23. Jessica Berman connects such reversing perspectivism with Hannah Arendt's "interactive universalism," but Berman's own approach—which abandons Arendt's conversations between differing discrete individuals for the reimaginings of fluctuating, multiply overlapping communities in Jean-Luc Nancy and Chantal Mouffe—has much in common with my description of the self resituated in global flows. See Berman, Modernist Fiction, 13-5.
24. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), 19.
25. Mark Starr, Lies and Hate in Education (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), 160-1.
26. [G. Lowes Dickinson], Letters from John Chinaman (London: Brimley Johnson, 1904); hereafter abbreviated LJC.
27. E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and Related Writings, foreword W. H. Auden (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 118.
28. G. Lowes Dickinson, The Autobiography of G. Lowes Dickinson, and Other Unpublished Writings, ed. Dennis Proctor, foreword Noel Annan (London: Duckworth, 1973), 111.
29. Dickinson, Autobiography, 190.
30. Although the letters are addressed to an English audience, the introduction to the American edition, by adding the further cultural comparison between Europe and the Unites States, indicates both the greater culpability of American culture in adopting standards "convertible into terms of money" and the greater responsibility of the American nation for the "fate of the Western world." See [G. Lowes Dickinson], Letters from a Chinese Official (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1903), x, xi.
31. Yoshio Markino, "Chaucer and Chinese Odes," Alone in this World: Selected Essays by Yoshio Markino and "Recollections of Yoshio Markino and Mamoru Shigemitsu" by Betty Shephard, ed. and intro. Sammy I. Tsunematsu (Brighton: In Print, 1993), 31-43.
32. (emphasis added) online The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, s.v. "syncretism."
33. In his later years, Dickinson was noted for wearing, instead of the customary mortarboard, a black silk mandarin cap—the first of which was a present from his friend C. H. Hsu. See Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 128 and the photograph, 169.
34. Shephard, "Recollections," in Markino, Alone in this World, 132.
35. Yoshio Markino, My Recollections and Reflections (London: Chatto Windus, 1913), 136, 135, 121; hereafter abbreviated RR.
36. Markino did work with an editor, for whom he read his chapters out loud, but she corrected them only when the sense was obscure. According to the writer and art collector Douglas Sladen, Markino's style "is not pigeon-English; the Japanese do not use pigeon-English, they abhor it. It is the result of a deliberate intention to apply certain Japanese methods of expression (like the omission of the article) to the writing of English, in order to produce a more direct medium, and the result has been a complete success." Douglas Sladen, Twenty Years of My Life (New York: Dutton, 1913), 72.
37. Yoshio Markino, My Idealed John Bullesses (London: Constable, 1912). It is difficult to "translate" Markino's title; it is both playful and loving and suggests both accepting the women as they are and treating them as ideal.
38. Yoshio Markino, A Japanese Artist in London, intro. Sammy I. Tsunematsu (Brighton, UK: In Print, 1991), 29; hereafter abbreviated JAL.
39. Sladen, Twenty Years, 72.
40. Joyce Cary, "Umaru," Cornhill Magazine, 165 (Winter, 1950/1951): 50-4; republished in Spring Song and Other Stories, ed. Winifred Davin (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), 19-24; hereafter abbreviated "U." For the dating of its composition, see Alan Bishop, Joyce Cary; Gentleman Rider (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 248.
41. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4.
42. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.
43. Alternatively, Corner's apprehension of Umaru could be described through a distinction proposed by one of my graduate students, Kendall Shields: not "the other" but "another."
44. Melba Cuddy-Keane, "Defining Cultural Democracy: Modernism and Universal Individualism," Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 4 : 56-77.
45. "This is not—at least at the moment—a global order driven by collective human will. Instead, it is emerging in an anarchic, haphazard, fashion, carried along by a mixture of influences." Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2000), 37.
46. These novels are now published in a single volume as Christopher Isherwood,The Berlin Novels (London: Vintage, 1999).
47. This connection is made by Robert Casserio, who describes Mr. Norris as a "buyer and seller of ideological stocks and bonds." See The Novel in England, 1900-1950: History and Theory (New York: Twayne, 1999), 318.
48. Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, in Berlin Novels, 243.
49. Many modernist works were translated into Chinese before the Cultural Revolution, including, in the 1930s, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Flush. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, John Lehmann's periodicals New Writing and Folios of New Writing featured translations of unknown young writers from a variety of countries, including France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Poland, Russia, and China.
50. James Clifford, "Traveling Cultures," Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 108.
51. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Vintage, 1990), 42-5.
52. Zitkala-Sa, "Why I Am a Pagan," Atlantic Monthly 90 (December 1902): 803; hereafter abbreviated as "WIP."
53. The fact that Zitkala-Sa's works were published in the broadly circulated journals Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine raises the further questions of modernists as readers of texts from other cultures, and such texts as embedded influences in the larger circuit of modernist discourse. Amardeep Singh provocatively raised these issues in his discussion of prefaces written by Westerners to non-Western texts, in his paper delivered at the 2002 conference of the MSA.
54. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 127.
55. By communal forums, I refer not only to the bodies comprising the heads and representatives of the participating States, but to the on-line open discussion forums established to provide at least the mechanisms for the participation of a broader community.
56. That this model appears to be now currently under threat, and for complex reasons combining liberal attitudes to homosexuality with reactionary economic and immigration policies, suggests to me first, that there is never any end to history and, second, that concentrated effort is indeed required even to keep in the same place.
57. See David Goldknopf, The Life of the Novel, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 108-9.
58. Nowell Charles Smith and J. C. Maxwell Garnett, The Dawn of World-Order: An Introduction to the Study of the League of Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). Expressing this same idea for our own time, Roland Robertson writes of globalization as a concept that "refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole" (G, 8).
59. online OED, 2nd ed., s.v. "sensitize."
60. Smith and Garnett, Dawn, 7.
61. Another of my graduate students, Paul Campbell, coined the term "happy globalization" to instill a useful caution about utopian dreams. I would like to thank all the students in ENG5605, in 2001-2002, for the discussions that have contributed to the present work.
Cultural studies has paid scant heed to questions of modernity, modernism, and modernization. The leading journals in the field, such as Cultural Studies,The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Social Text, very seldom publish essays that engage substantially with such ideas. Of the forty contributors to the massive Cultural Studies volume edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, none expresses even a cursory curiosity about modernity or modernism. Apart from one essay by Edward Soja, a similar indifference pervades another widely used collection edited by Simon During. Sifting through the ever-expanding pile of samplers, summaries, introductions, and overviews of cultural studies, one is easily persuaded that it is a field devoted entirely to the immediate present. 1
What might seem like an unfortunate sign of historical hubris or academic oversight is in some eyes the singular virtue of the cultural studies project. "Cultural studies," writes Simon During, "is the study of contemporary culture." 2 It is a field that is adamantly yoked to the new and the now, a method matched to its own moment, an approach tied to the epochal uniqueness of our own image-saturated, consumption-crazed, globally connected yet politically fragmented age. Since the mid-1980s, the lure of the word "postmodern" has proved almost irresistible; when "modernity" appears at all in cultural studies, it is often there to be refuted, derided, or denounced, a handy catch phrase for conservative politics, old hat metaphysics, and snobbish aesthetics. 3
While cultural studies may seem oblivious to modernist studies, the reverse is far from true. In literature departments anxious to remake themselves, cultural studies has become a much favored way of announcing that one is moving away from business as usual; it is widely used shorthand for social relevance and political urgency, for a clamorous movement to reconnect word and world. Although cultural studies often gives short shrift to history, in literature departments, paradoxically, it has come to signal a return to history. The "new modernisms" are a much heralded part of this critical turn, speaking to a sense of weariness with reverential rereadings of modernist masters and an eagerness for broader, more expansive maps of the modern that can locate texts squarely in the political fault lines and fissures of culture.
Yet the growing use of "cultural studies" as a catchall synonym for "the study of culture" should give us pause. Not long ago, I heard a well-known literary scholar remark in response to a question after his talk: "of course, we're all doing cultural studies now." The proliferation of such comments indicates that a specific rubric is being bloated and distended beyond all recognition, in danger of becoming as ubiquitous as it is useless. A phrase that once named a distinct project, an intellectual tradition, a core cluster of ideas and arguments, is now being stretched to subsume a grab bag of differing and often incompatible textual methods. Cultural studies may seem like a useful umbrella term, but if too many people try to cram under the umbrella, everyone will end up getting very wet. 4
Cultural studies, it must be said, has not been overly anxious to rein in the rampant, kudzu-like proliferation of its name. It is a much favored gambit in the field to argue that any attempt to specify and hence limit its agenda must be strenuously resisted. The downside of this claim that cultural studies cannot be defined is that it becomes impossible to show the wrongness of any particular definition. "Cultural studies," writes one critic, "is a whirling and quiescent and swaying mobile which constantly repositions any participating subject . . . a project whose realization . . . is forever deferred." 5 For other scholars it is the model for "an interpretative politics with no limits." 6 This aversion to circumscribing the parameters of cultural studies often goes along with a fervent denunciation of disciplinary straitjackets and institutional orthodoxy. Insisting on the utterly nonroutine nature of cultural studies is now a quasi-obligatory professional ritual.
To grasp what is at stake here, we need to reverse the optic, to realize that modernist studies can throw light on cultural studies as well as the other way around. Although cultural studies may pride itself on being postmodern, many of its assumptions are in fact quintessentially modern. Indeed, cultural studies is one of the latest avatars of the spirit of the avant-garde. At first hearing, this claim may sound counter intuitive; after all, doesn't cultural studies urge intellectuals to renounce the arrogant assumption of superior wisdom and critical insight, and to protest the all too common portrayal of ordinary people as mindless masses and "cultural dopes"? Isn't its ethos, then, the very opposite of a vanguard politics? In principle, yes; and yet this stalwart defense of the popular can easily tip over into a new form of status-seeking distinction, a covert bid for moral superiority and cutting edge radicalism in the highly charged fray of academic politics. The vanguardism of cultural studies takes a distinctive form; it lies not in vaunting the authority of intellectuals vis-à-vis the people but in trumping its own superiority as a field vis-à-vis the conventional disciplines.
The idea of the avant-garde, according to Matei Calinescu, yokes a progressive and future-oriented vision of time to a cataclysmic splitting of the world into opposed camps. 7 Assuming their own inevitable victory, avant-gardes define themselves against the tyranny of the past, the forces of stagnation, the benighted ignorance of old ways of thought. A parallel rhetoric runs through cultural studies. Proclaiming itself the wave of the future, cultural studies sees itself waging a form of guerilla warfare against the tyrannical forces of the reactionary and hidebound disciplines. Cultural studies is conjured in the future tense, as the certain culmination of the righteous hopes of the present. Think, for example, of the title of Anthony Easthope's book Literary into Cultural Studies; literature departments may still be institutionally dominant, Easthope concedes, but their days are numbered. Cultural studies is their manifest destiny and salvation, the means by which a stodgy and conservative field of study will be transformed into a suitably progressive one. 8
Moreover, cultural studies shares with the avant-garde a yearning for the vital, the intensely immediate, the bracing fervor of commitment. Both are enamored of the language of crisis, rupture, and transgression; both yearn to smash the aura of the artwork, to topple the masterpiece and tear down the walls between art and everyday life. F. T. Marinetti's famous call to destroy "the museums, libraries, academies of every kind" is echoed in cultural studies' contempt for the ivory tower and its longing to reconnect the humanities to the wider world. 9 Marcel Duchamp hoped that the provocation of his ready-mades would expose the fraudulence and hypocrisy of the art world. Similarly, contemporary critics hail the study of Oprah and MTV as an assault on the sacrosanct values of tweedy, out-of-touch mandarins.
It is a feature of avant-garde movements that they deny their own precursors, claiming to be utterly new and without precedent. The much noted presentism of cultural studies thus stems from the very modernity that it claims to have surpassed, as it repeats the quintessentially modern gesture of disavowing and disclaiming the past. Modernity holds the blueprint for the insurrectionary impulses of cultural studies, which are easily traced to the antinomian spirit of modern bohemianism and the avant-garde. At the same time, modern history also contains countless reminders of the gulf between revolutionary rhetoric and social realities. According to Peter Burger's well-known thesis, the enshrining of Duchamp's urinals and bottle racks in the museum exposes the hollowness of the claim that changing the nature of the art work will do away with the institution of art. 10 It is equally misguided to think that studying soap operas instead of Sophocles will efface the boundaries between scholarly knowledge and everyday life. Cultural studies has done much to invigorate approaches to popular culture, but it does so from a position squarely inside, rather than outside, institutional frames.
Here I agree with Tony Bennett, one of the most astute theorists of cultural studies as well as one of its most astringent critics. Cultural studies, he argues, likes to cast its project in a heroic, even redemptive, light, defining itself as a phantom social movement, a form of politics by proxy. It appeals to two contradictory ideas; the myth of marginality, exemplified in its critique of the institution, and the myth of wholeness, embodied in its claim to transcend rarified forms of academic specialization. Bennett argues that neither of these myths has much to do with the actual practice of cultural studies, even as they perpetuate a misleadingly static, reified, and unhistorical view of the disciplines. Instead of relying on a rhetoric of political charisma and aesthetic transgression, he writes, we need "to fashion a clearer sense of the specific and therefore limited frameworks of analysis and inquiry that cultural studies might claim as its own in relation to, and alongside, the concerns of more established humanities and social science disciplines." 11
In spite of the mutual misapprehensions outlined above, some scholars of modernity are drawing on the methods of cultural studies while steering clear of its oft-cited deficiencies: an excess of political hubris and too cheaply bought radical righteousness, a dispiriting lack of historical perspective, and an indifference to the archive. Whether this cross-pollination of cultural studies with recent histories and theories of modernity should still be designated cultural studies or something else (cultural history? cultural theory?) is beyond the scope of this essay. However the new work on the culture of modernity is clearly indebted to two key ideas of cultural studies that are often ignored or misunderstood: an expanded notion of the aesthetic field and a theory of articulation.
I will argue that these two ideas define the distinctive parameters of a cultural studies approach, a thesis that I pursue by contrasting such an approach to two other ways of linking the aesthetics and politics of modernity: the sociology of literature and culture and what I call political formalism. To survey a sample of recent publications in modernist studies is to realize that all three approaches are currently in play in critical discourse, even as they lead to differing, and sometimes diametrically opposed, conclusions. Only by circumscribing cultural studies and distinguishing it from other methods can we hope to discern its distinctiveness as a project. Cultural studies is not an all purpose panacea or the only valid way of thinking about culture and power. Stripped of its romantic-revolutionary rhetoric and its dubious messianic teleologies, it can be reenvisioned not as the utopian future of literary studies but as a specific part of its present.
* * *
Much of the work that currently goes under the name of cultural studies is more accurately filed under other categories. One of these rubrics, the sociology of literature, is admittedly short on contemporary charisma. In the United States, especially, it ekes out an existence on the margins of sociology departments and the peripheral vision of most literary critics. Yet its endeavors are important and resonate at many key points with the current catchphrases of literary studies. Sociologists of literature ask questions about the profession and politics of authorship; the institution of publishing; the relationship between literature and the marketplace; the mechanisms of canon formation; the history of reception; and the networks of connection and influence, discipleship, and affiliation, all of which shape literary achievement and reputation. Some sociologists also engage in textual interpretation, exploring the links between art and ideology and the various ways in which texts allude to or obscure social, political, or economic realities. In short, sociologists define art as a field that is shaped by political interests and struggles for power and legitimation.
To redescribe some influential trends in literary study as part of the sociology of literature is to connect these trends to a long and distinguished lineage of modern thought that stretches from Georg Lukács to Lucien Goldmann to Pierre Bourdieu. 12 In the study of Anglo-American modernism this tradition has been cast into deep shadow by the dominance of high formalism. As a result, recent sociological readings of modernism have burst on the scene with insurrectionary novelty; given the equal newness of cultural studies and its similar association with politics, it is tempting to equate the two. And yet, as I hope to show, the sociology of literature and cultural studies diverge significantly on the question of aesthetics.
An excellent example of a sociological approach to modernism is Lawrence Rainey's Institutions of Modernism. "For sociologists," writes Rainey, "institutions are the structures that interpose themselves between the individual and society; they are both social subdivisions of human beings and the regulative principles that organize various zones of activity and behavior." 13 Such institutions play a vital role in mediating between the artwork and its meanings and effects in the public sphere. Rainey's book brings modernism squarely down to earth. Rather than an austere artifact, a recondite and semisacred hieroglyph, it is just another commodity traded in certain venues and social milieus, brokered by key movers and players, imbricated in the logic of patronage, collecting, speculation, and investment.
Thus, Rainey deftly dismantles a reigning myth about the publication of Ulysses, according to which, as he writes, "Joyce and Beach are cast as heroic res who have succeeded despite a benighted legal system, philistine publishers, and a hostile or indifferent public." 14 The success of Joyce's novel had less to do with a small band of prescient readers alert to signs of literary genius than with the pecuniary interests of speculators in the rare book trade. Through a meticulous reconstruction of its publication history, Rainey documents the calculations that went on behind the scenes, showing that most of the early purchasers of Ulysses were investors buying deluxe copies with an eye to resale. Modernism did not transcend the market so much as market itself as transcending the market; its prestige was closely associated with an aura of expense and exclusivity that bound together discerning patron-readers and the writers whose work they supported. At a time when aesthetic norms were under siege, cost became a crucial touchstone of artistic worth; "the substantial price of the first edition," writes Rainey of Ulysses, "inevitably dictated a certain psychic investment, demanding assent to strong claims about the work's literary or aesthetic value." 15
In this and similar examples of modernist criticism we see techniques and methods from the social sciences being brought to bear on works of art. Sociology offers a rich repertoire of concepts for contextualizing and embedding aesthetic objects: institutions and public spheres, capitalism and commodification, alienation and anomie. To work in the sociology of literature is to slot artistic works into social and political frames rather than the other way around. According to one definition of the field, literature is of interest only insofar as it can be used "to reveal, exemplify or interpret social process." Whereas literary criticism may evoke the critic's fervent identification with the text, "no social science instills comparable psychic investment in the literary object." 16
In fact, sociological attitudes to the literary work are more varied than such a claim suggests. Early sociologists of literature, for example, Leo Lowenthal and Lucien Goldmann, drew a firm and unabashed distinction between great and minor works of art. Such scholars often engaged in close readings of canonical works, even as they ultimately sought to explain the internal features of literature as mediated reflections of a social whole. 17 Often tied to Marxist or neo-Marxist frameworks, such text based interpretations have fallen out of favor as the weaknesses of reflection theory have become apparent. Sociologists of literature today are much more likely to carry out empirically grounded analyses of institutional mechanisms of production and reception that shape literary meaning.
There is a similar diversity of sociological responses to the question of aesthetic value. First of all, a scholar may simply opt to suspend judgment, claiming that the question of aesthetics goes beyond her professional purview and disciplinary competence as a social scientist. This doctrine of "aesthetic neutrality" is perhaps the most common response within the largely positivist orientation of American sociology. 18 Alternatively, she may actively endorse and underwrite traditional criteria of aesthetic value, as in the example of Lowenthal and Goldmann cited above. Writing in a similar vein, Diana Laurenson and Alan Swingewood claim that "on this point, most sociologists of literature and literary critics are agreed: one studies great writers precisely because their greatness implies deep insights into the human and social condition." 19 Finally and conversely, she may see a sociological approach as actively undercutting the authority of aesthetic categories by accounting for them in nonaesthetic terms. Pierre Bourdieu for example adopts this position when he portrays artistic appreciation as little more than class-based symbolic violence. 20
It is a commonplace of contemporary criticism that cultural studies is anti-aesthetic, seeking to replace the truth of art with the truth of politics. (Eugene Goodheart's recent assertion that cultural studies "means the ideological interpretation of a text" typifies this quasi-ubiquitous belief.) 21 Against this view, I argue that the tradition of cultural studies reveals not a rejection but an expansion and pluralization of the aesthetic field; it seeks to enrich our sense of what counts as art by taking popular culture seriously. Whereas sociology brings out the political dimensions of even the most rarefied art works, cultural studies attends to the symbolic, expressive, and aesthetic aspects of the most mundane cultural artifacts and activities. Unlike sociology, cultural studies neither ignores, rejects, nor endorses the prevailing discourse of the aesthetic; rather, it intervenes in that discourse in order to alter its guiding assumptions and frames of reference. Clearly, such an intervention goes beyond a strictly Kantian framework; popular art, almost by definition, does not count as autonomous art. And it is no doubt because of the ready association of aesthetics with an exalted corpus of great works that cultural studies has often defined its approach as political rather than aesthetic. Yet this dichotomy leads us seriously astray. In its attentiveness to convention and form—the how as well as the what of meaning—and to the intensely charged affect that surrounds the experience of popular art, cultural studies owes a clear debt to techniques of aesthetic interpretation.
In other words, cultural studies bears the unmistakable marks of its dual parentage, literary criticism and sociology. It is as much about form as about content, as much about pleasure as about politics. It does not abandon close reading but requires it. One of the central tenets of cultural studies is that popular culture is more than just a delivery system for ideology, an argument that calls for careful attention to formal devices and conventions. To equate cultural studies with content analysis and ideology critique is to seriously shortchange its history and traditions. Think, for example, of Dick Hebdige's readings of the avant-garde elements of subcultural style, of Michel de Certeau's interest in the elusive poetics of everyday life, and of Paul Willis's concern with the dramaturgical and expressive dimensions of popular culture. Nor do scholars of cultural studies shy away from value judgments; to read Angie McRobbie on dance or Simon Frith on popular music is to be persuaded that such forms matter, not just because they can be read politically, but because they hook up so powerfully to the imaginative and expressive lives of their consumers. 22
How does this expanded vision of the aesthetic field change our view of the culture of modernity? As Michael North shows in Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, it decisively undercuts the antithesis of art versus society that still tends to shape our understanding of the modernist period. Charting the multiple flows of connection and influence among individuals, ideas, and fields that are often kept apart, North brings together anthropology and philosophy, psychoanalysis and public sphere theory, avant-garde art and music hall, archaeology and advertising, in a powerful synoptic sweep. In this thoroughly entangled and hybridized universe, many once clear-cut distinctions no longer make much sense. North gives us an anthropology of modern culture in which the aesthetic bursts out of solitary confinement in order to saturate the social field. "When even the most mundane product is marketed as an experience," North writes, "aesthetic considerations have penetrated the market to an extraordinary degree." 23
Whereas sociologists stress the determining power of institutions and systems, North points to the mediation of everyday experience via mass-produced texts as a quintessential fact of modernity. And in contrast to literary critics who champion a supremely self-conscious modernist art against the drab, dulled sensibility of mass culture, North argues that mediation carried strangeness into the heart of popular culture and everyday life. The relationship of modern individuals to their world was filtered through a dizzyingly eclectic array of ideas, images, and narratives circulating in the public sphere. "As society becomes progressively aestheticized," writes North, "as audiences begin to consume imaginative and symbolic materials as they had previously consumed material goods, then everyday life acquires an inherently ironic distance from itself" (RAR, 208). Thus, the popular culture of the 1920s was often highly self-reflexive and fully aware of the mediating status of language and form.
North steers clear of any explicit reference to cultural studies, yet the common ground is a shared conviction that popular culture and everyday life are not just explanatory context, but resonant, ambivalent, polyvocal text, richly deserving of formal scrutiny in their own right. "The common opposition of an ironic, aestheticized modernism to mass culture," he writes, "thus depends on a prior generalization about mass culture that seriously oversimplifies it" (ibid). We can no longer cling to a view of modernity as an era when avant-garde and kitsch faced off across the great divide, while postponing the blurring of high and low to the period known as postmodernism. Rather, North concludes, "it may be a certain self-conscious formalism, then, that most closely links modernist literary works with modern society" (RAR, 210).
In Reading 1922 the culture of modernity is read anew through the template of aesthetic modernism. Dissonance and estrangement are no longer distinguishing markers of the modernist masterpiece but are woven deep into the warp and woof of vernacular culture and everyday life. In North's compelling analysis, the ordinary is rendered extraordinary; defamiliarization is no longer just a specialized poetic device but an inescapable component of modern living. And yet, cultural studies also reminds us that aesthetics is conjured in the plural. It pushes us to look beyond our professional predilection for irony and artfulness and to explore other registers of aesthetic experience: the euphoria of escapism, the somatic charge of identification, the spine-tingling thrill of vicarious terror, the cathartic relief of narrative closure. Such pleasures have not disappeared in the modern era, though they have often been sidelined by modern criticism.
Melodrama is an example of a genre once viewed as hackneyed and old-fashioned that is now being reevaluated as a distinctively modern form of cultural expression. In Melodrama and Modernity, Ben Singer carries out a major work of cultural retrieval, uncovering a largely unknown corpus of American sensational melodrama that spanned the period from 1880 to 1920. Turn-of-the-century stage melodrama drew on the latest technological innovations in order to showcase suspenseful scenes of train wrecks, car races, storms at sea, collapsing hot air balloons, tornados, Alpine avalanches, and burning buildings. By 1910 it had been displaced by its cinematic equivalent at the local movie theater where the spectator enjoyed an even wider range of spectacles and thrills for a much lower entrance fee.
Singer shows that the melodramatic aesthetic spoke to modernity's "experiential qualities, its ideological fluctuations, its cultural anxieties, its intertextual cross-currents, its social demographics, and its commercial practices." 24 Yet it also suffered critical disdain because of its sensationalism and violence, formulaic yet disjointed plotlines, lack of interest in psychological depth, and appeal to a mass audience. Accordingly, melodrama is conspicuously absent from most accounts of modern aesthetics; indeed, it is often the counterfoil against which the modernity of modern art is defined.
According to Singer's useful definition, melodrama is a "cluster concept" that allows for different combinations of five elements: strong pathos; heightened emotional expression; moral polarization; nonclassical narrative mechanics—outrageous coincidence, convoluted plotting—and spectacular effects. Several of these elements also clash with what are often seen as quintessential elements of modern style. Thus, the lurid exaggeration and emotional extravagance of melodrama are patently at odds with a "cool" aesthetic of irony, knowingness, and detachment. Melodrama also defies the critical commonplace of a secularized and disenchanted modernity, giving us a morally schematic and providentially ordered universe, and inviting a sense of agitation and outrage at the spectacle of extreme injustice. Moreover, the aesthetics of melodrama hinges on the adrenalin rush of fast-moving action and cliff-hanging suspense. Such features receive short shrift in classic theories of modernism, where the mechanics of plot are disdained as a sop to the masses or a tired Victorian holdover.
And yet Singer shows how the formal features of melodrama were intimately linked to the social conditions of modernity.  These same features were echoed in the sensational film melodrama, with its thrills and spills, fleeting impressions, constant shocks, and visceral stimulation. The plotline of melodrama spoke to anxieties about the unpredictable and often brutal rhythms of modern capitalism by conjuring up scenarios of individual powerlessness, social atomization, and ruthless competition, even as it helped to assuage such anxieties by subsuming them within a morally legible framework. And the sensational film melodrama was also a prime vehicle through which to explore a distinctively modern vision of woman. As intimated by such titles as The Exploits of Elaine,The Hazards of Helen,The Perils of Pauline, and The Adventures of Dorothy Dare, melodrama offered a new script of female heroism that allowed women to engage in brawls and fistts, knock villains out stone cold, jump from speeding trains, and rescue men from burning buildings. It captured the paradoxical nature of femaleness at a pivotal phase of modernity, celebrating the excitement of women's new mobility outside the home, while also depicting lurid scenarios of assaults, abductions, intimated rape, and torture arising from their movement into the mixed-sex, mixed-class, and mixed-ethnicity chaos of the modern urban milieu. 25
Singer makes a compelling case for both the formal richness of melodrama and its quintessential modernity. To make the latter claim, as he points out in his unusually tough-minded reflections on method, is to confront difficult questions about how to link aesthetic forms and social norms, how to shuttle between fine grained textual analysis and larger historical pictures. How does one justify a claim for the political import or effects of aesthetic objects? What kind of evidence is needed in order to present a text as exemplary, emblematic, or symptomatic? What is the rationale for establishing a structural correlation between very different phenomena—for example, a lyric poem and the fact of empire—and at what point does correlation serve as persuasive evidence of causality?
Such questions go to the heart of the differences between cultural studies and another method with which it is often confused: political formalism.  (The word selectively is important here; my point is to show that political perspectives can be articulated via a range of differing, often conflicting, methodologies). In contrast to the sociology of literature, political formalism insists on the primacy and preeminence of aesthetic form, which it strives to decipher with a formidable array of analytical devices. It calls for a patient poring over poetic conventions, a relentless scrutiny of rative language, a neverending labor of reading between the lines. This textual hypervigilance is understood as not just aesthetic work, but also as political work. Form is not merely a container for content but a vital means of accessing the invisible intricacies of ideology. Metaphors, binary oppositions, narrative syntax, and visual schemas all carry patterns of hierarchy, exclusion, and inequality encoded in their DNA; a close reading of an innocuous and seemingly inconsequential textual thread can thus lead deep into the labyrinthian workings of power.
Alternatively, the plasticity of artistic form may allow it to resist such power, to set language askew and to estrange us from habitual schemas. Poststructuralist theories have helped breathe new life into the study of modernism, such that many of modernism's stylistic features (poetic language, narrative rupture, heightened ambiguity, nonlinear syntax) have acquired a newly audacious sheen. Progressive critics who might once have lamented the elitist, apolitical mind-set of modernism are now more likely to argue that the politics of modernism lies precisely in the perverse detours and ellipses of its form.
For example, in Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism, Joseph Boone pursues a meticulous analysis of modernist fiction from Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner. Boone marshals an eloquent defense of the technique of close reading as a way of engaging with what he calls, after Eve Sedgwick, the "numinous and resistant power" of aesthetic objects. 26 In the wayward trajectories and deviant narrative energies of modernism, he writes, we can find traces of queer alterity and the polymorphously perverse. In their indeterminate slipperiness and their fascination with sexual and textual ambiguity, modernist works anticipate many of the insights of poststructuralism. Their aesthetic is one of contradiction, ambivalence, and crisis, unleashing a plurality of voices that undermine the authority of any single master narrative. Thus, the perceived difficulty and obliqueness of modernist fiction is intimately linked to its questioning of hegemonic discourses.
In a parallel project, though one more wary of attributing qualities of resistance to aesthetic forms, Rachel Blau DuPlessis seeks to connect modernist poetry to political modernity. DuPlessis also defends the value of close reading, arguing for a repositioning rather than a rejection of the formal techniques of New Criticism. Pointing out that contextual approaches to literature usually slight the qualities and texture of poetic language, she advocates a "social philology" able to mediate between social ideologies and aesthetic conventions. Reading the work of a wide range of modernist poets, DuPlessis aims to show how social meanings are embedded and condensed in the deep structure of verbal artifice. 27
These methods of political formalism differ in key respects from those of cultural studies, where one does not find the same commitment to close reading as a source of political insight. At the heart of cultural studies lies the idea of articulation, best described as a theory of social correspondences, non-correspondences, and contradictions or alternatively as a theory of how contexts are made, unmade, and remade. 28 First developed by Ernesto Laclau, the idea of articulation was taken up in cultural studies in the late 1970s and is widely considered to be one of its most generative and influential concepts. 29 An articulation is a hookup, a temporary linkage, a forged connection between two or more elements. It is a contingent link between phenomena that do not share a unifying or essential identity and one that is unmade and remade over time. "Articulation," writes Larry Grossberg, "links this practice to that effect, this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics. And these links are themselves articulated into larger structures." 30 Culture is neither organically unified nor radically fragmented and dispersed; rather, it is a multijointed and multihinged composite of often disparate elements. Articulation thus seeks to explain how segments of the social field may join together to form temporary unities without resorting to a view of the social whole as an expressive totality whose essential features are mirrored in every one of its parts. The "so-called unity of a discourse," notes Stuart Hall, "is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary 'belongingness.' . . . A theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects." 31
The idea of articulation has obvious consequences for interpretation. According to cultural studies, the political import of a text cannot be inferred from its internal form or logic, but derives from its position in a constellation of texts, practices, and interests. The moment of production is less salient than the vagaries of reception; that a work is a capitalist commodity or the creation of a male-dominated culture does not determine ahead of time what its meanings and effects will be. Textual analysis thus needs to be extensively augmented by an account of practices, and here one may find one's hypotheses disrupted by disorderly and recalcitrant facts that do not fit a favorite theory. This constant checking of interpretation against empirical data is one obvious way that cultural studies departs from the tradition of aesthetic interpretation. Rather than synthesizing aesthetics and politics into a textual politics, it juxtaposes and adjudicates between literary and historical forms of evidence.
Perhaps we can now see why the readings of cultural studies will never be deep enough or close enough to satisfy the political formalist. Cultural studies is often accused of insensitivity to the intricacy, singularity, and complexity of the aesthetic object. Scholars in the field are, I have argued, much more attentive to formal questions than such a complaint suggests. And yet, it is also true that they rarely engage in the kind of dazzling, chapter-long exegeses of a single work that are so beloved of political formalists. Such tour de force readings strive to show how textual details can open up onto social wholes, how thick description of a particular work can be profoundly revealing of the defining patterns of a culture.
From the standpoint of cultural studies, however, there is insufficient payoff to justify such a degree of attention to aesthetic objects, given the lack of any necessary or clear-cut correspondence between specific works and the broader social field. To carry out a symptomatic reading is thus, in Grossberg's view, to see the world in a grain of sand, to proceed as if a text were a microcosmic representation of social relations that, if deciphered correctly, will yield the hidden truth of the social whole. 32 By contrast, cultural studies seeks to detotalize the social field and hence rejects the assumption that any individual work can represent that field. The political pulse of a culture is not to be found in the depths of a single work but rather in a mobile and discontinuous constellation of texts as they play off, influence, and contradict each other. Rather than reading into texts, cultural studies seeks to read across texts.
Laura Doan's Fashioning Sapphism, for example, accumulates a formidable density of historical detail to question the myth of the lesbian as a transgressive outsider and martyr to modernity. Indeed, in a deft act of defamiliarization, she shows that our common sense schemas of gender and sexuality were once conred otherwise. By embedding photographs of Radclyffe Hall and other mannish women within a thick description of the visual culture of the 1920s, Doan shows that what now seem like provocatively lesbian images were often read very differently, as a sign of modernity and up-to-dateness, or bohemian eccentricity, or aristocratic hauteur. It is precisely because of the multivalent coding of such images that Hall was such a respected and respectable re, her lifestyle widely feted in women's magazines and the popular press. Rather than delving into the hidden meanings of an aesthetic object—The Well of Loneliness—in order to show how it supports or subverts modern sexual ideology, Doan traces out its often surprising articulations with other texts and practices to reveal that modern sexual ideology was itself more differentiated than we may have realized. 33
Thus, even as the mainstream of cultural studies has often maligned or misconstrued the modern, its own method of articulation offers an implicit rebuke to such knee-jerk dismissals. In fact, another common complaint about cultural studies—that it relies on a self-righteous rhetoric of unmasking and debunking—strikes me as largely misplaced. For example, Stefan Collini writes in a notorious review of the field:
texts are interrogated (a favourite term) to demonstrate how they distort, occlude (another favourite), or in other ways inadvertently reveal the ideological pressure which shaped them. These pressures are in turn taken to be symptomatic of the way in which power operates in society to the systematic disadvantage of certain marginalized or oppressed groups. One effect of these combined developments is that cultural studies, particularly as practised in the United States, is in constant danger of turning into "Grievance Studies." 34
While this caricature is not unrecognizable, cultural studies strikes me as less guilty of the charge of holier-than-thou political correctness than other contemporary critical methods. Because it sees meaning as thoroughly enmeshed in practice, it does not conceive of texts as malevolent, all-powerful devices for the interpellation and manipulation of human subjects. And because it is interested in the making and remaking of culture in daily life, it is not especially drawn to a self-righteous rhetoric of unmasking or a hypervigilant hermeneutics of suspicion. 35
Let me illustrate this point with some concluding comments on a forthcoming book by Liz Conor entitled The Spectacular Modern Woman. Conor takes as her subject the pervasiveness of the female image in modernity and as an index of modernity. She begins from a premise familiar to feminist scholars: that modern mechanisms of looking are predicated on gender asymmetry, such that it is women, above all, who are defined by their visibility. The best-known development of this insight is of course the feminist formalism of Laura Mulvey. 36 Historically inflected versions of this thesis concur with Mulvey's view of woman as object, but refer to the changing perceptual field of modernity rather than the psychodynamics of male sexuality, invoking such ideas as the society of the spectacle and the modern hegemony of vision. In this view, women are barred from the modern subject position of the spectator because of their existence as embodied, specularized, objects.
Conor concurs that becoming a spectacle was deeply implicated in modern forms of subjectivity. For women in particular, to enter the modern scene was to make a spectacle of oneself, to apprehend oneself and be apprehended as an image. But Conor rejects the usual reading of this fact in terms of a subject/object dichotomy anchored in sexual difference. To become a spectacle, she insists, is not to be barred from the role of spectator, nor is it to be consigned to a passive or inactive condition. Conor's development of the notion of "appearing" is a conceptual milestone in rethinking the position of women in the visual scene of modernity. Appearing refers to the ways in which women articulated themselves as modern subjects by constituting themselves as spectacles. That is to say, it is a theory of representation that allocates an active verb to those who are seen by others and thus opens up a space for addressing female agency, desire, and investment in the image. Appearing, writes Conor, is precisely the conflation of object and subject, the syncretic moment of the subject experiencing itself as object or the object experiencing itself as subject.
Conor's extraordinarily rich compendium of archival material suggests there was no clear-cut correspondence between female visibility and male power. The rapidly multiplying images of the modern woman in film, advertising, magazines, photographic portraits, and display windows unleashed a wide range of responses from voyeuristic pleasure to moral outrage. Female visibility could be articulated as sexual availability, political assertiveness, personal vulnerability, women's association with the commodity, or a lost essence of femininity. Tracing out a typology of images of the modern woman, including the city girl, the flapper, the business girl, the beauty contestant, the screen star, and the screen-struck girl, Conor shows how feminine spectacle carried a volatile burden of meaning as connoting both verisimilitude and illusion, both the pleasures and the perils of modernity. This exploding repertoire of images was in turn taken up, negotiated, and modified by women themselves in their own quest to be modern.
Conor's work is a consummate calibration of female visibility as allowing for new possibilities of self-fashioning, sexual expression, mobility, and display as well as for surveillance, harassment, and punitive self-scrutiny. Aboriginal women, for example, were presented as visual anomalies on the modern scene, unable to enter modernity as self-conscious subjects invested in their own image. Conor reproduces a remarkable 1928 cartoon showing an encounter between a young Australian woman and the Aboriginal servant "Mary" who is scrubbing her floor. The mistress is elegant, slim, striking; she is dressed in the garb of an aviatrix, stylishly turned out in airplane goggles as well as high heels. By contrast, as Conor notes, "Mary sits in a puddle in sartorial indefinition, her hair unruly, her features projected in a kind of simian, fleshy excess compared to the precisely rendered lines of her missus." The mistress has just returned from her far-flung plane travels, soaring icarus-like into the brave new world of scientific modernity. Her maid crouches on the ground, firmly rooted in the drudgery of domestic space and the naïve literalism of primitive belief. Conor concludes,
Mary is unfashionable because, as primitive, she is torpid, against the visual flux and transience of modernity. She evinces no mastery over her appearance. . . . Her mistress stands, almost in long shot before her like a Screen Star, holding her gaze and not bothering to return it. Her understated features are cool and reserved; she appears modern. Through these binarisms, Mary does not really "appear" as primitive. She does not appear in the sense I have been using the term—she does not emit the signs of intentionality and control over her visual effects. Nor does she evince an awareness of the modern perceptual field and how to achieve visual congruence within it. Mary appears as "primitive" through not appearing. 37
As Conor shows, some forms of articulation are widespread and relatively stable, sutured into place by deep-rooted political interests and sedimented ways of seeing. For example, Australian legislators of the 1920s debated the merits of banning aboriginal people from movie theaters, on the grounds that their naïve understanding of the image would cause their passions to be dangerously inflamed by what they saw on screen. Here again we see how the aboriginal woman was deemed to lack the self-consciousness that would allow her to appear as an authentically modern subject.
* * *
I take it as self-evident that not every commentary on the aesthetics and politics of modernity can be neatly slotted into the three categories or ideal types that I have outlined. Boundaries exist only in order to be crossed and categories are never pure. Indeed, a hybridization of critical methods can be highly productive, providing it reveals some knowledge and critical awareness of the competing frameworks that are being juxtaposed and put into play. I would contrast such a self-conscious interrogation of method to the practice of naming any political reading of a text "cultural studies," often in disregard of thirty years of debates about methodology within the field. 38
For example, in popular surveys of cultural studies such as Patrick Brantlinger's Crusoe's Footprints, one can find Stuart Hall cheek by jowl with Elaine Showalter and Larry Grossberg nestling up to Roland Barthes. Such mappings of the field strike me as both too broad and too narrow in their ambitions. On the one hand, by labeling virtually any political approach to literature or culture as an example of cultural studies, they skim over fundamental disagreements about frameworks and methods. On the other hand, even as lip service is paid to cultural studies as an interdisciplinary project, almost every scholar cited in such surveys turns out to be based in a department of English literature. 39
My own view is that methodological similarities among scholars in different disciplines are more salient to the definition of cultural studies than the mere fact of being a literary critic who is interested in politics. Liz Conor, for example, is a cultural historian, while Ben Singer teaches in a film and communication program. Sociologists and anthropologists have also played a crucial role in redrawing the map of modernity via the method of cultural studies. 40 Such a method, I've been arguing, is characterized by a distinctive and productive tension between an expanded notion of the aesthetic field and a model of articulation that draws on social theory and historical method. This disciplinary hybridity is jeopardized by attempts to turn cultural studies into the future of literary studies, a move that will all too quickly sever its links to the social sciences and turn it into a form of pan-semiotics. (We can see such a future prered in Jonathan Culler's recent assertion that cultural studies is just another word for structuralism). 41
Hence to present cultural studies as the telos, redeemer, or utopian future of literary studies strikes me as doubly misguided. It is bad news for literature departments because it rides roughshod over the many interests of scholars—formalist, rhetorical, philosophical, literary historical, bibliographical, deconstructive, Marxist, psychoanalytical, etc.—that cannot be subsumed within a cultural-studies rubric, however defined. If cultural studies were to apply its own theory of articulation toward a more sophisticated account of institutional knowledges and the history of the disciplines, it would soon recognize the inadequacy of many of its quick-fire pronouncements about the reactionary role of literary studies.
Moreover, this argument is even worse news for cultural studies, undoing
the very interdisciplinarity it seeks to support by arrogating cultural
studies as the property of literature departments and designating English
professors as self-evident experts on culture. Such a move would be
especially unfortunate for modernist studies, where interdisciplinary work
is still in its infancy. Modernity is one of the few terms that resonates
across the disciplines, and yet there is remarkably little dialogue
between sociologists, political theorists, historians, anthropologists,
art historians, and literary critics about their differing conceptions
of the modern. The project of cultural studies, surely, is neither to
overthrow nor to transcend the disciplines. Rather, it is to encourage
forms of traffic across disciplinary lines that will in turn expand our
understanding of the multifarious and many-sided cultures of modernity.
Rita Felski teaches in the English Department at the University of Virginia and is editor of Feminist Theory and associate editor of New Literary History. She is author of Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, The Gender of Modernity, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, and Literature after Feminism.
I would like to thank Richard Handler and Allan Megill for their detailed and helpful comments.
1. "Cultural studies," notes Michael Pickering, "has ceased to be leavened by a historical sensibility ." See his discussion of this problem in History, Experience and Cultural Studies (New York: St Martin's, 1997). Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992).
2. (emphasis added) Simon During, "Introduction," Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.
3. See, for example, Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989); John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Angie McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light (London: Routledge, 1988); Ian Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1990). For a more skeptical view of postmodernism, see Stuart Hall, "On Postmodernism and Articulation," and David Morley, "EurAm, Modernity, Reason and Alterity: or Postmodernism, the Highest Stage of Cultural Imperialism," in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996).
4. Lawrence Grossberg, "Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies," in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1997), 273.
5. Quoted in Carolyn Steedman, "Culture, Cultural Studies, and Historians," Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, 617.
6. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "Cultural Studies and the Politics of Disciplinarity: An Introduction," in Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (New York: Routledge, 1996), 18.
7. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1987).
8. Anthony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991).
9. F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding Manifesto of Modernism," Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 42.
10. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
11. Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science (London: Sage, 1998), 19.
12. Lucien Goldmann, Method in the Sociology of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1987).
13. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 6.
14. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 42.
15. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 70.
16. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy Grisworld, "Editors' Introduction: Mirrors, Frames, and Demons: Reflections on the Sociology of Literature," Critical Inquiry 14, no. 3 : 422.
17. See, for example, Lucien Goldmann, Method in the Sociology of Literature and Towards a Sociology of The Novel (London: Tavistock, 1975); Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture and Society (Palo Alto: Pacific, 1968) and Literature and the Image of Man (Boston: Beacon, 1957). For a useful overview of different sociological approaches to aesthetics, see Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983).
18. See Anne Bowler, "Dilemmas in the Sociology of Art," in The Sociology of Culture, ed. Diana Crane (Cambridge, Mass. : Basil Blackwell, 1994).
19. Diana Laurenson and Alan Swingewood, The Sociology of Literature (London: Paladin, 1972), p. 22.
20. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction.
21. Eugene Goodheart, Does Literary Studies Have a Future? (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 103.
22. Richard Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Paul Willis, Common Culture:Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990); Simon Frith, Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Angie McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).
23. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 207; hereafter abbreviated RAR.
24. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1.
25. Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 258-9.
26. Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Making of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 23.
27. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
28. Jennifer Daryl Slack, "The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies," in Stuart Hall.
29. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977); and with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
30. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, 54.
31. Stuart Hall, "On Postmodernism and Articulation," in Stuart Hall, 141-2.
32. Grossberg, Bringing It All Back Home, 107.
33. Laura L. Doan, Fashioning Sapphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). As I hope my juxtaposition of Boone and Doan makes clear, differing methodologies can thus lead to very different conclusions about the meanings of homosexuality in modern culture.
34. Stefan Collini, "Escape From DWEMsville: Is Culture Too Important to be Left to Cultural Studies?" Times Literary Supplement May 27, 1994.
35. In fact, the most common complaint leveled against cultural studies by those familiar with the field is not that its practitioners are too negative and critical, but that they are too nice. Cultural studies is routinely accused of "populism." See Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London: Routledge, 1992).
36. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 : 6-18.
37. Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
38. One of the best overviews of these debates can be found in John Storey, What is Cultural Studies? A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996).
39. Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990).
40. Rita Felski, "New Cultural Theories of Modernity," in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
41. Culler writes "I am led to the hypothesis that cultural studies is (or should be) structuralism." "What Is Cultural Studies?" in The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, ed. Mieke Bal (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1990), 342.
What is it about T.S. Eliot's putative anti-Semitism that provokes such prolonged and extravagant response—attacks of increasing stridency from his critics, apologetics of increasing imaginativeness from his defenders? Readers of are doubtless familiar with the latest burst of warfare occasioned by Ronald Schuchard's spirited January 2003 defense of Eliot, "Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar," published along with by-and-large critical responses by distinguished modernists. So let me instead offer as evidence of the persistent power of this controversy the following datum. I recently co-edited a special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review entitled Jewish in America, and my fellow editor and I were surprised to discover that no fewer than five submissions contained allusions to, or denunciations of, Eliot. We accepted one of these, a poem by Roger Kamenetz entitled "The Lower Case Jew," in which Eliot is put on trial by a heavenly rabbinical court for anti-Semitism. Prosecuted by Bleistein and defended by Sir Ferdinand Klein, Eliot is found guilty and sentenced to attend "Hyam Plutzik's grandson's bar mitzvah / . . . [where] he'll hora with Rachel née Rabinovitch / And kazatzki with Allen Ginsberg / who will give him wet sloppy kisses." ("Oh, I am bound to a bagel of fire!" Kamenetz's Eliot cries in response to this doleful fate.) 1 Cruel as such a contrapasso might seem—it nails Eliot on just about every ground I can imagine, including what Kamenetz sees as his snobbery and his panicked homophobia—it was nevertheless striking that we received no submission similarly indicting Pound, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Hemingway, or Cather, to mention other writers of Eliot's vintage whose attitudes towards Jews were not always respectful.
Taken together, Schuchard and Kamenetz's responses, polar opposites in every other way, pose two similar questions: why now, why still, Eliot? And what, if anything, does the presence of Jews as equal players in the game of culture-making upon which Schuchard comments and to which Kamenetz's poem testifies mean not only for Eliot scholarship, but for our new, reconring sense of Eliot's era?
To address the first of these, as I tried to suggest in my 2000 book, The Temple of Culture, the controversy is rooted in the absolute preeminence Eliot assumed in the booming literary academy of the 1940s and 1950s, especially in America. 2 To be a college professor of English in this period was, perforce, to come to terms with a model of literary history and cultural value that placed Eliot, the work Eliot esteemed (e.g. metaphysical poetry), and the religious vision that Eliot affirmed at the center of critical and pedagogic practice. And such a period was also, and not uncoincidentally, the period in which an Anglo-American professorate which had closed itself off to Jews, frequently on the not-un-Eliotic argument that one needed to have a thorough and deep—a feeling—knowledge of Christianity in order to understand a literary tradition suffused with that faith, began to open up to this previously excluded group. Eliot's responses to Jews rankled many Jewish critics then. 3 They continue to do so, perhaps all the more vigorously as Jewish critics have abandoned the tactics of passing, accommodation, or internalization that marked their early years in the academy. 4 But more, it seems to me, is at stake in this continuing battle. For those critical of the New Critical canon and the rhetoric that informs its continuing study, Eliot offers a case study in that canon's complicity with prejudice, reaction, and the worst episodes in twentieth-century history. For those who wish to defend the canon that Eliot did so much to put into institutional practice, his problematic moments need to be explained. Battling over Eliot, in other words, is a way of battling over the nature and shape of literary experience and expression itself, and has been for at least the past two generations. It should not come as a surprise—it should in fact come as a relief—that this battle continues even at the moment when cultural studies has challenged the salience and value of the literary itself.
As for my second question: what does the new evidence that Schuchard has brought to the table mean? That issue ultimately opens out onto not only the literature, but also the ethno-racial dynamics of literary modernism itself. Setting aside his strained explanations of the worst of Eliot's anti-Semitic tropes and references, Schuchard has some interesting evidence to offer. He's clearly shown that Eliot's social and intellectual life intersected with that of many Jews without his expressing visibly anti-Semitic opinions and without their overtly shunning him. And, following up the discovery (generously acknowledged) of Ranen Omer-Sherman with hard work in the archive, he's shown that Eliot engaged in a long correspondence with American Jewish intellectual (and fellow Harvard alum) Horace Kallen which ended with Eliot's expressing disappointment at Kallen's militant secularism. 5 There is clearly more such evidence to be added to the record, and it comports with the main outlines of Schuchard's argument (although it will do nothing to mollify his critics). 6 To be frank, the implications of this evidence aren't all that earth-shattering. But the evidence does offer us an interesting opportunity to reassess a curious feature of the phenomenon we call literary modernism: namely, the complicated lines of personal and professional relation between Jews and gentiles, often crossing over between amity, enmity, desire, and rivalry, reflected in both the lived experience of modernist writers and in their work. These phenomena give us an opportunity to move through and beyond the latest flaring of the great Eliot debate, to use the issues raised by it not to resolve the question "was he or wasn't he?" ("he was, but so what? they all were," is more or less my position) but to suggest something fundamental about modernism itself: that along with relations with such recently canonized reifications as gender and race, modernism's distinctive literary investments and complex self-positioning may be seen as deeply implicated in—fundamentally structured around—what the nineteenth century called "the Jewish question."
One place to start to address not only the question of Eliot's overdetermined relations with Jews, and modernism's as well, is not the salons and little magazines of London or Greenwich Village, where he and his generation were encountering writers, intellectuals, publishers, and artists who were assimilating Jews. Rather, we can scroll back a bit and start, as so much of twentieth-century American thought does, at Eliot's Harvard—the Harvard, as well, of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and, at least in fiction, Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon. For in addition to the many things that this Harvard was—the center of New England and hence national intellectual life; a grand experiment in grafting a modern research university onto a liberal arts college; a cradle of pragmatist philosophy and the scientific study of the mind—it also served simultaneously as a home for Jewish students and as an incubator of racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Jewish thinking. Harvard, like Columbia, Chicago, and Penn, was located in a major metropolitan area to which Eastern European Jews thronged; its undergraduate admissions policies, at least until the 1920s, were relatively open, and Jewish students like Bernard Berenson (whose father was a local peddler) and German-born Horace Kallen found a tolerant home there. At the same time, however, Harvard was also a bastion of race thinking of the most problematic kind. Major res in the elaboration of American race and eugenics theory included such Harvard luminaries as Louis Agassiz, Professor of Geology and Zoology until his death in 1873, and Charles Davenport, Harvard B.A. and Ph.D., instructor of biology until he departed in 1899, soon to become one of the most important res in the eugenics movement. In the 1910s, Harvard offered no fewer than four courses in the principles of eugenics. Indeed, so pervasive was the connection of America's most prestigious university with this hot new form of academic thought that Eliot's cousin, President William Charles Eliot, was named a vice-president of the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912. 7 These atmospherics clearly influenced a number of its students: for example, Lathrop Stoddard, author of the anti-immigrant tract parodied in Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby,The Rising Tide of Color , graduated from Harvard Law School in 1908 and received the M.A. and Ph.D., in History in 1910 and 1912; it was while at Harvard, he later said, that his work turned in an explicitly racialist direction. 8
Eugenics and race-theory comported with explicitly anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish sentiment and activity. In 1894, three Harvard College alumni, Charles Warren, Robert DeCourcy Ward, and Prescott Farnsworth Hall, founded the Immigration Restriction League, which included in its number many other prominent alumni and professors, including Abbott Lawrence Lowell, later president of the University. The efforts of the League, buttressed by the nascent eugenics movement led by Davenport, climaxed in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, shepherded through congress by Harvard alumnus (and former student of Henry Adams), Henry Cabot Lodge. Also at this time, President Lowell sought to institute quotas on Jewish admissions; his efforts blocked, he advocated geographical ones. T.S. Eliot himself articulated the essential logic behind these quotas—that too great numbers of intellectually competitive but undercultured Jews were distorting the student body—when he complained, in a 1915 letter to his cousin Elinor Hinckley, of having encountered "the clever Jew undergraduate mind at Harvard, wide but disorderly reading, intense but confused thinking, and utter absence of background and balance and proportion." 9
To be sure, there's no one-to-one correspondence between the tides of racist, eugenicist, anti-immigrant or anti-Semitic sentiment, and Eliot's own experience there. He made friends with Horace Kallen, as Schuchard reminds us. And he does not seem to have read deeply in race theory or proto-eugenics at Harvard, although he did imbibe a considerable degree of comparative anthropology that was to have unfortunate applications in the dogma, later appropriated by the Nazis, of Aryanism. 10 Moreover, it's important to remind ourselves that Eliot's poetry reflects this milieu with a certain degree of ambivalence. As Lyndall Gordon reminds us, he lampoons high-toned Harvard ways—the drawing rooms best known for the taking of toast and tea—and haunted the streets of Roxbury (in which one of the Preludes was originally set) and North Cambridge in search, presumably, of a gritty urban authenticity that contrasts with the effete hermeticism of the world chronicled in Prufrock or Portrait of a Lady. 11 But at least considered in its ethnoracial guise, this gesture is perhaps more loaded than it might appear: unmentioned by Gordon, many of the areas into which the young college student wandered and from which he took impressions of fin-de-siècle deliquescence were precisely the ones in which Russian-born immigrant Jews congregated.
All this is not to indict Eliot for his reading, the attitudes of his peers, or his slumming—I'd hate to be held responsible for the currents of thought in my Northwestern University dorm, circa 1976, and the ethnoracial dimensions of my own fascinations with Chicago street life in that time would not, I'm sure, bear much scrutiny. But it is to suggest something about the world he, and much of American modernism, came from and the baggage he—and it—carried into the charged political and social atmosphere of London, Paris, and New York. Race thinking and a tendency to equate immigrants—especially Jewish immigrants—with the decline of Western culture; responses towards Jews that mixed a sense of tolerance and the possibility of friendship with the sense that those Jews were somehow overly competitive, lacking balance, background, poise: these were the attitude to which young men and women at Harvard and Radcliffe were exposed in their most impressionable years, as they were at Yale, Columbia, and Princeton, which imposed quotas on Jewish undergraduates in the 1920s.
Indeed, the encounters on the terrain of high culture between aspiring Jews and ambivalent gentiles was not only a Harvard phenomenon, or even a university one; nor are they of interest for merely biographical reasons. Rather, such encounters are an explicit theme of much of the writing of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Consider the following. In 1905, Edith Wharton published The House of Mirth, in which the downward path of a self-destructive gentile woman, Lily Bart, is plotted against the upward curve described by the career of a Jewish financier, Simon Rosedale; that the ascendancy of the latter in the corrupt and attenuated world of turn-of-the-century New York is on Wharton's mind may be best indicated by the fact that the working title for the novel was "The Year of the Rose." In 1907, Henry James published an account of the Lower East Side of New York in his travel book, The American Scene, which contrasted the seemingly barbaric language and customs of the swarming Jews to his own; but his account also located in them an energy and an intellectual power which he acutely felt lacking in both himself and his gentry class. In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, a novel in which a Jewish gangster, Meyer Wolfsheim ("the man who fixed the 1919 World Series") weaves a vast underworld web around a maniacally self-improving Minnesotan veteran and Oxford graduate, Jay Gatsby née Gatz. Wolfsheim is a sinister but oddly sympathetic re, with cuff links made of human molars but a kind word for his protégé after the latter's death; but he is untouched by Gatsby's demise, and remains a shadowy but successful player behind the scenes, running one criminal enterprise after another from his office at the Swastika Holding Company. In 1926, Willa Cather published The Professor's House, a novel in which a middle-aged professor with the resonant name of Godfrey St. Peter faces what can only be called a mid-life crisis as his wife and children prepare to move into an extravagant new mansion. He spends much of his time in his old house thinking of his former student Tom Outland, a perfect paragon of a man killed in World War I. St. Peter's daughter who was betrothed to Outland, has married instead a Jewish entrepreneur named Louis Marsellus who has brilliantly marketed Outland's invention, the Outland vacuum, and enriched St. Peter's increasingly vulgar, materialistic clan. Also in 1926, Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises, in which Jake Barnes, the castrated, war-wounded narrator, is shadowed by Robert Cohn, the alcoholic, former boxing champion at Princeton, now besotted with Lady Brett Ashley, with whom he has a brief affair about which he whines for most of the novel and whose new boyfriend, a matador, he savagely beats at the end of the novel.
Taken together, then, American modernism (which begins, in my view, with James) presents a remarkably consistent pattern of response with respect to the re of the Jew, a response sustained over two generations. And this response is encoded in narrative form as well as ideational content. The Lower East Side Jew is to James as Rosedale is to Lily as Wolfsheim is to Gatsby as Marsellus is to St. Peter as Cohn is to Jake Barnes; significant if complexly wrought doubles. Thus, Rosedale as a "plump rosy man of the blonde Jewish type" seems to be the slender, dark-haired Lily's antithesis and his desire repulses her; but as their fortunes shift and paths cross, they briefly meet in the middle, fellow outsiders in the gossipy, status-conscious world of New York. Robert Cohn, who discovers in boxing an antidote to his sense of outsiderdom as a Jew at Princeton, crosses romantic and professional paths with the novel's castrated journalist narrator Jake Barnes and then repeatedly rediscovers precisely that sense of outsiderness again in the circle of Lost Generation expatriates in which they both move. Wolfsheim is an immigrant (he still speaks with an accent) who uses the Oxford-educated veteran Jay Gatsby as a front for his various schemes, but Gatsby, like Wolfsheim, stands curiously without the social whirl that he has entered (when Nick Carraway first meets him, he seems to be a guest at his own party). The novel's lachrymose conclusion metaphorically positions Gatsby, too, as a kind of a reverse immigrant, a Midwestern emigré who has to come to the East in order to find his green-lighted dream. Marsellus is obviously the world-withdrawing, aesthete St. Peter's antithesis just as Outland was his wish-fulfillment version of himself; yet even St. Peter admits that the Outland vacuum could not have been made into a success without Marsellus. Tellingly, it is Marsellus's words that serve as the epigraph to the novel, not those of Outland or St. Peter.
In the works of all these writers, we see a remarkably similar relational logic, juxtaposing gentile and Jew and thereby defining all the things that are missing in the former—and all the things, for better or worse, supplied by the latter. Thus the gentiles are marked by effeminacy or at least ineffectuality, particularly in the massively restructuring postwar world. They are war-wounded or sexually dysfunctional; ridden by obsessive but fallible passions (Lily's for Selden, Gatsby's for Daisy, Jake's for Brett), and marked by an inclination towards dreamy aestheticism. Precisely the opposite qualities are associated with the Jews, who are sexually vital if not voracious, and capable of sustained energy and prodigious success in the ordinary world. But there is one highly significant overlap between the two categories. With the exception of Wolfsheim, who is comfortably and vulgarly himself, all these Jews have aspirations to enter the precincts of high culture that had previously been the precincts of the attenuated and attenuating gentile elites whose lack of faith even in their own tradition is summarized by the name of Cather's protagonist, "God-free" St. Peter. Rosedale has an eye for bric-a-brac; Marcellus leads the family on a Jamesian trip to Paris; Cohn is an aspiring, and appallingly unsuccessful, novelist, and so on.
The secret story of modernism these texts tells, then, is of an increasing contact between Jews and gentiles leading to complex relations of mutual desire and emulation, rivalry and respect, in the terrain of cultural achievement: Rosedale, Marcellus, and Cohn, want what Lily, St. Peter, and Barnes have, and the latter (and their creators) treat them with a mixture of affection, condescension, and contempt. And here, it seems to me, we can link historical experience with literary/cultural representation in a fairly explicit way, for these relations allegorize the experiences of the authors who have created them. As one set of outsiders—Midwestern Americans like Eliot, Hemingway, Cather, for example—sought to make their mark in the sphere of cultural distinction, they encountered in the salons and cenacles of Paris or Greenwich Village, in the little magazines, in the publishing houses, in the university classrooms (but not the faculty lounges) another set of deracinated outsiders elbowing their way in alongside them, namely assimilating Jews. The ensuing struggle structures their work. Gentile writers, particularly in the 1920s, create narratives that, despite their experimental tenor, identify their brood with the values of the ancien regime, with the cultural politics of nostalgia, superannuation, world-weary aestheticism, romantic idealism, and the like. These texts simultaneously and by the same gesture identify Jews not only as embodiments of modernity or materialism (this alone is a not-unexpected development, surely) but as culture-vultures, avid seekers after the legitimacy of taste or imaginative production, who are all too frequently rewarded for their lack of imaginative amplitude and cultural sophistication, not punished for it.
This pattern of representation isn't overtly anti-Semitic, despite lapses into anti-Semitic rhetoric of the deepest hue on the order of, say, Céline or Pound: human molar cuff links indeed! But it can't be freed from the charge of anti-Semitism either; indeed, on the deepest level, it is structurally so. To these writers, the re of the Jew is an overdetermined one, freighted with all the anxieties and rivalries they were experiencing in the new literary and cultural marketplace, and all the more loaded because through that re, they also had to reckon with the identification, as old as Matthew Arnold, between the alienated artist-intellectual and the assimilating Jew. Indeed, it is perhaps the last of these that is most persistently provoking, and can explain most fully the obsession with the Jew that marks the imagination of this generation of American modernists. For (and here I am adapting an argument made with respect to Eliot, Joyce, and Pound by Bryan Cheyette and Maud Ellmann 12) insofar as writers of Eliot's generation defined themselves as international rather than local in their interests; as exiles, outsiders, others, émigrés, wanderers—insofar, that is, as they defined themselves as what we have come to think of as "moderns"—their very self-conception made them look suspiciously like the Jews with whom they were competing for cultural legitimacy and artistic status. And the result is the response I have tried to detail above, in which Jews may be—almost always are—oddly sympathetic characters, certainly far from anti-Semitic stereotypes, yet are also positioned as illegitimate questers after the cultural authority and writerly excellence to which these American émigrés, internal and external, aspired.
Thinking in these terms has two consequences, one of them specific to the Eliot problem, the other, opening up onto a consideration of literary modernism at large. As far as the first is concerned, placing Eliot's response to Jews in this broad conration of thought resituates the debate about his anti-Semitic expressions from their occurrence to their motives, from the question of whether he was an anti-Semite to where his anti-Semitism might come from and what it might mean. This is not to say that there aren't spasmodic and quite disgusting anti-Semitic tropes in his poetry for which no amount of apologetics should acquit him; indeed, when compared to the contemporaries I have described above, the ugliness of those tropes becomes clearer. But it also is to say that Eliot's poetry of this era comports itself to the pattern I have sketched above. It's filled with images of masculine distress, castration, ineffectuality, aestheticism, or obsolescence and populated with Jewish characters like Rachel née Rabinovitch or Bleistein who contain a certain sexuality, if not vitality, and are connected by a set of allusions, conscious and unconscious, that point back to the émigré poet himself. Consider, as just one example, the first named of these. Defined by her Russian last name, Rabinovitch, as one of the surging hordes of Ost-juden, her first name also identifies her as a Jew, and a Jew of a particular type. That name ties back to the nineteenth-century French actress Rachel who, as I have tried elsewhere to suggest, provides one important model for the Arnoldian intellectual as well as for Henry James's maniacally self-fashioning actress Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse. Like Arnold's or James's Rachel, Rachel née Rabinovitch is a partially assimilating Other, "uptorn" as Arnold puts it, from her own origins but not yet arrived at a new one: if she was born as Rabinovitch, what, other than Rachel, or perhaps "Rachel," has she become? She is thus a re not only of horrific appetency, but also a re of socio-cultural liminality, and as such mirrors another assimilating re performing on the English stage of Arnold and James, confronting his own essential rootlessness, 13 and embarking upon an enterprise of assimilative refashioning: T.S. Eliot himself. 14
More broadly, this phenomenon suggests one way in which we might want
to rethink the nature and possibilities of the category "American
modernism" itself. Wonderful recent work has identified the modernist
enterprise with complex engagements with gender; with race; with
non-heteronormative sexuality. In doing so, it has supplemented the
modernist canon—Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Pound, et al—by
constructing alternative canons that emphasize different aspects of the
modernist enterprise, that have foregrounded various different sets
of writers. Faulkner and/or the Harlem Renaissance is crucial in one
reckoning of the modernist enterprise; Stein and other queer writers
in another, and so on. My response to the Eliot controversy suggests
a different approach to the same revisionary enterprise, one which
would not so much define a new "Jewish" modernism (Stein, Mina Loy,
Louis Zukofsky, Henry Roth, Charles Reznikoff), but rather stress the
ethnoracial dimension of the tropes, assumptions, and imaginative patterns
that structured not only the modernist movement, but the academic study
of literature itself. First, within the circles that created literary
modernism in the 1920s and 1930s; then, in the university English
departments that reified modernism's critical techniques and canonized
its central texts in the 1940s and 1950s; departments which then, in the
1960s and 1970s, proclaimed its death at the hands of the post-modern (a
term circulated, it might be added, by arch-Jew Leslie Fiedler—his
revenge against the gentile tradition): in all of these various sites,
the social and imaginative encounter between Jews and gentiles shaped
the very terms by which literary modernism and the academic study of
literature were built.
15
In this sense, and in this sense only, Eliot at his most problematic
perhaps can be given the last word. With respect to the complex,
charged affective and social matrix out of which modernism emerged,
the study of literature was institutionalized, and both
questioned and complicated; with respect, that is, to the dominant
tendencies in American literature and criticism of the last fifty years,
"the Jew"—the set of imaginative constructions and deconstructions
attendant upon the entry of Jewish intellectuals into the terrain of
high culture—truly is underneath the lot.
Jonathan Freedman is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford University Press, 1990) and The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Anti-Semitism, and the Making of Literary Anglo-America, 1880-1980 (Oxford University Press, 2000).
1. Kamenetz, "The Lower Case Jew," ed. Sara Blair and Jonathan Freedman, Jewish in America II: A Special Issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review 62 (Winter, 2003): 176.
2. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. Foremost among these, of course, was the irrepressible Karl Shapiro, who was also notoriously outspoken in his response to Pound. In a symposium in Commentary, "The Jewish Writer and the English Literary Tradition," for example, Shapiro wrote: "I have always been able to 'understand' Chaucerian and even Shakespearean anti-Semitism as lingering concepts of the medieval mind. Naturally, I make no such concessions to the modern literary anti-Semite, however great an artist he happens to be. . . . When Eliot perpetuates the myth of the bestial Jew, without taking the pains elsewhere to mollify this image, he commits an outrage against his Jewish contemporaries." [Commentary 7 (October 1949): 369-70]. For an uninhibited attack on Eliot and his critical hegemony on other grounds, see "T.S. Eliot: The Death of Literary Judgment" in Shapiro, In Defense of Ignorance (New York: Random House, 1952, 1960) 35-60. Here is a sample of his "take" on Eliot:
Eliot invented a Modern World which exists only in his version of it; this world is populated by Eliot's followers and is not a reality. The Eliot population consists of a handful of critics and professors and a few writers of Eliot's generation, though one would think, reading modern criticism and teaching from modern literary textbooks, that there really is a kingdom of Modern Poetry in which T.S. Eliot is the absolute monarch and Archbishop of Canterbury in one.
4. Within the field of English literary studies, some important works in this process were Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of the Jew in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and my own Temple of Culture. This new interest in Jewishness and the literary canon are part of a generational shift—Shapiro, Cheyette, and I are all roughly the same age—which has also seen the rise, within Judaic studies, of so-called Jewish cultural studies—I am thinking here of the work inter alia, of Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin; and more generally, the rise of the study of Jewishness in the context of the questions of gender and race particularly evident in the oeuvre of Sander Gilman, but crucial as example and provocation to us all.
5. Ranen Omer-Sherman, "'It is I who have been defending a religion called Judaism': The T. S. Eliot and Horace M. Kallen Correspondence," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 39 (Winter, 1997): 321-56.
6. In a recent biography of the late Leslie Fiedler [Mark Royden Winchell, "Too Good to be True": The Life and Work (Columbia, MO. : University of Missouri Press, 2002)], for example, Mark Winchell recounts the details of an unpublished early correspondence between the young Fiedler (who was quite unsparing about Eliot later in his life) and the distinguished poet; and one can note in his paraphrase of Eliot's response both the outlines of Schuchard's own defense and an echo of Eliot's correspondence with Kallen:
Fiedler dealt directly with [the anti-Semitism of the literary canon] in a letter to T.S. Eliot, dated, December 13, 1948. Although that letter has not been preserved, Eliot's reply of January 14, 1949, is currently housed in Leslie's private files. Essentially, Eliot sees the charges against his own poetry as a matter of geographical and generational sensitivity. Neither the Jews he has known in England nor his older Jewish friends in America have ever mentioned evidence of anti-Semitism in his work. (The poems in which the word Jew appears were all published by Jews—in England by Leonard Woolf and in America by Alfred Knopf and Horace Liveright.) In any event, those poems were written many years ago, before racial sensibilities have become as polarized as they are today. Eliot then concludes on a personal note. "Incidentally, and last," he writes, "as you say that you are Jewish: I hope that you will not consider it an impertinence of me to express the hope that you are diligent in attendance at your synagogue (if you are so fortunate as to have one in Missoula, that you observe the Law and read the Scriptures, and that you cherish the faith of your fathers" .
Eliot's response didn't mollify Fiedler, to say the least. According to a witness, at a conference in 1975 held in Athens, Ohio for example, he referred to Eliot as an "asshole," causing a number in the audience to walk out. (Ross Posnock, personal communication to the author).
7. See William Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 23. Tucker goes on to trace Harvard's continuing connection to the eugenics movement in the 1920s—William McDougal, chair of the Psychology department, was a great advocate—and its gradual distancing from the fad: in 1927, it turned down a $60,000 bequest to fund eugenics courses, although the principle at stake here may have been autonomy from donor requests than changes in communal predilection.
8. Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken, 1965), 391.
9. As quoted by Ronald Bush, "Response to Ronald Schuchard," , 10 (January 2003) and not mentioned in the original essay or in Schuchard's response .
10. For Eliot's connection with eugenics, see Donald Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In my view, this connection is considerably less problematic than his studies in Sanskrit, primitive religion, and comparative anthropology, for these are connected, via a number of different sources (comparative philology, the Cambridge school of anthropology, etc.) to the discourse of Aryanism, one which had even in its pre-Nazi instantiations a problematic relation to Jews (or "Semites"). For a fascinating account of some of the cultural and intellectual positioning involved, see Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match Made in Heaven, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1992). For an astute reading of Eliot in the context of anthropological thought, see Ronald Bush, "The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/Literary Politics" in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 20-32.
11. See Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (New York: Oxford, 1977), 18.
12. Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of the Jew; Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987).
13. Here's an example of Eliot's sense of his own rootlessness at this time, as given to us by Michael North. It is encoded in other racially problematic terms, but still poignantly apposite to his comments on Jews: "Eliot wrote to Herbert Read: 'Some day, I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn't an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn't a Southerner because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere . . . " Quoted in The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 78.
14. Matters after Eliot's conversion on this front are no better, but for reasons of space I have not included my consideration of them here. I would merely point out that Eliot's problem with free-thinking Jews, evident both in his University of Virginia lecture and in his correspondence with Jews (Schuchard quotes two of these, and the Fiedler correspondence adds a third to the list), grows out of the same dynamic of identification as his anti-Semitic poetry. Here, it's a racialized identification of the intellectual with the Jew, originating in Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, that he's responding to and defending himself against. Needless the say, from a Jewish point of view, the problem in his response, phrased in the most appalling terms in his lecture but evident in a more benign guise in the letters to Jews, is his need to label, identify, or define for Jews what their Jewishness should consist of, to tell Jews how they should act in the modern world. It's this that I mean by a structural anti-Semitism, one which is quite compatible with philo-Semitism and one that, indeed, often encompasses it (see Pat Robertson for a contemporary example). It inheres in a desire to construct symbolic meanings of Jews, which then get imparted to Jews, rather than the willingness to let Jews, as members of modern, pluralistic societies, make up their own mind about what their Jewishness can and should mean.
15. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. 12, 201. I learned of this citation from Mark Winchell, "Too Good to be True," 244.
Sometime in the mid-1950s the Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams, a leading member of Afro-modernism and black abstractionism, was introduced to Pablo Picasso by Albert Camus during a visit to Paris. Given Williams's association with various factions of cubism and his attempt to emulate its style to capture the hybrid cultures of his native Guyana, the meeting with the great artist was supposed to be a highlight of his career, perhaps a catalyst for new directions in the troubled relation between artists of African descent and the international avant-garde. But as it turned out, the meeting between Williams and Picasso, far from being an ephiphanic encounter, was to be remembered as anticlimactic:
There was nothing special about meeting Picasso. It was a meeting like many others, except that meeting Picasso was a big disappointment.  I never thought I would not like people like that. But the total of the whole thing is that I did not like Picasso. He was just an ordinary past-middle-aged man. I remember the first comment he made when we met. He said that I had a very fine African head and he would like me to pose for him. I felt terrible. In spite of the fact that I was introduced to him as an artist, he did not think of me as another artist. He thought of me only as something he could use for his own work. 1
Williams's disappointment may have arisen from a sense of heightened expectation about the master, or even the hurt that came from not being recognized as a fellow artist, but what stands out in this description of the encounter is that what Picasso found most enchanting about the Guyanese painter was a "fine African head," he valued as a model for art. Williams was disappointed that he was appealing to Picasso merely as an object or subject of art, not as an artist, not as a body, not even as a human subject. And yet, it is possible that this disappointment arose because Williams had assumed, as many historians of art have assumed over a century of modernism, that because Picasso was the most important re in primitivism, the movement in art when the Other, often black or brown, became a catalyst for modern art, that he must have had some respect for the cultures and bodies that had made modernism possible. How else could one make other cultures and subjects the sources of art, the agents of the major breakthroughs we have come to associate with modernism, unless one also valued the people who produced it? We now know, of course, that the relationship between Picasso and his African sources was much more complicated than Williams might have assumed. Indeed, the fascination with the "fine African head" did not simply reflect the insensitivity of an artist past middle age; on the contrary, Picasso's relationship to Africa, or his investment in a certain idea of Africa, which is evident from his early career to his high cubist period, was a meticulous attempt to separate the African's art from his or her body, to abstract, as it were, those elements of the art form that would serve his purpose at crucial moments in his struggle with established conventions of Western art. This is the gist of the argument I want to present in this essay.
Much has been written on Picasso and primitivism but little on his specific engagement with Africa. Indeed, a major part of the argument I will be presenting here demands a separation of primitivism, as a now canonized idea in the history of modernism, from African cultures and bodies. Picasso loved the idea of the primitive and tribal, but his relationship with the cultures and peoples of Africa and Oceania was more ambiguous. We are told, by André Malraux, among others, that Picasso was irritated by "the influences that the Negroes had on me" even as he eloquently discussed the magical influence of those African objects discovered at the Old Trocadéro on that fateful day in 1906. 2 In most of his reflections on the "Negro" influence he seemed careful to make distinctions between the effect or affect of African objects and cultures. When he talked about the "Negro," he was talking about the object rather than the person. 3 The fact that Picasso had an intimate relationship with African objects is not in doubt; but there is little evidence of an interest in Africans as human beings and producers of culture beyond his general interest and involvement in anti-colonial and other radical movements. Indeed, as Williams discovered in that encounter in Paris in the 1950s, Picasso seemed to be meticulous in his separation of objects of art from bodies, and it is my contention that it was in this division of bodies from artistic models that the African could be cleansed of its danger and thus be allowed into what Aaran has aptly called "the citadel of modernism." 4
It is now claimed that in order for modernism to claim its monumentality, that is its enshrinement in the very institutions of Western culture and museum culture that it had set out to defy and deconstruct, it had to shed the contaminants of the Other as part of what D. A. Miller calls, in a different context, its "routine maintenance." 5 In fact, the debates that have come to define modernism, the custodial commentaries on its monumentality, tend to see it as the triumph of endogamy over exogamy, of internal forces over external ones. 6 It is remarkable that except in those instances when the topic at hand is primitivism, the canonical narrative of modernism has little to say about African sources. 7 Now, this absence can be explained in one of two ways: one could argue, for instance, that the institutions of commentary have been so eager to secure the purity of modernism, that they have become mechanisms of surveillance against the danger that engendered it in the first place. Africa is first acknowledged as a significant episode in the history of modernism, and then it is quickly dispatched to the space of primitivism, a place where it poses no danger to the purity of modern art. However, there is a second, even more interesting explanation, namely that the practitioners of modernism had themselves started the process of containment, that they needed the primitive in order to carry out their representational revolution, but that once this task had been accomplished, the Other needed to be evacuated from the scene of the modern so that it could enter the institutions of high art. How else can we explain the paradox that runs throughout the history of modernism, the fact that almost without exception the Other is considered to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive? To put it more specifically, why is it possible to argue simultaneously that the discovery of African and Oceanic art enabled the moment of modernism yet claim that these works did not have a fundamental influence in the shaping of modernism? From Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's dismissal of the "Negro influence" in the rise of cubism to Pierre Daix's famous claim that "there is no 'Negro' in the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," one of the greatest puzzles of modern art is whether Africa has to be considered a categorical imperative in the theory and practice of modern artists or just a passing fad in the ideology of modernism. 8 My discussion will proceed in a circuitous way, but it will focus, from different directions, both on Picasso's entanglement with Africa and the critics' and art historians' entanglement with this entanglement. My goal is to show how understanding it—the entanglement that is—is crucial to our rethinking of the aesthetic of modernism and the schemata—and stigmata—of difference that both maintains and haunts it.
Let us start with a basic question: is there an Africa in Picasso's oeuvre? And if so, what form does it take? Is it the Africa of bodies or art forms, of material culture or abstracted ideals? At first sight this might appear to be a banal question, especially when we recall the countless debates surrounding the influence of Africa as the mark of Picasso's modernist breakthrough and, inevitably, the centrality of primitivism in his aesthetic practices. But this old question needs to be posed because with few exceptions, the major studies of the African influence in Picasso, whether for or against it, are explorations of the influence of certain African art objects on Picasso's work, or generalized explorations of how African art objects, discovered at the Old Trocadèro, triggered the "terror" that made modernism possible. The terms of reference in these studies tend to acknowledge the African influence and to dispose of it in the same breath, either by confining "Africanisms" to the realm of psychological fear or artistic structure. What these approaches seem to do, even in their detailed and meticulous study of "Africanisms" in Picasso, is also to minimize what I am calling the constitutive role of Africa in the making of modernism. In 1948 Kahnweiller would, in a single bold gesture, testify to the modernist's heavy interest in Negro Art and still proceed to "dispute the validity of the thesis of a direct influence of African art on Picasso and Braque." 9 In 1984, William Rubin would provide perhaps one of the most detailed explorations of the influence of primitive art on Picasso's major works and still conclude that tribal sculpture did not have a constitutive role in the shaping of his art. 10 From the moment Picasso began to be canonized as the most important painter of the modern period in the 1940s, the institutions of interpretation have been anxious to minimize or dismiss any direct and determinative correlation between his works and the tribal objects that surrounded him as he undertook the project of making art modern. Where the influences of the tribal seem self-evident, they are redefined as "convergences" (by Kahnweiller), "affinities" (by Rubin), or "connotations" (by Bois). 11
My interest here is to probe the reasons for this anxiety of influence. What threat does the acknowledgement of correlativity between the modern and its Others pose? What is the basis of the hauntology that has come to define the moment of modernism and Western high culture in general? 12 Elsewhere I have argued that one of the unifying characteristics of the aesthetic ideology that has emerged in Europe since the eighteenth century, is its concern with Others as the enabling conditions of beauty, taste, and judgment and, simultaneously, with the counterpoints or opposites of these conditions. If art has come to function as the defining point of cultural achievement and civilization, it is only because it functions within economies of desires and ideals—of purity and a chaste culture—clearly distinct from the danger and defilement represented by the Other and in need of defense from the barbarism that necessitates taste. 13 Modernism presents an immediate challenge to this thesis because, its overall economy, especially its adulation of primitivism, would seem to posit the Other not as a threat that must be contained but as the source of new energies. In 1919, T. S. Eliot declared that one could no longer understand culture without knowing "something about the medicine-man and his works": "As it is certain that some study of primitive man furthers our understanding of civilized man, so it is certain that primitive man and poetry help our understanding of civilized art and poetry." 14 What is easy to miss in declarations such as this one is that the primitive was a conduit to understanding "civilized" man, art, and poetry, not an endpoint in itself; there was no incentive to understand the Other unless it would lead to an understanding of Western civilization either in its "childhood" or moments of crisis. Thus, Eliot wanted his readers to comprehend something about the medicine-man so that they could recognize the sensibility of the poet, "the most able of men to learn from the savage." 15 Savagery and the artistic sensibility would intimately be connected in the aesthetic of modernism; however, it did not follow that the moderns were willing to give up civilization to become one with the savage. Indeed, the relation between the modern and the savage was defined by a dialectic of love and loathing, identity and difference. So it is with Picasso and Africa. Even in his "Negro" period, Picasso seemed to prefer the African art object to the "uncultured" African body. Nevertheless, this preference for the art object over the body was something that Picasso arrived at in the process of working through his aesthetic ideology at certain crucial phases of his career, beginning with his troubled relation to academic art during his youth, his subsequent flirtation with "soft" modernism, and culminating in the cubism that marked the revolution in modern art. His oscillation between the African body and artwork appears to be the symptom of a deep and continuous engagement with the continent, the mythologies surrounding it, the fantasies it generated, and ultimately the threat it posed to the idea of civilization that the modernists both wanted to deconstruct and yet secure as the insignia of white, European, cultural achievement.
Under these circumstances, it is best to begin a rethinking of Picasso and the haunting of Africa by comparing his ration of the continent in the years before his "Negro Period" (1906-1908) and the irruption of modernism. It is useful to recall here that in the early years of his career, Picasso was preoccupied with what Marilyn McCully has called "classicizing subjects and forms"; he was primarily attracted to the art forms of what he construed to be classical cultures, mostly Iberian and Egyptian. 16 It is important to note at the outset that he did not consider "Negro Africa" to be part of this classical heritage or classicizing impulse. The absence of Africa from Picasso's classicism suggests an early awareness, on the artist's part, that the value of "Negro Africa" as a model or source of art lay elsewhere; it could not be relegated to antiquity nor could it be considered modern; rather it occupied a middle space temporally located both in the childhood of mankind and yet very much part of the living world. This understanding of Africa was determined—and explained—by Picasso's Andalusian background much more than his French sojourn. Indeed, as Natasha Staller has shown, Picasso's engagement with the myth of Africa predates his 1904 move to Paris or his 1907 discovery of African art objects at the Old Trócadero (SOD, 269-301).
My concern here, then, is the meaning of Africa in Picasso's pre-primitivism period, especially the often forgotten fact that he was the product of an Andalusia whose identity had historically been defined against an African cartography, disconnected from the "dark" continent by the Strait of Gibraltar but connected to it by history. This ambiguous connection led to "a series of complex and ambivalent racial, religious, and sexual stereotypes, and [to] the Malagueno myth of Africa, including the belief that the defeat of Africa made one modern" (SOD, 269). Staller informs us that the defeat of the Moors entered Andalusian consciousness as an epochal moment: "the middle ages ended on 18 August 1487"; it was understood "in terms of apocalyptic rupture—a rupture explicitly understood in terms of modernity" (SOD, 271). The myth that Picasso inherited from this history was one in which Africa was posited as the unmodern antithesis of the new Malaga: to become modern was to break away from Africa. Modernity, rather than classicism, defined what Picasso inherited—and resisted—as tradition. Where does resistence fit into this narrative? Since Picasso had to reject tradition in order to become an artist, or at least to break away from the artistic traditions associated with his father, he needed, paradoxically, to discover and valorize a counterpoint to the modernity of Andalusia by inventing his own version of the unmodern. He could seek this unmodern, first, in the classical tradition. But it also seems, as scholars of his early works have noted, that a mastery of classical models of painting, especially those concerning the human form, would not enable a rupture in Western systems of representation; after all, one of the uncanny moves of modernity was to embrace the classical itself as the source of its civilizational authority. 17 In this sense, it was significant that the Malagueno myth of the modern was predicated not on a break from antiquity, but from the Middle Ages, clearly associated with the Arabic, Moorish, and hence African influences.
Aware, then, that the classical alone could not be valorized as the alternative to the modern, Picasso's work in the early years turned to the painting of the body in order to appropriate its classical form but also to mark his difference from the inherited tradition. What stands out in his transitional works from 1906 such as the Two Nudes ( 1), is what Margaret Werth has aptly described as a historical and formal liminality. 18 Werth argues that the Two Nudes is liminal "in that it situates itself between formal investigation and the archaic of primitive; between materialization and dematerialization of the body; between ration and disration; and between masculine and feminine." 19 But I think this liminality is also the reflection of a deep anxiety about tradition. On one hand, Picasso wanted to re the body in the classical style, on the other hand, he wanted his representation to be in excess of the conventions he had inherited; and this excess is marked by his drawing of the human form out of proportion and, more significantly, by his conversion of the face to a mask. As the Portrait of Gertrude Stein ( 2), also painted in 1906, was to illustrate, Picasso would turn to masking when he felt he had failed to capture the human face even after numerous sittings. 20
But if Picasso's goal was to break away from inherited conventions—and the distortion of classical forms in the early works seems to enforce this view—then there was an even more radical way in which he could achieve the task of disration, that is, by turning to Africa. We know, for example, that the artist inscribed his youthful rebellion by claiming a Moorish identity. We also know that his adolescent drawings are populated by Moorish res and subjects, representing the danger of what I have called the "unmodern." These drawings represent juvenile fantasies about the Moorish Other. In the late 1890s, however, Picasso embarked on some academic paintings of the African body ( 3). 21 These paintings are important for two reasons. First, they represent the first and only time that Picasso was interested in the corporeal form of the African. After that, as I will show later, Picasso's interest in things African, even during his so-called "Negro Period," was limited solely to art objects which came to stand in for Africa itself. Second, in his academic paintings, Picasso perceived Africans in a twofold relation: the African nude represented the body in its "natural" state, one which was, nevertheless, out of proportion with the "ideal" in long-established European notions about ways of representing the human form in art. (These paintings reflected stereotypical notions of the black's excessive sexuality; indeed, what made the black body, in the form of the models Picasso was painting, compelling was its unusual distortion.) In order to defy convention—in the Two Nudes, for example—Picasso could draw the white body by drawing it out of proportion. Now, it seemed, the black body [Begin Page 462] represented the corporal form out of order, even in nature, and hence already in defiance of the laws of proportion and symmetry. In these early paintings, the African's body, in its disproportional form and primitive sexuality, would allow Picasso to kill two birds with one stone, both classicism(which favored idealized bodies) and modern culture (which was coy about male sexuality). Consequently, in this early phase of his career, Picasso adopted African forms as a way of thinking through the limitations of the forms of representation favored by the art academy, namely a sense of order, proportionality, and idealization. The African body formed the embodiment of disorder. 22
There is, of course, great irony in this narrative of Picasso's early relationship with the African: he was obsessed with African imageries and bodies before he ever laid his eyes on any real Africans; while when he first visited Paris in the year of the Universal Exhibition of 1900 and encountered colonial Africans on display, blacks seemed, in Staller's apt phrase, to slip off his "mental map" (SOD, 303). What banished African's and Moors from Picasso's consciousness? Where did they go? And why and how did they reappear in 1906? Behind these questions lies the larger problem of the repressed in representation, for, to twist the words of Fredric Jameson, it is precisely at the moment that the object of analysis (reality, history, or even Africa) is repressed, or its influence is denied, that "by a wondrous dialectical transfer the historical "object" [Africa for my purposes] itself becomes inscribed in the very form." 23 But a probing of Picasso's political unconscious must be prefaced by two additional factors. The first one is basic, namely that irrespective of the form they would take in Picasso's work, from the phantasm in the juvenile sketches to the abstractness of high cubism, African objects were what he was later to call "intercessors," instruments for mediating the kinds of forces, often unspoken and unlicensed, which he needed in order to break through the edifice of modernity (PM, 11). Apparently, Africa was most useful to Picasso when it was confined to the unconscious—there but not there—mediating other needs and desires, while not serving as a primary faction in itself. From this perspective, it would seem that when he was encountering real Africans in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, they had nothing useful to perform in his artistic project in their embodied form. 24
The second factor to consider when probing Picasso's political unconscious recalls what happened during his sojourn in Gósol in the summer of 1906. Here I am interested not so much in what has been referred to as Picasso's "regression to ethnic and primitive roots," or even in his turn to female res as the intercessors of the primitive, but in his valorization of this distortion and dissymmetry as part of his method and signature. 25 If the paintings at Gósol have one thing in common, it is their intertextual and contrapuntal relation to previous works which they acknowledge as part of their schema and yet displace in terms of form and meaning. Picasso's primary goal in the "Blue Period" (of which the stay at Gósol is exemplary) was the artistic deformation of the European canon of painting. This goal could best be achieved through the distortion of the white female form, a subject or re whose ideality represented the classicism he was ting against. This point is easily made through a comparison of Picasso's The Harem and Ingres's Turkish Bath (. 4 and 5) and of his Reclining Nude and Goya's The Naked Maja (. 6 and 7). What we see in these repaintings of significant works in the European canon is a reinstallation of established conventions of painting, a distillation of formalized artistic subjects, and a transmutation of genres. 26 But what does this repainting of European works have to do with Africa? If we were to read The Harem in itself, as an isolated object of reflection, or even in relation to Ingres's Turkish Bath, perhaps nothing, for there is little in the painting that points to Africa or the "Orient" as the primary referent. Treated as autonomous objects what we have in front of us is one painting (Turkish Bath) functioning as the intertext of another (The Harem). And yet from its title and implicit motif Picasso's Harem does seem to echo the odalisque and this has led commentators to read it in explicitly Orientalist terms. 27 Picasso encouraged this kind of reading by describing the quality of the picture as that of "L'humanité féminin, la femme d'Afrique." 28 Still, one wonders whether, this kind of strong Orientalist reading is supported by the painting itself. One could argue that Picasso has modernized the odalisque and thus distorted its terms of reference and this may well have been his intention; nevertheless, compared to the modernist Orientalism of, lets say Matisse, the "Eastern" referent is weak and displaced. 29 It could be said that in comparison to Matisse, Africanisms or Orientalisms would be notable in Picasso's painting simply because they were absent where they should have been present, or rather, absent where we are encouraged to look for them. However, Africa was not entirely absent from Picasso's "mental map" in the Gósol period—it had just become confined to his artistic unconscious, where it would re-emerge forcefully in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ( 8) in ways that are still being contested. [Begin Page 466]
African art objects are, of course, part of the thick description of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and also its enigma. According to Malraux, Picasso was unwavering in his view that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon came to him unconsciously during the visit to the Old Trocadéro and that it came to him not because of the enchantment of the forms of the African art he encountered—he doesn't seem to have paid much attention to these—but because what he recognized in this art was a force, or spirit, that was hard to describe or objectify. In other words, he was attracted by what he considered to be the unconsciousness and inexpressible. The discovery of African art was unique for Picasso because "for the first time the discovery of an art was not the discovery of a style. African art was discovered, not an African style" (PM, 171). In this context, the contrast Picasso was to make between himself and Braque was revealing. For Picasso, African objects were agents of exorcism (magical wards to be used against the economy of symbolic form); for Braque, African art was valued because of its form: