrace and actively
desire&emdash;this degree of radical difference. But I do
think it's possible.
CS: I
should probably leave our dialogue at this moment of
qualified optimism, but I feel compelled to add that one of
my quarrels with psychoanalytic theory in general is that it
always seems to posit an "us" that does not recognize
"ourselves" as uncanny or foreign, at least without
psychoanalytic intervention. I have no real argument with
the ideas from Kristeva you discuss above, but I do have a
response which is that part of what is needed, obviously, is
to let those who are always foreigners within every culture
speak and be heard, not as representatives of some unified
although disenfranchised group, even when the "group"
consists of one person's psyche, but as the very voices of
difference. I come back again and again to Foucault's
Madness and Civilization with its poetic exhortations that
we listen to the voices deemed mad and try to take in what
they say without translating it into the terms of reasonable
discourse or subjecting it to analytic meaning-making. To me
this is what Delauze and Guattari do at the beginning of
Anti-Oedipus where attending to the "mad" gives them the
tools to defamiliarize what they had previously understood
as inevitable contents of "the human mind."
EB:
A perfect lead-in for us to issue the call for
experimentation in content but most especially in form! One
of the things I liked most about feminist criticism in the
1970s and 1980s was its commitment&emdash;at least in
theory&emdash;to changing the ways that scholarship was
written. Innovations in critical voice were what made work
like Helene Cixous's and Luce Irigaray's so exciting. But I
think that feminist scholarship in large part lost its
commitment to formal radicality in its bid for scholarly
legitimacy (there's the whole apparatus of academia again).
Another reminder of why it's so important for Rhizomes to
encourage participation from as diverse a group as possible.
Trent Reznor and Judith Butler talking together about
abjection! Part of
the problem for us as editors will be not just encouraging
strange conceptions to migrate to Rhizomes but recognizing
them once they arrive. This gets at the whole issue of how
to evaluate new thinking. In our Rhizomes manifesto we say
that we're devoted to publishing new work. Yet we also are a
peer-reviewed journal, which implies and necessitates the
use of evaluative criteria that presumably would be capable
of assessing degrees of innovation. How to generate those
criteria? What balance of innovation and recognizability
(for lack of a better term) would need to exist in the new
work itself? It seems to me that one of the problems;or one
of the advantages&emdash;with information or art on the web
is that it often arrives in an undigested form;the bad and
the beautiful together in a lump. The evolution of
evaluative filters seems an important thing, but how to do
this without once again recontaining the new in the forms of
the familiar or worse rejecting it out of hand?
References... Bird, Jon et.al. 1993. Mapping the Futures, Local Cultures, Global Change. New York: Routledge. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, Volume 1. trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Connors, Steven. 1993. "Between Earth and Air: Value, Culture and Futurity." in Bird, pp.229-236. deCerteau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. trans Steven F. Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Federman, Raymond. "Imagination as Plagiarism [an unfinished paper. . .]." New Literary History volume 7, Number 3 (Spring 1976). Hebdige, Dick. 1993. "Training Some Thoughts on the Future." in Bird, pp. 270-279. Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. NewYork: Columbia University Press.