Border Dialogues (Routledge Revivals)

Journeys in Postmodernity

Iain Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317911388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1990, Border Dialogues explores some of the territories of contemporary culture, philosophy and criticism. It touches on arguments surrounding Nietzsche and Italian 'weak thought', the mysteries of being 'British', and with more immediate concerns such as computers, fashion, gender and ethnicity. The chapters explore how such different strands are joined together, and how this can lead to a reassessment of contemporary cultural criticism. This innovative and interesting reissue will be of particular interest to students of critical theory, cultural studies, radical philosophy and deconstruction.

Chapter 1
The ‘double solution’

In Derek Jarmari's film Caravaggio (1986), the text - Caravaggio's paintings, his biography - dissolves into an extensive textuality. The film itself, its lighting and chiaroscuro effects, become an example of the Caravaggio-esque. As a young painter, Caravaggio is initially presented as an early seventeenth-century, homosexual, 'wild boy', simultaneously a street punk (on his knife is inscribed the motto, 'No hope, no fear') and a self-proclaimed 'work of art'. This is supplemented by typewriters, train whistles, cigarettes and a paper hat made from an old copy of L'Unità. These are all found in a Rome of the early 1600s: anachronisms that constitute a recognizable 'Italianicity'. (All the sounds, including that of the rain, were recorded in Italy, while the film was shot in a warehouse on the Isle of Dogs.) Such signs blatantly refuse the rules of the pedantic antiquarian. The feel of the film is itself distinctly baroque. In its decentring of perspective and sense of excess the film proposes a disturbing affinity with both the birth of that epoch and the climate of the late twentieth century. This is hardly parody or pastiche but rather an intelligent seizure of the traces of the past that flare up in the present. For the film proposes a representation of a Caravaggio that is comprehensible, hence complex and fragmentary and not the solid referent of a traditional art discourse, a Hollywood film or a neat historical tale.

This example of the apparently disordered detail and vertiginous experience of the baroque is also a sign of our times. Today, as then, we are witnesses to the ruins of previous orders of meaning that come to be re-elaborated, extended and ultimately undone. We are left turning over the traces, unwilling to succumb to their fading authority yet at the same time unsure of what lies in their abandon. The hard die of the rationalism we have inherited, once presented as the unique, progressive and symmetrical appropriation of reality, has been softened up, submerged and thwarted in an excess of sense, in a short-circuiting and confusion of connections. One of the more recent symptoms of this breakup, and breaking-out, has been the recourse to the fictional, aesthetic and literary modes in recent critical writing. The languages of criticism are no longer understood to be transparent. They, too, are overloaded and uncertain about what is it they are representing. They, like the reality they seek to reveal, have turned in upon themselves, become suspect, even neurotic, seeking to conspire with the complexity they sense.

There are numerous strands involved in this move away from taking language and discourse for granted, as though they provide an unproblematic access to reality. Such a problematization of reality is certainly not, despite the attention it has recently received in the debate over postmodernism, a recent development. There are clamorous precedents in philosophy that, on the one hand, develop out of Nietzsche's critique of analytical enquiry and its metaphysics, and, on the other, out of Wittgenstein's reflections on the limits of language; there is the ideological critique developed in Marxism; and there is the foundation of psychoanalysis based on another, repressed, language, that of the unconscious. In all these particular interrogations, 'reality' is not so readily available.

To this history we need to add the presence and persistent interrogation of the 'other', the unknown and the unanswered, the inscrutable and indecipherable, which in modern European thought has invariably, together with race, been represented by the 'feminine'. As a metaphor of disruption and transgression the latter usually 'bears no direct or even necessary relation to real-life women'.¹ Still, it is has largely been the encounter between the transgression of post-Nietzschean thought and, often unacknowledged, 'real-life' encounters with the repressed histories, languages and voices represented by women, ethnicity (the 'Jew', the 'Black'), and the non-Western world in general, that increasingly form the secret challenge to critical discourse.

What the alternatives to the traditional language of criticism and thought share is a common focus on what Friedrich Nietzsche referred to as the 'school of suspect' and its intention of removing the mask from immediate appearances. Of course, subsequent debate lies precisely in what it is that we find behind the mask. For classical Marxism it is the 'real' relations of the social world governed by the regulatory mechanisms of a particular mode of production. Central to this particular idea of unveiling the 'real' is the theme of authenticity. The Marxist critique that penetrates the mask lays the basis for a social alternative to emerge in which men and women would come to fully reappropriate themselves in a world stripped of false appearances and the fetishizing rule of commodities. This suggests, although now in a materialist language, the Hegelian belief that truth lies in a total synthesis; in this case, the ideological critique seeks to recompose a non-alienated totality in order to arrive at a complete or non-partial point of view. As Gianni Vattimo, critic of such totalizing aspirations, and proponent of a 'weaker' mode of reasoning, points out, ideology here is not only considered to be false because it hides the truth, but also because it involves partial and incomplete thought.²

With psychoanalysis there is a more complex enquiry that takes us behind the self-referring individual of modern rationalism to an unstable knowledge encountered in the dreams, drives and desires of our secret, psychic life. The fundamental problem for both Freudian analysis and the Marxist critique of reality, is that when examining the distinction between symptoms and sources, between the symbol and what is symbolized, where can we say that appearances stop? Jacques Derrida has convincingly argued that what is presented as a logical or scientific 'truth' is itself a rhetorical device, an effect of language that seeks to negate its status as language precisely in order to better its claim on the real.³

The author of the Interpretation of Dreams depended, for example, on the stories his patients told him; he analysed not a dream but a recollection, a fragmented narrative, a fiction. Freud himself acknowledged this deep-seated ambiguity in his analytical writings, underlining the infinite and whirling play of language that carries with it the strange sensation of losing oneself as sense is transformed, rewritten, and proliferates in interpretation. When Freud speaks of the dream, he is referring not to the actual dream itself, but to its reconstruction, to the elements that constitute the space of memory in the present. What is important is not so much what happened - in the dream, in childhood - as the particular account or the narrative that the patient presents to the analyst. It is that material which is interpreted; 'reality', what actually might have happened, is no longer immediately available. It has been rewritten and displaced by a construction that comes to be represented in the second order of a discourse that simultaneously claims theoretical status and yet so often reads like a novel.⁴

This, against the naturalist and regulatory assumptions of the later institution of psychoanalysis, proposes a critical language in which the poetics of the symbol becomes central. In what Freud defines as Verleugnung the symbol constitutes a refusal, a repudiation or negation, of the real. For what the symbol offers is the infinite language of the double, the uncanny, the disguised, the displaced. Here the symbol is not the medium of communication but is rather something that disturbs communication. The symbol's relationship with the principles of communication is encompassed in an endless game of 'montage and sabotage': 'In the repudiation the disguised displacement winks at the reality principle.'⁵

The further and more notorious response that emerges from the 'school of suspect' is that behind the mask there is nothing; that there is in fact no elsewhere in which we can locate the 'truth'. This stark vision is summed up in the Nietzschean proclamation that 'God is dead'. In this 'critique of the critique' (Nietzsche) there is no longer a transcendental structure, a priori synthesis or metaphysical guarantee to protect us from ourselves and the world we have made. There exists no reality beyond appearances. In this extreme secularization of analytical languages, where a metaphysical violence imposed in the name of a transcendental 'reality' or the 'Truth' is refused, it is language itself, our constructions, narratives, the stories we tell each other, that tends towards becoming what Derrida terms the factor of truth. Here we are talking about a sense of reality which is not something that can be reduced to the formal dialectic of reason, history, progress, and the 'authentic' or 'original' foundations of abstract being, but is rather something that becomes, that emerges through difference, through specificity, through dialogue, through our languages and histories; that is, in the insistent intercourse of the world.

This sense of dialogue and the becoming of 'truth' was once suggestively set out in an alternative version of the Œdipus myth offered by Friedrich Hölderlin. The tragedy of Œdipus, according to the German poet, lies not in the fact of patricide or incest, but in his persistent interrogation of the blind prophet Tiresias. In his insistence on arriving at the bottom of things Œdipus condemns himself to be the victim of the same abstract law that drives him to violently extract the truth at all costs. Œdipus's indiscretion before the oracle of Thebes leads him to find the 'double solution which establishes once and for all our final ambivalence': first, before the Sphinx, there is the solution that permits him to avoid death; then there is the solution, torn from the seer, that condemns him to death. Œdipus's questioning presents us with a world full of infinite interpretations. But in this world he seeks a final answer, he is set on 'the demented research for knowledge'.⁶ It is not by chance that Œdipus becomes one of the primordial emblems of the Occident.

Only Œdipus can avoid death by the oracle, only Œdipus is able to be condemned to death by the oracle. The inseparable link between the two solutions supports the entire idea of the resolutory capacity of thought, it is a situation in which we still find ourselves today.⁷

Alongside the Freudian account and the founding myth of modern psychoanalysis the phallus here returns in the thirst for complete knowledge, in the blind obedience to the authority of logos and its hegemony of vision.

The origin of the essays in this book lies somewhere in here, in this world of the 'double solution' in which there is no obvious or metaphysical 'truth', no absolute or pure sense to guide and orientate us; where, in the encounter with possible meanings, diverse, asymmetrical signs and histories propose a constant sense of difference, deferring and ambiguity; where causality does not necessarily lie in the obvious calculus of the abstract but frequently 'in the often despised sedimentation of temporal circumstances'.⁸ In what follows I have attempted to examine some of the spaces between some of these signs, dialogues and histories, and to scan the circuits in which they move and acquire significance. What emerges is not 'authentic' to any single point of origin, explanation or metaphysical axiom, but seeks rather to be authentic to a particular set of historical circumstances and associated possibilities: to the complex fabric of social and historical experience, to the (con)temporary, that is mortal, hence unique, set of conditions in which we act and make sense of our lives.

Today, we can perhaps talk in terms of a shift or reorganization of sense, a change in what Raymond Williams would have called the contemporary 'structure of feeling'. Knowledge, at least as it has been articulated in western societies, has consistently invoked optics and an ocular conception of cognizance. It has been organized via visual metaphors. As it is defined in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the term theory comes from the Greek theoría contemplation, speculation, sight, formed on theorós - spectator, formed on thea, base of théa - sight, contemplation. The metaphor betrays its metaphysical lineage. It takes us all the way back to Plato's cave and its allegory of knowledge as something divined from the passing shadows on its walls, from chained beings meditating on an optical illusion, a speculum. But such representations are not about mere mimesis; what we see is coded and therefore involves not only displaying certain things but also hiding other things. In inscribing a woman's voice in the allegory Luce Irigaray brings to light the masculine partiality that passes for a fixed and universal illumination. The cave, the given, the matrix, the uterus, the hole in the Earth, provides the silent scene of representation, the space of the simulation, the: 'Eternal archive of the Idea. An infinitely delayed birth for which every diversity, every controversy, is obliterated in blind contemplation'.⁹ Representation involves repression: some things are shown, other are hidden; some things said, other unsaid. For in every representation the object represented is initially cancelled and then replaced, re-presented, in another context and language.¹⁰ Representation, as Freud noted, is a 'cannibalistic discourse', it devours and "'takes the place" of the history lost to it.'¹¹

Inaugurated by the modern impact of photography and cinema, we are today in the midst of a radical permutation in our sense of vision. It involves a modification that may turn out to be as significant for how we understand the world as the introduction of geometrical perspective during the Renaissance. The referent, as encountered in the formal semblance of painting, or the photographic and cinematic image, has educated our eye to observe objects and everyday details in a certain manner. This particular organization of matter, this sense of perspective (and position), has increasingly been supplemented and then radically modified by techniques, which are never merely 'technical', in which the languages of representations are themselves increasingly foregrounded. In this marriage of technique and logos it is increasingly the syntax of such languages, rather than their referentiality, that proposes a further mutation in perspective. We increasingly find ourselves dealing less with the referential premises of a particular image and more with its languages of gestation, with its languages of becoming, with its morpho-genesis.¹² This is as true of the self-referring meditations of twentieth-century avant-garde art, contemporary fashion and music as it is, for example, of the syntax of the computer. Inside the simulating machine, on the other side of the screen, there are no fixed images, no finished sounds, no final text. What we find instead are bits of information, digits of promised pitches, patterns of potential expression: shadowy traces, images of a composite world, languages of potential sense.

This, for the computer itself is also a contemporary allegory, suggests a remarkable renovation in terms of space, time, sense, and knowledge. What this 'crisis in representation' has done is to add contemporary weight to an older idea that it is the mediation, the employment and deployment of languages, rather than the objects they supposedly represent, that becomes central, that, as Wittgenstein put it, mark the limits of our world.¹³ This frees individual signs from their earlier regimes of reference in a particular time, place and tradition, The more a sound, style, object or image is reproduced, quoted, sampled and referred to, whether it is the skyline of New York, or the voice of James Brown, the more an 'aura' accumulates around it. The more languages that are invested in the sign, the more 'authentic' it becomes. Walter Benjamin's original argument has been turned inside-out, as it were; it is no longer the grainy texture of the original painting, voice or object that draws us into a history and a tradition, but the secular and social quantity of subsequent reproductions (in prints, records, photographs, cassettes, fashion, advertising, cinema) that now guarantees a historical presence and reproduces an aura: 'we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.'¹⁴ It is no longer the object but the encounter with the languages and discourses that orbit around it that counts.

It is language itself that has become both the palimpsest and fulcrum, not only of immediate sense and aesthetics, but also of an effective ethics and politics. It is the languages of pleasure, of tragedy, of pain, of hope, of freedom, of detail and difference, of death and beginning, ... of the 'real', and not naked reality, that address us and which we, in turn, address. Thus these languages are not autonomous. They are integral to the 'social construction of reality'. Their power lies precisely in their detailed exchange with what is being continually addressed and constructed through the dialogue itself: our particular sense of time and place. In this way, our very understanding of reality becomes a political issue. For language, while representing an insuperable limit in our description of the world simultaneously involves our in-scription. 'Description never reduces the complexity of the world but adds to it.'¹⁵

Such a shift in emphasis from interpretations of a presumably already given reality to one that we come to construct and modify through the languages at our disposal is not reducible to one or other of the two dialogic poles: language or the 'real'. It is only guaranteed by the social and historical horizons that have permitted and continue to permit such a dialogue to take place.

In Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982) there occurs a dialogue of this type set in the near future Los Angeles of 2019. One possible reading of this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The 'double solution'
• 2 An island life
• 3 Some metropolitan tales
• 4 A handful of sand
• 5 Voices, traces, horizons
• Notes
• Index