Beyond "The Subject": Individuality in the Discursive Condition

Author(s): Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 3, Philosophical and Rhetorical Inquiries (Summer,
2000), pp. 405-419
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057612 .
Accessed: 12/06/2014 20:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
New Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Beyond "The Subject":
Individuality in the Discursive Condition
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth*

Identity is, above all, an accomplishment, a

particular work, a particular act. Identity is not

something separate from responsibility, but on

the contrary, is its very expression.
Vaclav Havel1

The postmodern condition

famously throws into crisis Foucault's
"founding subject" of history and with it many of the liberal
values that Eurocentric societies have taken for granted for at
least several centuries. Once the existence of the irreducible "indi
vidual" is contested, what becomes of moral
identity, autonomy, agency,
freedom, and collective responsibility? In short, what becomes of the
liberal values associated with individuality once we suffer the loss of that
atomic that irreducible cartesian that
subject, cogito, free-floating
monad that grounds so much of the European tradition
philosophical
before some have mounted
post-structuralism? Fearing catastrophe,
now-familiar efforts to rescue
that liberal subject.
This essay works toward the definition of a new kind of subjectivity
which might refigure our sense of liberality. The questions involved have
to do with the possibilities available beyond the subject of liberal
tradition. What are the possibilities for subjectivity outside the confines
(some say constrictions) of that personal identity called by L?vi-Strauss a
"miserable treasure"? Beyond the traditional subject of Descartes and
Locke, what possibilities exist for autonomy, freedom, and responsibil
ity?things that have for so long been associated with post-medieval
modernity?

* Thanks to Michael Alexander, Malcolm Bowie, Christoph Lindner, Karen Stears and
Tom Vargish for invaluable contributions from editorial to phrase
ranging reading
making. For the invitation that first me to organize some of the
prompted thoughts
pursued here, I am grateful to the organizers of the 1997 Saintsbury Conference at

Edinburgh.

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 405-419

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
406 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

In approaching the postmodern problem of subjectivity, the impor

tant first step is methodological. The most influential discussions of it
have been grounded in philosophical texts, so that literary texts have

only figured marginally, if at all, as quotation-quarries and exempla;

little attention has been paid to the sheer fact of literary language, its
to turn convention aside, to reform the act of atten
particular power
tion, to ground and limit the very formulation that is prior to any
discussion at all, philosophical or practical. Languages are our tools of

thought, the essential precursors of practice. If, as Saussure said a

are above all then texts are the
century ago, languages systems, literary
most highly achieved specifications of those systems. This essay seeks its
confirmations, then, in the work of contemporary writers because they
for contemporary readers a range beyond what is conventionally
provide
imaginable.
Totake only one example, consider the bearing on subjectivity of the
way great writers like Proust or James experiment with the powers of
Both the "associative volatility of language" as
language. emphasize
Malcolm Bowie so splendidly put it in describing Proust for a lecture
audience. It is precisely Proust's ability to push his language to the point
of of coherence lost, that teaches his readers its powers and
catastrophe,
limits. These threats are the very things that make Proust invigorating to
read.

Something similar can be said of Henry James, the first author writing
in English actually to situate subjectivity at the perilous margins where
syntax fails. James, especially in his magnificent late work, forces his
readers to cruise that In such texts, it can be
boundary. argued,
ismost liberated precisely at the point of breakdown. This is
subjectivity
not at all a psychoanalytic point; psychoanalysis is not required for a
reader to the necessary bond between risk and freedom.
recognize
The
difficulty and even violence of language in late novels like The
Golden Bowl and The Wings of theDove enact the psychic stress involved in
transactions even on mild occasions.
powerful interpersonal apparently
On the occasion when Theale returns from an omi
portentous Milly
nous appointment with her doctor at the end of "Book Fifth," we get
nothing like a result; in fact we get the whole of "Book Sixth" before her
returns into focus. Instead, we luncheon conversa
problem get masking
tion American and a silent friend's unasked ques
concerning scenery
tion as to what news Milly has had from her doctor. "What had she had
from him? It was indeed now working upward again that Milly would do
well to know, though knowledge looked stiff in the light of Susie's glitter.
It was on the whole, because Densher's hostess was
therefore, young
divided from it by so thin a partition that she continued to cling to the
Rockies."2 As usual in James, there is no establishing anything like plot

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BEYOND "THE SUBJECT"
407

or character from this; the point is the way language operates, through
uneasy referents and displaced concretia like the Rocky Mountains to
the sense of torque and strain invisibly formulating a set of
produce
subjective relationships which hardly find anything like "accurate"
material expression. This entirely kinetic subjective realm is rarely
marked or other instead, it is
by symbols, emblems, objects; simply
carried by a language that accumulates but refuses to "come to the

point." There is studiously no "There" there in this James; conversations

take place that don ytactually take place; complex descriptions seem to
exfoliate from one site to another as if to make a habitation of language
itself. These linguistic pressures force the recognition that whatever of
importance is "there" lies in the in-between?precisely what Cixous calls
the site of writing. Again, to take a final instance from this novel, this
passage deals with another case of such writing.

... he felt her as in wide warm waves, the of a general, a kind of

diffusing, spell
beatific mildness. There was a
depth of it, doubtless, for some than for
deeper
others; what he, at any rate, in knew of it was that he seemed to stand
particular
in it up to his neck. He moved about in it, and it made no he floated, he
plash;
swam in it; and were all for that matter, like fishes in a
noiselessly they together,
The effect of the place, the beauty of the scene, had much
crystal pool. probably
to do with it . . . (424)

A reality is made material, even though no literal fishes or

subjective
pools are involved. The thematic development of this metaphor involves
many quite different iterations, involving seas of loss, of love, of kindness
and betrayal, and even the sea at Venice. We are well beyond epic simile
here, as the various toward common but
particular specifications gesture

unspoken threat of catastrophe

elements. A lies in the lack of conven
tional resolution, in the constant prizing open of expected closures. By
readers on that boundary, James keeps alive the threat that
keeping
inspires creative, liberating performances and that asserts the indis
soluble bond between subjectivity and language.
Thosefeats of language achieved by great writers have been described
powerfully by some interpreters as the necessary basis for social renewal:
particularly in Julia Kristeva's briefs for the "semiotic" function of
language, or in H?l?ne Cixous's injunctions about writing with the body
and against The Law. These particular efforts, and many inspired by
them, often remain in the ambit of psychoanalytic theory and confined
that convention. Kristeva's is a
by "subject-in-process" only partially
successful (hyphenated) attempt to dislodge the fixed subject of history;
even Cixous's much more radical "writing in the in-between" may be
interpreted as invoking conventional parameters in order to defy them.3

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
408 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Such approaches have inspired new respect for catastrophe, but have
not dealt with it as an interpretive problem. The "associative volatility" of
if not restrained, could overcome its rational functions of
language,

producing meaning. What then for the

subject positions that such
language entails? What does
associative volatility portend "the for
subject"? Catastrophe would mean the end of sense, of sequence, of
story, of self, possibly the end of control and continuance. This is the
fear, explicit or not, reflected in the vehement and usually impressively
ignorant journalistic attacks on what is taken to be "postmodernism."
Reconceiving subjectivity in the discursive condition involves impor
tant reconsiderations of what language is and how it operates: a first step
being the renunciation of any dualistic representations of linguistic
function?for example the Kristevan "dispositions" of language that
must be either symbolic or semiotic. Either cling to embattled reason or
lose it in the dissociated rattle of semiosis. The potential for both/and is
rendered tenuous by the dualistic formulation. Such either/or formulae
a continual
provide cycling around a closed and long-familiar termino
but no of access to a new horizon. The formulation
logical system, point
suggests that is a sealed system,
a house, a sort of
language prison
Truman Show of Discourse in which there is no escape from the pre
ordained scripts.
Such willed misprisons of linguistic function obscure the potentiality
of language as a site of liberation from the restrictions that modernity
imposed upon subjectivity. This essay explores the opportunities pro
vided by the Saussurian characterization of language as a split system, in
which finite practices in speech or writing {paroles) specify the unspoken
and unspeakable potential of a language {langue).
My discussion will proceed in two stages. First, I consider how "The
Subject" has become an entirely inadequate description of subjectivity in
the discursive condition, to on condition."
improve Lyotard's "postmodern
In the discursive condition, subjectivity must be kinetic, not static; it
must be multiplied, not single. Second, I make some suggestions

concerning the implications of this discursive subjectivity for our rela

with "the past." Though some of the first part of my discussion
tionship
will be familiar to some readers it will not be familiar to all, and it is
essential preparation for the less familiar subsequent discussion.

not necessary to
In considering subjectivity "Beyond the Subject" it is
conclude that we have left individuality behind: and this for two quite
different reasons. First, and as has been generally noted, the cultural
conditions of modernity remain broadly functional. The singular "sub
of iswith us still and so is its appropriate order of things,
ject" modernity
in which the world became objectifiable according to certain grammars

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BEYOND "THE SUBJECT" 409

of perspective that remain very much part of the political and cultural
practice of Eurocentric societies. "The subject" is a phrase that often
functions as a more term for the same
discourse-friendly unitary
consciousness indicated by terms like "individual" or even "self." What
ever the term, the construct belongs to the modern way of "saving the
essences."4 That essential subject, and the grammars of modernity which
have sustained it, still remain central to Eurocentric societies in count
less ways. Even if we desired it, there would be no question either of
reconciling modernity with postmodernity, or of between
choosing
them.5

But there is another, more interesting reason why we are not obliged
to relinquish the term "individuality": because it remains applicable to
more kinetic forms of The crisis
postmodern subjectivity. contemporary
of the subject is central to the crisis of objectivity long since announced
by surrealism and pursued and produced ever since by writers and
filmmakers alongside scientists and technicians. The crisis of representa
tional culture itself has been central to the twentieth century across the
range of science, in art, in in
practice?in politics, language?wherever
the hegemony of singular grammars has been challenged.
This crisis of objectivity has by now been very well-documented and
recognized, and its implications pursued: implications particularly for
the historical conventions which so those of moder
embody grammars
nity and their founding unitary subject.6 Since at least the turn of the
twentieth century philosophy and science have problematized the
of natural or otherwise, and have thrown
practice describing objects,
on the constructive of all whether math
emphasis power languages,
ematical or
linguistic, and upon the differential, not essential, values
produced and maintained by such languages. In fact, postmodernity has
been defined by the turn toward language: as the cultural "moment"
when, in Derrida's words, "language invaded the universal problematic,
the moment when . . . became we can
everything discourse?provided
on this word" (280). "Discourse" is the term for non-verbal
agree
that is, for differential with elements and rules,
languages, systems

concerning everything from urban plans and fashion to the conduct of

politics and war. "Writing" in these discourses, or
languages, takes place
whenever a act one or several of these discourses.
particular specifies
This emphasis upon a discursive
condition has taught us to search for
"code" rather than for "structure": a shift with substantial
implications,
not least for subjectivity. With the broad translation into various cultural
terms of the Saussurian redefinition of language as a system of differen
tial relationships, and not a collection of pointers, has
everything
become discourse. The idea that all systems operate like language, thus
defined, is one of the most powerful ideas of the past century; it still has

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
410 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

not been at all fully explored, and has been unaccountably resisted by
the very professors of language and literature whom one would expect
to welcome these developments that bring literature and language back
from marginality. In any case, the recognition of the power of language
has reminded us that inhabiting a language means inhabiting a reality,
and that so-called "reality" (one begins to search for ways to qualify such
once-unproblematic terms) changes with the language.
To reformulate "the subject" as an element of such differential
that is, as a function of discourse, means to the
systems, accept

multiplicity of what used to be called "the subject": because subjectivity

in several discursive whether
always operates simultaneously systems,
their and elements are verbal or other
grammars languages sign systems
of gender relations, or fashion, or politics. In these condi
composed
tions, it makes less and less sense to consider subjectivity in terms of

simple location at all.

And so the familiar arise about autonomy, freedom, and
questions
"The subject" appears to be no longer the originator of
responsibility.
but its creature. What independent or moral life can be
language,
expected of a subjectivity controlled by systems into which it is born and
over which it has little control? What uniqueness is possible for a

subjectivity thus positioned? If discourses preordain subject positions,

do they also preordain what we once called individual history? What
become of concepts like social justice and even "human rights" when
their epistemological are discredited and their founding sub
grounds
ject distributed throughout the functions of systems?
Saussure provided the clue to a new construction of subjectivity when
he pointed the way toward language as a model of a new kind of
system?a differential, not referential one. His distinction between the
and the usage, between and
language system particular langue parole,
holds a key because it points to a crucial gap between potential and
realization. This difference between the potential and the practice
renders a forever so as it remains
linguistic system incomplete-able, long
a living language and does not become "totalized" (Levi-Strauss's term)
new specification.
and thus dead, fully realized, incapable of
The implications for subjectivity of this distinction between language
as potential and a particular act of speech or writing, have remained
almost entirely unexplored. For example, the distinction raises a ques
tion as to the ontological status of a "language." Where, exact?y, is
as such differs powerfully
English? Nobody doubts that it does exist, and
from Swahili or Urdu. Obviously the sequence, "Colorless green ideas
an English though itmay have little of that
sleep furiously," is sentence,
called "meaning"; just as obviously, the same five words in
product
different order?"colorless ideas green not an
furiously sleep"?is

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BEYOND "THE SUBJECT"
411

English sentence. Clearly English is somewhere, but where? Not, surely,

in grammar books made up after the fact; those rules are always ignored
by wise schoolchildren taking tests. Its functions are not spoken, even by
no one ever verb,
grammarians; actually says, "subject, object"?those

relationships are understood, the "language" implicit. Whatever "En

is, it is entirely disseminated. Its rules are the implicit knowledge
glish"
of all (and only) native speakers. But that sum of speakers both contains
and exceeds the language. In short, English demonstrably exists but is
unrecoverable. We can only "recognize" it in this or that specification,
never in the abstract, as in grammar books and
diagrams.
The arena
of subjectivity and freedom lies in this gap between the
of a differential code and any particular specifica
potential capacities
tion of it. This "Tender Interval" (Nabokov's phrase for something only
slightly different) between language {langue) and enunciation {parole)
to subjectivity a set of conditions entirely different from those
brings
belonging to the unified world of modernity.
The linguistic model tells us two things about all systems that operate
like language, that is, differentially: first, that the structure is always
never explicit; and second, that the explicit statement can
potential,
push the limits of systemic potential without ever exhausting it. That is
precisely what Proust and James do, what poets and artists do, and why
their work contributes so directly to social health. As Vaclav Havel
suggests in the epigraph to this essay, identity is kinetic; it is a process, an
event, a of value, "above all, an accom
particular expression systemic
a work, a act," the of
plishment, particular particular "very expression"

responsibility, not
something independent it. Identity in his terms of
definitely has nothing to do with reducing difference, as is the habit of
identity-producing political regimes whether they are the "retrograde"
chauvinist regimes based on "blood," or the marxist and capitalist
systems "hypnotized" by economic indicators. Rather, identity appears
only in the act of specifying sets of rules. And as we operate simulta
in several sets at once, as the series of
neously identity appears constantly
multiplied specifications of the potential provided by those rule regi
mens. to use Nabokov's words arrives in the
Identity, again, "prodigious
individual awareness" that makes of this or that moment "an unprec
edented and unrepeatable in the continuum of a life."7
event
The specification in question?and this is crucial?is not singular but
multiplied by the numerous systems in play. Code-multiplicity means
that we no have a or even a
longer only subject-in-process, subjectivity-in
process, but something more like subjectivity-in-process?s. Adequate
discussion of this condition of identity must take into consideration its
upalimpsestuousnessn?to use the delicious term coined by the poet and
scholar Michael Alexander. Identity is both sequence and palimpsest. Its

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
412 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

singularity exists in the unique and unrepeatable sequence of a life, but

not in some essential "subject." And its palimpsestuousness derives from
the multiplied discursive condition in which each moment involves a
complex subjective specification of multiple codes. The unique and
poetry of an individual life cannot at all be compassed by
unrepeatable
sociological generalizations, which confuse its crucial singularity and
flatten its palimpsestuousness with "the weeds of statistics and waist-high
generalizations" {Ada 76). Identity consists in the unique and unrepeat
able sequence of enunciation.
complex
This idea of a distributed subjectivity, far from being a loss or a lack,
allows for the actual complexity of conscious life more fully and
precisely than the modern "subject" ever did. A complex, multilaminated
subjectivity actually seems a fairly commonsense description of lived
in our time: more than does the abstract or "miser
experience cogito
able treasure" inherited from Christian and Romantic absolutes. It
seems even to that monadic idea of
particularly pointless, wrong, impose
"the upon
a that is more random and
subject" personal knowledge
radical than that traditional model allows.
Such multiple poetry in process defies any classical ideas of "the"
a era of modernity, political activists used to talk
subject. During bygone
about trying to make a difference, as if exceptional intervention were
to "action." But in the discursive condition it is impossible not
requisite
to make a difference. "We are difference" as Foucault the real
says;8

question is, do we make the difference we intend?

Beyond the subject, then, comes a kinetic subjectivity-in-multicoded
process. Instead of a static singularity, this postmodern subjectivity is the
nexus or intersection at which a and
moving unique unrepeatable

sequence is constantly being specified from the potentials available in

the discursive condition. Such a subjectivity is individual in its sequence,
not in some irreducible core. Its uniqueness lies in its trajectory: the
to within which an
lifelong sequence, impossible anticipate, unpredict
able series of are made from among the
specifications languages
available. The of resonance, its power of
volatility language?its poetic,
associative linkage?provides precisely the varied opportunities for
selective specification that constitute the unique and unrepeatable
poetry of a life.

Such reformulation of subjectivity, by eradicating the consensus

apparatus upon which historical conventions rest, radically alters our
to the past. History is par excellence a grammar of
relationship
perspective founded by individual subjects. What vanishes with that
subject into the discursive condition is the entire humanist apparatus of
infinities, objectifiers, and common denominators upon which so much

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BEYOND "THE SUBJECT" 413

has depended. Foucault not only established the role of the subject as
founder of history, he also announced early that itwould be necessary to
think about the nature of the the nature of the series.
again sequence,
He renounced the all too recognizable philological wrangle of philoso
phers and struck out into new territory where even history, even time,
belong to the palimpsest of codes and to "this dirty game of substitu
tions" as Julio Cort?zar puts it in his palimpsestuous novel, Hopscotch
{Hayuela).
Given the discursive condition, we have the power to revise our acts of
attention and thus, however lightly, to revise the discursive condition
itself within the terms of those languages or codes which constitute our
worlds. But our are in the small,
possible opportunities ready-at-hand

daily iterations or revisions of discursive potentials that constitute the

real basis for radical change. Often we engage in this "writing" unaware.
Certainly the inscriptive activity which constitutes identity in a postmodern
context takes well below the much-mentioned meta-narratives,
place
which are neither langue nor parole, and which are too often radioactive
with the terms of modernity and thus incapable of addressing those of
postmodernity.
In the discursive condition, then, where the ineffable poetry of
individual lives take shape, there is no longer any possibility of realizing
the neutral time of modernity "in" which a common time and a common

past could exist. The neutrality requisite for sustaining and "reading" a
common time (history) simply cannot be maintained among the finite
sequences produced by distributed subjectivities. The powerful com
mon denominators of neutral time and neutral space have lost their
function.

Funeral laments, attacks on and other of

postmodernity, expressions
grief are understandable enough, given what is at stake. Neutrality in
time and space were possibly the most original and creations of
powerful
modernity; they were the necessary conditions of empiricism in science
and philosophy, and of representation in politics and in art. They
produced "the immense, historically developed capacity to keep the
world in mind" that Meyer Schapiro eloquently described more than
sixty years ago.9 That capacity may be the act of attention most essential
to humanism. It is not a small matter.

Butin dealing with the challenges of postmodernity, denial is not an

acceptable outcome because denial provides no basis even for rescuing
the liberal values that have been so broadly challenged. In the discursive
condition, time is a finite dimension of events, not an infinite and
neutral envelope for them. This is a problem for physical as well as for
human sciences, though I will concentrate here only on the human
sciences.

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
414 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

In the human sciences, all events are linguistic in the sense that they
are specifications of languages, of discourses, of differential systems of
In and discursive time is a differen
relationship. psychic linguistic terms,
tial function of sequences that are at once individual and multiplied in
the sense discussed earlier. Time consists in the sheer fact that every
specification of a code, every act of writing or speech, occurs serially. A
plurality of possible sequences can be generated from each discursive
language, and any individual sequence of subjective specifications is
palimpsestuous, not one but a plurality of possible specifications.
involving
Such times, like the sequences that sustain them, are finite. Such
times are periodic; they come to an end; they know nothing of the
infinitehorizons and heroic potentials of modernity. While it has always
been obvious to most grownups that personal time comes to an end, it is
easy, perhaps seductively easy, to lose sight of that determining fact
within the conventions of modernity; this is precisely because of their
infinite horizons and temporal neutralities and, above all, their "history"
linking past and future. In the coded discursive world, however, where
becomes a dimension o/events, not a containing medium for
temporality
them, the "time" of history is really not possible to the extent that history
is a collective event, an of faith in common
expression grammars,
a common time. Discursive time is as as a
especially only long given
sequence, and those sequences are always finite. Old style historical
conventions of their causalities and their emer
explanation, especially
gent forms, have little validity when they are restricted to this or that
and life. cannot even be rescued as so
unique unrepeatable History
called autobiography, that most heroic form of modernity, because it
cannot allow for chance, for sublimation, for unacknowl
substantially

edged rhythms of attention that have little to do with conscious will and
much to do with of differential function.
unspoken, unspeakable systems
What, then, are the possibilities of writing history, or even of perpe
when its consensus has been dismantled, not
trating History, apparatus

by philosophical fiat but by the world? Are there alternatives to History

and its past that would permit rescue of the liberal and representational
values which so far have depended on modernity and its history? Such
considerable interest; entire are
questions currently generate journals
devoted to considering it. And whatever answers are available, they
cannot be found within singular disciplinary apparatuses.
Analternative kind of relationship to the past has been explored in
terms in certain narratives. I want to look briefly at
practical literary
those explorations in Nabokov's work as a way toward new vocabulary
and new acts of attention that yet do not at all require giving up the past
or enduring any other of the apocalyptic alternatives suggested by
evangelical writers such as Baudrillard and Jameson. History is an act of

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BEYOND "THE SUBJECT" 415

attention, a form of within a of

recognition particular grammar perspec
tive, one that from its Renaissance sources visual rather than
emphasizes
kinetic values. An alternative system to that of historical recognition is
what I shall call anthematic recognition from Vladimir Nabokov's
"anthemion."

Apart from "anthem" nothing resembling "anthemion" is to be found

in the OED. It is a Greek word meaning a floral pattern of particular

complexity. Anthemion was one of the titles Nabokov considered for his
last long book, eventually entitled Ada. His "anthemion," judged both
from his own descriptions in Ada and also from the massive example of
his late work, indicates an interlaced, flower-like design where themes or
arrive and from various and
patterns depart posting places, recurring

recrossing without exact repetition, and yet providing a kind of rhythmic

iteration and patterning. Between the iterations of a thematic sequence,
as between the beats of a particular rhythm, lie tender intervals within
which opportunity lies and the sum of which constitute memory.
Nabokov's work suggests a new standing place for recognition of the
past.
But before
turning to specifics, a brief note is in order
prefatory
because, sadly, in English-speaking countries literary analysis requires
on the larger public scene. Just how art in
justification language has
come to be put in this position would be worth but would
exploring,
an entire at least. main interest here is to make
occupy essay My explicit
what should be obvious, that highly achieved literary writing opens new
in our collective discursive in our to revise
powers potentials, power
social codes rather than to the same old exclusions and
merely repeat
the same, same, old stories over and over
emphases, again.
For English-speaking societies especially, where sequence rather than
inflection governs coherence, various crises of historical conventions

suggest the importance of exploring new with the past. It is

relationships
the artists, not the philosophers, who have been first and have gone
farthest in pursuing the problem of time: a problem that has seemed
particularly opaque to philosophers and psychiatrists. Lyotard, Derrida,
Ricoeur, and Kristeva, for mention "time" as a but
example, problem
they get nowhere with it, never problematizing the term historically to
allow for radically different constructions. Over-devotion to empiricism
hampers British and American philosophy and overexposure to phe
nomenology hampers Continental philosophy, especially the looming
presence of Heidegger and Being and Time which so originally breaks up
the modern idea of consciousness-in-temporality. Writers and other
artists, however, have been exploring new temporal habitations for at
least a
century.
It cannot be said too often that philosophical treatment of the

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
416 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

problems engaged in this essay have been anticipated earliest by

artists?anticipated sometimes by many decades. How many different
writers?Virginia Woolf, Andr? Breton, Vladimir Nabokov, Marguerite
Duras?have constructed narratives where life is not a not a
story, point
of view, not a journey, not a line, and have explored instead the thought
that individuality exists in sequences which have little to do with the
cumulative forms of history? Since early in the twentieth century, Jarry
and Kafka, Picasso and Braque, Dali and Bu?uel, painters, architects,
dramatists, musicians, novelists, and filmmakers have been exploring
the practical implications of what we can now call a cultural
postmodern
critique. We find that critique in a range of international and interdisci
plinary achievement by Borges, Ionesco, Joyce, Faulkner, the Surrealists
and their many heirs, Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet, Duras and Hawkes,
the nouveau roman, Kundera, Calvino and Cort?zar, Beckett, Tom

Stoppard and Barcelona's

La Cubana, Kieslowski, Tarentino and the
Coen brothers, Sch?nberg, the Beatles, John Cage, Charles Jencks and
Frank Gehry, and the list could go on.
Since the turn of the twentieth century the greatest literary writing has
come precisely from such experiments with the linguistic element of
subjectivity. Vladimir Nabokov attended especially to the problem of
time and of refigured relationship with the past. Nabokov also happens
to be that rare creature, a writer in who can remind us what our
English

language is capable of. Nabokov does sustain us, just as John Hawkes
said.

Nabokov himself offers us precisely a comparison between historical

and anthematic recognition of the past, and especially in his last little
jewel of a book, Transparent Things. Composed of twenty-six short (often
one or two the novella is constructed from two basic
page) chapters,
elements. On the one hand, there is on the other, of
history; problems
anthematic recognition. In the first element of the text, the more
familiar obsessions of personal history are the fatal responsibility of the
anti-hero, (sometimes "You") Person or, in
hapless Hugh pronounced
Britain sometimes "Parson." In the second element, a
mesmerizing
narrator fixes
reader's theattention on exfoliating problems of
anthematic recognition as the variety of thematic elements grows and
their patterns interlace, embedding "history" and its poor productions
and mistaken a larger context of emerging
"meanings" within systems
where one be uneasy with terms like "joy." Nabokov
cannot emphasizes
precisely that "associative volatility of language" that we considered in
Proust and James, and that conventional historical narratives repress.
Within that volatility, the anthematic subjectivity is born.
"You" Person's ("You" Parson's) is a modern story of
recognizable
travel, of marginalia in the text of life, of sexual encounter, and of a
touching ifmisguided search for consummation with an obscure object

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BEYOND "THE SUBJECT"
417

of desire. His life is cut short by its attempt to recapture

conventional the
past?a fatal attempt encouraged by psychiatrists. This history is embed
ded in a much different kind of sequence that completely scrambles its
historical values: a sequence marked by a narrative voice that wishes
Person well, but that definitely counsels against the pursuit of personal
history, with its lasting identities and its explanations that are only well
dressed mistakes.

For readers, Nabokov's narrative element introduces continuous,

digressive distractions from the history of Hugh Person and provides an

imaginative, even magical sequence of language and art running paral
lel to, and eclipsing, the history that poor Person seeks to reconstitute.
Training readers in how to sustain these powers of magic becomes the
of the book. I will try to indicate how this works, although it is
project
diminishing to extract from a book where linguistic values
particularly
can be in the and several at that.
only grasped reading, readings
The first chapter of Transparent Things begins the process of exploring
the possibility suggested by the book's title: in particular, the necessity
for practicing new acts of attention that preserve new kinds of standing
relative to the The narrator warns novices to avoid the blandish
past.
ments of history:

When ^concentrate on a material whatever its situation, the very act

object,
of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking theinto
history of that object.
Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact
level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
Man made or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used
objects, by
careless life . . . are difficult to in surface focus: novices fall
particularly keep
the surface to themselves, and are soon with
through humming happily reveling
childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall A thin
explain.
veneer of immediate is over natural and artificial matter, and
reality spread
whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please
not break its tension film. Otherwise the miracle-worker will find
inexperienced
himself no on water but among fish.10
longer walking descending upright staring

The powers required to pursue history destroy the past by sinking into it;
allowing the past to refract through "transparent things" requires a
as miraculous as that of walking on water but nevertheless
discipline
possible for the novice "miracle worker" who learns by staying at the
exact level of the moment, letting the past shine through. "Things" no
longer function as they did in the objectifying grammars of modernity;
are not but instead, the occasions, the carriers, the
"things" "objects"
sites where the act of attention can be performed, where memory
inflects, and re-inflects again, an imaginative awareness engaged in the
process of creating the unique and unrepeatable poetry of a life.
For readers, the text a continuous of that
provides experience

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
418 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

mental maneuver to pass from one state of

"mysterious required being
to the next." Conscious life is reborn three seconds, not
every perhaps
much different from, but perhaps not quite the same as, before. Being
the creature of these complex specifications is a heady business, and
certainly not to be viewed nostalgically as a loss. Instead this inflected
sequence of anthematic indicates the way retains
recognition experience
value without lapsing into explanation. This is what replaces "the
subject" and its history.

This to doors toward new constructions of

essay attempts open

subjectivity that allow for individuality and freedom but in terms

consistent with the discursive condition. The definition of anthematic
subjectivity in turn can lead in several directions: toward reconceiving
the ideas of causality and project that belong to the problematic
historical conventions of modernity; toward reconceiving historical
problems in terms of finite not of neutral time;11 or toward readjusting
social definitions so that poverty can be conceived in poetic as well as
economic terms, as the restriction of available Such new
languages.
directions may provide opportunities to avoid some of the circularities
currently plaguing attempts to redefine "history" and "the subject." In
case, the of cultural renewal and cultural are far
any problems change
too big and far too important to be accessible to glib "solutions." My
intention is to open doors, not ransack the room.

Recovering the past is an attainable goal for those with the power to
keep the world in mind. But keeping the world in mind is increasingly
difficult to do in a multicultural and multinational epoch, and those
who try can seem like the mad agents of unthinkable oppressions.
World-historical solutions have shown their dangers.
from one state of to the next involves a different
Passing being

relationship to the past from that of historical recovery, and involves

mental maneuvers?of a different
imaginative powers?mysterious quite
kind. The unprecedented and unrepeatable event is the potential
beginning of anthematic development, each a specification of a systemic
each with its own pattern and future. The sum of such
potential, possible
anthematic over time constitutes the continuum of an
developments
individual life. Anthematic emphasis falls precisely on the present
moment: not as a transfer site between and future, but as the
past

growing point of the unpredictable anthemion of a life. Each sequence

has its own possible grammars and specifications, its own past and
trajectory.
"The past" of such discourse is something difficult to muster or wield
in collective terms: bad news for world-historical thinking. Instead of

seeking objects of desire made opaque by the determinations and

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BEYOND "THE SUBJECT"
419

of history, the narratives congenial to postmodernity

interpretations
us to at the exact level of the moment; there can
encourage keep only
the past shine through "transparent things"; and only there can moral
life gain the amplitude and inflection provided only by values generally
associated with culturally depreciated terms like "aesthetic" and "po
etic." At the exact level of the moment we are well beyond the
determinations of historical "pluralism" and its singular subjects and

projects, and well ahead in the reclamation of a discursive subjectivity.

Edinburgh University

NOTES

1 Vaclav Havel, December 9 address to the Parliament and Senate of the Czech Republic
{New York Review of Books, 5 March 1998).
2 Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, Facsimile edition (Columbus, 1902, rpt. 1970), p.
249; hereafter cited in text.
3 See H?l?ne Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" ("La rire de la m?duse," LArc, 1975),
tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1.4 (1976), 875-93; Julia Kristeva, Desire in

Language, tr. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1980).
4 Elizabeth Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel: Time, Space and Narrative,
2nd rev. ed. (Edinburgh, 1998), pp. 16-24.
5 For see Jacques Derrida, "Structure and Play in the Discourse of the
example, Sign
Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass 1968), p. 293; hereafter
(Chicago,
cited in text.
6 See Catherine Belsey, "Constructing the Subject," in Feminist Criticism and Social Change,
ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (New York, 1985), pp. 45-64; Robert Berkhofer,
Beyond the Great Story (Princeton, 1995); Mark Bevir, "Foucault and Critique: Deploying
Agency Against Autonomy," Political Theory, 27.1 (February 1999), 65-84; Diane Elam,
en
Feminism and Deconstruction:
Ms. Abyme (London, 1994); Elizabeth Ermarth, Sequel to
History: Postmodernism and
the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, 1992); Keith Jenkins,
Why History? (London, 1999) and The Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997); Delo
Mook and Thomas Vargish, Inside Relativity (Princeton, 1987); Thomas and Delo
Vargish
Mook, Inside Modernism (New Haven, 1999); Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore, 1993)
and Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 1998); Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984).
7 Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York, 1969); 1:12, p. 76;
hereafter cited in text as Ada.
8 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge du Savoir), tr. A. M.
(LArch?obgie
Sheridan Smith (London: 1969, 1972). Includes Foucault's Inaugural Lecture at the
de France, also called "Discourse on p. 131.
College Language,"
9 Meyer Schapiro, "Nature of Abstract Art," Marxist Quarterly, 1 (January-March 1937),
77-98, see especially 85.
10 Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York, 1972).
11 See, for example, "rhythmic time" in my Sequel toHistory and my "Ph(r)ase Time:
Chaos Theory and Postmodern Reports on Knowledge," Time and Society, 4.1 (February
1995), 91-110.

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:20:09 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions