MLA 2005

Three sessions organized for the 20^th Century Comparative Literature Division

Program arranged by the Division on Comparative Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

Current cultural theories addressed many aspects of the electronic age: Hyper-reality, the human/inhuman, the cyborg, etc. Paul Virilio’s dromocracy (from ‘dromos’ avenue or race course - Greek) refers to the acceleration as a defining feature of the ‘information age.’ According to Virilio this acceleration (which seems to be pushed to its limits) is the real end of modernity. How does acceleration affects representation, literary expression or literature in general?

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Program arranged by the Division on Comparative Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

The 20^th century witnessed the dismantling of the great British and French empires that extended over most of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East. However, imperialism is far form over. Representations if past and current empire building is the topic of this session. The term representation customarily refers to ‘presence’ or appearance’ (cf. Oxford Dictionary), although it may also refer to something that is ‘standing for’ something else (Spivak). Particularly this aspect of representation is a much debated topic not only in Academe, but in the larger cultural milieu, mostly because it is frequently filled with ideological content.

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Program arranged by the Division on Comparative Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

The relationship between knowledge and power is so complex that it warrants exploration in different disciplines ands with various approaches. The intellectual has often been portrayed as trapped between Academe and the world, or between the private and the public sphere. Is it true that the intellectual’s role is the ‘produce and disseminate knowledge? What part power plays in the intellectual’s life?

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My essay reads Paul Virilio's dromocracy through the aesthetic theory developed in his crucial *Aesthetics of Disappearance* (1980) and presupposed in his subsequent work. Virilio seems to offer the most up to date account of the state of things, combining media technical accuracy with dire prophecies of an approaching cultural limit in the absolute speed of digital information. The advantage of this limit is its claim to mark a decisive historical distinction. Literature offers no such prophecy: it cannot support Virilio's claim but rather underlines the means (that is, the rhetoric) through which the advantage is gained. Literature disappears under dromological conditions: this end is its representation and future. Virilio explains the critical limit through a reconfiguration of the metaphorical "form" (his terms) of the aesthetics of disappearance. Simply put, dromocracy is a theory of metaphor. In turn, this theory relies on the experience of reading literature as the model for absolute speed against which all other speeds are measured. The rhetorical status of Virilio's theory is typically overlooked. The appeal of the theory is its "technical" and non-rhetorical perspective. It is unsurprising that the logistics of perception hides a rhetoric of metaphor, since logistical success achieves deception and persuasion. The central aesthetic claim of Virilio's theory is that the transport or delirium of the logistics of perception (read: the transport of metaphor) is the medial experience of disappearance. At the famous limit of pure speed, the metaphorical form of aesthetic non-appearances reverses and blurs. The actuality of virtual images and the irreality of actual phenomena change place but remain within the form of metaphor. What seems like a relation between perception and the real turns out to be the rhetorical logistics within a metaphorical schema. The schema preserves only itself, its persistence as the witness of enabling disappearance. In turn, literature is the presentation and truest exemplification of what this schema witnesses. It is always possible to literally present examples of this witnessing. Likely suspects are the visual appearance of letters in concrete poetry and hypertext literature, or in intermedial works such as Mark Danielewski's *House of Leaves*. These remain, however, empty and opaque monuments to the disappearance of literature. Dromocracy affects literature only within the persistence of an aesthetic ideology concealed in the seemingly non-aesthetic forms of technical media.

“Reading Speed”

Cultural critics and theorists have discussed the intrusion of machines into the humanities. Donna Haraway, N. K. Hayles and others have argued for a hybridization between humans and machines and the importance of cyborgs. The notion of hypertext is often used to study novel links between literature and computers. Fewer are those who, like Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari but especially Paul Virilio, have analyzed the presence of machines, computers and electronic communication as part of a generalized acceleration that entirely changes the way humans relate to the world. If acceleration and the accompanying rise of dromocracies--as Paul Virilio would have it--replace the older democracies based on presence and geopolitics affect all domains of humans’ lives, they especially alter such disciplines as culture and politics. I propose to use the work of Paul Virilio as a point of departure to argue that literature as we knew it several decades ago is no longer possible in an age of speed when duration and delay so important for traditional texts, have been eradicated. The arrival of the speed of light has done away with conventional ways of reading based on delay. In addition, the light of speed, that is the digital image, does away with writing and with representation in favor of presentation. When skills replace questioning and experimentation once associated with a culture that is also more and more commercialized, what is, we will ask, the position of literature and art in society? Can literature still serve as a form of questioning? As a form of resistance? What new ways of reading and writing are possible in an age of dromocracy?

“They just don’t look comfortable with a book in their hands.” A colleague of mine, expressing the difficulties of teaching novels to undergraduates, said this to me as I prepared to teach what students in our department deem the “dreaded” Introduction to Literary Studies course. I was going to start the semester with the latest novel by William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, hoping a post-9/11 work would at least grab their attention, if not alleviate their dread, and put them a bit more at ease with those awkward and tedious things called books. It turned out this strategy worked. The class was especially intrigued with the narrative integration of hypertext in addition to the protagonist’s (Cayce Pollard) ironically adverse reaction to corporate logos as a “cool hunter” and her search for recognizable patterns within a “mysterious collection of video moments, merely called ‘the footage,’ let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source.” After the semester, however, a student told me the classes’ “real” reason for liking it so much: “short chapters, kinda like surfing the net, like Cayce.” If the form of Pattern Recognition makes a reader feel like she is visiting site after site, or “surfing the novel,” it would seem that this “accelerated” formal characteristic could be used for entrance to and application of contemporary theories of perpetual deferral and displacement to novels in the information age. This strategy, however, was undermined for the students were intuitively cognizant of this proliferation, and felt quite at home with it, even if they lacked the jargon to articulate it in “theoretical” terms. Like the jet-setting Cayce and the corporate elite she is contracted by, they already live (and are subject to) the hyper-real life of an accelerated postmodernity, thus the novel and use of poststructuralist theory to read it, once grasped, were received as a narrative and theory of the obvious. On the other hand, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue that an assumed “literary absolute” is still manifest: literature “produces the truth of production in itself” in an infinite advance of singularities connected within an absolute, and thereby finite, subject. In other words, the romantic drive for wholeness in and as literature remains with the modern or postmodern work because even what is labeled the most fast-paced and fragmented narrative is whole as a fragment. Consequently, the questions addressed in this paper are: 1) how are the emergent and accelerated representational forms of the information era, like the Internet, transforming the generic characteristics of the novel, its affects, and how to discuss it; 2) are such changes inferring an era distinct from the modern, or are they but reorientations of a persistent “romantic unconscious” driving (and denied by) modern discourses, thus rendering claims that acceleration signals a “real end to modernity” no different than a romantic assertions of a “real” literary absolute; 3) and how does “surfing” a novel such as Pattern Recognition foster a space for considering the material and metaphysical consequences of a "dromocracy”?

This paper is taken from a larger research project entitled “Land and Empire.” The project is informed by a two-fold approach: (1) a historical-genealogical study of the rise of the British Empire from the 18^th to the 20^th century (and the subsequent shift of the mantle of empire to a U.S. national and corporate transnational context); and (2) a critique of current ontological formations of collective human existence through the development of an alternative formation that I refer to as an “ontology of inhabitancy.” The project explores the gradual development of a “discourse of enclosure” (my specific reference point is the British Parliamentary Enclosure Acts), a discourse that has come to be foundational to transcultural forces of 20^th-century colonialism and current neocolonial formations. Generally thought to have ended in the 18^th century, enclosure acts continued well into the 20^th century–-informing considerably the logic of British imperialism by structuring its economies of reality, and governing its realms of knowledge production at home and abroad. My discussions of 20^th-century British literature and culture are therefore underpinned by this historical analysis. Up until the 17^th century, much of the English landscape was arranged collectively around small villages and their communal “common” lands. After the Restoration, however, state authorities sought new procedures of discipline, new avenues of foreign and domestic investment, and new models for advancement. Parliament’s model of disciplinary control came in the form of enclosure acts–-judicial pronouncements that sanctioned the privatization and colonization of the common lands. Though the pre-enclosure system was no golden era, once parliamentary acts of enclosure had become an accepted, “natural” way of life, the commons came to be seen as first useless, then dangerous; they began to signify a lack within a nation’s topography. Annexed to the periphery, away from the center of “proper” culture, the commons–-and the people living on them–-were given an inferior status and referred to as “uncivilized” and “wild” in the same fashion as imperial colonies of early America, Africa, India, and the East Indies. Significant references to enclosures and “savage common lands” can be found in many English novels from the 18^th to the 20^th century: Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, Mansfield Park, Shirley, The Mill on the Floss, The Return of the Native, Kim, Heart of Darkness, Victory, The Rainbow, Howards End, and A Passage to India–-to name just a few. These literary works serve as a useful index for measuring the rise of a philosophical world view based upon enclosure. This world view also informs current international (neo-imperial) relations. Ecosystems around the planet, for instance, are increasingly threatened by the enclosure of open areas for purposes of various “land development” projects. Transnational pharmaceutical corporations (the fastest growing business industry) enclose the biological commons by privatizing and patenting the biological domain (for example, the development and use of “terminator seeds” in Third World agricultural communities has resulted in a decline in calorie intake in Mexico, Argentina, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and elsewhere). There is also an immense archive of agricultural, economic, and political documents written by historians and statesmen from the 18^th to the 20^th century that has established a significant discourse of enclosure. My research reveals that the essence of humanity, and humanity’s relationship to the land, has changed fundamentally because of this discourse of enclosure. A key historical moment here is the 17^th-century court case known as “Gatewards Case,” which continues to buttress the legal system of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. “Gatewards Case” made illegal the form of human subjectivity known as “inhabitancy” (the specifics of this I can detail in a longer abstract, if necessary). This transformation significantly informs land relations in the current global environment, in addition to current articulations of “justice” and “human values.” Of immediate connection to the humanities is the direct enclosure and privatization of knowledge production with the rise of “Intellectual Property Rights” (IPRs). Information on productive methods of fertilization in Third World communities, for instance, can be “discovered” and developed by biochemical companies, then sold back to the territory from which the method originated. Because of IPRs, these agricultural communities have begun to find themselves in the peculiar position of having to pay for their own knowledge, knowledge that evolved cumulatively and collectively. My paper explores the manner in which literary works are caught within, but also struggle against, this widespread discourse of enclosure—in an attempt addresses one of the basic goals of the humanities in the age of empire: the need to explore new possibilities for humane values. These works of literature can be connected to various non-State social movements and new developments occurring throughout the Third World, in order to rethink the current status of literary humanism and the potential of humanism in general to serve as a humane force for social justice in a globalized world that gives greater priority to socio-economic mobility and technological innovation than to the needs and values of communities that are used and abused by these rapid changes. Some of the non-State alternative social movements and developments include: the Communal Property Association of South Africa; the Brazilian Women’s Land Movement; La Via Campesina; the Communal Irrigation Management System of the Swiss Alps; and the Middle Atlas Central Area Agricultural Development Project in Morocco (the specifics of these I address in my paper). (Please note: This abstract emphasizes literary and political approaches in relation to the question of empire in the 20^th century. To meet the needs of the panel, I could easily place emphasis on a number of philosophical works that I discuss in conjunction with land relations: Badiou, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, Heidegger, Laclau, and Zizek).

A new world order is emerging before our eyes. This order has been variously called globalization, Empire, neo-imperialism, postmodernity, virtual capitalism and so on. A motley crowd constituting of people belonging to different spheres of social life—intellectuals, academics, activists, politicians, artists—seem to be grappling with a “common” question, “What is globalization?”. Fredric Jameson, in his preface to The Cultures of Globalization, maintains that globalization is the intellectual property of no specific field. It seems to concern politics, economics, culture, media, market, information technologies, and daily life. Broadly speaking then, the concept of globalization constitutes social, economic, political and cultural processes that, taken together, produce the characteristic conditions of contemporary (late twentieth/early twenty-first century) existence. Historically, globalization marks the end of Cold War, which brought about the collapse of Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market. The emergence of globalization has brought with it several challenging questions. Scholars, in various fields, are grappling with the difference or similarity between the old and the new— between modernity and globalization, between sovereignty of the nation-states and global sovereignty, between old imperialism and new imperialism, between the global and the local, between national corporations and multinational corporations, between industrial labor and immaterial labor, between the proletariat and the multitude/collectivities. In this paper, I propose to examine the question of the constitution of the Empire. In other words, what forms of subjectivities or peoples are emerging in this era of globalization? More specifically, I will examine two important attempts by scholars at theorizing the new emergent subjectivities in the Empire. One of the most famous attempts has been that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their books Empire and Multitude, they state that the multitude can become the new political subject in response to the new form of global sovereignty. Multitude constitutes a non-liberal pluralism by which they mean democratic pluralism. According to them, this multitude has the potential to bring about a real alternative to Empire; it will establish democracy and destroy sovereignty. Another important attempt has been that of Gayatri Spivak. Drawing from Jacques Derrida, in her book The Death of the Discipline, she proposes the concept of “collectivities.” She maintains that the notion of collectivities is non-reductive, undeterminable, and yet to come. In contrast to the streamline, hegemonic individuals that are produced in this age of globalization, she believes that, there should be efforts made to produce “collectivities” in our literature classrooms. In both cases the authors believe that, in an age saturated by consumer culture, there is a possibility of the emergence of a political subject who would resist the new regime. But each account gives rise to several questions which I propose to examine. Hardt and Negri believe that power has become biopower in Empire, that is, it has seeped into the cells of humans, who believe that it is “democratic.” If this is so, then how is a revolutionary political subject possible? In response to Spivak one may ask how is it possible to translate the open-endedness of poetic thinking into political action? Can literature provide a blue print for political action?

The essential task for a literature intent on challenging U.S. hegemony, I argue in this paper, is to render visible the transnational networks of power that characterize contemporary American imperialism. Despite the current paroxysm of unilateral expansionism, the defining and distinguishing characteristic of U.S. imperialism over the last century has been its informal nature. Unlike previous imperial powers such as Britain and France, that is, the United States has not relied predominantly on territorial conquest and political subordination. Instead of developing an extensive colonial apparatus, the U.S. asserted its imperial sway from the beginning of the 20^th century primarily through foreign direct investment and through the modern corporate form, making its power distinct from previous European forms of imperial hegemony. The genius of U.S. policy makers, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, has resided in their corresponding ability to represent America’s informal empire in terms of a framework of universal rights. The outlines of a contemporary anti-imperial literature are discernable, I suggest, in Robert Newman’s The Fountain at the Center of the World (2004) and in social movement manifestos such as the texts published in We Are Everywhere (2003). Newman’s epic novel focuses on the impact of what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” the privatization of the global commons that has been one of the primary facets of the neo-liberal reconstruction of empire over the last thirty years. While offering a critique of the transnational networked power of institutions such as the WTO that underlie imperial power today, Newman’s novel also traces the emergence of an anti-capitalist “movement of movements” that links the dispossessed in the capitalist core and periphery. The Fountain at the Center of the World and the movement manifestos I discuss document the emergence of new anti-systemic social movements that over the last decade have come to constitute an important internationalist counter-articulation to global imperial power.

Intellectuals are often portrayed as "trapped" between affiliating with academe and the public-private sector. The rise of the corporate university is alleged to pull intellectuals away from the realm of academic values and into the realm of corporate and market (or neoliberal) values. The general conclusion of most criticism of this type is that the intellectual's values and identity are compromised in some way. This conclusion is reached by assuming that corporate and academic values are incompatible. Today, this assumption calls for reconsideration.Academe is no longer nor will it ever be again an oasis divorced from private and public interests. Therefore, intellectuals must view the recent demand to straddle academe and the public-private sector as the continuing condition of the academy, and work to develop a sense of intellectual self-identity that does not view itself as "trapped" or "compromised." As the nature of academic identity changes, so too must the identity of intellectuals. I would argue that the changes in the configuration of the university call for intellectuals to consider the markets for their ideas. As "corporate intellectuals," members of academe would configure their identity as allied to both the insular world of the academy and to the public sphere. Not only is this a potentially more positive, socially responsible identity for intellectuals, it is more in tune with the current and continuing material conditions of the academy. So, for example, in considering writing a book or offering a course, intellectuals would weigh market considerations with academic concerns, asking both whether the project will have a market and whether it will further academic discourse. Furthermore, as many academics are considering ways to have more public influence, this reconfigured identity will be more consonant with their values. Intellectuals in the humanities are increasingly turning attention to the public-private sphere in their academic work, particularly in the wide-ranging field of cultural studies. A reconfigured identity as a public intellectual will be more in tune with this shift to cultural studies. Rather than feeling we are trapped between academe and the public-private sector, we should praise how intellectuals in the U. S. are finally beginning to turn their attention en mass to the public-private sphere. One of our goals as intellectuals might be to find ways to bring the two spheres to work together more organically, exercising public accountability without compromising our intellectual freedoms. In the process, increasing numbers of academic intellectuals will become more like public intellectuals. This will be one of the more encouraging consequences of the corporatization of the university, even if it will decidedly alter the meaning and nature of the American intellectual.

Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves.

one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures,

but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things,

In January 2003 Stanley Fish – preeminent scholar of Milton, literary theory and the law – published an article in the Chronicle for Higher Education. In this treatise, Fish argues for a more streamlined (read: conservative) university, one that disregards ostensibly extramural concerns e.g., academic responses to war, poverty and disease. The university, in Fish’s estimation, should be a site wherein individual theorize about issues of social justice and welfare, no where they respond to those issues. The title of this article condenses Fish’s sentiment: “Save the World on Your Own Time.” Fish’s argument interests me primarily because it is diametrically opposed to my sense of the university. Indeed, my experience at the university, past and present, is a direct contradiction of Fish’s principle. My experience is one of intellectual contravention, a concenrend attempt to speak to those issues that Fish and those of his ilk would rather see neglected, swept under the rug on a quotidian basis. My aim in this paper is to read myself as text, parsing the phenomenological aspects of my decision to remain a contravener while simultaneously making a plea for more contravention in the university setting. I draw on Michel Foucault’s analysis of parrhesia in Feerless Speech and excerpts from Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual, amongst others, as a theoretical framework. I also comment on the characterization listed in the call of intellectuals (or in my case intellectuals in training) being “trapped” between Academe and the private-public sector. This assertion intrigues me because I don’t envision myself as being “trapped”. Quite the contrary, I think there is something generative that comes from finding oneself positions at this intersection.

Keeping in mind my role and others as scholars and educators that serve a specific function in society, in this paper I question and then complicate the place of teaching, scholarship, and theory as the de facto space of political praxis. I explore assertions made by "cultural workers" and the participation in organizations like the World Economic Forum and/or the World Social Forum to show the steps necessary to move cultural work into the sphere of political activism. I then turn back the clock to two different politically charged moments in the expansion of curriculum in universities--post -WWI canon reformation and the institutionalizing of European Civilization Studies at universities like Columbia and a late-1980s so-called "Culture Wars" and struggle to alter classroom syllabi at places like Stanford (one of several sites of heated debates between Jesse Jackson and William Bennett, for example.) Here, I ask, what was happening behind the scenes during this "war" between a so-called "Left" and so- called "Right"? Was this actually deflecting attention away from an increasingly unpleasant real everyday life for women, people of color, and the working class and poor during the Reagan and then Bush Sr. administrations? As Walter Benn Michaels succinctly announces, "as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality". The locating of politics within debates about culture also point us to a necessary discussion of the role of the intellectual-scholar formed by and working within the university. I thus turn to a specific discussion of the role of faculty like myself that teach Chicano/a literature within a university that has historically proven--and continues to be today- -to be subject to the fluctuating needs of capitalists to extend markets. However, within the university space, there remain certain protections that allow for the freedom of expression, of ideas, and discovery. I turn to a brief discussion of the recent threat of dismissal here at CU Boulder to fire Ethnic Studies professor Ward Churchill that threatens such a space where the freedom of expression and discovery has been protected against capitalist interests. Along the lines of Bertrand Russell and Edward Said, that as a Chicano professor and scholar I propose that we must all remain committed to a "third way" of thinking: the secular advancing of knowledge within such universities and the systematic opposition to any force that might threaten to dismantle such a secular space of learning. In the strongest sense, then, I propose that we not cut off the classroom from the world, but rather work to ensure that it remains a secular space where we might impart well reasoned and clearly articulated ideas. Namely, I ask, can our work in the university really uphold the claim that our "cultural work" (theories, pedagogy, scholarship) will destabilize capitalist hegemonies. Or, rather, is our job within the university to make, as Edward Said so nicely states, "more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present. I end the paper with a discussion of what intellectuals and university trained scholars can do in and outside the classroom. I suggest that while we can impart and participate in the shaping of knowledge that can help us know our world better beyond the classroom, it is not the same thing to propose that our scholarship and classroom work is political work