So Much For Memory...

[Warning: This is bound to bore the kids.]

Even though thinking about books you haven't read often produces displays of rank stupidity, I've been thinking about Edward R. Jones' The Known World this afternoon and I've reached some damn damning conclusions about the conclusions Sean McCann draws from it over yonder.  Not really.  I'm loath to think too long about what I haven't read, so what I'm really talking about here is McCann's suggestion that The Known World chooses "history over memory" because

emphasizing history will mean assuming that no one living in the present has a privileged, supra-empirical knowledge of the past. It’s true, of course, that you don’t have to assume a racial soul to believe that you’ve been affected by history.  (In that sense, everyone’s affected by history, which is I think part of the reason for Jones’s wide social canvas. He’s less interested in special individuals than a whole society.) But you may need something like a racial soul to believe that you possess a history that is a special inheritance.

That's a damn fine point, and I think he's right.  He's building off what Walter Benn Michaels argued in the penultimate chapter of The Shape of the Signifier.  In it, Michaels argues that ideas of "special inheritance" and the "materiality of the signifier" inevitably slide into identity politics.  I'll tackle the more complicated, less convincing case first.  What Michaels means by "the materiality of the signifier" is a De Manian commitment to the "material vision" of a text.  The text becomes a thing, a series of physical marks readers don't interpret but experience.  This focus on the experience of the readers leads, inevitably, to identity politics.  Building on "Against Theory," Michaels wants to prove that

if you think the intention of the author is what counts, then you don't think the subject position of the reader matters, but if you don't think the intentions of the author is what counts, then the subject position of the reader is the only thing that matters. (11)

That's the Short Version.*  This argument hinges on the materiality of the text because, in the first case, you believe that the author of the intention is inscribed in every single copy of the text for anyone to interpret, but in the second, you value your experience with this particular copy of the text and you're the only one who can experience your experience.  If this sounds like a strange argument to be making, it's because 1) it is and 2) Michaels is arguing against the position that every last dash, stroke, line and doodle in Emily Dickinson's notebooks is a part of her poems (and that if you only reproduce the words and dashes you're not reading the "real" poems).  In other words, he's arguing against the De Manian position that all these marks "count as part of the object...not because they are important to the 'purpose' of the object's maker but because--insofar as they are part of the object's 'sensuous appearance'--they are part of what the reader 'reads' or 'sees' without reference to the maker's purpose" (6).  One that necessarily individual experience is privileged, people can't disagree about what a poems mean; they can only discuss the different things it means to them.  We can't argue about what it means because it doesn't mean anything, it's only experienced differently by people with different perspectives.  And "different perspectives" means "identity politics," because people with different subject positions "can without disagreement give the same mark different meanings" (66). 

All well and good, I suppose, but I find the obverse more interesting: if you base your work on identitarian politics, you're necessarily talking about your experience with the materiality of the text, and must therefore admit that you've never known the world beyond your navel, must less said anything interesting about it.  Which is where this ties in with the original conversation, because those who buy into identity politics are ones who want to privilege a supra-empirical knowledge of the past.  The question stops being "What does this History mean?" and starts being "How does this History make me feel?"  The problem with that, obviously, is that someone not only can decide to feel any way they damn well please about History, they can argue that because of who they are, they should get to be the ones who decide what it means.  It's their special privilege, their culture, their Memory, and if you're not one of them, you can't say anything productive about it because it didn't happen to you.  And by the implied "happened to me" they really mean "happened to my ancestors, my culture, and living in my cultural Memory," you know, like slavery or the Holocaust.  Michaels wants to divorce these claims, divorce History from Memory, because he believes that "what we owe the victims of injustice is justice, not a causal account of how they came to be victimized" (166). 

So he disposes of the idea that we're haunted by the Ghosts of History and replaces it with one that relies not on identity but justice.  I'm on board.  But, but, but...

...I have trouble imagining what this world would be like, and I think that's the crux of the problem I have with Sean's argument.  (Not to mention an excellent excuse to read The Known World.  I still naively believe that literature expands my imaginative horizons.  Reading Jones may help me imagine Michaels' vision of A World Without Identity Politics that doesn't involve jump-suits, unitards or uniformly shaved heads.)

*This is the Long One: Michaels wants to determine "what a text is--what is in it and what isn't, what counts as part of it and what doesn't--without the appeal to the author's intention.  And the point is that if you do this, you find yourself committed not only to the materiality of the text but also, by way of that materiality, to the subject position of the reader.  You find yourself committed ot the materiality of the text because, if you don't think it matters whether the author of the text did or didn't intend [for example] eighty-six blank pages to count as part of it, the mere fact that they are there must be dispositive...Once, in other words, the eighty-six pages count not because some author meant them to count but because they are there, in front of you, then everything else that is there must also count--the table the pages are on, the room that the table is in, the way the pages, the table, and the room make you feel.  Why?  Because all these things are part of your experience of the pages, and once we adjure interest in what the author intended (once we no longer care whether or not the author intended us to count the room the work of art is in as part of the work of art), we have no principled reason not to count everything that's part of our experience as part of the work."

Comments

[Sean McCann]

I'm interested to hear more, Aceph. I think I see what you mean. The point I meant to make is that there's a kind of argument that Faulkner and Morrison have won by making an alternative feel shallow and complacent and incapable of great lit. I liked Jones's novel, among other reasons, for the way it reminds that that's not necessariy true.

[A. Cephalous]

More? MORE?

As I walked to class this morning I realized that one aspect of Michaels argument that bothers me is that he attacks materiality-of-the-signifier-ists and identity politicians on their own terms. That'd be akin to me debating creationists on their terms. Sure, my biblical exegesis might be superior to theirs, but I've still defended evolutionary theory on the basis of biblical exegesis. That argumentative mode intends either to 1) convince people of the problems with their own arguments using the only evidence they'll accept or 2) mock the hypocrisy of the people you're debating. Michaels intends both, I'd wager, and he has a sound reason for doing so: the positions of the people he's debating are subtended by contradictory propositions and therefore ought to be discarded in favor of self-consistent ones. As a political position, by which I mean, as a position on a matter of academic politics, I admire what Michaels' accomplishes; but as a position on literary texts and on the interpretation (and, I'm realizing, the production) of literary texts, I'm not sure of its value. (And this isn't because I love Faulkner. Alright, maybe 37% because I love Faulker, 23% because I'm a contrarian, and 40% because I'm balking at the implications of Michaels' argument.)

You're certainly right that Faulkner (and to a far, far lesser extent, Morrison) have won because their traumatic-birth-and-historical-or-cultural-continuity model has generated, well, the works of Faulkner and Morrison. Because I haven't read Jones yet, I can't speak to its accomplishments, but here's a shot at what I think is behind my concerns: what's at issue in debates of History vs. Memory is really a matter of individual responsibility vs. collective trauma/guilt. Individual responsibility can be historically compartmentalized, whereas collective trauma/guilt necessarily extends to all members of the collective, past, present and future. In political terms, collective trauma/guilt subtends claims for slavery reparations; furthermore, it focuses attention on the sins of the past instead of the inequities of the present (and therefore botches the opportunity to hold contemporary individuals responsible for the actions that've created/perpetuated these inequities). I'm with Michaels there. I can see why the representation of this continuity in literature would also--if we grant culture this sort of formative power--have implications for politics at large, i.e. dispense with the idea of collective guilt on television and in books and movies and people might think differently. But even though I grant culture the ability to shape thought thusly, I'm not sure that sense of collective trauma and collective guilt could be eliminated. Logically, and ideally, it should be; but I'm not sure it's possible. Without saying that the capacity for this collectivist sense is hard-wired, I'd say I strongly believe that it's a necessary by-product of how humans have and will continue to interact. I realize I've backed myself into a corner, because I not only can't explain why I strongly believe that, I'm also well aware that I might only believe it because of the limitations imposed on my horizons by the cultural moment in which they've been shaped. And, of course, short of undertaking a Gadamerian intellectual history of the past 3,957 years, I can't responsibly refute that latter claim. In short, I currently think that that is necessarily true, but I can't substantiate that claim. I'm more than willing to be talked out of trying, however...

[Sean McCann]

Maybe collectivism can be explained by evolutionary psychology. (Well, everything can be explained by evolutionary psychology. That's the problem, right?) But before going that route, or only that route, you'd also want to consider other possible factors--social, economic, institutional, and, above all, political contexts. Nine times out of ten, when we're talking about collective responsibility we're talking about state action and state compensation. But to the extent that memory talk is (as it usually is) intensely psycholgistic, it usually doesn't have very useful ways of talking about state action.

What I mean to say is that I'm not at all averse to considering problems of collective responsibility and collective redress for historical injustice or injury. (Trauma is another thing entirely.) I don't think being suspicious of trauma or inflated accounts of memory is necessarily inconsistent with that at all. And, of course, being suspicious of them wouldn't mean you couldn't appreciate great novels, anymore than being suspicious of heroic virtue would mean that you couldn't appreciate, um, Icelandic sagas.