I much prefer Adorno's wording to Jean-François Lyotard's now frequently invoked description of our supposed "postmodern tradition." (See Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984].) Lyotard emphasizes the discrediting of the master narratives (les grands récits) which he claims dominated the West from the Enlightenment until after World War II. Our postmodernism, Lyotard asserts, is evident in the ways we strive to do without these obsolete, global--and hence necessarily totalitarian--tropes. Apart from the curious fact that Lyotard's explanation is, by his own definition, an obviously modernist account of postmodernism--i.e., he offers precisely a global, and rather monolithically reductive account of the modernist/postmodernist distinction--there is something decidedly parochial in his certainty that "we" no longer believe in any of the nineteenth century's totalizing systems. If his claims are restricted to the domains of philosophy and literary theory, and if the privileged examples of discredited master narratives are the theories of Marx, Freud, and their various successors, then Lyotard is undoubtedly correct. If one believes, as I do, however, that Darwin's theory of evolution is the nineteenth century's most powerful totalizing theory, then it becomes clear that the sway of that theory, and its explanatory power, has only continued to increase throughout this century.
38.  (Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978], I, 19)
.
A geography text should aim at literary form. It should present a standard of knowledge, a method, and a perspective. Supplementary ideas ought to be built round the map, not the printed page, for only so can we cultivate the visualizing habit of mind.
--Halford John Mackinder, 1908
A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one--a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law.
--Friedrich Ratzel, quoted by H. G. Wells as the
epigraph to The Outline of History, 1920
[I]f you knew the threefold sorrow with which my life is barred, like those well-fortified cities one sees in Elisée Reclus's Northern Europe volume, you would forgive me.
--Marcel Proust, letter to Suzette Lemaire,
1 November 1894
Early in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the reader encounters an auditory image of the infantile artist's first experimentation with language:
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the green wothe botheth. 1
The prototypically modernist linguistic play of "the green wothe botheth" establishes a problem of imagining to which the young Stephen will return, although the problem cannot be resolved: "you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could" (PA, 12-13). In its encoded contestation of national and poetic imagery (the Irish green, the poetic rose), Stephen's "green wothe" is an exemplary geopolitical image. It posits a form of cultural and political identification whose difficulty Stephen later finds inscribed in and around the "picture of the earth on the first page of his geography" textbook (PA, 15).
The meaning of "geopolitics" as a term used to describe global political problems is by no means easy to pinpoint. Its increasing use as a keyword in critical theory and cultural studies signals a need to theorize what Homi Bhabha has recently called "the geopolitics of the historical present." 2 As part of that critical effort a number of studies of geopolitics have appeared, including Gearóid O Tuathail's recent Critical Geopolitics. 3 The genealogy I offer here emphasizes two features of the formation of what O Tuathail calls "classical geopolitics" (CG, 22): the suppressed importance of anarchism in the formation of imperialist geopolitical paradigms, and the fate of nineteenth-century ideas of "culture" in the formation of twentieth-century geopolitics.
The history of geopolitics may be summarized as the failure to constitute the discipline of geography as a scientific field of study, a failure on which the very success and persistence of reactionary geopolitical paradigms are premised. Most of my examples are drawn from the work of geographers, anthropologists, and social scientists, and something I emphasize is the way geopolitical paradigms took shape around disciplinary boundary crossings within the academy not unlike the interdisciplinarity that characterizes cultural studies today. 4 At issue is not only the fate of an academic field of study, but also the ensemble of residual problems and questions that come to mark the wider sense of "geopolitics." Stephen's problem of imagining a "green rose" is exemplary of this ensemble of questions because it offers not a definition, but a problem: "It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended" (PA, 17).
In Joyce's novel, a geography textbook precipitates Stephen's problem of identification, and it is to geography books that I turn to examine the emergence of the geopolitical image. In particular, I am interested in the work of three geographers: Elisée Reclus (1830-1905), the French anarchist geographer; Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), the German geographer whose theory of "living space" (Lebensraum) and political geography generally set the terms for the later development of Geopolitik; and Halford J. Mackinder (1861-1947), the British geographer who championed the "new geography" in schools and universities in Britain.
Mackinder is given special prominence, not only for the central place he occupies in genealogies of geopolitics, but also because his geography illustrates a formalist logic at work in the formation of geopolitics reminiscent of both the strategies of literary modernism and of the Freudian dreamwork of condensation and displacement. 5 The significance of Mackinder's geography lies in its ability to synthesize the radically different political implications of Ratzel and Reclus into a single geopolitical image, that of Britain in his Britain and the British Seas . In that image are constellated not only the contradictions of European geography over the turn of the century, but also the distinctive features of the breakdown of nineteenth-century European ideas of culture.
Halford Mackinder is remembered as an important re in the development of geopolitical thinking chiefly for his heartland thesis. First formulated in "The Geographical Pivot of History," a paper delivered in January 1904 to the Royal Geographical Society, Mackinder's thesis projects global political power as naturally pivoting around Central Asia, the "heartland" of land-based power in what Mackinder sees as the fundamental strategic and historical interplay of land and sea. The thesis is abbreviated first in the form of the map of "The Natural Seats of Power" that accompanied the 1904 paper ( 1), and then in the set of maxims in Democratic Ideals and Reality :
Who rules East Europe commands the
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island
Who rules the World-Island commands the World. 6
The key features of this rhetoric and iconography of geopolitics may be seen as early as 1887 in Mackinder's influential address to the Royal Geographic Society, "On the Scope and Methods of Geography." Assuming leadership of the "new geography" movement, Mackinder took up the "educational battle" over the place of geography in British schools and universities. 7 Mackinder argued not only for the unity of geography as a discipline, but also for its central place in general education. The "continuous argument" 8 of geography, which ranges from physical geography to political geography, makes it the discipline able to bridge the gap between the natural and the human sciences: "One of the greatest of all gaps lies between the natural sciences and the study of humanity. It is the duty of the geographer to build one bridge over an abyss which in the opinion of many is upsetting the equilibrium of our culture." (SM, 16) In all of these claims, and perhaps most particularly in the gesture toward resolving a general crisis of "culture," Mackinder condenses and displaces a range of debates giving shape to the formation of geopolitics, most notably the theoretical debates in Germany, including those raised in Ratzel's two-volume Anthropogeographie (1882-91).
The opening sections of the first volume of Anthropogeographie offer a comprehensive classification of the different branches of the science of geography as a whole, which Ratzel divides into "physical geography" (physikalische Geographie) and Anthropogeographie, Ratzel's coinage for "human geography." As his title indicates, Ratzel is most concerned with the second of these branches of geography, whose systematization as a science was the project of Anthropogeographie. His definition of "anthropogeography" asserts that priority should be given to human geography since the human being (der Mensch) is the main object of study for every science. 9 He then goes on to insist, however, that anthropogeography is intimately connected to the natural sciences. The connection between the natural and the human sciences gives geography its distinctive object of study, namely "the geographical diffusion of humankind across the earth's surface" (A, 22).
This core claim of Ratzel's--what Woodruff Smith has dubbed the "diffusionist revolt" against dominant liberal patterns of academic thinking in nineteenth-century Germany--has many implications for the disciplines of geography and anthropology. Its innovative construction of what each discipline takes for its object of study belongs, moreover, to the late nineteenth-century attempt to unify the so-called cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften). 10 The significance of "culture" as the shared object of study is suggested by Ratzel's classification of the branches of geography that renders cultural geography (Kulturgeographie) as a synonym for Anthropogeographie. Neither "culture" nor "humanity," however, survives as the principle of coherence around which Ratzel is able to construct geography as a science. By the late 1890s, "biogeography" displaces anthropogeography--eclipsing both "culture" and "humankind" as the proper object of geographic study--to produce a geography in the service of an expansionist, imperialist politics.
The logic of the formation of geopolitics may be traced largely in the changing focus of Ratzel's works from Anthropogeographie to Politische Geographie and Der Lebensraum . The same logic, at once disciplinary and political, simultaneously informs Mackinder's "new geography," a formulation aptly reminiscent of "new imperialism." It is hardly a surprise that the formation of geopolitics coincides with the rise of "new imperialism" in Europe in the late nineteenth century, although its full scope and importance for the foundations and legitimation of the modern discipline of geography have only recently been addressed. 11 Mackinder's work helps illustrate the wider cultural crisis within which geopolitics take shape and the logic by which the formation of geopolitics reconres nineteenth-century notions of culture.
In his Democratic Ideals and Reality Mackinder looked back with revealing ambivalence on the success of German geography, "Judged from the standpoint of Berlin, it was a wonderful thing to have impressed Kultur, or Strategical mentality, on the educated class of a whole people, but from the standpoint of civilisation at large it was a fatal momentum to have given to a nation." 12 In abbreviated form, Mackinder's phrase "Kultur, or Strategical mentality" encapsulates the conceptual knot linking the definitional confusion of "culture"--in translation across a variety of languages--to the formation of geopolitics. Among the many things condensed in Mackinder's use of the German term "Kultur" is the logical culmination of Ratzel's attempt, and failure, to unify a science of cultural studies (Kulturwissenschaft) around geography.
Mackinder's diagnosis of the "fatal momentum" of Kultur is attended by a barely concealed admiration for the "wonderful thing" that made geography into the teaching of "strategical mentality." Part of Mackinder's ambivalence clearly comes from the fact that he had been advocating this kind of teaching since the 1880s. If the difference for Mackinder lies in the distinction between Kultur and "civilisation at large," this only makes the key role of "culture" in the formation of geopolitics all the more visible. It also conceals the extent to which Mackinder's own "educational battle" in the 1880s to bring geography into schools and universities formed part of a complex collaboration and competition amongst geographers from different European countries who together were shaping their disciplines to legitimate, and be legitimized by, official nationalism.
One immediate source for Mackinder's arguments was J. Scott Keltie's influential 1885 report on geographical education throughout Europe. 13 In an appendix, Keltie's report translates the curriculum statement for the military academy of the University of Berlin. This "'Instruction' as to the Scope and Method of Studies to be Observed at the Kriegs-Akademie, Berlin"--a title echoed in Mackinder's "On the Scope and Methods of Geography"--has strong affinities with Mackinder's claim for the "continuous argument" of geography: "The circle of sciences, comprehended generally under the name of geography, forms the transition and concatenating link between the natural and historical sciences" (GE, 111). The imperialist "scope and methods" of each educational program is suggested in the final section, with its significant emphasis on the term "culture":
A systematic scientific conception of geography will take the whole earth's surface as the subject of its comparative studies, and all the more when at the present time European culture is pressing forward on every hand with rapid progress. In consideration, however, of the historical task devolving on Europe, to become the representative and leader of this world-wide culture, the student in his historico-geographical studies will specially apply his mind to the appreciation of the physical conration of Europe, and how it exercised such influence on its inhabitants as to qualify them for such a mission. [GE, 111]
Here, perhaps, is registered the birth of geopolitics. If so, it is more than an embryonic version of the U.S. fascination for Haushofer's program to make the man in the street "think geopolitically" and to train the nation's leaders to "act geopolitically." 14 Translated for an English evaluation of the place of geography in education throughout Europe, which in turn served an international readership, Keltie's report is a document that registers the moment in which a discourse of geopolitics takes shape. In its formulation of "European culture," it registers the roots of geopolitics in an entanglement of geography and culture, anticipating the terms of Mackinder's equation between Kultur and "strategical mentality."
Mackinder's "political geography" draws its rhetorical strength not only from the new imperialist and militarist discourse of post-1870 Europe, however. The generalist vision of his 1887 address also looks back to the mainstream of nineteenth-century European geography and its encyclopedic ambition to provide an inclusive description of the earth and its inhabitants. This had been Alexander Humboldt's ambition, in his travel writings and his Kosmos; it had been Carl Ritter's, too, in his Erdkunde. Perhaps the fullest, most ambitious attempt to realize the grand narrative claims of nineteenth-century geography was the nineteen-volume La Nouvelle géographie universelle by Elisée Reclus. Reclus's work provided a monumental precedent for Mackinder's vision of a geography that sought to follow the "continuous argument" from "physical geography" to "political geography." 15 From his first major work on physical geography, La Terre (1868-69), through the Nouvelle géographie universelle (1876-94), up to his final, six-volume work of "social geography," L'Homme et la terre (1905-08), Reclus had followed just such an argument.
For Reclus, however, the argument of geography was a matter of human emancipation. Writing in the second volume of La Terre , Reclus articulated the connection between the work of geography and the work of political emancipation:
Human beings, these "reasonable beings" who love so much to boast about their free will, nonetheless cannot make themselves independent of the climates and of the physical conditions of the country they inhabit. Our liberty, in our relations to the Earth, consists in understanding the laws of these relations to confirm the liberty of our existence. 16
Liberty was a theme Reclus would never abandon. The experience of imprisonment as a Communard a few years later only helped confirm that theme more clearly with the simultaneous formulation of his anarchist position and his project to write the Universal Geography. 17
Liberty, of course, was also the great theme of nineteenth-century liberalism. In the Universal Geography's effort to realize the full emancipatory impulse of the nineteenth century's grand narrative ambitions, it underscores the role of geography in helping shape the principles of both freedom and science in what Jean-François Lyotard calls "the narrative of legitimation" of knowledge in the nineteenth century. 18 The central place of emancipatory principles in nineteenth-century geography shows through even in the "new imperialist" rhetoric with which the Berlin "Instruction" characterizes Europe's "mission" as "representative and leader of this world-wide culture" (GE, 111). The same terms--with a different inflection from that given in Keltie's translation--belong to the emancipatory claims with which Reclus conditions the narrative of his Universal Geography. Reclus, in his introduction of 1876, writes that Europe's "inhabitants, whatever their failings and vices, or their state of barbarism in some respects, still impel the rest of mankind as regards material and mental progress." 19
"Progress" for Reclus, of course, has a different political significance than for the curricular "Instruction" (or its likely English readers). That very difference, however, draws attention to the importance for geography of the definitional confusion over the term "culture" in the formulations "European culture" and "world-wide culture." For Reclus, "first place" (UG, 3) is accorded to Europe, the historical and geographical formation of whose "material and mental progress" is made the narrative condition for a "universal" geography. This eurocentric imperative also informs the Berlin "Instruction," both in its explanation for why special curricular emphasis is to be placed on the physical geography of Europe, and in the implied synonymy of "European culture" and "this world-wide culture" (GE, 111).
What gets blurred in the Berlin "Instruction"'s use of the term "culture," however, is a hypothesis on which Reclus's "universal" descriptive geography depends: that the "progress," or "laws of liberty," of Europe's historical development may be linked to the universal history of humankind. This hypothesis of culture in the broadest sense might be said to be the founding ideal of European historical geography. Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91) is a crucial antecedent. While attacking the presumptive superiority of European culture, it made European geography the condition for imagining what principle of development or culture (Bildung) connects European culture with the history of all humankind. 20 The connection between the two remains a hypothesis for a whole range of nineteenth-century formulations of culture. The multiplicity of senses that Raymond Williams has shown to accrue around this keyword depends, moreover, on a complex translation effect, by which, for example, Matthew Arnold translates the German idealist notion of Bildung as culture. 21 The specifically geographical formulation of eurocentrism in this hypothesis of culture conditions many of the most ambitious nineteenth-century narratives; G. W. F. Hegel's Philosophy of History, Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization, and Karl Marx's Capital are some of the more influential. 22
The rhetoric of Mackinder's call for a "new geography" is shaped around the ambiguous legacy of this older geography, hence the "duty" of the geographer to make a "bridge" over the "abyss" that is "upsetting the equilibrium of our culture." What makes Mackinder such a revealing re in the crisis of legitimation at the turn of the century is how he attempts to remodel the old into the new imperialist vision. If his crucial talent as a synthesizer of knowledge enabled him to reproduce the theoretical arguments of Ratzel while masking their real consequences for the discipline of geography, it also enabled him to abbreviate the emancipatory narrative claims of that earlier "universal" geography embodied in the work of Reclus.
Outlining his "geographical philosophy" in 1908, Mackinder wrote:
When you have got your myriad facts, registered by the labour of all the generations which have gradually built up the map of the world in its infinite detail, you have then got to play with them. You have to acquire such facility in this respect that you are able to see with the mind's eye, not the mere map of Italy with the boot at the end of it, but the blue sky, and the blue sea, and the brilliant sun. . . . You must be able to see this image, and then to prolong it by an effort of imagination beyond the horizon. Thus to be able to visualize is of the very essence of geographical power. 23
Confirming the rhetorical power of synthesis in Mackinder's "new geography," this characteristic statement underscores the central place of visualization in that rhetoric. Visualization, as Derek Gregory argues, is at the foundation of the modern discipline of geography; its "Cartesian perspectivalism" defines what O Tuathail, following Gregory, argues is the key feature of Mackinder's "geopolitical gaze." 24 In his series of geography textbooks, which reflect an ambitious attempt to reshape all aspects of education from kindergarten to the university, Mackinder sought to provide a solution for the problem Joyce formulates in Stephen's encounter with his geography textbook. 25 For Stephen the geography textbook reveals a contestation of political perspectives through the colors green and maroon, which his school-mate Fleming has used to illustrate the picture of the world, and which Stephen associates with the colors of Davitt and Parnell: "He turned over the flyleaf and looked wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man" (PA, 16). If for Mackinder the geography textbook ought to resolve such contradictions, simultaneously instructing the pupil "what politics meant" and "where the universe ended," Mackinder's emphasis on the formative imaginative experience of the child's "varying at will the pattern seen" nonetheless draws attention to a process of "play" in visualization reminscent of the auditory, verbal, and visual play inaugurated by Stephen's "green wothe." 26
Some of the founding ambiguities of Mackinder's "geographical philosophy" emerge in his most important geography textbook, Britain and the British Seas . The influential first chapter, "The Position of Britain," provides a revealing illustration of how he uses the visual aid of the map. In the process, he abbreviates, almost subliminally, a whole history of geographic representation from classical antiquity to the present, in which the position of Britain shifts from the periphery to the center of the world:
Before the great geographical discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the known lands lay almost wholly in the Northern Hemisphere and spread in a single continent from the shores of Spain to those of Cathay. Britain was then at the end of the world--almost out of the world. . . . During two thousand years Britain was at the margin, not in the centre, of the theatre of politics, and for most practical purposes her position was accurately shown in the maps of the Greek geographers [. 2 and 3] and in the fantastic charts of the medieval monks [. 4 and 5]. 27
Mackinder's emphasis on Britain's peripheral position is illustrated by two ancient maps, the thirteenth-century Mappa Mundi that places the British Isles at the bottom left-hand portion of the map, and the Greek map according to Eratosthenes.
The maps serve more than an illustrative purpose, however, as becomes clearer in the second paragraph, "The historical meaning of the Columbian discoveries can best be realised by turning a terrestrial globe so that Britain may be at the point nearest to the eye ( 6)." (BS, 1) As "the eye" of the reader turns from the ancient to the contemporary world maps, the gradually emerging contours of a familiar Mediterranean yield suddenly to the global projection. All the while illustrating the text's argument about the position of Britain, this sequencing of maps abbreviates, diagrams, and illustrates a history of geographical exploration as a history of the world. The text sustains the argument about the position of Britain, although it has modulated into an argument about how the "globe-wide" world may best be viewed, geographically and historically, from the point of view of Britain (BS, 13). This modulation becomes complete when the text completes the sequence of res by reference to a "photograph of a globe showing the true form of the North Atlantic" (BS, 5):
Europe, Asia, Africa, and the two Americas are thus included within the visible hemisphere; but the chief feature even of the land-half of the globe is a great arm of mediterranean ocean, Atlantic and Arctic, winding north-ward . . . . No flat chart can give a correct impression of the form of the North Atlantic. Only a globe can suggest its vast bulging centre, and the relative insignificance of its Arctic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean recesses [ 7]. . . . For most purposes, therefore, the North Atlantic is a rounded basin, with eastward, northward, and westward gulfs, and a southern exit. But the five historic parts of the world are accessible from its waters, and for the generations that followed Columbus history centred increasingly round its shores. Thus Britain gradually became the central, rather than the terminal land of the world. [BS, 1-4]
The effect of this series of images is to produce an argument seemingly independent of text, a field of visual play that owes something to early developments in the technology of the moving picture. Mackinder was indeed attentive to turn-of-the-century developments in multimedia, as indicated by his work for the Visual Instruction Committee of the Colonial Office established in 1902. 28 If, as Tuathail argues, Mackinder's "conscious reaction" to "new technological developments like cinema," was a "modernism of reaction," the reactionary formalism that results is founded on a thoroughgoing ambiguity, displacing geography's "Cartesian perspectivalism" within a discursive frame of reference that includes the simultaneous emergence of high modernism and mass culture. (CG, 35)
Mackinder's use of maps stands in revealing contrast to that of Ratzel, whose idea of the "Oecumene" Mackinder cites to formulate the expression "globe-wide world." At the end of volume 2 of Anthropogeographie, Ratzel presents a "classificatory map of humankind in the framework of the Oecumene" ( 8) to indicate what he has called "the anthropogeographical picture (Bild) of humankind" depicting the spread of different peoples throughout history over the surface of the earth (A, 470-71). Emphasizing the difficulty of representing, without distortion, the true geographical "picture" or "image" (Bild) of humankind, Ratzel invokes the model of realist pictoral perspective:
To the geographical image/picture of humankind belong, besides the horizontal distribution that we determine through the depiction of the boundaries of the Oecumene, and the shadings of distribution density--to these belong also the distances, in which the various parts of humankind are ordered one behind the other according to historical age, and the heights to which better-positioned or culturally better-equipped peoples have risen. 29
Ratzel's imaginary picture illustrates the problem of human perspective that must vanish in the production of the geopolitical image. As Mackinder turns Ratzel's anthropogeographical picture of the world into his "globe-wide" world, the question of anthropology disappears. Mackinder's geopolitical image thus constitutes the riddling afterimage of all those attempts to systematize and explain human history as the cultural development of all humankind.
Much of Mackinder's political geography, and geopolitics generally, may be derived from the striking juxtaposition of the ancient map of the world, with the Mediterranean in the center, and the world map organized with an "eye" on Britain. The formalist logic of this play on the visual image is most evident in the middle two maps of the four-part sequence. Here, without the distraction of the details on the medieval map or the claim to realism in the photograph of the globe, there is a stark contrast of black against white. The black and white spaces of the ancient map effect, indeed, a momentary confusion while the eye sorts out the relation of black, corresponding to land, and white corresponding to water; a correspondence that is confirmed as one turns to the continents and oceans of the global vision. This perceptual play of re against ground is reminiscent of the perceptual experiments in literary and artistic modernism discussed by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious and Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious. If the formalist play of re and ground results in what Jameson calls the modernist "declaration of independence of the image as such," the modernist logic of this "optical unconscious," in Krauss's terms, is as applicable to Mackinder's political geography as it is to what Jameson traces in the "perceptual vocation" of Joseph Conrad's "sensorium" and to what Krauss traces to the origins of abstract art. 30 It is according to such a logic that Mackinder establishes a central aspect of his political geography, the interplay of sea-power and land-power.
The reversal of re against ground is by no means incidental to the overall argument. In 4 the land is white, and the sea black, something that surely contributes to the initial confusion of looking across to the blank spaces of the sea and the blackened land masses of 2. Similarly, the curious effect of the photograph of a globe is, in part, produced by the visual contrast of white continents and black seas, juxtaposed with the white seas and black continents of the preceding image. This alternating pattern produces a formalist ambiguity, not only in the sense that what stands out as re in the one map--the shape of continents--becomes ground in another map, but also in the sense that on any one map re and ground might be reversed.
The visual trick of what might be called an unconscious optics of geopolitics serves to place the image of Britain in particular relation to that educational and formalist imperative of the child's "varying at will the pattern seen." Concluding the argument of his first chapter, Mackinder writes:
Seen thus in relation to earlier and to later history, Britain is possessed of two geographical qualities, complementary rather than antagonistic: insularity and universality. Before Columbus, the insularity was more evident than the universality. . . . After Columbus, value began to attach to the ocean-highway, which is in its nature universal. [BS, 11]
There is good reason to recognize here, if not the central paradigm of geopolitics, at least one of its most characteristic abbreviations of world history. It constitutes the rhetorical power of the opening to Mackinder's 1904 address to the Royal Geographical Society, "The Geographical Pivot of History," in the argument that, "from the present time forth, in the post-Columbian age, we shall again have to deal with a closed political system, and none the less that it will be one of world-wide scope" (SM, 30).
Virtually the same abbreviation of world history accompanies what is probably the first use of the word "geopolitics" in the English language. In the same year that Britain and the British Seas was published, Emil Reich, the Hungarian-born historian who settled in England in the 1890s, gave special emphasis to the term in his review of the monumental Cambridge Modern History. 31 Nor is Reich's "geo-political" an isolated formulation, since it recurs in his noted Foundations of Modern Europe , and again in the two-volume Handbook of Geography , whose opening chapter closely follows the shape of Mackinder's argument. 32 Reich reiterates Mackinder in arguing that "English history falls, from the geo-political point of view, naturally into two divisions, prae-Columbian history and post-Columbian history." 33 Reproducing this paradigmatic abbreviation of world history, Reich codifies Mackinder's "position of Britain" as a specifically geopolitical image.
Even as Emil Reich was codifying Mackinder's "position of Britain" as a specifically geopolitical image, a very different reading of Britain's unique position was being advanced by Elisée Reclus in his last monumental work, L'Homme et la terre. As Reclus argued in the final volume's analysis of contemporary history, Britain occupies a unique position because "Each movement of the British Isles, which little England symbolises, has its repercussions throughout the entire world." 34 Entitled "England and its Cortège," Reclus's analysis of British imperialism emphasizes the contradiction around which Mackinder's geopolitical image of Britain is shaped: "The life of the nation finds itself thus split and determined, in certain respects, by a contradictory politics, since it must act all at once to safeguard the ferocious insularity of the homeland, and ever more actively to maintain its relation to its colonies in order to assure the means of conquest and domination over tributaries spread in all parts of the earth" (Ht, 6:1-2). Reclus's alternative reading of the "position of Britain"--based, indeed, on a rereading of the opening chapter of Britain and the British Seas--calls attention to the fundamental ambiguity of Mackinder's geopolitical image. (Ht, 4:460)
If that image seems singularly fixed on the British nation-state, the fascination with its fixed position on the world map is not a result of the Britishness of the image, but rather the potential global rearrangement of the world and of world history that it makes imaginable. To be sure, Mackinder's Britain and the British Seas is fairly explicitly premised on projecting the political unity of the British state and its Empire--thus the "geographical qualities" of "insularity" and "universality" are said to be "complementary." The very terms, however, in which Mackinder attempts to resolve the split imperatives of national sovereignty and imperial power call attention all the more clearly both to that contradiction and its attendant political instability. Mackinder's imperialist geopolitical image is not only haunted by Reclus's anarchist geopolitics; its very power depends on the anarchist thesis that the nation-state is a merely transitory form, a thesis that geopolitics articulates in the ambiguous imperialism and anarchism of its own image.
Mackinder's heartland thesis, while appearing to make the "pivot" of history something objectively given by global, physical conditions--the dichotomy of land and sea, and the distribution of the continents--is an extended argument for welding the British nation to its imperial system. 35 What gives the "geographical pivot of history" strategic interest, after all, is not the fixed position of the state within a set global order, but rather the very instability of political forms in a changing international "balance of powers."
The principles of "social geography" that enable Reclus to redirect Mackinder's geopolitical image toward a critical analysis of conquest and domination have a striking resemblance to later marxist theories, particularly from Lenin onward, of imperialism, uneven development, and the global reach of capital. In this radical socialist sense, as Yves Lacoste argues, L'Homme et la terre anticipates twentieth-century critiques of imperialism. 36 Reclus outlines these principles in his introduction to L'Homme et la terre, "'Class struggle,' the quest for equilibrium, and the sovereignty of the individual's self-determination (la décision souveraine de l'individu), these are three types of phenomena that are revealed to us in the study of social geography and which, in the chaos of things, prove sufficiently constant for us to be able to give them the name of 'laws'" (Ht, 1:iv). Among the many striking points to emerge from these "laws" is the way "class struggle" and "the search for equilibrium" both follow from the splitting of all human collectivities as the result of "an unequal development" (Ht, 1:iv).
The anarchist politics informing these laws explains not only the "repression" of Reclus in the formation of academic geography, but also his rejection by marxists, for whom "the sovereignty of the individual," for example, would have been suspect in its utopian refusal to engage in a politics of wresting control of the state. 37 Consigned to the utopian nowhere of nineteenth-century anarchism, Reclus's geography nonetheless illuminates the persistence with which the ambiguities of nineteenth-century ideas of progress, evolution, and culture shape the formation of twentieth-century geopolitical paradigms.
Most revealing is the insistence with which Reclus sustains the eurocentric imperative for hypothesizing the connection between European culture and the cultural development of human history as a whole. The narrative condition of the Universal Geography's emphasis on the "moral ascendancy and industrial preponderance" of Europe had depended on the ambiguous, utopian future condition that "equality will obtain in the end" and "what we call civilisation will have 'its centre everywhere, its periphery nowhere'" (UG, 3-4). Between the completion of the Universal Geography and work on L'Homme et la terre, Reclus reformulated the terms of this future "equilibrium" to argue, in an essay entitled "The Hegemony of Europe" , that Europe had become "the centre of equilibrium between the forces of the human race." 38
Reclus's notion of "hegemony" is premised on a eurocentric articulation of the accelerated unification of the world under the forces of global capital. Such forces involve a process of "Europeanisation"; all parts of the world, he writes in L'Homme et la terre, are being drawn into "the atmosphere of a general culture, of a predominantly European type" (Ht, 2:139). The ambiguities with which Reclus formulates the connection between European culture and the global strategies of domination and conquest come close to the leverage Antonio Gramsci gives his key concept of "hegemony"--in the outline, for instance, of his "Hegemony of Western Culture over the Whole World Culture." 39 The affinities are interesting to note since Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" has played a particularly important role in current cultural studies, opening nineteenth-century formulations of "culture" to anticolonial contestations of eurocentric assumptions. 40
Reclus's perspective is necessarily eurocentric, but its relevance for his analysis of the means of imperial conquest and domination sheds light on the conceptual riddle of culture that haunts the imperialist formation of geopolitics. Mackinder's ambiguous evaluation of the success and "fatal momentum" of "Kultur, or Strategical mentality"--anticipating later repudiations of Nazi Geopolitik--now suggests that Mackinder's political geography is constructed to condense and displace the connection between European culture and military strategy. This is necessary for Mackinder's imperial geography because what for Reclus is only implicit in the formulation of "Europe's hegemony"--anticolonial contestation of European culture--is what imperialism seeks to make unconscious. In this sense the geopolitical image might be considered the shared dreamwork--"Europe's hegemony"--of both anarchism and imperialism.
Something of the spirit of Reclus's conception of Europe's hegemony shows through in his remarks on the effects of "Europeanisation" on the "citizen of the world:"
In spite of his aversion to the foreigner, in spite of the tariff which protects him against outside business, in spite of the cannon facing the two sides of the tabooed line, he eats bread which comes from India, drinks coffee which is harvested by the Negroes or the Malaysians, dresses himself in material made from American fibre, uses devices which are the product of the combined work of a thousand inventors of every time and race, experiences the sentiments and the thoughts which millions of men experience with him from one end of the world to the other. 41
In what sense the "sentiments" and "thoughts" of this cosmopolitan "he" might be "experienced" by millions of other men and women remains, of course, open. This is precisely the sort of question that Mackinder's geopolitical image of Britain seeks to foreclose through formalist abstraction. The place of Reclus in the formation of geopolitics provides a reminder that this foreclosure is, in fact, an open question that not only haunts, but that also determines any reading of the geopolitical image.
Mackinder's "new geography" is clearly premised on the politics of the "new imperialism." Nonetheless, Britain and the British Seas, whose "idea," Mackinder notes, "was first suggested to me by the needs of some foreign students visiting Britain" (BS, vi), can only ever reiterate the "play" of the pupil's imaginative "varying at will the pattern seen." For all the ocularcentrism of Mackinder's geography, and geopolitics generally, the geopolitical image is always open to the fullest kind of contested cultural play. The "green wothe" of Joyce's infant artist is one example, but there are many more. Another touchstone of literary modernism, Gertrude Stein's Geography and Plays , is full of such examples--both in its title, and in its most celebrated line from the poem "Sacred Emily": "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." 42 Like Stephen's "green wothe," this "signature phrase" for Stein's experimental literary modernism might also be read as an exemplary geopolitical image, particularly in the extended use to which Stein put it in her children's book about the nine-year-old girl Rose in The World in Round . 43 Used as an epigraph to that book, the formalist play of the phrase and its circular ambiguity ("rose is . . ." or "a rose is . . .") both illustrates and contests the elementary geographical fact that "the world is round." 44
The formation of "geopolitics" over the turn of the century is not a history of geographical institutions. It is, rather, the story of imaginary institutions of geography. Indeed, the foundation in 1923 of Karl Haushofer's famous Institut für Geopolitik turns out, as O Tuathail so well describes, to be a myth, an "imaginary" embellishment on German geopolitical theories that reveals perhaps more about the "unconscious fears and fantasies" of U.S. political discourse than it does about the role of Geopolitik in shaping Nazi policy. (CG, 114) Far from suggesting that geopolitical theories have no effect on the real world, what this imaginary geopolitical institute underscores is the fact that the influence of geopolitics persists long after its failed institution as a "science."
The history of geopolitics traced here is a genealogy of an imaginary institution whose contours are defined not only by the reactionary politics of European imperialism, but also by the emancipatory politics of European socialism and anarchism. Perhaps no image captures the spirit of the moment in which geopolitics took shape better than the Great Globe proposed by Elisée Reclus for the World Exhibition of 1900. Exceeding both the scale and spectacle of previous globes, such as the one built for the Great Exhibition in 1851, Reclus's "dream monument" sought to achieve a scientific precision in geographic measurement, description, and representation after the pattern of Enlightenment ideals, rationalism, and scientific inquiry. 45 In the elaborate scaffolding of galleries, ladders, and elevators necessary for its exhibition, it offers a striking illustration of Timothy Mitchell's thesis that the apparatus of nineteenth-century representation and its "metaphysic of modernity" constructs "the world-as-exhibition." 46 It is, indeed, a perfect example of those ambiguous "dream images" of the nineteenth century discussed in Walter Benjamin's "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," from which Mitchell draws to reformulate Martin Heidegger's "age of the world picture."
This image encapsulates the ambiguity with which geopolitics is formed by the rejection and incorporation of nineteenth-century forms of representation. In presenting his project at the Sixth International Geographical Congress in London in 1895, Reclus suggested the accuracy of relief might make the Globe a model for the photographic reproduction of maps, possibly creating "a complete revolution in the cartographic industry." 47 Mackinder's photograph of a globe, the last in the sequence of images demonstrating the position of Britain, is an interesting modification of Reclus's ideal. Anticipating late twentieth-century satellite images of the earth from space, its characteristically nineteenth-century fascination with the photographic image illustrates the turn-of-the-century optics around which the geopolitical image constitutes its modernist perspective. 48
Chris GoGwilt is associate professor of English and co-director of the Literary Studies Program at Fordham University. He is the author of The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire . This essay is adapted from the first chapter of The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock, 1860-1940 (forthcoming) and is used with the permission of the publishers, Stanford University Press. Reproduction of material from the forthcoming book in any manner requires the permission of the publishers.
* Unless otherwise noted, all translations into English are my own. Of the many people to whom I am indebted for insights, comments, and suggestions, I would like to thank, in particular, John M. Archer, Fraser Eaton, Fawzia Mustafa, and Gerry O'Sullivan.
1. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 7; hereafter abbreviated PA.
2. Homi Bhabha, "Anxious Nations, Nervous States," in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 210.
3. See Georóid O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), hereafter abbreviated CG. For earlier book-length surveys see Geoffrey Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1985), and Patrick O'Sullivan, Geopolitics (London: Croom Helm, 1986). See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).
4. Although this essay is not a diagnosis of the current state of cultural studies, the parallels are particularly interesting given that geopolitical problems occupy something of a central position in cultural studies today. Some general indications include the prominence of geography and geographers in recent debates within cultural studies (see, in particular, Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations [Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994]), and the intersection of these interests with directions in postcolonial studies (see, for example, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism [New York: Vintage, 1994]; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [London: Routledge, 1992]; and Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991]).
5. See, in particular, O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics. The reader is urged to compare O Tuathail's important discussion of Mackinder's work with my rather different argument, which was formed before that book was published.
6. H. J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (London: Constable and Co., 1919), 194.
7. H. J. Mackinder, The Scope and Methods of Geography and the Geographical Pivot of History (1887; London: The Royal Geographical Society, 1951), 194; hereafter abbreviated SM.
8. "Geography must be a continuous argument, and the test of whether a given point is to be included or not must be this:--Is it pertinent to the main line of argument?" (SM, 24)
9. See Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropo-Geographie oder Grundzüge der Anwendung der Erdkunde auf die Geschichte (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1882), 1:20; hereafter abbreviated A.
10. For this story see Woodruff Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 140-61. Friedrich Ratzel is the main re in that story. For accounts of Ratzel's work see also Günther Buttmann, Friedrich Ratzel: Leben und Werk eines deutschen Geographen, 1844-1904 (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1977); and James Hunter, Perspectives on Ratzel's Political Geography (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983). For selected extracts of Ratzel's work in English translation see Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer: Geopolitics in Action (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1942).
11. See the volume of essays Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); esp. the introduction and Gerhard Sandner and Mechtild Rössler, "Geography and Empire in Germany, 1871-1945," 115-27.
12. H. J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 26; Mackinder's emphasis.
13. J. Scott Keltie, Geographical Education: Report to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society (London: John Murray, 1885); hereafter abbreviated GE. See O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics, 84-85.
14. Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer, 16. See also the revealing examination of American mythologies of "Geopolitik" in CG, 111-40.
15. Mackinder's respect for Reclus's work is indicated, albeit ambiguously, by the inclusion of Reclus in a series he was editing. The title of the series, The Regions of the World, already suggests Mackinder's own abbreviation of the encyclopedic reach of an earlier geography. In the prospectus Reclus is listed as a contributor entrusted with the region Western Europe and the Mediterranean. In the end, Reclus's work and that of his fellow anarchist geographer Kropotkin never appeared. It is nonetheless revealing that, when Mackinder published his own contribution, Britain and the British Seas in 1902, Reclus, at that time both well-known as a geographer and notorious as an anarchist, red so prominently in Mackinder's editorial vision. It points to the shaping presence, albeit edited, of an anarchist geography and politics in the reactive formation of geopolitics.
16. Elisée Reclus, La Terre , 2:622; cited in Béatrice Giblin's introduction to L'Homme et la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1982), 64.
17. For this point and on Reclus generally see Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism (London: Croom Helm, 1979).
18. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31. Lyotard's argument traces two major versions of this narrative. The first, "more political" one whose subject is "humanity as the hero of liberty" is associated with the politics of French primary education; Lyotard traces the second "more philosophical" version back to the ideals of German education/culture (Bildung) as instituted with Wilhelm von Humboldt's foundation of the University of Berlin. What Lyotard suggestively calls the "Bildung-effect" of the second higher educational ideal of "the disinterested pursuit of learning" has a particular bearing on what I call here the hypothesis of culture in the most general sense. A "Bildung-effect," for example, shapes Matthew Arnold's notion of culture in Culture and Anarchy. Already evident in Arnold's translation of the ideal of German Bildung is the attempted combination of the politics of primary education and the political contradictions of higher educational ideals. If Reclus's unwavering insistence on the quest for liberty suggests Lyotard's first "narrative of freedom," Reclus, a student of Carl Ritter's at Berlin, also held to the ideals of that second, "more philosophical" narrative associated with the model of German higher education. The hero, for Reclus, was both science and liberty.
19. Elisée Reclus, The Universal Geography: The Earth and Its Inhabitants, ed. E. G. Ravenstein (London: Virtue and Co., n.d. [1876]), 3; hereafter abbreviated UG.
20. Such an abbreviated account of Herder's argument necessarily elides the complexity both of that text and its reception, complexities discussed recently in Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). The foundational passage, which leaves its imprint on Reclus, Ratzel, and Mackinder, reads as follows:
The unique Mediterranean sea, how much has it become the determinant of all Europe. . . . Were one to change the borders of these lands [that surround the Mediterranean], take away a channel here, close up a waterway there; then the development [Bildung] and the laying waste [Verwüstung] of the world, the fate of whole peoples and parts of the world through centuries takes a different course. [Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 47-48]
21. Arnold translates Wilhelm von Humboldt's ideal of Bildung in the epigraph for his report on education (Matthew Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent [London: Macmillan and Co., 1868], 177). Discussed in that work, it also shapes the spirit and title of Culture and Anarchy. This blurring of senses of culture is by no means, as Williams suggests, merely an English Bildung-effect, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 91; and idem, Culture and Society: 1750-1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). Nor is it only the European and North American "Bildung-effect" Lyotard describes. As Gauri Viswanathan has shown, the colonial shaping of educational ideals opens the translation effect of "culture" to a great many more inflections, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
22. Buckle's History of Civilization in England, noted for its emphasis on the influence of geography on human history, provides a useful point of reference for the geographical formulation of eurocentrism: "looking at the history of the world, as a whole, the tendency has been, in Europe, to subordinate nature to man; out of Europe to subordinate man to nature. . . . The great division, therefore, between European civilization and non-European civilization, is the basis of the philosophy of history" (Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England [1857; London: Oxford University Press, 1911], 1;115). The formulation is a particularly useful point of reference for a great many liberal versions of the hypothesis of culture, perhaps especially in that it suggests the highly unstable, imaginary anchor of eurocentrism for nineteenth-century narratives. I shall pursue this point in a further stage of the current project, turning to the form of narrative not yet addressed here, namely, the form of the novel.
23. H. J. Mackinder, The Development of Geographical Teaching Out of Nature-Study (London: George Philip, 1908), 7.
24. The "problematic of visualization" in geography is taken up at length in Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), esp. 15-69; O Thuatail takes this issue up in the first chapter of Critical Geopolitics, 21-55, esp. 35.
25. The link between primary and university education in Mackinder's vision is summed up by the nickname given to the courses Mackinder organized, at the request of Richard Burdon Haldane, Secretary of State for War, for senior army officers at the London School of Economics. Taught from 1906 until 1914, the years in which Mackinder produced his school textbooks, they came to be known as "Haldane's Mackindergarten" (W. H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 35).
26. Mackinder, The Development of Geographical Teaching, 1.
27. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 1; hereafter abbreviated BS. The references to res correspond to Mackinder's with the difference that I have reproduced the corresponding Greek and medieval maps together. Mackinder sets my res 2 and 3 at the end of the chapter to illustrate the supplementary note on the word "world" to which I turn in the following section.
28. See Mackinder, India: Eight Lectures (London: George Philip and Son, 1910), 67; see also CG, 89.
29. Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie. Zweiter Teil: Die Geographische Verbreitung des Menschen (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1891), 614.
30. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 230-31; and Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1993), esp. 1-27.
31. See Emil Reich, "Recent Historical Methods and the Cambridge Modern History," in The Monthly Review, vol. 9 (November 1902): 117-132.
32. See Emil Reich, Handbook of Geography: Descriptive and Mathematical, 2 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1908). The book is a testament to Reich's sense of the importance of "what [the author] has ventured to call geopolitics" (vi).
33. Reich, Handbook of Geography, 1:3. Reich's codification of the geopolitical image of Britain is enacted with a formalist gesture not only toward the natural sciences, but also toward the hard sciences of mathematics, physics, and astronomy: "England has now become the centre of the political and commercial world. Herschel has well proved, that she occupies the geometrical centre of all the great continental masses of the globe" ; a claim reiterated in volume 2, the mathematical part of the Handbook .
34. Reclus, L'Homme et la terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905-08), 6:1, hereafter abbreviated Ht.
35. See in particular SM, 43.
36. See Yves Lacoste, "The Geographical and the Geopolitical," in Pascal Girot and Eleonore Kofman, International Geopolitical Analysis: A Selection from Hérodote (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 14. Lacoste adds that in its "analysis of imperialist rivalries, their methods of conquest and territorial control" the work remains unsurpassed .
37. Kristin Ross argues that Reclus's social geography "had to be repressed" for the field of French academic geography "to take institutional shape" (Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988], 19; see also 90-94).
The liberal-sounding term "equilibrium" and Reclus's quotation marks around "class struggle" might well have aroused marxists' suspicions. A notable example of Reclus's active neglect in marxist debates is provided by G. V. Plekhanov's 1906 review of L. Metchnikoff's analysis of the geographical causes of oriental despotism, in which Plekhanov uncovers an anarchist tendency in Metchnikoff's reference to Reclus. See Anne Bailey and Josep R. Llobera, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Science and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 66. For an extensive discussion of the differences between Reclus's anarchism and marxism, see Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism (London: Croom Helm, 1979), esp. 131.
38. Reclus, "The Hegemony of Europe" , quoted in Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 240.
39. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 416-418. Gramsci's eurocentrism is also made clear in this section: "European culture . . . is the only historically and concretely universal culture" .
40. The work of Stuart Hall in this regard is decisive. See Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems," in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, eds. S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Wills (Hutchinson: CCCS, 1980), 15-47; and idem, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular,'" in People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), 227-240. I am thinking, too, of the use to which the Subaltern Studies group has put Gramscian ideas. See Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). The significance of Reclus turning to the use of the term "hegemony" in the mid 1890s is suggested by the genealogy of the concept offered by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), which has also shaped the conceptual use of the term today.
41. Reclus, "Quelques mots d'histoire," in La Societé Nouvelle (November 1894), quoted in Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism, 242.
42. Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 187.
43. See Cyrena N. Pondrum's discussion of what she calls Stein's "signature phrase" in the introduction to Geography and Plays, xlii-xlv.
44. Gertrude Stein, The World is Round (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), 5.
45. "Dream monument" is a translation of Reclus's own description of the design as "ce monument rêvé" in Reclus, "Project de construction d'un globe terrestre à l'echelle du 100,000e," in Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress, , 630.
46. Mitchell's reformulation of Heidegger reads as follows: "Non-Europeans encountered in Europe what one might call, echoing a phrase from Heidegger, the age of the world exhibition, or rather, the world-as-exhibition. World exhibition here refers not to an exhibition of the world but to the world conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition" (Colonising Egypt, 13). This final phrase, in particular, applies well to Reclus's account of the scaffolding needed to exhibit the Globe. In his project for the Great Globe, presented at the Sixth International Geographical Congress of 1895 held in London, Reclus conceived of a second globe, framing the scientific globe, in order to protect it from the weather (Reclus, "Project," 629-30). We might thus note that Gregory's reproduction of the 1897 illustration for the Paris World Exhibition of 1900 in fact represents only one part of the extraordinary utopian project, and, notably, the form imagined for exhibition. This form leaves out the actual globe, not only in its display of the outer model, but also in conceiving the inner vault as the screen for the projection of a vast panorama. See Gregory's description and illustration in Geographical Imaginations, 38.
47. Reclus, "Projet," 627.
48. See Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 65.
.
An intense new scholarly interest in the culture of modernist cities has captured the imagination of our fin de siècle--the Paris of Baudelaire and Manet; the Vienna of Freud and the secession; the Berlin of dada, Brecht, and Döblin; the New York of the Harlem Renaissance. No doubt such interest arose almost naturally out of imaginatively cross-disciplinary endeavors within the academy, but at least subliminally it gained its momentum from the widespread contemporary obsessions with issues of cultural memory. In the case of Vienna, which caught the American imagination in the new gilded age of the 1980s both as a plethora of cultural riches and as a secret warning about the end of liberal culture, there was the added fascination of what was best embodied in the title of the big French Vienna show, "The Joyous Apocalypse." 1 At the same time, much of this newer work on metropolitan culture seems energized by a pervasive sense of loss at a time when such major Western cities are caught in a maelstrom of transformations that make it desirable to hold on to an afterimage of these prototypically modernist cities and to fix that image in memory before the owl of Minerva completes its flight.
My larger claim in this essay is that issues of vision and visuality should be central concerns for literary scholars working as cultural historians. I hope to show through a set of examples that vision is a key aspect of the literary project of Vienna modernism. The dark underside of Vienna's celebrated visual culture, manifest in painting, design, and architecture, becomes visible in literary works rarely studied in terms of their deployment of visual metaphors or of the role that the visual plays in their narratives.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna literature is famous first and foremost for intense explorations of the problematics of language, its shortcomings and failures, and its role in the constitution of individual subjectivity and social identities. The focus on language as a medium as it characterizes the work of writers and intellectuals as diverse as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler; Ernst Mach and Karl Kraus; Fritz Mauthner and Sigmund Freud; Ludwig Wittgenstein and Robert Musil has always been recognized as Vienna's major contribution to modernism in an international field. In German literary criticism, Hofmannsthal's "The Letter of Lord Chandos" has become canonical as an articulation of the modernist crisis of poetic language that underlies so much of twentieth-century literature all the way to Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, and Ingeborg Bachmann. 2 The crisis of language was also intimately linked to the dissolution and transformation of traditional modes of narration. Austrian literature gave significant shape to several of the most far-reaching narrative innovations of modernism: firstly, variants of the narrated monologue (erlebte Rede), most famously in Franz Kafka, but also in Hofmannsthal's early stories from the 1890s; and, secondly, the stream of consciousness in Schnitzler, who developed the technique before Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce.
In research on classical modernism, this crisis of language was read as questioning the very feasibility of poetic speech. It was usually treated in isolation as an emblem for the aporias of literary modernism in general: the inability to carry on a literary tradition, the difficulty of securing a place for poetic language in a disenchanted world, and the failure to communicate in a way that gives lasting form to the chaos of life. These aporias in turn triggered the fervent desire for transcendence in some hermetic "other" language (Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kafka) and it led eventually to notions of a literature of silence, or more recently, of unrepresentability. Just as high modernism in the visual arts pursued the impossible dream of a pure visuality, modernist literature harbored a desire for a pure language of poetic form. While the crisis of language has also often been understood as a trigger for, or part of, a crisis of identity and its overcoming (Hofmannsthal's Chandos, Rilke's Malte, or, in a different way, Musil's Ulrich), the contemporary discourse about subjectivity, language, and visuality has opened up a new space for more precise theoretical readings of that link between the crisis of language and identity crisis. 3 Notions of the split or decentered subject permit us to go beyond the traditional codings of the modernist identity crisis as a binary opposition between a stable ego or self versus ego loss or deindividualization (Ich-Verlust or Ent-ichung). This older discourse of depersonalization and ego disintegration, often cast in existentialist terms, was implicitly built on assumptions of loss and nostalgia on the one hand and hopes for reconstitution and redemption of self and identity on the other. Such hopes have been subjected to withering critiques from various quarters, and today are difficult, at best, to sustain.
Such earlier literary criticism also failed to see how issues of visuality are central to the crisis of subjectivity articulated in literary texts as the crisis of language. What I will call the disturbance of vision flows from the experiences of urban life, and it is central to the issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality that deeply troubled all of the writers of the declining Habsburg Empire. Indeed, it seems plausible to claim that the identity crises at the center of so much Viennese literature are rooted in disturbances of vision that are anything but merely optical phenomena.
In this essay, I will offer three examples of the crisis of vision as related to the problematic relation of language and narrative in Vienna modernism--Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, and Musil. Each is significantly different from the others, but together they point to the centrality of disturbances of the visual field in a rapidly modernizing urban culture at and after the turn of the century.
When one hears about disturbed vision, one thinks not necessarily about the city, but about dreams, projections, and hallucinations, doppelgänger, spectres, phantasms, and the like. This discourse inevitably leads to the Freudian uncanny (das Unheimliche) and Freud's reading of the threat to eyesight in Hoffmann's Der Sandmann as fear of castration. Not surprisingly, Freud's analysis focuses on the space of the home and of family life as the originary space for disturbed vision. In that focus, Freud is significantly different from the literary examples I have in mind, where the disturbances of vision emerge primarily from encounters with the public, social world and in city streets. In Freud's text, public space as a threat to visual mastery does, however, appear at one point where he recounts a personal experience of the uncanny as repetition compulsion:
Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot summer afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while ago. 4
This passage contains key elements of that which interests me. The experience of the uncanny, which always threatens identity, emerges from a foreign urban scene that is coded as "other." The loss of spatial orientation is linked to the phenomenon of being seen, of being in the eye of the other. Urban space is coded as sexual, and the threat of female sexuality emanates from the invisible interior of these little houses. The disturbed flâneur departs precipitously in the scene described as well as in the text itself where Freud quickly turns to the more innocuous example of losing one's orientation in the forest fog; nature is refuge from an urban experience, which evidently had been too close for comfort.
In Hofmannsthal, a strikingly similar scene ends quite differently. But before I get to this, let me first turn to two of Hofmannsthal's fictions, "The Tale of the 672nd Night," a short text from 1895, and "The Letter of Lord Chandos," the letter of a lord to his mentor and patron Francis Bacon, which is one of the founding texts of literary high modernism. 5 Both texts appear in then-traditional forms of short prose, the fairy tale and the letter. With their subject matter displaced to the most unrealistic of literary genres, the fairy tale, and to another time and geographic space (Renaissance England), respectively, both texts begin with a description of an aesthetic existence typical of the fin de siècle. Lord Chandos is presented as a productive artist and writer, whereas the aesthetic sensibility of the merchant's son, the protagonist of the earlier tale, is entirely passive. Both res, however, share the total immersion in what Hofmannsthal called "preexistence," a kind of secularized, mystical, and cosmic union with all creatures and things. 6 Chandos describes this blissful state of mind before his breakdown: "In those days I, in a state of continuous intoxication, conceived the whole of existence as one great unit: the spiritual and physical worlds seemed to form no contrast, as little as did courtly and bestial conduct, art and barbarism, solitude and society; in everything I felt the presence of Nature; and in all expressions of Nature I felt myself." 7 The merchant's son, on the other hand, gains access to this state only after he has withdrawn entirely from society, thus making preexistence a secondary rather than primary phenomenon and marking it as aesthetic decadence in the vein of J. K. Huysmans' A Rebours, but with a historicist twist:
Gradually his eyes were opened to the fact that all the shapes and colors of the world were embodied in the things of his household. In the intertwining of [ornaments] he came to recognize an enchanted image of the interlocking wonders of the world. . . . For a long time he was intoxicated by [t]his great profound beauty that belonged to him, and all his days moved more beautifully and less emptily in the company of these household things, which were no longer anything dead or commonplace but a great heritage, the divine work of all the generations. 8
This passage, of course, represents the withdrawal of the aesthete into the ivory tower. One is reminded of what Freud much later described as the "oceanic feeling", and the specific dimension of aesthetic narcissism is obvious. 9 It is equally clear that Hofmannsthal's state of preexistence, with its blurring of boundaries between inside and outside, past and present, Ich and Nicht-Ich, already departs radically from the traditional mode of seeing as coded in Renaissance perpectivalism and in the Cartesian separation of body and mind. There is no longer a stable seeing subject that looks at an object. Where the seeing I/eye is dissolved in such secularized, mystical experience, death is never very far away; the psychic breakdown is predetermined. In the case of the merchant's son, "Yet he felt the emptiness of all these things as well as their beauty. Never did the thought of death leave him for long." ("672," 283)
Chandos's life after his breakdown, which deprives him of the ability to speak or to write, is also characterized by feelings of vacuity and inner stagnation, despondency and feebleness--the inevitable death-like depression that follows the manic upsurge of an aestheticized unio mystica. ("LLC," 138, 133) Once one reads beyond the initial description of Chandos's loss of the ability to speak and to think coherently and referentially (words "crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi" ["LLC," 134]), the issue of visuality emerges at the center of what has been described as his crisis of language and of depersonalization:
My mind compelled me to view all things . . . from an uncanny closeness.  I no longer succeeded in comprehending them with the simplifying eye of habit. For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated around me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back--whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void. ["LLC," 134f.]
If the state of preexistence was already characterized by a dissolution of a controlled Renaissance visuality, then we have here another kind of disruption of visuality that Lacan has described as the split between the eye and the gaze. Similar to Lacan's sardine can floating on the water and returning his look with a ray of reflected sunlight, words stare back at Chandos, who is forced, as if by some magical power, to return the gaze, thus being reduced to an image or object and losing his subjecthood in a whirlpool. If seeing is mastery, then being seen denies precisely such mastery since the seen body is objectified in the other's field of vision. The Lacanian paranoia of the gaze appears here in the relation between Chandos and language. Key to the crisis of language is thus not just the linguistic falling apart of sign and referent, which now appears more as a side effect. Rather, Chandos's subjection to the gaze denies not only a stable subjectivity (as it does in Lacan), but also destroys for good the possibility of an aesthetic immersion in preexistence.
At this point, we can see more clearly just how the "Tale" complements the later "Letter" in crucial ways. Only if we read the "Tale" together with the "Letter" do we get full access to the social and urban dimension of this disturbance of vision. As with Chandos, the merchant's son's loss of preexistence and his descent into mental collapse is triggered by a dark and sinister force that cuts across his field of vision. As with Chandos, the gaze represents an absolute and opaque alterity threatening aesthetic subjectivity. Contrary to Chandos, being seen has definite social parameters in the "Tale." The awareness of being seen by his servants first makes the merchant's son reflect upon their fate as separate from his (no mystical union here between master and slave). Increasingly, however, these eyes of the other become aggressive and force upon him an acknowledgment of his own "deepest being, his secret human inadequacy" ("672," 287). Then, on a trip from his country house in the mountains back to the heat-stricken city where he has some unsettling business, we find him in a situation reminiscent of the Freud passage:
Curiously, like a stranger, he walked through the familiar streets and came at last to the banks of a little river, which at this time of year was virtually dry. From here, lost in thought, he followed a shabby street inhabited by a large number of prostitutes. Without paying much attention where he was going, he then turned to the right and entered a completely deserted, deathly still cul-de-sac, which ended in a steep stairway almost as tall as a tower. ["672," 289]
Climbing up this staircase he enters into a surreal urban space, threatening and unknown: "He climbed higher and at the top entered a quarter of the city that he could not recall having seen before. Nonetheless, an intersection of low-lying streets suddenly struck him with dreamlike familiarity" ("672," 289). In this space the merchant's son now has a series of hallucinatory experiences, all of them uncanny and distorted repetitions of events and encounters from his earlier life. A mutation of one of his female servants, sexually alluring and carrying two statues of oriental, Medusan goddesses, mysteriously appears to him in a doubled mirror reflection in a pawn shop. Another servant, in the shape of a four-year-old child who resembles the fifteen-year-old girl servant in his home, stares at him aggressively through the panes of an abandoned greenhouse before locking him in that greenhouse after a hostile and wordless encounter. He tries to escape the horror of the child's gaze and finds a secret door in the back of the greenhouse that opens up into an even more surreal urban maze of walls and short pathways leading nowhere. His only escape is a wooden plank perilously bridging an abyss many stories deep. Close to physical and mental collapse, he barely makes it across and eventually finds his way back down into the city's netherworld. These unforgettably haunting pages encapsulate the idea of an invisible and uncanny city space in which categories of time and space become blurred and distorted, endangering the identity of the body in space and of consciousness in time. It is a thoroughly corporealized vision. The alien city space that threatens him with its gaze and turns him into a helpless object becomes a space of memory filled with nightmarish resemblances and revenants, too threatening to read as mere dreams. When he finally does escape from this part of the city in which both time and space have become totally destabilized, he finds himself in another quarter alien to him, that of the lowly houses where the soldiers live. In the final part of the story, he observes the soldiers washing the hooves of their horses and is struck by the ugliness of the horses and their "angry, rolling eyes" ("672," 295). Just when he feels compassion and wants to give some money to one of the soldiers, however, the force of the paralyzing gaze returns with a vengeance: "At that moment the horse turned its head and looked at him with ears treacherously laid back and rolling eyes that looked even more angry and wild because of a scar running straight across its ugly head just at the level of the eyes.   And that his face was contorted with fear, because people were threatening him because he had a large gold piece and would not say where he had gotten it." ("672," 296) At that point, the horse gives the merchant's son a violent kick that results in a humiliating death. "Finally he vomited bile, then blood, and died with his features contorted, his lips so torn that his teeth and gums were laid bare, giving him an alien, threatening expression." ("672," 297) In death his face assumes the horse's expression, just as the sight of the horse had triggered the memory of the poor man in his father's store. His vision is not only temporally disrupted by the return of a repressed, but there is also a literal merging of the seer with the seen, a kind of grotesque mimesis in death that points to the ultimate humiliation of the protagonist. Throughout this text, then, the experience of being looked at undermines and threatens identity, and by the end of the story it emerges clearly as a social experience, an individual encounter with a member of the underclass in childhood and its lingering power in the merchant son's imagination. This is the political unconscious that struggles to the surface in the "Tale." It is thoroughly repressed in the "Letter," where the threat of being seen no longer emanates from the city and its social realities, but rather from language, from the gaze of the words, thus blocking the real, social source of the disturbance. It is hardly a coincidence that Chandos's crisis does not end in death, but rather in an attempt to reconstitute the aesthetic project, as it were, in a minor key. The concluding passages articulate Lord Chandos's dream of finding that radically "other" language, a dream which for too long has been celebrated as the core of modernist literature.
So far, I have tried to restore the crisis of vision to the fabled crisis of language held to be at the origin of modernist literature. I would now like to link my textual analysis with some comments on Vienna as a metropolitan space. What is striking in Hofmannsthal's text is that the experience of being looked at has not just a social, but a spatial dimension. Not only does the look of his servants undermine the protagonist's sense of self, the urban experience itself becomes increasingly threatening as he enters poorer and mysteriously unknowable quarters that disrupt his spatial orientation. I would suggest that the city as gaze brings him down, the city as an abyss, an unknown and, to him, unknowable space. Here we enter into the specifics of Vienna's urban plan and its spatial distribution of classes. Carl Schorske has shown how the newly wealthy middle class of Vienna came to occupy the urban development called the Ringstraße that had been built in the liberal era of the 1860s and 1870s and that is often compared to Baron Haussmann's Parisian boulevards. 10 The Ring was a wide, circular swath of land that had formerly served as a fortification of the old city and its political center, the Imperial Palace. In its new incarnation, the Ring project included on the one hand official buildings such as a new city hall, a parliament building, a theater, and the university. They all were built in a variety of historicist styles, facing a broad, circular corso in perpetual horizontal motion, but lacking a clear spatial relation. On the other hand, behind this spatially fuzzy and visually destabilizing medley of public buildings, there were streets upon streets of representative apartment housing, the so-called rent-palaces (Mietpaläste) of the bourgeoisie. The circular layout of the Ringstraße was visually directed inwards, toward the old city center, and thus it still served as a kind of fortification, now in a social rather than a military sense. The Ringstraße enclosed the upper-class areas of the city, separating them from the rapidly expanding lower-middle-class, proletarian, and subproletarian (Vorstädte). While such divisions existed in other nineteenth-century cities as well, the situation in Vienna is unique since the sociological separation was given direct architectural expression in the layout of the Ringstraße. If all the structures of the Ring were visually oriented toward the center, i.e., toward the Imperial Palace, then Vienna's bourgeoisie had its back to the popular classes of the Vorstädte while directing its social and cultural look toward the old imperial aristocracy and the emperor. The Viennese bourgeoisie, the political carrier of Austrian liberalism, was literally located in the ocular crossfire of an aristocracy that it tried to imitate but that mostly despised it, and a working class that it experienced as a threat. Inside the circular and constricted space of the Ring, seeing and being seen exhibited an inevitable social pathology. Displaying its taste and wealth, the bourgeoisie sought the eye of the aristocracy, but repressed or foreclosed the look of the popular classes, which thereby became that opaque and ubiquitous threat encountered in Hofmannsthal's "Tale."
The habits of young Vienna's artists and writers reflected this reality. Rarely did they venture out into the Vorstädte, which remained closed territories, spaces of imagined threats, "dark landscapes near the tramway" characterized by their "heavy breath" and their "obtuse and apathetic joylessness." 11 At the same time, these authors were fully aware of how the Vorstädte represented the ultimate threat to Vienna's literary culture, which was increasingly visual and was represented by the movies. Early cinema in Vienna arose exclusively in the Vorstädte, together with other new forms of mass leisure activities (cabaret, soccer fields, popular gastronomic sites, entertainment parks, etc.). As the Vorstädte expanded quickly into formerly rural areas, rural modes of an oral culture with its illiteracy blended with technologically new forms of urban culture such as the cinema. In a short essay on film from 1921 entitled "Substitute for Dreams," Hofmannsthal explains the success of the cinema in Vienna's Vorstädte by citing the masses' fear of language, particularly in its written form. He describes the Vorstädte as those "dark nether regions into which no written word ever penetrates." 12 The oral and the visual thus stood against the scriptural, and if one considers further that much of the population influx into Vienna came from the outlying and non-German speaking areas of the empire, one gets a good sense of why the German-language writers felt increasingly embattled, and why language became such a central concern in Vienna and not in Berlin or in Munich.
Schnitzler's Fräulein Else, a masterpiece of Vienna modernism published in 1924, deals with the disturbances of vision and the gaze in fundamentally different ways. Contrary to Hofmannsthal, the political unconscious in Fräulein Else is not deeply repressed, but present on the surface in Else's stream of consciousness, to be deciphered easily by the patient reader, though clearly not fully accessible to the character herself. Contrary to what one often hears about the stream-of-consciousness technique, it is usually much less unconscious and less private, less transgressive and less liberatory than literary critics make it out to be. Thus it is not surprising that Else's inner monologue--garbled, chaotic, associationist, and riddled with clichés and hackneyed phrasings as it is--reveals her common sense, and insight into her own situation: the social and moral strictures of Vienna society that envelop young, unmarried women from good families; her sexual desires that find only imaginary outlets; the dual morality of Vienna society for men and for women; the ambiguous gift of her extraordinary beauty; being spectacle as woman and self-conscious object of the male gaze; the back-and-forth between an enforced exhibitionism and an equally stringent command to withdraw from male advances; the financial machinations and gambling of her lawyer-father, which she understands only too well in terms of the risks they pose to her future; the dilemma of loving her father but being able to help him only at the price of self-abandonment; the precarious situation of her family's Jewish background, which must be masked by strategies of assimilation. The crisis of language exists here too, but in a very different mode. With Else's incessant inner monologue, Schnitzler gives the reader access to the enforced silence of a complex female re, not in order to help her into self-articulation, but in order to lay bare the complex social reasons for this silence. As Elisabeth Bronfen has pointed out, Else is "in complicity with the fantasies and desires of her culture," and it is precisely this complicity that splits her into appearance and being, public silence and private verbosity, "actress and commentator, medium and author." 13 Else's identity troubles are fundamentally more modernist than those of the merchant's son, who never quite knows what hit him, but hers is a modernism of complicity with society rather than a modernism of resistance.
Vision is the central problematic of Else's inability to speak to her friends and family and to find an appropriate mode of self-representation. On vacation in a mountain hotel, she receives a desperate express letter from home pleading to save her father from bankruptcy and jail by securing a sizeable loan from a Mr. Dorsday who is vacationing at the same spot. Dorsday, a rich Viennese art dealer and an old friend of the family, agrees under one condition: "And this time I wish nothing more, Else, than--to see you." 14 Dorsday proposes, that is, to see Else alone and naked. The gendered gaze, the gaze of male desire and power, coupled with the financial transaction intended to save her father, precipitates the crisis for Else as she attempts to postpone the inevitable. This gaze, however, is firmly embedded in the specific social conditions of male and female relationships in fin-de-siècle Vienna. All of Else's fantasies about amorous and sexual encounters are predicated on her body's availability as an image to male sight. Much more could be said about this story, especially about how this gaze is linked to Else's dreams and fantasies about death, but the crisis of language here too is rooted in a disturbance in the field of vision as it emerges from metropolitan life. Schnitzler's point is not to present Else's haunted inner ramblings as the clinical case of a hysteric. Rather, he links her inability to think and to express herself coherently to the conflicting and insoluble demands placed on her as a result of a young, middle-class woman's positioning in a gendered and sexualized economy of vision and social status. Else's lack of control of the visual field generates her increasingly frantic and desperate attempts to regain control by verbally rehearsing her anticipated encounters with Dorsday in her mind. She imagines how she might stage her naked body, seeking a way to make it a public event rather than satisfying Dorsday's private voyeurism, thus both fulfilling and negating the contract. When she finally displays her naked body during a piano performance in the hotel's music salon to the eyes of the assembled listeners (including Dorsday), she has found that public articulation, but pays the price of falling into a catatonic state in which she is finally deprived both of the language of words and of her body.
In Fräulein Else, the loss of the eye's self-confidence in the field of vision leads to the dispersed and chaotic use of language. By using the stream-of-consciousness technique in which Else repeatedly splits herself into first and third person, Schnitzler has found the perfect literary form to express this dual crisis of language and of visuality. He does it in such a way, however, that in the end the reader is fully enlightened about Else's traumatic experience. While she remains unable to construct a coherent and transparent narrative of meaning, the reader is able to put all the pieces of Else's inner monologue together. What at first sight appears to be an impenetrable puzzle becomes by the end of the story fully lucid and transparent to the reader. Else's complicity with her culture and society is successfully transformed by Schnitzler into a radical critique of that society, without, however, offering any strong sense of an alternative. The final tableau of the story hovers between catatonia and death, with Else's stream of consciousness fading to a trickle of half words and syllables followed by ellipses of silence: "I'm flying . . . I'm dreaming . . . I'm sleeping . . . I'm drea . . . drea--I'm fly . . . " 15
Robert Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, a collection of short prose pieces of varying lengths, treats the visual in yet different ways. Like Schnitzler, who had pursued a medical career, Musil was a man of Viennese enlightenment, rationalism, and science, but he pushed beyond Schnitzler's rather pessimistic analysis of urban life and of the disintegrating empire toward some sense of transcendence and renewal, the famous "mysticism bright as daylight" of "the other condition." 16 With Musil, we have yet another type of linkage between language and vision. We get neither the paranoid vision of Hofmannsthal's male subject, nor the gendered and sexualized vision of Schnitzler. Persistently reflecting on the enabling and disabling functions of language and vision in the urban environment (one might think here as well of the famous street scene in the first chapter of Musil's The Man Without Qualities), Musil does not represent the crisis of language as a breakdown or urban psychosis. Neither he nor his man without qualities panic when faced with shifting identities, the instability of language, or the permanent flux of the ego. Instead, Musil rather rationally explores how language and visuality reveal their hidden underside if they are tested and observed from an unfamiliar and estranging perspective. Nevertheless, Musil's search for "the other condition" (der andere Zustand), a union of mathematical reasoning and mystical knowledge, of science and morality, of verbal and nonverbal communication, points to the fact that underlying his permanent experimentalism of representing the flux of the visual world, with its play of surfaces, physiognomies, and gestures, was the explicit longing for some redeeming arrest in a controlled field of vision. At the same time, the self-identical eye/I would not be the subject of control here and Musil himself was aware of the ultimate unattainability of either control or redemption. His other condition, as it is developed in The Man Without Qualities, and differently in his Posthumous Papers, could be read as a partly scientific, partly mystical version of Hofmannsthal's preexistence. With its strong scientific component, however, which Hofmannsthal's rather romantic mysticism lacks, it belongs with that cold stream of modernism that would become so prevalent in the interwar years in Germany in writers such as Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn, and in Berlin's Neue Sachlichkeit.
Rather than wonder about the elusive status of the visual in Musil's version of rational mysticism, I want to focus on his representation of visuality as pragmatically and experimentally estranged in the urban context of Vienna. Here Musil operates with notions of estrangement, defamiliarization, and de-automatization of perception, familiar to us from the avant-garde aesthetics of the 1920s. "Binoculars," a key text of the Posthumous Papers, codes vision in terms of modern media right from the beginning: "Slow motion pictures dive beneath the agitated surface, and it is their magic that permits the spectator to see himself with open eyes, as it were, swimming among the objects of life. Movies have popularized this phenomenon." 17 Film enables a temporally different kind of seeing that delves, as Musil's imagery suggests, underneath the surfaces of visual normalcy. The spectator's eyes remain open and conscious in this aquatic realm of slowed down motion. Its effect, however, is not only a new perception of depth, which brings a formerly hidden visuality to the surface of consciousness, but a kind of self-conscious vision in which the spectator sees himself seeing. In other words, optical phenomena are experienced as historically contingent and dependent on new media technologies. Musil is convinced that new technologies of the visual enlarge and expand the realm of what can be seen. He shares the Enlightenment's confidence in processes of demystification and denaturalization that make visible the previously invisible. In that spirit, we find the male observer in "Binoculars" sitting at the window of a street-corner building looking through his binoculars at a variety of objects and people in the urban setting before him. The tone is by-and-large light and satirical, objective and distanced, as for instance when the observer pokes fun at the foolishness of fashions or the strangeness of body motions when they are isolated and observed through the binoculars. Bodies are cut apart, legs are severed from each other. It is as if the observer were a surgeon operating on the human res that get "trapped in the little circle of his instrument" ("B," 82).
In addition, the denaturalization and estrangement of vision also has its disturbing underside for the observer. Musil's visual uncanny is located not just a psychic phantasm in the private eye of the observer, but is located out there in the world. For example, by directing the binoculars at a trolley, spatial reality is radically destabilized:
The trolley made an S-shaped double curve in front of the palace. Countless times from his second story window, the observer had witnessed it approaching, seen it make this very S-shaped double curve and drive away again: at every stage of this development the same elongated red train. But when he watches it through the binoculars, he noticed something completely different: an inexplicable force suddenly pressed this contraption together like a cardboard box, its walls squeezed ever more obliquely together (any minute it would be completely flat); then the force let up, the car grew wide to the rear, a movement swept once again over all its surfaces, and while the flabbergasted eyewitness released the breath he had held in his breast, the trusty old red box was back to its normal shape again. ["B," 82f.]
This comforting return to visual normalcy is lacking in another instance. Significantly, an inanimate object returns the observer's gaze in the typically threatening way that Lacan's evil-eye theory claims as constitutive for all vision. As the observer points his binoculars at a building, he is
struck by how clearly this support structure, these windows and cornices had positioned themselves in the circle of his looking-glass; now that he had taken it all in with a single glance, he was almost startled at the stony perspectival exactitude with which it all returned his gaze. He suddenly realized that these horizontal lines that conjoined at some point toward the back of the building, these contracting windows that became all the more trapezoid the farther to the side they were situated--indeed, this entire avalanche of reasonable, familiar limitations into a funnel of foreshortening located somewhere to the side and to the rear--that all this had until now struck him as a Renaissance nightmare; an awful painter's legend, actually, of disappearing lines, reputedly exaggerated, though there may also be some truth to it. But now he saw it before his very eyes, magnified to more than life-size, and looking far worse than the most unlikely rumor. ["B," 82]
The scopic regime of Renaissance perspectivalism is not only disturbed from the outside by the gaze of the other, whether this other is inanimate or animate, but perspectival visuality is itself also implicitly decentered. The viewpoint of the spectator inevitably comes face-to-face with its negative counterpart, the vanishing point at or beyond the horizon where the viewing subject is not present. The vanishing point becomes a black hole of otherness (or outthereness) that threatens or even destroys the subject's self-possession in viewing. Musil's text locates this visual experience in urban space, and it is easy to see how he focuses here on one of the primary visual experiences in the post-Haussmannian metropolis, with its endless avenues and boulevards whose parallel lines appear to meet in infinity. The annihilation of the subject is actually one of the conditions of the perspectival look that is usually thought to represent visual mastery. What frightens the observer most in this passage is that the rules of painterly representation as developed by the Renaissance and with the model of the camera obscura are not just a convention, but are confirmed by the realities of the world as seen through a technical apparatus. Rather than taking comfort in the compatibility of representation and reality, however, it is precisely this compatibility that threatens the observing subject. Musil's irony vis-à-vis his observer is unmistakable.
Missing in Musil is the social paranoia that pervades Hofmannsthal's texts and that Schnitzler's writings critically dissect. This variation has to do with differing backgrounds and socialization patterns, along with generational factors, and with the fact that Musil spent many of his student years in Berlin and was thus much less influenced by the literary culture of the Ringstraße and the famous Café Griensteidl. Most importantly, however, Musil had a scientific understanding of vision and perception. In Berlin he studied philosophy and psychology with Carl Stumpf, a successor to Hermann von Helmholtz, whose Physiological Optics had established a modern understanding of key aspects of vision such as light (brightness), depth (stereoscopic vision), distance, space, and color. Helmholtz understood vision as subjective, and a physiological model of vision slowly replaced (or superseded) the camera obscura model that had been the basis for traditional accounts of vision and its representation. 18 By the mid-nineteenth century, popular gadgets such as the stereoscope or the thaumatrope, based on bifocal or split rather than monofocal vision, had challenged the older model. Musil's text is interesting because his use of this nineteenth-century apparatus for the avant-garde purpose of estranging vision pries it away from the alleged normalcy of perspectivalism. The question, of course, is why his story privileges binoculars rather than film. I would suggest that the shift from the moving image to the still image points to Musil's scientism. The story's setup conforms to the inherent demand of the stereoscope that the observer be in a fixed position, which corresponds to the view from the window above the street. This fixed position is also that of the "objective" scientific observer who in the end never quite abandons his sense of control of the disorienting visual phenomena he experiences. There is no possibility for paranoia here. Consider how the text ends:
In this way, the binoculars contribute both to our understanding of the individual, as well as to an ever deepening lack of comprehension of the nature of humanity. By dissolving the commonplace connections and discovering new ones, it in fact replaces the practice of genius, or is at least a preliminary exercise. And yet perhaps for this very reason we recommend the instrument in vain. Do not people, after all, employ it even at the theater to heighten the illusion, or during intermission, to see who else is there, thereby seeking not the unfamiliar, but rather, the comforting aspect of familiar faces? ["B," 86]
Estranged vision is privileged as representing an avant-garde rupture of "natural" vision, but that rupture cannot be sustained when the new media that made it possible are socialized back into normalcy. There is a second limitation as well. The purpose of estranged vision in this text is cognitive gain, which, however, remains entirely within the orbit of a scientific mode of vision that Musil both shares and criticizes. In "Binoculars," Musil does not move toward the notion of vision that is implied in his "other condition," one in which the scientific/avant-garde habits of looking would be dissolved and opened up toward a reciprocal structuring of visuality, a momentary break both in objective and subjective vision where all hierarchical subject/object distinctions would fall by the wayside. Whether Musil's "other condition" is able to move significantly beyond the limitations of the avant-garde paradigm or simply rearticulates notions of modernist epiphany is a question I cannot begin to broach here. Ultimately, it may be a question of limited interest because the urban context tends to disappear from the texts that approach this other condition. It will be more interesting to read these Viennese texts against city texts from Berlin or Paris from the same periods. That comparative project, however, is work still to be done.
Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is an editor of New German Critique and author of After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post Modernism and Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia .
* This essay and the essay by Ann Douglas derive from papers delivered at the conference "Modern Culture and Modernity Today" held at Brown University, 14-15 March 1997, organized by Professor Robert Scholes, and sponsored by the Malcom S. Forbes Center, the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and . Our gratitude to Professor Scholes and Mark Gaipa for their collaboration.
1. The exhibition was held at the Centre Pompidou in 1986. The catalogue is entitled Vienne 1880-1938: L'Apocalypse joyeuse (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1986).
2. Paradigmatically, this canonization appears in a book first published in Germany in the 1950s by Walter Jens, Statt einer Literaturgeschichte (Neske: Pfullingen, 1978) and more recently in George Steiner, Real Presences (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), 111 f.
3. Especially important here is the work of Jacques Le Rider, Das Ende der Illusion: Die Wiener Moderne und die Krisen der Identität (Vienna: ÖBV, 1990). The American translation is Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York: Continuum, 1993).
4. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," trans. Alix Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 17:143 f.
5. The critical literature on both texts is enormous. Much of it is discussed in Jacques Le Rider, Das Ende der Illusion as well as in idem, Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Historismus und Moderne in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997).
6. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Ad me ipsum," in Gesammelte Werke. Reden und Aufsätze, 1925-1929, Aufzeichnungen, ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1980), 10:599.
7. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "The Letter of Lord Chandos," in Selected Prose, trans. Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern (New York: Pantheon, 1952), 132; hereafter abbreviated "LLC."
8. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "The Tale of the 672nd Night," in German Literary Fairy Tales, ed. Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning (New York: Continuum, 1983), 282 f; hereafter abbreviated "672."
9. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 11.
10. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).
11. My translation. Fred Heller, "Ottakring. Die Kleinstadt," Der Tag, 16 September 1923.
12. My translation. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Der Ersatz für Träume," in Gesammelte Werke: Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), 9:144.
13. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 284, 282.
14. Arthur Schnitzler, Viennese Novelettes, trans. R. A. Simon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), 154.
15. Ibid., 200.
16. For these notions see Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (New York: Vintage, 1995), 2:777-837.
17. Robert Musil, "Binoculars," in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (London: Penguin, 1987), 81; hereafter abbreviated "B."
18. On this paradigm shift see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
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