What Lies Between

Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics

Matt Tierney

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783480609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

By what aesthetic practice might post-politics be disrupted? Now is a moment that many believe has become post-racial, post- national, post-queer, and post-feminist. This belief is reaffirmed by recent events in the politics of diminished expectations, especially in the United States. What Lies Between illustrates how today’s discourse repeats the post-politics of an earlier time. In the aftermath of World War II, both Communism and Fascism were no longer considered acceptable, political extremes appeared exhausted, and consensus appeared dominant. Then, unlike today, this consensus met a formal challenge, a disruption in the shape of a generative and negativist aesthetic figure—the void. What Lies Between explores fiction, film, and theory from this period that disrupted consensual and technocratic rhetorics with formal experimentation. It seeks to develop an aesthetic rebellion that is still relevant, and indeed vital, in the positivist present.

Part 1 VOID

Introduction

IS THE POST IN “POSTWAR” THE POST IN “POST-POLITICS”?

Now is a moment that many believe has, at long last, become postracial, postfeminist, postqueer, nearly postgender, and absolutely post-political. This view is reaffirmed by recent events in the politics of diminished expectations that, during the first years of the twenty-first century, have guided the whole spectrum of life in the United States. Indeed, this view seems to gain ground precisely because it relies on such diverse phenomena for its evidence, ranging from the right-wing defeat of key tenets in the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to the centrist defeat of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). However, as this book explores, the post-political phenomenon is not new, and neither is the idea that art, film, and literature might yet enable some ways of overcoming those diminished expectations.

It may seem strange to begin this book by putting two of its title terms—postwar and post-politics—under erasure. However, if territorialism and brinksmanship have guided every international policy or action since the Spanish- and Philippine-American Wars, and if policing and surveillance have guided domestic rule, then it cannot really even be said that there was ever such a thing as a “postwar” America, at least not since the turn of the twentieth century. But what about “post-politics”? Is that a real thing? As the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset put it in 1959, “the characteristic pattern of the stable Western democracies in the mid-twentieth century is that of a ‘post-politics’ phase—there is relatively little difference between the democratic left and right, the socialists are moderates, and the conservatives accept the welfare state” (1959, 100). For Lipset, a post-political reality set in once it was shown that neither Soviet communism nor central European fascism held any hope for human betterment. Most certainly, what Lipset called post-politics is not the same as what gets called post-politics today. To imagine that socialists and conservatives become indistinct—as Lipset imagined in the middle of the century—is not the same as asserting the deaths of racism, sexism, and homophobia, as many do now. However, in our own moment as in the moment that followed World War II, “post-politics” would name a new historical phase: a time without partisanship, when human life might move forward in the frame of a unified society, and where dissent can only derail the common project.

Suffice it to say, from the perspective of what follows, the very idea of post-politics is little more than a wobbly strut in the legitimating architecture of the status quo. “Post-politics,” like “postwar,” is a fiction. It is a dense figure, not an actual state of being, and its long lifespan attests to this—for surely some politics must have transpired since Lipset’s declaration over a half-century ago. It is difficult, indeed, to imagine anything but politics in the movements of gay rights and feminism, in the diversity of civil rights movements (from the American Indian Movement to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), in antiwar movements and environmentalism and the advocacy of the homeless and the resistance to nuclear power. In the poetic sense of the word figure, post-politics names a site of strangeness within the cultural text. It is the nonsensical idea that a time marked by contestation is not actually so marked at all. Even as it declares a state of rest, it is a site of restlessness, ambiguity, ambivalence, and excess within political speech. Rather than the common name of any lack of conflict in contemporary life, post-politics is a place where conflict happens all the time, transforming normative language and conventional historical wisdom until they cease to make sense. Put differently, the figure of post-politics is the crack in the mirror of culture, the blindness or point of resistance of the political problematic to itself. As a descriptor that is by turns ontological and historical, it impedes in advance the terms of any possible intervention. It enacts, and does not merely describe or disavow, a political way of being. Post-politics shines its optimistic light on the moment, sweeping away the shadows of putatively dead politics: administrative politics, bureaucratic politics, racist politics, and police politics. When it has done so, nothing can block its rays. Not politics, certainly—it is already too late for politics. Politics is ostensibly gone and dead, already “post.”

Rebellion and dissent can thus take shape only as anachronistic intrusions on the common sense of a triumphant present, and analysis and action are forestalled before either one can get much of a start. But just because the proponents of post-politics are making an ontological and historical claim does not mean that post-politics actually has any purchase on being or the past. Simply, post-politics is the opposite of what it says it is. It may not be good politics, but as a reformulation of the possibility of collective organization and action, it is most certainly politics. In figurative terms, post-politics thus issues a pure contradiction: it names exactly the thing that it is not. However, as a poetic problem rather than a name for a state of being—as a figure, a kind of writing—post-politics opens itself up to being rewritten.

This book is concerned with just such rewritings in an earlier moment, in the undetermined contortions of form that mark certain works of mid-twentieth-century literature, film, and criticism in the United States. A post-political moment, if such a thing can even be posed, resists analysis partly because it is so pleasing to think about. In the receding youth of the twenty-first century, who wouldn’t prefer to believe that we live in a time when bigotry and uneven wealth have faded into the past? In the shallow center of the twentieth century, who wouldn’t have preferred to believe that social reshaping and reorganization no longer needed to rely on a terrifying assertion of sovereignty? In either moment, who wouldn’t prefer to ignore antagonistic calls to attention if common sense says that we have already achieved a workable peace? This book explores a prior post-political impasse so as to understand the present, as a repetition or echo of the post-politics of that postwar moment when communism and fascism no longer appeared acceptable as avenues for institutional politics and when all political and social extremes appeared exhausted. Returning to the postwar period makes sense because that earlier moment offered a greater degree of critical response to the supposed onset of post-politics, in a diffuse tradition of thinkers and makers who discarded middlebrow platitudes in favor of intellectual ideals and secular tastes and who contested the very form of an apparent consensus.

These so-called cultural radicals contributed to what I call a void aesthetics in order to undercut the stubborn discursive formations that promoted moderate social behavior and modified goals for national and subnational groups. Their work in literature and film, and in criticism and theory, opened a gap in that myth and exposed the medium on which it was written. They provided tools that, I propose, are useful in our present conjuncture. I turn to works of postwar literature and film that deployed a generative and negativist aesthetic figure—the void—in order to help counteract today’s consensus myths. In these dissenting works, collective action and national identity, while incommensurable, might nonetheless be induced to conflict through an experimental style and form. Void aesthetics was not a movement, properly speaking, because so few of its participants ever coordinated, or even conversed, with one another. It was far too restless and discontented to be thought incrementalist or reformist, although certainly many of its practitioners were indeed reformists. Yet it was not revolutionary either, unless a revolution can be conceived without posing a concrete and alternative social vision.

I am guided in my investigation of mid-twentieth-century print and film culture by Alexis de Tocqueville’s discontented claim that there are only two kinds of American writer—the writer who executes precise but local analysis and the writer who makes broad but imprecise claims, so that “his ideas are all either extremely minute and clear or extremely general and vague: what lies between is a void” (2003, 480). In mid-century works of fiction (by Paul Goodman, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison), film (by Orson Welles, Jonas Mekas, Douglas Sirk, Wright again), and theory (by the “Melville revival” critics), I find thinkers and makers who were invigorated by such a void between extremes, committed to exploiting it as an element of both form and theme, and inventive of the national, transnational, and nonnational communities that can form wherever populist and institutional impulses clash and coexist. Because these thinkers and makers saw post-political consensus as an effect of a mass-media technocracy, then rapidly on the rise, they also redefined the very concept of medium so it could refer to the fragile social body itself—as what Walter Benjamin regarded as the “pure means” of political change, and as the communal problem of what lies between (1996, 290).

Void aesthetics gave shape not to an acceptance or denial of consensus but rather to a critique of its fundamental terms and of its broken, gap-ridden rhetoric of self-legitimation. To the writers and filmmakers of the void, although they never came together as a movement or even as a community or adopted a common perspective, the whole spatial imaginary of American politics was flawed. A different way of thinking was required, one that would be other than left or right or center, if there were to be an escape from the suffocating impasse of “post-politics.” Void aesthetics was not a new point on the available political spectrum. Instead, it made a disturbance in political space itself from the standpoints of culture and art, as an open-ended reimagination of potential forms of community. Because the idea of post-political consensus relied partly on a discourse of telecommunications and technology—of a “mass media” capable of making it possible to imagine that all viewers or listeners occupied a short political spectrum—void aesthetics also involved a reconsideration of the very notion of medium. Where consensus built on the media of what Jodi Dean (2009) has called communicative capitalism, void aesthetics capitalized on a different definition of medium when it mobilized art’s world-making energy—against technocracy and consensus and on behalf of collective life.

This fact is vital, as the potential for aesthetic thinking again is again in demand, and consensus again seems to be the horizon of democratic art and action. On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down key provisions in the Voting Rights Act. In 1965, the original legislation had acknowledged that some states were historically more likely than others to manipulate poll access and the boundaries of voting districts in order to reduce the impact of nonwhite voters on elections. In short, not only did the VRA name certain long-standing tactics as racist and therefore worth prohibiting (such as poll closure and the electoral redistricting known as gerrymandering), it also drew a map of shame, highlighting the jurisdictions most resistant to antiracist thought and action, especially in the Deep South. With the 2013 decision, however, neither the jurisdictions nor the particular electoral activities would any longer be regarded as racist before the law. This was, said the court, because the civil rights movement had achieved what it had set out to achieve. Writing on behalf of the majority of the court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “In 1965, the States could be divided into those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics. Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were” (Shelby County v. Holder 2013, 18).

Racism is finished, goes the line, so antiracism is superfluous. Naturally, since the decision was handed down, acts of voter suppression have become rampant and far more difficult to prosecute or prevent—a fact that was perfectly predictable, given the Roberts decision’s presentist logic. Disposing of antiracist provisions because of their perceived success, argued Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her dissent from the majority, is like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet” (Shelby County v. Holder 2013, 33).

One day later, the court rendered another decision that appears to emanate from the opposite end of the linear political spectrum that the court supposedly embodies (from Justices Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor on the ostensible far left to Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia on the far right). On that day, June 26, 2013, the Defense of Marriage Act was finally disabled, in the most significant advancement of the struggle for so-called “marriage equality.” Signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, DOMA had allowed state governments to ignore the legal status of same-sex couples married in other states and allowed the federal government to refuse same-sex couples any access to the benefits generally granted to married couples. DOMA had been a victory for American homophobes and for the conservative movements with which they affiliated. Now that it was undone, state and federal benefits—to say nothing of cultural benefits—would be far more accessible to women who had married women and to men who had married men. In its effects, according to the majority opinion of Justice Anthony Kennedy, “DOMA undermines both the public and private significance of state-sanctioned same-sex marriages; for it tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition . . . [and] humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples” (United States v. Windsor 2013, 22–23).

By righting this wrong, the DOMA decision would seem to stand very much opposed to that of the previous day. Whereas the VRA decision was a stand against antiracist legal action, the DOMA decision showed a willingness to take transformative action against juridical and governmental homophobia. What was on one day a historical illogic became on the next day the premise of a victory for social justice.

But at the same time, both judicial decisions illustrate just how hard it is to maneuver within the stuckness of American public life at present. Each offers the illusion that there was something blockading common culture or common deliberative activities but that this blockade was no longer in force, or enforceable, and the law must adjust. Real racism had inspired the Voting Rights Act, but the Voting Rights Act had done its job by ending racism; as a result, its continued implementation was said to propagate a new racism, albeit one directed by the liberal majority against a conservative white Southern minority. State-sanctioned heteronormativity licensed the signing of a Defense of Marriage Act, but the Defense of Marriage Act could no longer survive after the loss of this sanction; to hold DOMA in place would be to keep homophobia alive, so a dismantling of DOMA must mark that homophobia’s public condemnation.

The historical illogic is the same in both cases: a hate-bound politics of identity lies in our past, but a postidentity post-politics is now possible and must be legally accommodated. As much as “postwar,” then, “post-politics” is a void. Carried across a global blogosphere, it is nonetheless not anything. It is empty. What travels through fiber-optic cables and satellite relays, this void, is the contradictory figure for a comforting present that arrives as the result of a misunderstood past. In my conclusion, I explore contemporary aesthetic experiments in holding this void open while re-thinking the medium of its conveyance.

AFFIRMING THE VOID

This book charts the twisted course of both of these terms—void and medium—through an earlier moment when post-political stuckness was already evident, in the postwar years, when modernist and romantic aesthetics were often, but not always, either ignored or depoliticized. There are three parts: on void; on medium; and on blankness, a political figure for the mediation of void and the foundational reconsideration of medium. The postwar period itself is often considered as the sum of attributes that are fully and positively expressed, even when such attributes are also difficult and dynamic: anxiety about sexuality and gender roles; conflicts among racialized groups; tension between conservatives and liberals, as between liberals and radicals; strain between federal and state governments, as between US and Soviet governments; unease about both the communicative and the destructive potential of emergent technologies. These phenomena are present to critical consciousness because of their cultural pervasion. Unsubmerged and largely visible across representational modes, they are the fraught but positively expressed aspects of American life. Moreover, in general, these phenomena also contribute to shifts toward the rhetoric of cultural consensus and the containment of communism in the United States during those years. What licenses post-political consensus is thus its capacity to produce and accommodate even what would seem to exceed it. So it is that the social phenomena—anxiety, protest, tension, strain, unease—should exert themselves in the dissensual terms of contestation, disidentification, and break, rather than in contained or consensual terms, and yet still be reducible to consensus post-politics by commentators then and since. In an ever-narrowing field, belief in consensus (by critics either now or after the war) converts the languages of negation and conflict into a language of placid, positive, acceptable stance-taking. Objections thus get incorporated into the frame of consensus—they are part of how it works—while real opposition becomes just another position and the constitutive fact of exclusion is itself excluded.¹ The void in this context is not a kind of dissent but rather a point within the consensual field where consensus begins to appear incomplete, faulty, nontotalizing. It is where consensus becomes apparent, not as already accomplished but as always in the process of being made.

A model for using the void to think about postwar post-politics (a pair of words that I insist on using even under erasure, in spite of their semantic poverty, simply because they are the words that circulate) might be seen in one of the first book-length studies of the period’s literature, Tony Tanner’s 1971 book City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970. For Tanner, postwar culture was characterized by a struggle between formal rigidity and formal looseness and by a tension between closed and open forms of language and national identity. He cites images of fluidity and disaggregation in fiction of the period and offers them in contradistinction to images of constraint and convention and so restates the bind: “Clay, jelly, jellyfish—what this image cluster suggests [in its guidance of postwar fiction] is the dread of utter formlessness, of being a soft vulnerable, endlessly manipulable blob, of not being a distinct self. The nightmare of nonidentity, of no-form, is a recurrent one. On the other hand, any one adopted armature which will contain and give shape and definition to the jelly or clay is at the same time felt to be an imprisoning deathly constriction” (18). To Tanner, postwar literature is flanked on one side by dissolution and flux and on the other side by rigid institutional and discursive stricture—it belongs, he says, citing the novelist James Purdy, to “a nation of frozen jelly-fish.”

But might the period’s culture and aesthetics also open up a space where action can be taken within and against the normative armature, within and against consensus? Might there be a strategic management of the oppositions of identity and nonidentity?² Of form and no-form? Tanner asks the question in just these terms: “Can the binary opposition of fixity/fluidity be mediated by some third state or term?” (1971, 19). And then he answers that, yes, indeed, “there is a third or mediating area in which the writer searches for his freedom and his form—and that of course is verbal space” (19, my emphasis). That third space, I propose, is the void with which this book is mainly concerned—insofar as the void is a spatial figure and a medium (a “mediating area”) for formal, symbolic manipulations of identity and language (a “verbal space”). The void is a host to both form and movement, where these may exert themselves against the uselessness of total structure as well as against the senselessness of total fluidity. Within this “mediating area” of certain cultural texts, the nation makes itself apparent not as Purdy’s frozen jellyfish bu...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Void
• Part 2: Medium
• Part 3: Void as Medium
• Conclusion
• References