Rabkin, The Fantastic, Chapters 4-6

Rabkin's definition of Sci fi: "One definition that seems to encompass the diverse works we havem entioned is this: a work belongs in the genre of science fiction if its narrative world is at least somewhat different fromo ur own, and if that difference is apparent against the background of an organized body of knowledge" (119). This definition includes dystopian fiction of all types, then, not just technologic ones--"body of knowledge" here might include social knowledge, religious knowledge, or ecological knowledge (although that, too, borders on the scientific). Rabkin further notes that this definition is dependent upon a sense of "difference" and the audience's perspective. Rabkin even goes so far as to posit a prescription: "A good work of science fiction makes one and only one assumption about its narrative world that violates our knowledge about our own world and then extrapolates the whole narrative world from that difference" (121). For me, the key word here is "extrapolates"--this is what good dystopian fiction does: it extrapolates one element, and leaves the rest untouched, so as to allow for reader identification and recognition.

I have some trouble with Rabkin's "reversal"; at times there is a complete reversal, but many works that are fantastic (i.e. Doctor Who) are serial in nature, and it is hard to imagine continual reversals--after all, once we accept that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, it becomes a normal part of the narrative, a joke that the reader is "in on" and can appreciate the non-shock value when new characters seem surprised. This is not fantastic for anyone but the confused human who keeps running around the edges of the blue box; nor is there anything fantastic about the Stargate, after the first movie. What is reversed in Stargate the series? What is reversed in ;the 200+ episodes of Doctor Who? If I answer nothing, then I'd be saying they aren't fantastic. Unless...this is why there always must be a moment of exposition to new or minor characters, so that we can once more bereminded that htis is a reversal. Where, then, does the identification lie?

Rabkin later (144) distinguishes Utopias (or, "approval") and Dystopias ("disapproval") and divides each into subgenres based on their reliance on either "contemporary perspectives" or "Organized body of knowledge" (one leading, of course, to "fantasy" and one leading to "science fiction"). He further divides each of these into either "extrapolation" or "reversal"--and then gives examples of each. I heartily disagree with his placement of "We" under the "reversal-knowledge" box of dystopian fiction, for I feel there is far more extrapolation at work than reversal, and that that extrapolation is a critique of "contemporary perspectives." It is not so much that OneState is a world where imagination is bad (a reversal) than this ban on imagination is an extrapolation of Stalinist Russia (which is when/where this book was written). If Bellamy's Looking Backward is an extrapolation of Victorian social policies into an ambiguous (at best) utopia where the sick are criminals and criminals are sick, how is We's "illness of imagination" any different?

Rabkin's further chart of circles(147) upon overlapping circles (which place dystopias INSIDE utopias....which i heartily disagree with) only serves to point out that classifying genres by category is a difficult and, in the end, not very helpful cause. Of course, his chart helps me to see why I call some things "true" dystopias--and while there isn't a space for post-apocalyptic fiction, I can imagine another circle for that. It also helps to show the releationship between Sartreian (word?) satire and dystopian fiction--both are "disapprovals" (I'm digging this word)--or in Burke, "stylized, strategic responses"--but are different narratively and aesthetically. More importantly, they are different rhetorically, featuring a different audience, a different purpose (exigence), and very different constraints (publishing-wise).

"In addition to showing new relatinships among works that use the fantastic to similar degrees, inspection of each display alone may well be profitable. For example, works in areas 4 and 7 seem to assume that man will change under the operation of science, while works in areas 6 and 9 seem to assume that society will change under the operation of man. This contrast suggests two hypotheses: 1) science fiction writers feel man is ultimately subject to powers beyond his control, while 2) satirists feelt hat men are always responsible for their actions." (149). Hence the inherent struggle in dystopian fiction for agency over structural determinism. Of course, this is always a question when we begin to speak of change, as Burke notes in P&C. Is it the Scene that makes the Agent, or the Agent who makes the Scene? Dystopian writers tend to feel that man has a choice up to a point--and that point was passed long before the start of their stories.
Of course, Rabkin is the one who set up this chart, and so it is not a "natural" chart like the table of the elements--it shows us Rabkin's assumptions instead of some natural property of the genre. And he begins with the assumption that these three genres (science fiction, utopian fiction, and satire) *are* three seperate genres, and he separates them according to his own understanding of the fantastic. He is asking the "essence" question--is text A essentially science fiction? And if so, what is the essence of scifi? Instead, we should take a more rhetorical approach: in what cases under what conditions does text A count as a member of genre X?

Satire, it seems to me, is a rhetorical mode, not a genre--a way of stylizing an argument, a way of arguing, like "deliberative" or "forensic" and carries with it certain topoi (just as "deliberative" always--according to Aristotle--has some discussion of "the good", satire always carries with it some discussion of benefits and the good of society, but reverses the logical means of arguing.)
After reminding us that the Victorian attitude toward technology informs most texts, and all scifi texts, Rabkin fastforwards to the 20th Century's complex attitude toward science in general, and technology specificially. "In the twentieth century all utopian schemes have included technology, and it is only sicne the emergence of the psychic monolith of The Bomb taht utopias are required to include, as wells did wtih this ruleing elite of humanists, a safeguard against technology gone astray" (155). I'm not sure we can locate The Bomb as the shift from a utopian-in-general attitude to the "dystopian impulse" Booker finds, but it is a good marker, and we can say that by the time of The Bomb, the shift had definitely happened.

"If the fantastic is indeed a basic mode of human knowing, then we should be able to see related and parallel developments in non-narrative materials (190). A way of knowing that is non-scientific draws us into Lyotard's questions of post-modern epistemology. And I must again ask: What do we do with post modern dystopias like "The Dispossessed", which does not clearly reverse anything, but reverses reversals and leaves us disorented. And what to do with the non-programatic medium of American film? What do we do about The Matrix (the place)? The film does not give us an answer but to Wait for The One. Agency is deprived, and we become voyeurs into a horrific landscape, but nothing more. The reversals in The Matrix displace us without allowing us to emerge from the theatre and re-orient. It reverses not the narrative of the film, but the grounds of our own reality, and lets us flounder around this construct as the minor characters we are--but now we are horrifically aware of our own status. This is in opposition to the satirical mode of arguing, to the traditional utopian mode of argument, in that it not only assumes that the Scene determines the act, but that the Scene has been determined by some outside force far greater than ourselves. There *is* no argument beyond a simple revelation (Welcome to the desert of the Real), no equipment for living. It's Stylized, but not strategic.

Rabkin, The fantastic in literature

Rabkin, Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976
Chapter 1
"Talking plants--and (Komodo) dragons for that matter-- are not inherently fantastic; they become so when seen from a certain perspective. The fantastic does more than extend experience; the fantastic contradicts perspectives" (4)

Star Trek time travel episodes to the 20th C does the opposite--the fantasy there is that we ever thought in such primitive ways as we now do. For a member of the Enterprise to enjoy 20th C scifi, then, they must "suspend their disbelief" in order to "be rewarded by a delightful fantasy. Those who aren't willing to follow the signs in the text will throw down the book in distaste. Unless one participates sympathetically in the ground rules of the narrative world, no occurrence in that world can make sense--or even non-sense." (4)

Rabkin distinguishes three non-normal occurrences in literature: The Un-expected, the dis-expected and the anti-expected. (8-10). The Unexpected is literally not expected, but is not in breaking with the rules of the novel or the reader's own world. The dis-expected are "those elements which the text had diverted one from thinking about but which, it later turns out, are in perfect keeping with the ground rules of the narrative. Jokes depend on the dis-expected" (9). And the anti-expected is most closely aligned with fantasy, and are the 180 degree reversal of the ground rules (i.e. in Gulliver's Travels, we are given a scientific, adventurer's opening monologue--enmeshing us in the Enlightenment world view--but then there are tiny little people!) But "because so many of our perspectives enter a narrative with us...fiction often conflates the anti-expected and the dis-expected" (12).

"We have then three classes of signal for the fantastic: signals of the characters....signals of the narrator...and signals of the implied author (such as the narrative structures of Borges and Moorcock" (24).

For Rabkin, Fantasy is a genre, but "the fantastic" is a literary function of the reversal of the ground rules for a given diegesis. Can I do the same with "Dystopian fiction" and the dystopian impulse Booker describes? If so, what is that function? It's a rhetorical function, not aesthetic or plot-dependent, that's for sure.
z
What is fantastic about dystopian fiction? The fantastic happens when the hero/ine has that moment of recognition, of "enlightenment" (apt word, amylea!), and becomes able to see that his/her own world is *wrong*--and begins to desire to change what seems to be a utopia. Dystopian fiction depends no shifting perspectives, past and future, cause and effect--a recognition of the present as evil, of--to quote myself--the bait *as* bait, and not a yummy and convenient worm.

Chapter 2

The Fantastic and Escape

[Burke speaks of "escapist" literature in P&C--but he wants to note how we label literature, what motives that reveals, what interpretations are embedded in that naming]

Rabkin reminds us that "escapist" literature usually refers to lit that society perceives as having little value, as aiding the reader in a "general evasion of responsibilities" (43). What is interesting about this naming, for me at least, is that it marks genre not as a matter of form, but of effect.

Rabkin, of course, believes this label has two misconceptions: "First, that 'seriousness' is better than 'escape'; second, that escape is an indiscriminate rejection of order" (44). I would add that "order" is necessarily the goal--for many dystopian fictions wish to avoid order at all costs (especially those of the totalitarian persuasion). In that case, escape and the evasion of responsibility (but not response-ability) that goes with it are the intended effect upon the reader--a symbolic act of evading order (by reading to escape) that hopefully bleeds over into similar disruptive acts (what Badiou calls an intervention?) in Real Life.

"Escape in literature is a fantastic reversal, and therefore not a surrender to chaos" (45). The "escape" is an escape from the schemas of our mind, our "ground rules" of the universe. Further, "in the literature of the fantastic, escape is the mans of exploration of an unknown land, a land which is the underside of the mind of man" (45). Therefore, even the worst case scenario can have order--it's simply our world in negatives. More importantly, as Rabkin implies, is that the reader can recognize these aspects, can become educated, can be comforted by knowing that his own world is equally structured (or rather, inversely structured)--a sense of Justice emerges.

Rabkin then traipses off into structuralist land by reviewing Propp's thesis that all fairy tales have the same deep structure--this I do not disagree with, although as a Burkeian I'd point out that they seem to have the same structure because of how we name the similarities, and I'm more interested in why we wish to be able to name these disparate examples as "the same." And why "the same" is a good thing, a comfort. Still, I can't help but see a similar structure in both "fairy tales" and "dystopian fiction" (both of which Rabkin would categorize under "the fantastic in literature"); in both, there is a moment of recognition that leads the hero to a journey, traveling across an unfamiliar landscape where some all knowing villain is waiting and watching. But unlike in fairy tales, the dystopian protagonist is not rescued, does not learn his/her lesson. It is as though Hansel and Gretel get eaten after all, as though no prince awakens Sleeping Beauty and she is suspended in the void of sleep forever.

Fairy tales represent "a controlled world" (56), and this world is "an escape from our own, but, as with Poe, an escape through a diametric, fantastic reversal, so that the narrative world actually explores the underside of our conscious world. This world of escape is a controlled world, controlled not by the archfiend within us, but by the conventions of the fantastic genre itself" (57). Here I'd pull out the Lex Rhet from Burke--the form itself is a fulfillment of desire, the form itself acts as a response to the chaos represented within that form. As such, the genre works best when we are familiar with it, when we know what to expect, what to desire, how to respond fittingly.

The rigid form of fairy tales works not because of some cosmic alignment (the golden ratio) but because it is easily recognizable. It's very existence is proof of order, and thus a comfort. As Rabkin writes, "By making a fantastic reversal of the rules of our world and offering an ordered world, fears of maturation can be met and symbolically tamed" (59). Likewise, by making a fantastic reversal of social order, ecologic order, technologic order, we should expect a symbolic taming of fears of The End. This, indeed is what Utopian fiction does. But dystopian fiction does not tame the fears, does not symbolically temper the chaos, but encourages it.

Dystopian fiction does not end happily ever after because a return to the present order is not the goal. Escape is not the goal, but a heightened presence, an awareness of the here and now and of responsibility. The moral of the story is not borne of the mores of a community (as with fairytales) but emerges from fears of those very hierarchies and assumptions. Dystopian fiction doesn't reverse the ground rules, it amplifies them so that we can see them more clearly. It make the fish aware of water, it makes the trout differentiate bait from food.

"In some fashion, escape literature always presents the reader with a world secretly yearned for. If that world is merely the too-good-to-be-hoped-for accumulation of the dis-expected, as in pornography, it may reveal much about the writer and/or reader, but will not serve to give either a new perspective on the mental constraints from which they seek escape. However, if the escape world is based on a fantastic reversal, then, as with the fairy tale, that escape need not be a descent into triviality but a message of psychological consolation" (73).

But I'm not sure triviality is the correct word here. For much "work" is accomplished in slash and fanfic in general, which one can read as "too good to be hoped for accumulation of the dis-expected" (in that the scenarios of fic are within the realm of reality, but highly unlikely and sometimes against the ground rules set up--"canon")--work for both the author and the reader. But perhaps Rabkin is correct that this work is not quite enough--could that be the driving desire behind fandom? That no amount of writing, reading, picture rendering, discussing, role playing, can ease the desire to make the dis-expected the norm? That we cannot overthrow the ground rules of our society by simply playing with a text, now matter how many pages or hours we spend? Rabkin wants fantasy texts to be "psychologically useful" (73)--but useful for what? In what context? For whom? What "order" must this reinforce? Slash is the reversal, the "queering" of order anyway--so I doubt it'd be psychologically useful in the way Rabkin imagines.

Toward Helhaven: Burke's Dystopian Imagination

AmyLea Clemons. "Toward Helhaven: Burke's Dystopian Imagination." Presented at the Seventh Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society. Villanova University, Radnor, PA. June 29-July 2, 2008.

"On the other hand, though I have, for several months, been compulsively clipping news stories about pollution, in the long run any kind of complaining becomes a damned bore" (Burke, Hellhaven 56).

"Toward Helhaven (misspelled in your program--but that's my fault): Three Stages of a Vision" appeared in the early 1970s, declaring that "Some give a decent life on Earth ten years, some thirty, some at most a hundred" (62). Here we are in 2008, though--and while watching CNN might convince us that we are now living in Burke's technological and ecological wasteland, we have not yet had to leave the planet. Dystopian or anti-utopian fictions such as Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and Atwood's Oryx and Crake begin with a satirical critique of the author's current conditions and extrapolate the situation into the future, weaving together narrative, satire, and argument to create powerful texts that, in the end, are not about some future hero or heroine, but about the reader in his or her present. In the 1930s and 40s the genre emerged and flourished; Hitler's march across Europe, the US's flailing then recovering economy, new forays into technology, and the horrors of the eventual world wide war led many writers to put pen to paper and imagine the worst case scenario. But Burke's comment that I began this presentation with holds true: in the long run, these warnings fall flat, they become too generic, predictable, and no longer rhetorically effective. A damned bore, which brings us no closer to preventing apocalypse than before.

In the same essay that Burke declares these complaints "boring," he offers his own dystopian vision of ecological collapse, overwhelming technology, and constant surveillance. This hellhaven satire, however, could be seen as yet another complaint--ineffectual, unenlightening, and even trite--if we do not consider Burke's understanding of rhetoric and social change. The rest of this presentation will highlight Burke's dystopian imaginings as they are threaded through CounterStatement and Permanence and Change, and point to how these works emphasize Burke's inherent hope in human Acts and Agency.

First, let me outline some of my assumptions about dystopian fiction. Dystopian fiction is persuasive in a very particular way: It attempts to move the reader to action by presenting an extrapolation of the current situation (Eric Rabkin Nowhere Else). Dystopian fiction--particularly that of the 1930s to 1950s--has a regular form and plot structure; while the particularities of these structures are up for debate, few deny that dystopian fictions are highly "generic" and easy to recognize for their formal elements, tropes, and appeals (Darko Suvin and Gary Wolfe have both posited logical structures for the genre). More particularly, I argue, dystopian fiction's structure has an awareness of its readers and the tendencies of reading humans to identify with, engage with, and emotionally invest in certain plot structures and hero archetypes. As such, dystopian fictions (both in literature and film) feature heavily on space and context (for readers to recognize similarities) and attempt to provide a hero that all can identify with. What is important for me is that even as I describe here these structures and assumptions, I find myself struggling to avoid Burkeian terminology because there are few who are able to describe the workings of dystopian fiction as Burke does. It is not just that Burke provides us with terms for analysis, however; but that the connection between Burke and dystopianist thought goes both ways: That is, I do not want to "use" Burke to analyze dystopian fiction, but to show how what M. Keith Booker calls a "dystopian impulse"--the impulse to warn and to extrapolate to a worse case scenario is already a part of Burke's system.

As early as CounterStatement, Burke shows a particular attention to what Wayne Booth calls "didactic" fiction--his opening statements on "pamphleteering" and its relationship to "pure" art and "proletariat" literature can easily be applied to utopian and the emerging genre of dystopian fiction. In discussing censorship (always a "dystopian" issue), Burke compares Plato's Republic to Aristotle's Poetics, declaring that the censorship in The Republic requires a "one-to-one ratio between art and society" (xii)--a direct correlation between what is imagined and what comes to be. Burke, unsurprisingly, links this Platonic fear of mimesis to the totalitarianism of the 20th century. Burke continues down this dystopian path as he describes how "liberal" art, acting as a lightening rod (as Aristotle suggests in the Poetics) can quell the fears of the day, becoming a release valve. The fear he describes is recognizably dystopian: "The sort of fear I had in mind, for example, concerned the attitude toward the ‘promises’ of applied science. More and more people, in recent years, are coming to realize that technology can be as ominous as it is promising. Such fear, if properly rationalized, is but the kind of discretion a society should have with regard to all new powers" (xiii). Burke’s dystopianism appears here, as he first applauds those rational enough to fear, then warns us to pay attention to the fears, all the while assuming reason will prevail against both mass panic and blind scientific pursuit. Once aware of the faults, the logical human will respond rationally and evade danger.

Later, Burke more clearly aligns himself with the arguments of dystopian fiction when he argues through Gide that "society might well be benefited from a disintegrating art, which converts each simplicity into a complexity, which ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication, works corrosively upon those expansionistic certainties preparing the way for our social cataclysms. An art may be of value purely through preventing a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself (105). Many dystopian fictions draw their dystopian "energies" (again, Booker's word) from the extent to which they become too much of something--too capitalist, too egalitarian, too controlled, too masculine, too religious...etc. More importantly, Burke's Lexicon Rhetoricae gives us a hermeneutic for analyzing the rhetoric of literature. Even here, we see Burke's concern for identification and reader participation--both of which are essential to the mechanics of dystopian literature. In describing the Symbol and the emotions or associations it may arouse in a reader, Burke notes that "Often, to 'charge' his work Symbolically, a writer strains to imagine some excessive horror, not because he is especially addicted to such imaginings, but because the prevalence of similar but less extreme symbols has impaired their effectiveness" (164) His following discussion of the proletariat novel utilizes the terms of the Lexicon to show the relationship between "aesthetic" devices and rhetorical ones, connecting again reading, action, and social change.

Permanence and Change

, of course, is concerned with humans as social beings, but what Burke again emphasizes, particularly in Part I, is the relationship between interpretation and action. It is not simply that societies change or, in a more Marxist screen, that conflicting classes eventually lead to a synthesis of two opposing groups. For Burke, there must be a critical moment when the situation is interpreted--when, to continue Burke's opening metaphor, the trout recognizes the bait as bait and swims the other direction. Unlike the simple yet noble trout, however, "We not only interpret the character of events (manifesting in our responses all the gradations of fear, apprehension, misgiving, expectation, assurance for which there are rough behavioristic counterparts in animals)--we may also interpret our interpretations" (6). A dystopian trout would write about the horrors of bait, and other trout would respond in kind--the more horrific that bait-story, the more likely other trout are to avoid shiny lures. Burke continues to expect the (albeit flawed) human mind to first recognize, then interpret, criticize, and finally Act. While there may be some jumping around between the interpretative and critical stages, the form remains basically stable, with "any educated action" being one that has been "abstracted" (pc 105)--that is, put into a schema of interpretation. What is worrisome to Burke is that trained incapacity will prevent us from completing these steps, and, by implication, prevent us from amelioration.

Further in Permanence and Change, Burke refers to the "technological psychosis" which we see echoed in the tradition of technological dystopias such as 1984, Vonnegut's Player Piano, the Terminator series, and Burke's own Helhaven. Like most of the technological dystopias, Burke's fears seem centered on the man/machine divide, and he asserts that "man is essentially human, however earnestly he may attempt to reshape his psychological patterns in obedience to the patterns of his machines" (PC 63). Later he asks "How many people today are rotting in either useless toil or in dismal worklessness because of certain technological successes?" (101).

In general, dystopian arguments may be seen as a particular case of what Burke refers to as a danger-response (150)--an interpretation of a stimulus (in this case, a situation) as dangerous which leads to action. However, unlike the heat of fire or the pain of disease, abstracted stimuli may not lead to an immediate or ameliorative response: "We do not persuade a man to avoid danger. We can only persuade him that a given situation is dangerous and that he is using the wrong means of avoiding it" (150). Dystopian scenarios name that danger, and are, as the chapter titled "permanence and change" suggest, secular prophecies, new orientations toward the present and toward history in toto. Burke further suggests that even new discoveries can quickly become dystopic landscapes: "Such is the case with those elaborate regimens of social diet which we build up by a slowly selective process until certain ills gain prominence and authority enough to grow self sustaining or creative. These ills become powers in themselves, leading us on to still further interests, all farther and farther afield from our original patterns of humane gratification" (182). Even here, Burke's instinct seems to be to warn, to extrapolate, and to predict an unwelcome social condition.

What does it mean that Burke has (apparently) this occupational psychosis? These connections are obvious to me, because I spend most of my time thinking about apocalypse. For some reason, I am preconditioned--and, it seems to me Burke is preconditioned--by the linguistic texture in which I find myself, embedded in a set of terms and relationships that allows me to ascribe meaning (and thus cause and effect) to a given situation, to a given interpretation of a situation. The dystopian motive--that is, that which moves us to prevent dystopic situations--includes assumptions about motive, rhetoric, and human progress in general. While I've only managed to highlight Burke's dystopian imagination in two of his books here, the impulse to analyze and persuade by extrapolating to a worse case scenario remains central in most of Burke's work. In his own words, this appears to be his "attitude towards history"--and it is, despite the warnings of failure and totalitarianism, essentially a comic one, oriented toward hope. I will end with Burke's own satiric prayer: Envoi: Nocturne With Noise:

Spring springs among us, on this sod,

Spring vs. Total Fall

And may there be some kind of God,

that He have mercy on us technologic all.

Works Cited Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. ---. Permanence and Change: AN Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. --- "Toward Helhaven: A Vision in Three Stages." On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows, 1967-1984. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 54-65. Works Referenced Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Rabkin, Eric. "Introduction". The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

Evergreen

if you had run
I would have run
and when you slowed to a walk
I would have cast nets and made camp
right there, wherever was far enough
you were waiting on me to say Yes
and if I had said yes
you would have started running
my silence disappoints you
but it does not mean I wish to stay
only that I've forgotten how to go
how to say Yes against the echo of No
how to jump from the tower and and not die

The End of the World: Prelim studying

The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

Introduction: Rabkin

"The modern popular literature of the end of the world continues humanity's permanent questioning of its place and its permanent quest for a reason to exist. We forever reimagine the pligrimage in and out of history, seeking the well at the world's end, to drink the knowledge the gods withheld from Adam" (vii). Rabkin connects the apocalyptic impulse in art to the existentialist quest--how, though, does the resulting art provide that knowledge, enact that quest, create that history for its readers? What do the books *do*, not what do they explore or explain. How do they work on their readers to either provide an answer or to provide an echoing feeling of nothingness?

"When the world ends, what really ends is not all of creation but--only--the world as we know it" (viii). And the "as we know it" includes, most importantly, all thsoe little acts of human creation--art, literature, the buildings of cities, the social hierarchies of communities. This is what we despair at in dystopian fictio: The loss of the humanities, the death of the liberal arts. For without these, we are absent from the universe; we might as well have not existed, if not for the trace of being left in our creations. Fahrenheit 451 is most explicit about this, in making each person a book and a book each person. And what of the dystopian books themselves? They fortell of their own destruction, they warn of the loss of their warnings. They stand between Us and their own destruction.

Ch 1: Gary K Wolfe. The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End

"As in most post-holocaust fiction, the 'end of the world' means the end of a way of life, a configuration of attitudes, perhaps a system of beliefs--but not the actual destruction of the planet or its population" (1). This, I think, is the difference between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fictions--in dystopian fiction, the world has ended as we know it, but humans flourish (perhaps too much!). In post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the world's population is gone, humanity itself has disappeared not just in the attitudes, values, and beliefs we now hold, but in body as well.

The BSG effect: "Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrtative wtih a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimisitc, such a fantsy is very much in keeping with tradition of millenarian thought" (3). What is missing here is a close reading of a text that can show *how* the texts create desire, how they persuade, create identifications with readers, what they argue, what answers they provide. What is the role of revelation? What is the mechanism of that optimism, that hope? (Note: Optimism--opt= eye, to see. Theory. To envision. To make present symbolically).

What is the pleasure of the text for the READER?

"On the simple level of narrative action, the prospect of a depopulated world in which humanity is reduced to a more elemental struggle with nature provides a convenient arena [TOPOI???] for the sort of heroic action that is constrained in the corporate, technological world that we know" (4). Wolfe goes on to describe other benefits this topoi provides the *writer*, but does not discuss the pleasure(s) for the reader. Yes, we all enjoy a good heroic story with clear cut good and evil, a simple story of pure survival, but I think the dystopian texts are more narratively complex than that, when we examine them through Brooks' idea of the arabesque nature of plots. It's not just the plot that matters, but the story--not the events that occur, but how they're told--that matters. It's the "stylized" part of Burke's "strategic answers, stylized answers" that gives us the equipment for living, that persuades us that this equipment is the right equipment. In other words, the flashback, the revelation, the backstory, is more important than the subsequent events. BSG is interesting not because we want to see them reach earth, but because we are given a future without a past, and a story that slowly reveals that past, piece by piece, episode by episode.

Ch 4 W. Warren Wagar "Round Trips to Doomsday."

"With the exception of a few modern men of science, writes Mircea Eliade, 'humanity has never believed in a difinitive end of the universe'....Ends that lead to fresh beginnings and further ends appear regularly in science fiction, reflecting some of the most characteristic anxieties and ideological paradigms of late industrial culture" (73). Jameson echoes this connection to late capitalism in his Archaeologies of the Future--certainly our socio-economic situation contributes to our attitudes toward history (it's our terministic screen)--but literary texts emerge from more than just an economic position.

This chapter would be helpful to explore BSG: All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

Ch 5 Brian Stableford "Man-made Catastrophes."

This chapter briefly addresses causality and links to Christian eschatology--I need to look at it further.

Ch. 6 W.W. Wagar "The Rebellion of Nature."

For comparing traditional literary natural apocalypses with Doctor Who's "Utopia"--what do both say about the nature of nature? Of history? Of our organizing of time? Of humanity's understanding of the infinite? Of Time?

Yes, that's me. So?

Your Score: The Eccentric

You scored 35Artist, 45 Philosopher, 20 Scientist!

You live in a world of vast abstraction and color. You are hardly interested in the mechanics of real life; you are preoccupied with the substance of existence (the story and narrative, the symbolism), and the form and shape which life itself takes. You mix the mystical with the rational, like St. Thomas Aquinas, you find inroads between the sublime and the tangible ... you might have a propensity to let yourself go, though, in different ways. Everyday chores and responsibilities are not high on your list of passions; neither is any kind of "daily ritual" most likely. Your ideal work involves something that combines a medium for self expression (such as writing), with the inherent rationality and inquisitiveness of your philosophical side. You are very youthful in your demeanor. You are a true representative of modern culture and society; with its shifts toward new systems of spirituality which combine ancient mysticism with classic reason. You are not preoccupied with wealth most likely. Examples of Eccentrics: Timothy Leary, Stanley Kubrick, Socrates. Quotes from "Eccentrics": "I am a little unusual, a little different and very unique."

Link: The Tri-Variable Personality Test (qualified psychologist) ... Test written by divncom on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(divncom)

desire

the stark stillness she has sought refuses to resolve, to become fixed in reality

it has passed over her dreams like some restless spirit, or a thought about leaving the stove on

but no means no in any language, even with that beat she allows to pass before speaking

Prelim notes: Buber I

Buber, Martin. "Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour." On the Bible. Ede. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.

Buber begins with an anecdote-like paragraph about those times we all face wherein we recognize a *moment*--that this moment will change everything, the (as Badiou might say) horizon of an event. At this moment there are two basic impulses: first, to "cherish the until-now-unsuspected certainty of thus being able to particpate on the ground of becoming" (to seize the day and make change); or to "banish all such impulses and resolve... not to let himself be fooled--not by the situation, which is just an embroilment, and not by himself, who is just a man come to grief; for everything is linked invincibly with everything else, and there is nowhere a break where he can take hold" (172). Again, I turn to Badiou--how does something new emerge? How do we break with the state of the situation, with the continual movement of "history" in order to form a future? Is human agency (here, "choice"--173) part of that break, or are humans just incidental? What is history?

"How shall we manage to escape from the dilemma whose discursive expression is the old philosophiucal quarrel between indeterministic and deterministic views of the world?" (173). Indeed, this old quarrel seems to be what dystopian fiction addresses--the genre as a whole seeks to provide a response to that quarrel (to "put in his oar" in Burke's words), and the early pieces, at least, fall on the side of choice, making that implication by their very publication, their readership, their circulation. Later, "postmodern" dystopian fictions are less certain of their own agency, their ability to incite choice by increasing awareness. Buber states this for me: "....philosophy does justice to the life experience in which the moment of benginning the action is illumined by the awareness of freedom, and the moment of having acted is overshadowed by the knowledge of necessity" (173).

Buber next asks several questions "Does a historica; hour ever experience its real limits otherwise than through undertaking to overstep those limits it is familiar with? Does the future establish itself ever anew or is it inescapably destined?" (173)--again, these are the questions that dystopian fiction addresses, and answers with many different answers. Then again, it's "equipment for living", not holy scripture, so that's not surprising. These two options--breaking with history (choice) or following a predetermined progression in faith are visible in the two kinds of apocalyptic writings in the Bible--those of "the prophets in the ages of the kings of Judah and Israel" and those of "the apocalyptic writings of Jewish and Jewish-Christian coinage in the age of late Helenism and its decline" (174). Human understanding of history and our role in it has changed dramatically, giving rise to these two options, this crisis of agency--the divide between the "prophetic" and the "apocalyptic" (174).

Jeremiah is his key OT example--Buber explains that twenty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the exile, God spoke to him to reveal the change that was to come. Jeremiah becomes the prophet, the "announcer" (Nabi/navi)(175). In Jeremiah, God is seen as a potter who "works on the historical shapes and desitines of human nations" (176) but humans still have freedom to either act in accordance with his will or to turn from the plan. Jeremiah, as the announcer, reads the situation before him, and plans his speeches accordingly--sometimes he tells them to turn from evil for they will be saved, at other times he proclaims a coming storm, an inevitable catastrophe (176). In either case, "no end is set to the real working power of the dialogue between divinity and mankind, within whichcomapssion can answer man's turning of his whole being back to God" (176). The time table is open, there is no sense of entellechy. "Dialogue" is key here--the conversation is ongoing, not one prophecy (fiction) mapped out already. Put simply, "The task of the genuine prophet was not to predict but to confront man with the alternatives of decision" (177).

Buber cites one important "mixed form" (hybrid genre) between the prophetic and the apocalyptic--that of the "anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile" who appears in Isaiah. "Among the prophets he was the man who had to announce world history and herald it as divinely predestined. In place of the dialogue between god andf people he brings the comfort of the One preparing redemption to those He wants to redeem; God speaks here not only having foreknown but also having foretold what now takes place in history--the revolutionary changes in the life of hte nations and the liberation fo Israel conummated in it" (178). In this new genre, there is "the unheard-of new character of the historical situation" (179).

We begin with the Fourth Book of Ezra, in which "the speaker pretends to be living as amember of the king's house in exile just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans", yet the book was clearly written in the first century CE: "The actual historical-biographical situation of the speaker is deliberately replaced by an alien scene taken over as analogous to his own" (180). Here we get further contrasts between the fiction-writer (the writer of apocalypses) and the prophet--the prophet "addresses persons who should hear him" while the "apocalyptic writer has no audience turned toward him; he speaks into his notebook. he does not really speak, he only writes; he does not write down the speech, he just writes his thoughts--he writes a book" (180). In the apocalyptic writings, "there exists for him [the writer] no possibility of a change in the direction of historical destiny that could proceed from man, or be effected or coeffected by man. The prophetic principle of the turning is not simply denied in its individual form, but aturning on the part of the communithy is no longer even thought of" (182). Here I should connect communual turning, communal atoning to Girard's sacrificial atonement and the role of tragedy. Somehow.

Connections: "There is, of course, an optimistic modern apocalyptic, the chief example of which is Marx's view of the future. This has erroneously been ascribed a prophetic origin....Here in place of the power superior to the world that effects the transition, an immanent dialectic has appeared" (183). Yes, yes it has.

---

Further contrasts: "Prophecy originates in the hour of the highest strength and fruitfullness of the Eastern spirit, the apocalyptic out of the decadence of its cultures and religions" (183).

Event horizon

WIP--Found poem

Something might have happened in the snow
it might have come unglued, unhinged,
or slowly rusted underneath the snow.

There might have been an opening I missed
a pockmark, a drip mingling with the snow
in the winter sun there's so much to be missed

Somewhere in the settling of the spring
came rushing water, fog and perfect mist
drowning leaves of grass in what had been a spring

Gentle rivers raze the fields unhinged
washing over seeds and rust and a thousand sins of spring
But here we watch the foundations come unhinged
Something must have happened in the snow

The new Prelim List, or, How Amy Dies by Grad School

After going through my notes from my two meetings with Sandy Goodhart, I have successfully composed the following sort-of final prelim outline.

Topic areas, the major things the prelim will cover:

The rhetorical tradition of discourse on social change, including: dystopia as topoi, places from which to speak, a recurring position for a recurring concern. Aristotle's Rhetoric,
Plato's Republic and the tradition of rhetoric and utopia/dystopia. Burke's
dystopian/utopian musings, his assumptions about agency and symoblic action
leading to (or away from?) utopia

The literary tradition of apocalyptic or prophetic fiction: Judeo-Christian apocalyptic fiction and its rhetorical structures. Dystopia as tragedy for the postmodern era (including a critique of humanism and human agency)

Current transformations of that tradition and its relationship to PoMo's critique of causality, order, and master narratives: Dystopian film's adaptations of more the written fictions as problematic, particularly in conjunction with agency (The Matrix,
Blade Runner, Terminator series)


Yeah, no prob. Cough.

Reading List
Aristotle's On Rhetoric
Plato's The Republic
More's Utopia
Bacon's New Atlantis
Derrida's "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy"
Various essays by Eric Rabkin
Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Buber: Paths in Utopia; and Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour
Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism
Lyotard's The PostModern Condition
Jameison's Archaeologies of the Future
Burke: "On HellHaven", Permanence and Change, Phil of Lit Form, the Motives
trilogy
Blanchot's "Literature and the right to death"
Dostoyevski's Notes from Underground
Rousseau's Walden Two
Theatre of the Abusrd: Works from Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus
M Keith Booker's Field Guide to Dystopian Fiction and The Dystopian Impulse in
Modern Literature
The popular dystopias of the 30s and 40s: Brave New World, We, 1984, Fahrenheit
451
The next generation of dystopian fiction (50s-70s): Lord of the Flies,
Clockwork Orange, Player Piano, He,She,It, The Dispossessed
The "postmodern" dystopias: Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep (and many other Dick novels), Gibson's first trilogy
(Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Feed, maybe Discworld
The Films: Filmic versions of the traditional dystopias, Terminator series (and
tv show), Blade Runner, some of the really bad ones like "The Island", Minority
Report, I am Legend, Enemy of the State (oh, let's just list all the Will Smith
films, shall we?)....and any others?


Yep. I'm a dead woman.

C'est fini!

Alors, c'est un fait qu'il faut que, quand je lire Foucault, je faites des faults. J'ai fini les essaies, j'ai pensee trop, j'ai enonce mes penses a la monde. Alors, c'est fini, mais pas fait bien. Ce me laisse froid, le termine, et je ne veux que dormir sans les penses. Mes yeux ferment, et je me fait absente.
La langue, c'est belle.

Course Encyclopaedia--Even MORE

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2007.

• The Multiple


• The One


• Situation


• Count-as-one


• Presentation


• The Void


• The Event

The Multiple

"In sum, the multiple is the regime of presentation; the one, in respect to presentation, is an operational result; being is what presents (itself)" (24). The multiple, as a presented element, is also counted. Thus, a mulitple is what gets counted in the count.

"There is another way of putting this: the multiple is the inertia which can be retroactively discerned starting from teh fact that the operation of the count-as-one must effectively operate in order for there to be Oneness" (25). To me, this makes the most sense mathematically. If we consider set theory as mathematicians do, sets are sets of numbers that are grouped according to a common rule (or two or three). These numbers in the set (what B calls "multiples") must fit into the rule to make the set "true"--to fit the definition. If we say "the set of all odd integers", we are giving not only a structure to the set, but anticipating what will be in the set. If we were mathematicians, we'd say that the set of all odd integers is represented by 2n +1--and the formula given allows for an infinity of multiples, and allows us to anticipate what is to come. The count is an effect of this formula, since the formula itself is what first determines what belongs to the "set of all odd integers". Of course, this formula itself can be counted, and the set of all odd integers has other subsets within it (including the elusive "set of all prime numbers"). In math, structure and the count are both easily represented formulaically, and we can predict easily what belongs once that formula can be found (except for the prime numbers one. Damn). Humans are not so easy to order with shorthand.

The One

"The one is not" (23). In "deciding" upon the problem of Western metaphysics ("what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one"), Badiou declares that the One--that is, the essence of Being, the unpresented Platonic Ideal, is not. Or, in English, that the unpresented Whole, is not available to us without first there being the parts (multiples) which are presented, which present "being" by there mere presence in our field of vision. Or hearing. Or some other method of witnessing.


"The fact that the one is an operation allows us to say that the domain of the operation is not one" (24). The one is a function of the count in that in counting what is present, we are presented with presentation--which is being itself.

Situation

"I term situation any presented multiplicity.....Every situation admits its own particular operator of the count-as-one. This is the mpost general definition of a structure it is what prescribes, for a presented multiple, teh regime of its count-as-one" (24).

"Yet there is no situation without the effect of the count, and therefore it is correct to state that presentation, as such, in regard to number, is multiple" (25).

Count-as-one (compter-pour-l'un)

See Situation, above. The presented multiples must be counted. The count-as-one also forms the structure of the situation, is a definitional operation. It includes or excludes.
Presentation/Unpresentable/Re-presentation

"Structure is what obliges us to consider....that presentation is a multiple...and what authorizes us, via anticipation to compse the terms of the presentation as units of a multiple" (25). The structure, the formula, is what enables us to see that the set of all integers (the One, being) is Not--that there is only the multiples that occur after the count, after the presentation of examples (multiples, elements) that belong to a given set.

"...for presence is the exact contrary of presentation" (27). Presence is the Being that Plato imagines--being qua being. Presentation, however, is one step removed; it's the expression (interesting word, considering B avoids talking about the symbolic) of that ultimate Being. Presence's definition contains within it the idea that it cannot be presented--the English term uses the past participle for a reason, to show some kind of transformation has taken place, some displacement occurs from the original (Present) to the new form (presentED). Further:

"If there connot be a presentation ofbeing because being occurs in every presentation--and this is why it does not present itself--then there is one solution left for us: that the ontological situation be the presentation of presentation" (27). The situation (the count of, the structure of) being must have presentation within it, but what is it presenting, if not being itself (since being can't be presented?) It is presenting the very idea of presentation--which, again, contains within it the idea of some original Presence somewhere. Or when.


The Void
"...every situation implies the nothing of its all. But the nothing is neither a place nor a term of the situation. For if nothing were a term that could only mean one thing; that it had been counted as one" (54). Every situation contains within it this void because "there is a being of nothing, as a form of the unpresentable" (in order to include, there must also be an exclusion. Every presentable, counted element of a situation also has an unpresented, unpresentable part that is the Being, the one, that is the operational result of the count-as-one) (54).

"The 'nothing' is what names the unperceivable gap, cancelled then renewed between presentation as structure and presentation as structured-presentation, between the one as result and the one as operation" (54). See my above comment.

"By itself, the nothing is no more than the name of unpresentation in presentation" (55). As we discussed in class, the void has only one element--it's name, which names all of the unpresentables as unpresentable.

"I term void of a situation this suture to being. Moreover, I state that every structural presentation unpresents 'its' void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive face of the count" (55). The void is a result of a subtraction ( 0 only exists as x - x), the subtraction of the inconsistent multiple from the consistent--or is it the other way around?


"It is essential to remember that no term within a situation designtes the void" (56). It's not surprising, then, that the state is unable to name revolutions as such.

"The void is what bounds the inconceivable, and thereby forecloses itself from any other relation, including its self-identity" (Barker. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2002, P. 5).

Event

And names: "The event has the nameless as its name: it is with regard to everything that happens that one can only say what it is by referring to its unknown Soldier" (205). The event, at the edge of the void, cannot be recognized by the state, for fear of the unpresented mass of the void. The name of the event is important, then, for what it can tell us about the multiples involved.

And the state: "The event occurs for the state as the being of an enigma" (208). The state, again, cannot recognize the event for what it is because the situation does not count the unpresented.


The evental site is "an entirely abnormal multiple, that is, a mulitple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation" (175). None of the elements of the site are presented, are not part of the legitimated count--thus, this is the space of possibility.

Course Encyclopaedia--More!

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1991.

1. Field


2. Captial, types of


3. Habitus


4. Symbolic Power

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Field

Definition "The purpose of Bourdieu's concept of field is to provide the frame for a 'relational analysis,' by which he means an account of the multi-dimensional space of positions and the position taking of agents" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 5).

As structuralist? "Here Bourdieu reveals the structuralist underpinnings of his theory. He posits that the field is not ontologicaly grounded, but rather constituted of ever-changing relations--it is not a static thing, but a dynamic process, in which fluid relationality is the source of structure. He also refers to a universal aspect of all fields, cultural and otherwise: each involves specific forms of capital, which the agents aim to accumulate and increase through their varying 'strategies'" (Hipsky 192).

Field, then, is somewhat similar to the field (champs) that Foucault describes--it is not simply there, but a construct of relationships. For Bourdieu, these relationships are economical (in that they relate to forms of exchange for strategic purposes).


Political fields: These specific fields are "the site in which, through the competition between the agents involved in it, political products, issues, programmes, analyses, commentaries, concepts and events are created--products between which ordinary citizens, reduced to the status of 'consumers', have to choose, thereby running a risk of misunderstanding that is all the greater the further they are from the field of production. (Bourdieu 172)

Bourdieu widens the political field to not only politicians, but discourse about politics (as long as that discourse comes from an authorized subject).

Capital, types of

Definition of: "Bourdieu's notion of capital, which is neither Marxian nor formal economic, entails the capacity to exercise control over one's own future and that of others" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 4).

Capital seems related to agency and power (pouvoir); how it differs from either of these is unclear to me.

Symbolic capital: "...functions to mask the economic domination of the dominant class and socially legitimate hierarchy by essentializing and naturalizing social position" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 5).

Why is symbolic capital special? "Symbolic capital might thus be said to have a dialectical relationship with the other forms of capital; as a concept it underscores the fact that none of the positive properties that circulate on the literary field ever permanently or objectively inhere in any of the individuals, groups, works, or literary forms that are held to partake of those properties" (Hipsky 192).

Symbolic capital is a mystifying (a la Marx) force--it allows us to misrecognize the other forms of capital as natural or necessary.

Habitus


Definition: "Bourdieu characterizes the habitus as a system of general generative schemes that are both durable (inscribed in the social construction of the self) and transposable (from one field to another), function on an unconscious plane, and take place within a structured space of possibilities (defined by the intersection of material conditions and fields of operation (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 4).

What it does: "Between the social structure and agents there is a high degree of correspondence, mediated and generated by the habitus. It is through the dispositions inculcated in the habitus as these unfold in the structural space of possibility that the relationship of individuals to a social structure is objectively coordinated....The possibility of historical change rests in the limited conjucture between a social structure and the actions of agents as mediated by the habitus" (LiPuma 16).

LiPuma posits the possibility of change as a side effect of habitus--habitus mediates between structural determinism and the free will of agents.

Symbolic Power

Symbolic power is created and maintained through structuring structures and structured structures.Symbols are imbued with associations, connotations, and thus power because of the symbolic system they arise from; these powers allow those in dominant positions to hold symbolic capital.

"Structuring Structures": Associated with the "neo-Kantian" tradition: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Durkheim, and in many ways Foucault, as "treats the different symbolic universes...as instruments for knowing and constructing the world of objects" (Bourdieu 164).

i.e. We use these structures to construct the mental and physical objects, to create world views.

"Structured Structures": Associated with the semiotics of Levi-Strauss and traditional structuralism. The always/already present structure is what creates meaning from symbols. (Bourdieu 166). Both Structuring and Structured structures only work by social consensus--insofar as subjects submit themselves to the symbolic power that emerges as a result of the system. Dominant classes use this symbolic power in the creation and maintenance of ideologies (a la Marx).

Course Encyclopaedia, continued

Foucault, Parts 3 and 4 (The Statement and the Archive and Archaeological Description).


Terms for this section

• Statement


• Genre


• Subject


• Author(ity)


• Constraints


• Ruptures and change


• Archaeology
  

---

Statement

In French: l'énoncé, the said. Past participle of enoncer. Other uses: "Wording", "Utterance", "lecture", "declaration", "exposition"


What an énoncé is not: "We have put to one side, not in a definitive way, but for a time and out of methodological rigour, the traditional unities of hte book and the oeuvre; that we have ceased to accept as a principle of unity the laws of constructing discourse...or the situation of the speaking subject...; that we no longer related discourse to the primary ground of experience, nor the a priori authority of knowledge" (79).
And/nor: "I do not think that the necessary and sufficient condition of a statement is the presence of a defined propositional structure, or that one can speak of a statement only when there is a proposition" (80).
And: Statements can sort of be seen as a "sentence" bu "the equivalence is far from being a total one; and it is relatively easy to cite statements that do not correspond to the linguistic structure of sentences" (82).
It is also not "an act of formulation--something like the speech act referred to by the English analysts" (82-83).


Relationship to Burke: "...whether, while analyzing 'objects' or 'concepts,' let alone 'strategies', I was in fact still speaking of statements" (79-80).


An attempt at definition: "Must we admit that any series of signs, figures, marks, or traces--whatever their organization of probablity may be--is enough to constitute a statement .....? In which case, we would have to admit there is a statement whenever a number of signs are juxtaposed--or even, perhaps--when there is a single sign. The threshold of the statement is the threshold of the existence of signs" (84). This is still problematic, because MF is trying to talk about statements without talking about the situation or linguistic system (system of differences) or something external to the enunciative moment--and yet, "signs" are only signs in that they are agreed-upon substitutions for the signified. As he says, "If there were no statements, the language (langue) would not exist" (since language systems are rules based on acceptable statements). So clearly he must try again:


The statement is a unique formation, "neither entirely linguistic, nor exclusively material"; instead, it is "caught up...in a logical, grammatical, locutory nexus. It is not so much one element among others, a division that can be located at a certain level of analysis....it is a function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether or not they 'make sense', according to what rule they foolow one another or are juxtaposed, of what they are the sign, and what sort of act is carried out by their formulation" (86-87).


Relationship to the referent: "A statement is not confronted...by a correlate--or by the absence of a correlate as a proposition has (or has not) a referent....It is linked rather to a 'referential' that is made up not of 'things', 'facts', 'realities', or 'beings', but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it" (91). In this description, there seems to be something logically prior to the statement that allows it to mean--things are named--this implies someone doing the naming in the past, some consensus on what counts or doesn't count as a "thing" that can be discussed, about which something can be said (énoncé).


And, at last, the clearest definition: "We will call statement that modality of existence proper to that group of signs: a modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces, something more than a succession of marks on a substance, something more than a mere object made by a human being; a modality that allows it to be in relation wtih a domain of objects, to prescribe a definite position to any possible subject to be situated among other verbal performances, and to be endowed with a repeatable materiality" (107). My emphasis here--the statement positions us--it Situates us. Hence, "situation", the way things are positioned in relation to one another. These positions are hard to imagine, to theorize (to See) without imagining a corresponding space/time, and it is tempting to map these situations onto a geographical map or a timeline. To Place. But while some situations are dependent on physical space or "real time", some are not. My relationship to my father is a situation, a "placement" of subject positions created by our statements to and about each other, but these cannot be mapped onto a map of Ohio or Indiana. Likewise, statements made online cannot be mapped onto the space of the internet, despite our attempts to call them websites or William Gibson's dream of a navagatable matrix that corresponded exactly to ISP locations of servers. As a non-spatial person, I am most bothered by the attempts to describe all of these philosophical and theoretical concepts in terms of space, or diagrams or flow charts: I'm afraid this adds extra elements or makes relationships far more descrete and finite than they really are.

Enough ranting.

Genre [See also Genre in contemporary rhetorical theory]

MF seems to avoid the subject of "genre" as we think of it, probably because naming and thinking of things in terms of genres is itself a unique aspect of our discursive field. Still, there are times when his discussion of "discursive field" seems to border on what we call "genre"--something that is regular, with rules, but formed from the mass of statements. An appropriate response, if you will.

Use of Genre: When discussing the difference between statements and propositional structures, MF finds that two similar sentences, while propositionally the same, are quite different statements: "If one finds the formulation 'No one heard' in the first line of a novel, we know, until a new order merges, that it is an observation made either by the author, or the character (aloud or in the form of an interior monologue); if one finds the second forumulation, 'It is true that no one heard', one can only be in a group of statements constituting an interior monologue, a silent discussion with oneself, or a fragment of dialogue, a group of questions and answers" (81). Here, the placement of the statement in a novel matters: the statement would belong to quite a different discursive formation if it were found, say, in a newspaper, or between friends. Genres, for MF, seem to be here to help us analysts limit the possibilites when we encounter a new statement. We use the idea of "genre" to limit the possible discursive field the statement could belong to, but this does not mean that genre and discursive field are the same thing, for the discursive field of, say, nursing, has many genres involved. Some discursive fields are named for the genres that seem to dominate them (although, I assume, that any genre can participate in the formation of the discourse surrounding an object, subject, or idea). Genres, for Foucault, seem to be more for the analyst--something after the fact that we construct to help us better talk about the rules of formation with some regularity (instead of spinning off into a million clauses as Foucault finds himself doing). In Burkeian terms, we have the recurring situation of needing to discuss the rules that govern statements belonging to a particular discursive formation, and so we create a proverb, a strategy, a Name that can stand as short hand for all of those rules, contexts, authorities, etc that are part of the statement. Archaeology, then, is undoing this naming process, translating this shorthand back into its original grammar and signs.

A discursive formation is not a genre: A discursive formation does "not form a rhetorical or formal unity", but it is "made up of a limited number of statemetns for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask oneself how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point in time...." (117). Genre study, however, does try to trace the evolution of the genre--which, as Carolyn Miller notes, carries with it the assumption that the genre is now "fixed" ("ideal, timeless form"), that it is a Thing, not a process. Unlike genre, discursive formation does not address a rhetorical or formal unity--while Miller attempts to downplay the requirement of "formal" by moving genre into the realm of social action and speech act theory, there is still a rhetoricality to those things we call genre--a repeatablility, something that can be templated and parodied.

Relationship to Archaeology:

"Archaeology does not describe disciplines. At most, such disciplines may, in their manifest deployment, serve as starting-points for the description of positivities; but they do not fix its limits: they do not impose definitive divisions upon it; at the end of the analysis they do not re-emerge in the same state in which they enteredc it; one cannot establish a bi-univocal relation between established disciplines and discursive formations" (178-9). If by "discipline" he means "statements recognized belonging to the discipline, what I describe above as the dominant forms that help us identify a discourse formation, then clearly he is saying that genre--disciplined texts, texts of a discipline--analysis is different from what he calls archaeology.


Subject [See also Subjectivity from Parts II and III]

Relationship to statement: "A statement also differs from any series of linguistic elements by virtue of the fact that it possesses a particular relation with a subject" (92).

"We must not, in fact, reduce the subject of the statemetn to the first-person grammatical elements that are present within the sentence" (92). And thus, the author dies.

"Is not this subject exterior to the sentence quite simply the individual who spoke or wrote those words? As we know, there can be no signs without someone, or atelast something, to emit them. For a series of signs to exist, there must--in accordance with the system of causality--be an 'author' or a transmitting authority. But this author is not identical with the subject of the statement; and the relation of production that he has with the formulation is not superposable to the relation that unites the enunciateing subject and what he states" (92).

Foucault on Free Indirect Discourse (a literary theory term, style indirect libre): In a novel, we know there is an author whose "name" (George Eliot? Currier Bell?) appears somewhere on the cover. But there are many problems with simply attributing all sentences in the novel to the person who gets paid all the royalties: "(...we are still faced with teh problem of the dialogue, and the sentences purporting to express the thoughts of a character; we are still faced iwth the problem of texts published under a pseudonym: and we know all the difficulties that these duplications raise for practitioners of interperative anlaysis when they wish to relate these formations, en bloc, to the author of the text, what he [sic] wanted to say, to what he[sic] thought, in short, to that great, silent, hidden, uniform discourse on which they build that whole pyramid of different levels); but, even apart from those authorities of formulation that are not identical with the individual/author, the statemetns of the novel do not have the same subject which they provide when they describe things as they would be seen by an anonymous, invisible, neutral individual, who moves magically among the characters of the novel, or when they provide, as if by an immediate, internal decipherment, the verbal version of what is silently experienced by a character" (93). A long quote, yes, but important for those of us concerned with narrative voice in 18th and 19th C novels. The "Free Indirect Discourse" utilized best by Jane Austen is a rhetorical puzzle that many literary scholars try to PoMo their way out of by using the Death of the Author and Foucualt's comments on the author as function. But Foucault here is only pointing out what is bothering the critics in the first place: This other voice that interrupts the normal direct/indirect quote diad is not that of the author, and it is not enough to simply call it part of the author function and throw it away. I want to think through what this not-author, not-narrator voice does to the reader reading. How does it change the truth-value, the "realism" of the novel? How does it try to mold the inner reading voice of the reader to that of this non-author narrator?

The subject, the situation, and the statement: The ennunciative function is not "some additional relation that is superimposed on the others, one cannot say a sentence, one cannot transform it into a statement, unless a collateral space is brought into operation. A statement always has borders peopled by other statements. These borders are not what is usually meant by 'context'--real or verbal--that is, all the situational or linguistic elements taken together that motivate a formulation and determine its meaning" (97). The statement is something other than a sentence said in the right kind of "situation" (as Bitzer imagines there are rhetorical and non-rhetorical ones). What sets a statement apart is that it is unique, although connected to other statements--but these situations are not what "motivates" (as in exigency) a statement to arise. Nor is there any speaking subject bringing it into being, declaring it a statement and thus making it so--"it is not simply the manipulation by a speaking subject of a number of elements and linguistic rules" (99). Nope. Not Bitzer at all.

When analyzing statements we must "operate thereofre with out reference to a cogito." This analysis "does not pose the question of the speaking subject, who reveals or who conceals himself in what he says, who, in speaking, exercises his sovereign freedom, or who, without realizing it, subjects himself to constraints of which he is only dimly aware" (121). In a single sentence, Foucault does away with most of the assumptions that went into Bitzer's rhetorical situation, which required a speaking subject who evaluated the exigencies, tailored a speech to his audience (yes! His!), according to constraints such as genre, time, space, ethos, etc. To analyze the nature of, the thing behind (sub-stance?) a statement, then, we should not analyze it via Bitzer's hermeneutic.

Authority
"...the materiality of the statement is not defined the space occupied...but rather by its status as a thing or object.....we know, for example, that for literary historians the edition of a book published with the agreement of the author does not have the same status as posthumous editions, that the statements in it have a unique value..." (102). This unique value, however, comes not from the authority of the author, but the authority of the institutions of Literary History that bestow that unique value on special editions. The reason why, MF implies, we do value the version of Great Expectations that Dickens wrote first over the one his editor made him write, or the versions edited 100 years later by Dickens scholars (corrected texts, added illustrations, etc), is that the first edition, the edition with Dickens's hand on it, cannot be repeated once Dickens is dead. What is valued is the un-repeatablility.

Authorship: See Subjectivity above.
Constraints [See also Constraints in contemporary rhetorical theory]

Bitzer's constraints seem to imply a silencing--that if conditions were different, so much more would have been said. Bitzer's rhetorical situation can be seen as a filter: it sifts out from the mass of all utterances that which can be said for a given situation, and the mesh of the sieve is made up of situational constraints such as time, place, audience, etc. What emerges is what is left over once all of the unsaid things have fallen through.

Foucault's version of what is said (enonce) is just the opposite. Instead the Said being what is left after all else is silenced, a subtractive process, Foucault's system is one of Positivities. Foucault asserts that "the words, sentences, meanings affirmations, series of propositiosn do not back directly onto a primeval night of silence; but that the sudden appearance of a sentence, the flash of meaning...always emerge in the operational domain of an enunciative function; that between the language as one reads and hears it, and also as one speaks it....there is not a profusion of things half said, sentences left unfinished, thoughts half expressed, an endlessm onolgue of which only a few fragments emerge" (112). Instead, statements are generated by the positivities of a given discursive field (125).

Rupture and change

[See also Badiou's Event above

Relationship to "regularity": "An analysis that reinvests in the empirical element of history...the problematic of the origin: in every oeuvre, in every book, in the smallest text, teh problem is to rediscover the point of rupture, to establish, with the greatest possible precision, the division between the implicit density of the already-said, a perhaps involuntary fidelity to aquired opinon, the law of discursive fatalities, and the vivacity of creation, the leap into irreducible difference" (142). This, Foucault says, is what the history of ideas attempts to do: to find the "tipping point" (as Malcolm Gladwell class it) of an era, idea, movement, discourse. This poses two possiblities: resemblance and procession--either the new idea resembles an old one or it is simply the natural evolution of a series of ideas.
On rarity: the analysis of statements and discourse formations seeks to "establish a law of rarity" (118), to determine what might have been said in a given situation compared to the statements that did appear.
Events and rarity: "...archaology distinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of discourse....[including]a fourth level, at which the substitution of one discursive formation for another takes place. These events, whic hare by far the most rare, are, for archaeology, the most important" (171). The rarity of a truly new discursive formation is what interests the archaeologists. Here, the event is a linguistic one: the changing out of one form for another in an abrupt and radical way.
Archaeology

In true Foucauldian fashion, we are given more about what archaeology is not than what it is. The chapter "Archaeology and the History of Ideas" contrasts the two methods extensively--but it is simple enough to state that Archaeology seems to do exactly the opposite of the history of ideas, it seems throw out many of "history"'s main thinking tools (like "object" and "subject"), and has a very different understanding of the "progression" of history--Archaeology is concerned with the gaps, not the continuity.

Other, more positive definitions:

"Archaeological description is concerned with those discursive practices to which teh facts of sucession must be referred if one is not to establish them in an unsystematic and naive way, that is in terms of merit" (144).

"Archaeological analysis individualizes and describes discursive formations. That is, it must compare them, oppose them to one another in the simultaneity in which they are presented, disctinguish them from those that do not belong to the same time scale...[etc. A lot}" (157).
"Archaeology tries to establish the system of transformations that constitute 'change'; it tries to develop this empty, abstract notion, with a view to according it the analysable status of transformation" (173).

The Symbolic and the Virtual Event

When, in May of 2007, "fandom exploded" online, the "event" seemed fixed and obvious to the journalists who covered the happenings: the owners of the blogging platform LiveJournal deleted some of its members' journals without notice or consent, causing thousands, if not millions of pages of creative works, conversations, and games to be lost to the ether of the Internet. Although not a politcal or state driven event, although little was physically at stake in the subjects' right to being, the situation that has since been termed "Strikethrough07" (or Strikethru07, or simply Strikethrough) raises several questions not only about the nature of subjectivity in online communities, but of the nature of the event as described by Alain Badiou when the event in question takes place in the symbolic and virtual realm. Specifically, Strikethrough07, when analyzed as an event, shows the difficulty of presentation and represenatation online, of subjectivity as described by Badiou, and of naming in the event.

What seems necessary here is to extend or perhaps amend our understanding of the symbolic--of the rhetorical--in Badiou. Kenneth Burke's description of a "situation", which is clearly different from Badiou's "event", may nonetheless be helpful. For this paper, we will examine the traces left by Strikethrough, the representative documents surround the unpresentable event itself. We hope that through a thorough examination of Badiou's "event," Burke's "situation" and Foucault's "ennunciative event" we can describe how events like Strikethrough are possible in virtual and symbolic spaces, and the consequences for all three ideas of an erruption of the established structure.

Dis-ease in Bleak House: An Overview

Much has been written on Dickens's use of illness and disease in Bleak House and in his other novels; however, these comments usually fall into one of three categories: Disease as plot device; disease as a reflection of Victorian social dis-ease; and disease as contributing to "the feminine" or female identity in Victorian England. Each of these three approaches, however, ultimately returns to and requires an understanding of Dickens as a "realist" writer--that is, a writer who created texts that accurately reflect the intrusion of the mundane and abject (such as filth in the streets).

**Note: Most critics agree that the unnamed disease that strikes Esther is smallpox, despite the prevalence of cholera at the time Dickens is writing.

Disease as plot device

Perhaps the simplest use of "disease" is as a rhetorical device to move either the plot or the reader. The scarring characteristic of smallpox is an ideal plot device because "the infection provides a crisis in the heroine's life that Dickens uses in Carlyle's fashion to transform Esther from a naive girl to a true Bildungsroman character" (Gurney 79). As a highly transmittable disease, smallpox is better able to move between characters and scenes to create thematic links and move the story forward (Gurney 89). Further, "the presence of disease in the text does more than provide a tension between sickness and health in the various characters--it posits the entire novel as a document searching for a cure" (Benton 70). As readers, we are implicated in this cure--once the tensions of the novel are resolved, we should administer those same antidotes to our own dis-eases.

Readers are further implicated in the story of disease by means of the sympathy (or lack thereof) the text arouses in readers. Maura Spiegel argues that Dickens is "everywhere attempting to expand our sympathy" but that he is also "careful in negotiating what he understands to be readers' points of tolerance and intolerance" of descriptions that require sympathetic responses (Spiegel 3). In particular, Bleak House educates its audience about propers emotional responses to illness, either one's own illness or that of others. Esther is our model character, who teaches not only how to be sympathetic, but how to manage and control our sympathy: "The proper or moderate balance must be struck, and Dickens appears to have been convinced that an effortful but not distorting self-management intensifies our sympathy" (3-4). This sympathy is key to Dickens's social reform rhetoric: only by having sympathy for the characters he depicts in terrible conditions will we be moved toward social change.

Disease as social dis-ease

As social criticism, Bleak House offers a vision of England that would have inspired not only sympathy, but fear in its contemporary readers (Gurney 82). Although there are many diseases present in the novel, smallpox is clearly Dickens's central device for arguing for social change. According to Schwarzbach, the prominent theory of disease transmission in Victorian England was the "pythogenic"--"the theory held that rotting organic matter produced specific poisonous agents; when a person cam in contact with them he contracted on fo the several fevers" (22). Unlike germ theories, then, pythogenic theories tie a disease to a location and a hygenic (and aesthetic) condition; represented as "miasmas" or fogs, these centers of disease had to be visited for the illness to be caught, such as at Tom-All-Alone's (22-23). From this pythogenic theory, Dickens could argue for better social conditions leading to fewer illnesses.

Smallpox was known to be one of the few "contagious" diseases that could be transmitted person-to-person--one of the few illnesses that could cut across social classes (Schwarzbach 26). Unlike the pythogenic diseases, smallpox as device could help Dickens argue for sympathy towards suffering in general (Fasick 137), which would hopefully lead to social reform. Graham Benton puts it most clearly:

I would argue that disease...fills...a dual role, that disease represents a containment of power in that it 'selects' and 'isolates' certain individuals upon whom it asserts its authority, and at the same tme dsease, because of the arbitrary nature of contamination, remains outside hte artifical construction of power relations. Disease is 'god-given': through a discourse of poetic justice, one can argue disease represents the ultimate juridical system. And yet, expectations are reversed in Bleak House--it is the innocent and the 'good' who are afflicted. Such an inversion operates to produce sympathetic readins, and forces the reader to look for causes for such an eteliologically derrived tragedy (72).

Disease as sign of the feminine

Robert Lougy identifies Dickens's preoccupation with disease (and the filth, contagion, and death that accompanies it) with Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, "particularly its relationship to sexual difference and the feminine" (Lougy 476). Lougy notes that we cannot escape the abject in Bleak House, that "it rubs our noses in this quotidian muck" (477) anymore than we can escape death, for the novel is "structured...around an extended joke about death" (Jarndyce and Jarndyce) (479). Lougy, like Kristeva, places disease, death, filth, and sex in the liminal--the transitional space outside of the symbolic order. Lady Dedlock, as a liminal character marked early on by death, sex, disease, and an actual physical stain (after visiting the graveyard), represents a break with the (masculine) order, and must be dealt with accordingly (489). More importantly, however, the novel itself acts as a mediating, ordering device: it describes the indescribable, erases what must be erased, and teaches us how to deal with the abject--just as Esther does, by redirecting her narrative at the moment she encounters her mother in death (Lougy 493).

Disease is further linked to the feminine realm by Esther's scarring; disfigurement and disease literally marks the women as sexually and culturally different. Helena Michie, using Elaine Scarry's terminology, claims that pain can make or unmake "a self and a world" for the female character, and that for Dickens, "the process of making and unmaking is itself foregrounded in the illnesses of his heroines, and that pain necessarily both temporarily reproduces female physicality and makes any notion of the stable and fully representable female self impossible" (Michie 199). The female self in Dickens is always marked by some dis-ease which prevents that character from wholly constructing herself. "Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend become, then, not only gigantic experiments in realism, but texts in which female pain produces a discourse of and for the female self, of and for the female body" (200)--the literature is "equipment for living" in that it teaches its readers what appropriate female identity and discourse looks like.

Key Passages:

Bibliography

Benton, Graham. "'And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day': Pathology, Ontology and the Discourse of the Diseased Body. A Study of Illness and and Contagion in Bleak House." Dickens Quarterly. 11 (1994): 69-80.

Fasick, Laura. "Dickens and the Diseased Body in Bleak House." Dickens Studies Annual. (1996): 135-151.

Gurney, Michael S. "Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House." Literature and Medicine 9 (1990): 72-92.

Lougy, Robert E. "Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's Bleak House." ELH 69 (2002): 473-500.

Michie, Helena. "'Who Is This In Pain?': Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.2: 199-212.

Schwarzbach, F.S. "The Fever of Bleak House." English Language Notes. 20.3/4: 21-27.

Spiegel, Maura. "Managing Pain: Suffering and Reader Sympathy in Bleak House." Dickens Quarterly 12.1: 3-10.