The Sexual Politics of Time

Confession, Nostalgia, Memory

Susannah Radstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134918850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Looking at a diverse range of texts including Marilyn French's The Women's Room, Philip Roth's Patrimony, the writings of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, and films such as Cinema Paradiso, Susannah Radstone argues that though time has been foregrounded in theories of postmodernism, those theories have ignored the question of time and sexual difference.

The Sexual Politics of Time proposes that the contemporary western world has witnessed a shift from the age of confession to the era of memory. In a series of chapters on confession, nostalgia, the 'memories of boyhood' film and the memoir, Susannah Radstone sets out to complicate this claim. Developing her argument through psychoanalytic theory, she proposes that an attention to time and sexual difference raises questions not only about the analysis and characterization of texts, but also about how cultural epochs are mapped through time.

The Sexual Politics of Time will be of interest to students and researchers of time, memory, difference and cultural change, in subjects such as Media and Cultural Studies, Sociology, Film Studies.

Chapter 1
On confession

It is characteristic of our present age that virtually all serious writing tends to be confessional.

(Ong 1975:20)

This chapter introduces the question of temporality into critical discussions of the confessional mode. After surveying the critical literature on confession, it argues that though a focus on temporality might appear to align confession with modernity, this would be a reductive and homogenizing view.

Confessional criticism

Contemporary cultural criticism suggests that confession continues to mark Western culture and that it remains of interest both to academics and to cultural critics. Recent conference literature refers to the continuing ‘compulsion to confess’ (Ashplant and Graham 2001) and to the ‘imperative to speak out … evident in popular culture … such as confessional television’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001:1).¹ Peter Brooks’s recent treatment of the subject opines that confession is ‘deeply ingrained in our culture’ (Brooks 2000:2) and that confession is to be found everywhere, though especially in the ‘everyday business of talkshows’ (ibid. 4; see also Elsaesser 2001:196). A recent edition of a literary radio programme examined the significance and value of confessional literature and poetry (‘Off the Page’, 2000). Like Brooks, ‘Off the Page’ noted confession’s contemporary move from the more rarified arenas of poetry and literary prose, to the public (and more downmarket?) spheres of TV chatshows, televised courtrooms and presidential addresses. Meanwhile, the popularity and marketability of popular literary confessions was remarked upon in broadsheet journalism of the late 1990s (Bennett 1995; Wurtzel 1998). These recent treatments of confession appear to suggest, then, that the injunction to confess does arguably continue to impress itself across a range of cultural domains. These comments demonstrate, too, that confession extends far beyond the limits of autobiographical writing. Thus, in the analyses with which I conclude this chapter, my focus falls not on confessional autobiographies but on confessional novels.

In what follows, a two-pronged argument will attempt to unsettle the twin assumptions of confession’s contemporary ubiquity and cultural dominance. First, it will be suggested that approaches to confession such as those already cited (as well as to cultural objects of study more generally) rest on unquestioned assumptions concerning culture and temporality – assumptions that overlook culture’s complex and multiple temporalities and, in so doing produce falsely homogeneous categories. Second, it will be proposed that even where a degree of dominance might once have been granted to a confessional ‘mode’, such a view is now in need of modification, given the shifts now taking place that set confession alongside other equally if not more powerful cultural trends and imperatives.

Though treatments of confession point to the continuing centrality of confessional discourse in Western culture, the attention accorded to confession remains, however, uneven. On the one hand, in the wake of Foucault, cultural theory continues to explore the ways in which confessional discourse constitutes an exercise of power. In such studies, confession’s reach is shown to extend to medical, psychological and judicial discourses (Tambling 1990). Yet in literary studies confession is often collapsed into autobiography (see, for instance, Anderson 2001) – a move that elides confessional literature’s relations with the confessional mode’s wider cultural resonance and reach.

This is the case in Mark Freeman’s study of St Augustine. In common with many accounts of autobiography and of confession, Mark Freeman’s study, Rewriting the Self (Freeman 1993) takes as its starting point and as its exemplary text St Augustine’s Confessions. Though he does acknowledge that the self that is St Augustine’s concern may not be ‘strictly equivalent to our own “modern” conception of the self’ and that the meaning of selfhood found in the Confessions remains ‘a far cry from our present-day conception’, Freeman argues, nevertheless, that St Augustine’s ‘vision of the self remains very much with us to this day’ (ibid. 26). Freeman’s aim as a psychologist, rather than a literary theorist, is to retrieve revised accounts of ‘truth’, ‘the self’ and ‘freedom’ from the jaws of contemporary literary theory’s emphases upon construction, subjection and determinism. In place of approaches that stress the subject’s ‘imprisonment’ in language, the illusory nature of reflectionist claims that language ‘reflects’ life and the ideological nature of ‘freedom’, Freeman suggests that rewriting the self ‘involves significantly more than the mere re-shuffling of words. Indeed it is … a process of breathing new life into language, of imaginatively transforming it into something different from anything before’ (ibid. 21).² This rather compelling account of the ‘free operation of the narrative imagination’ (ibid. 221) proceeds by way of a study of the temporalities of rewriting the self. Since the Confessions, argues Freeman, ‘the self with which … we … are concerned is constituted, defined, and articulated through its history’ (ibid. 29; his emphasis) and autobiography has concerned itself with charting, via memory, ‘the trajectory of how one’s self came to be’ (ibid. 33). Yet, argues Freeman, although, since St Augustine, rewritings of the self have been concerned with tracing the development of that self, these narratives do not follow a straightforwardly future-oriented, linear path, but move, rather, between retrospection and prospection. Development, Freeman points out, is traditionally understood to move ‘essentially forward in time’, but a reading of the Confessions suggests that self-development’s trajectory might be understood differently: in the Confessions, ‘development, rather than adhering strictly to the forward-looking arrow of linear time, was itself bound up with narrative and was thus thoroughly contingent on the backward gaze of recollection’ (ibid. 224).³ In foregrounding the confessional subject’s development, as well as the confessional narrative’s complex mode of narration, Freeman points to two defining features of the confession – its foregrounding of development, or what I’ll go on to call ‘becomingness’, and its mode of narration – a mode in which the position of confessional subject is divided between a narrated ‘I’ located in the narrative’s past, and a narrating ‘I’ located in the narrative’s present.

Freeman identifies four stages of the developmental process that structure Augustine’s Confessions, but which he believes to be far more widely applicable: recognition that some change is required; distanciation from that which is causing difficulty; articulation of the problem and of the projected future self; and finally appropriation of a new way of life (ibid. 36–49). Each of these developmental stages, Freeman argues, is marked by the present revision of the past in the interest of moving forward towards a projected superior state of being. For Freeman, imaginative play resides in this ‘shuttling back and forth between prospective and retrospective time’ (ibid. 46) through which the self is not just made but plays an active part in its remaking.

Though Freeman is quick to point out that ‘the concept of the self is very much relative to time and place’ (ibid. 27; his emphasis), he argues that narrative and interpretation are essential features of ‘what we now think of as human self-understanding’ (ibid. 48). Though one might want to limit this statement somewhat (who are the ‘we’ doing the thinking here?), more problematic is the extension of this argument to the concept of development, or ‘moving forward into a superior region of being’. Though Freeman acknowledges that development may take many forms, and that the forms that it takes will be shaped by culture and society, he does nevertheless insist that development itself remains an essential feature of self-understanding. For Freeman, then, ‘[t]he process of rewriting the self … hovers in the space between recollection and development’ (48–9).

Rewriting the Self’s psychologically oriented thesis concerns itself only marginally with literary or cultural history. Its revised understanding of development can be seen to spring directly, indeed, from a critical engagement with developmental psychology.⁴ Nevertheless, the centrality accorded by Freeman to St Augustine’s Confessions is determined to an extent by that text’s pivotal place in literary history, and more specifically in histories of autobiography. As Freeman notes, for Georges Gusdorf, the Confessions resides ‘[a]t the edge of modern times’ (Gusdorf 1956, quoted in Freeman 1993:25) and inaugurated new understandings of the self which are still current today. Although Freeman would acknowledge the existence of historical discontinuities between autobiographies – between, say, the spiritual orientation of St Augustine’s fourth-century confessions and the more psychological, inward-turning narratives of the late twentieth century – his emphasis falls, rather, on shared ground and, in particular, on that process of combined retrospection and prospection that arguably constitutes the developmental path taken by all post-St Augustinian rewritings of the self.⁵ Freeman’s psychologically oriented reflections on ‘re-writing’ the self are clearly inflected by postmodernist questions concerning textuality and events; the meaning of experience; language and subjectivity and the possibilities for change and transformation. The thesis he produces is a subtle one, aimed at retrieving some potential for self-determination from the excesses of textual and historical determinisms. For Freeman, the past is neither fully determined by, nor fully determinative of the present: rather the process of rewriting the self involves forwards and backwards movements that project a transformed self for the future. Freeman’s thesis engages with admirable lightness of touch, then, with postmodernist theory’s concerns with history, textuality, determinism and the subject. Yet though Re-Writing the Self makes great interdisciplinary strides, its range is not without bounds and in what follows, I will propose that its thesis requires some revision.

First, though Freeman positions St Augustine’s Confessions at the centre of his thesis, the specificity of confession’s autobiographical or first-person strategies of self rewritings remain unaddressed. Rather, the Confessions is treated as the template upon which other types of autobiographical ‘rewritings’ can be placed.⁶ A study of confessional rewritings of the self might therefore reveal breaks or even continuities masked by a study that overlooks the importance of and differences between modes of autobiographical writing. Second, though Freeman’s thesis is very much concerned with temporality, it does not engage with the plethora of recent debates concerning modern or contemporary (or as some would have it, postmodern) temporality/ies (Harvey 1989; Huyssen 1995; Jameson 1984; Osborne 1995).

Freeman argues that the balance between retrospection and prospection that emerged in the Confessions – that emerged, that is, at the ‘edge of modern times’ – continues to structure contemporary rewritings of the self. However, it has been proposed that the temporality of those modern times may now have been superseded. Fredric Jameson’s seminal writings on postmodernism were amongst the first to suggest that the very structure of Western temporality may now be undergoing a profound change which he linked with a ‘crisis in historicity’ (Jameson 1984:69). Jameson’s mapping of this shift associates it with a new stage of capitalism characterized by the ungraspability of multinational or even global power networks and technologies of reproduction rather than production. Under these new conditions in which spatial rather than temporal metaphors come to the fore, the contemporary Western subject may have ‘lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience’ (ibid. 71). This proposition led Jameson to suggest famously that contemporary Western culture – and most specifically, writing – may be best understood via Lacan’s psychoanalytic account of schizophrenia. On this account, schizophrenia describes a condition in which the relationship between signifiers snaps, stranding the subject in ‘an experience of pure material signifiers, or … pure and unrelated presents in time’ (ibid. 72). Andreas Huyssen’s Twilight Memories puts forward a thesis that stresses the technological rather than the economic determination of the atrophy of historicity and the reordering of time, proposing that ‘in the wake of the information revolution, the relationship between past, present and future is being transformed’ (Huyssen 1995:7). For Huyssen, contemporary and modern temporalities are complexly related. In our own times, he suggests, the future appears no longer to lie ahead but ‘seems to fold itself back into the past’ (ibid. 8). Meanwhile, computers and information systems eliminate almost all time-lag between production and reception, while circulating material that may mix, for instance, archive footage with actuality: the synchronicity of the principles according to which information networks function must be set against, that is, ‘the multiple images and narratives of the non-synchronous’ (ibid. 9) that they provide. Jameson and Huyssen are by no means alone in proposing a contemporary transformation of temporality. Moreover their studies suggest also that the positing of an ‘epochal’ temporality stretching from Gusdorf’s fifth-century ‘edge of modern times’ to the twentieth century may be far more problematic than Freeman’s thesis implicitly assumes. Huyssen himself points out that, according to certain historians, the temporal structure of past–present–future did not arise until the beginning of the eighteenth century (1995:8). What this suggests is that Freeman’s findings concerning the ubiquity both of the balance between retrospection and prospection and of the developmental theme may be prompted by readings of past rewritings of the self rooted in (mis)readings of contemporary temporality, which may no longer be dominantly structured along the line of past– present–future. Moreover, even if Freeman’s thesis concerning the temporalities of modern autobiographies is accepted, accounts of contemporary temporalities would suggest that the balance between retrospection and prospection that Freeman finds in post-St Augustinian self rewritings may no longer remain in place.

As noted earlier, like much literary criticism, Freeman’s thesis concerning the retrospection and prospection that constitutes all autobiographical rewritings takes St Augustine’s Confessions as their origin and model. This move overlooks differences between the forms, histories and, most significantly for my present purposes, the temporalities of specific first-person literary modes. In particular, Freeman’s approach sidesteps questions concerning the confession’s history/ies and temporality/ies. This overlooking of confession can be partly explained by Freeman’s cross-disciplinary journey which led him to rethink developmental psychology via a reading of autobiography and its criticism. For while confession as a discrete mode of self-representation has recently proved of great interest to cultural theory, autobiographical studies have tended to assimilate confession to autobiography. The first chapter of one of the most recent introductions to autobiography, indeed, commences with a discussion of St Augustine’s Confessions that omits any discussion of that text’s relation to the mode of confession more generally (Anderson 2001:27). Studies of contemporary Western culture continue to insist, however, on the ubiquity and centrality of confession. Freeman’s template of autobiographical retrospection/prospection is first derived from St Augustine’s Confessions – a text which he positions at the edge of autobiographical modern times, but which might be considered in relation to the specificity of the confessional mode and its histories. Thus if Freeman’s mapping of autobiographical temporalities may be predicated on a retrospective (mis)reading of contemporary temporality which he perceives to be structured along the line of past–present–future, his readings of post-St Augustinian self rewritings may be predicated also on an erroneous projection of the confessional onto all manner of other autobiographical modes. One way to complicate Freeman’s thesis concerning the temporalities of self rewritings, therefore, would take as its starting-point the histories, temporalities and cultures of confession.

The relationship between discursive modes such as confession and the wider culture is not one of simple reflection. It cannot be straightforwardly assumed, therefore, that texts are structured by or reflect the temporalities of their times in any straightforward manner. For instance, though Fredric Jameson does suggest that avant-garde poetry may have ‘adopted schizophrenic fragmentation as its fundamental aesthetic’ (Jameson 1984:73), he simultaneously notes the emergence of ‘the nostalgia mode’ (p. 66) which he discusses, in the main, in relation to cinema. On Jameson’s much cited account, this historicist mode substitutes the style or feel of the past for a ‘real’ history that has now become beyond reach (ibid. pp. 66–8). The ‘nostalgia mode’ arguably constitutes, therefore, a symptomatic response to the contemporary transformations of temporality and their effect on consciousness. Andreas Huyssen, too, has suggested that the contemporary technologically driven transformations of temporality he identifies have played their part...