I stood [the stereoscope] above a pair of prints as I had seen some of the others doing. I could see two images, not one, and there really did not seem much point. It was much simpler to work with an ordinary magnifying glass.  It was the same sort of feeling of triumph and wonder that I remember long ago when I first stayed up on a bicycle without someone holding on behind. From then on interpretation was much easier. 26
Babington-Smith would play a key role in British intelligence efforts against the German aircraft industry and Vergeltungswaffen, or "revenge weapons," the V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets. But her first artificial stereopsis triggered memories of childhood rather than prophecies about strategic detective work. Her WAAF colleague, Ursula Powys-Lybbe, writes how, in peering down through the scope, she also gazed back in time at her own childhood, except that here it is a childhood in which the [Begin Page 367] stereoscope itself had played a role. The device acts as both a purveyor and an object of nostalgia:
Sometimes, when I was a small girl, a treasured box of glass slides would be brought out accompanied by a wooden viewer with two black eyepieces, and I would be allowed to put a slide into the viewer and stare through the eyepieces at a fairy-tale world of sparkling snow, high mountains and dark trees—then suddenly and breath-takingly, my mother and father were standing like real people and looking at me—not flat people as in an ordinary photograph. The slides had been taken during my parents' honeymoon in Switzerland.
That childish thrill was felt by everyone who, for the first time managed to shuffle a stereo pair of aerial photographs into the correct position in the viewer.  Shapes in plan were transformed into real-life ships or churches or bridges. You begged for more prints, and like the child with its new plaything, you spent a half-hour in a wonderland of discovery. 27
In its reconnaissance application, the stereoscope's power lay not just in making the enemy's intentions seem legible in the landscape, but in reawakening the observers' personal associations with the medium and channeling them toward the ends of military intelligence. These observers had encountered its technological forerunner, the parlor stereoscope, in another world—in peacetime, in childhood, in domestic spaces where stereograms embodied and catalyzed longing for the past, for possession of a toy-sized world, for escape to exotic locales. By appropriating the same optical technology for reconnaissance, aerial stereoscopy wrote over its observers' first associations; after the war, they would never again regard the stereoscope simply as a portal to personal nostalgia or reverie. But while they squinted through its eyepieces at 3-D images of tiny docklands, factories, airfields, and launch platforms, the device mobilized their affective ties to its former uses, imbuing aerial views of military and industrial sites with the glamour of magic, fantasy, wonder, and play.
The stereoscopic image also camouflaged its own mode of reproduction through the impression of palpable immediacy it conferred on its objects. Amplified by the brief tactical currency of the photos, the image's aura of presence insisted urgently on the here and now of interpretation, collapsing the distance its constituent photos had actually traveled from the site they depicted to the observer's scope. That distance was not only spatial and temporal but technological and industrial as well: once the camera plane had landed safely, the cartridges of exposed film were rushed through a technically cutting-edge process of accelerated mass reproduction. Allan Sekula describes this process of development and dissemination:
The making of these reconnaissance prints was one of the first instances of virtual assembly-line image production. (Henry Ford's first automobile assembly-line became operative only in 1914.) The establishment of this method of production grew out of demands for resolution, volume, and immediacy. No method of reproduction but direct printing from the original negative would hold the detail necessary for reconnaissance purposes. Large numbers of prints from a single negative had to be made for distribution throughout the hierarchy of command. In addition, the information in prints dated very rapidly. Under these circumstances, efficiency depended on a thorough-going division of labor and a virtually continuous speedup of the work process. Printers worked in unventilated, makeshift darkrooms; 20 workers might produce as many as 1,500 prints in an hour, working 16-hour shifts. 28
As one terminus of this industrialized developing process, reconnaissance interpreters belonged to a kind of consumer vanguard, benefiting from techniques of photographic mass production that had not yet reached consumers in civil society. Installed in comparatively safe and well-organized facilities, they were insulated from the spectrum of violence involved in obtaining and developing the photos, a spectrum that included not only dead pilots and wrecked camera planes, but the exploitive use of conscript labor to ensure the tactical currency and bulk dissemination of the photos. At the same time, the observers' status as professional interpreters of industrially mass-produced images, along with the esoteric nature of their calculations and surveillance, helped conceal the fact that they also belonged to one of several classes of worker within the perception-and-targeting machine of military intelligence. And like most of the workers in the reconnaissance production line, they learned to experience extended shifts, repetitive labor, physical strain, and insulation from the violence their "product" recorded and facilitated, as a rare species of privilege.
If the glamour of the interpreters' work exceeded that of developers and even pilots, it did so because of their singular position within the power/knowledge grid of military intelligence. As we have seen, aerial stereoscopy, like the general work of photo interpretation to which it belonged, was situated within a professional narrative of forgetting, relearning, practice, and eventual mastery—a narrative of election and initiation into a top secret coterie, heavily defended by codes and shibboleths. It was a narrative that consolidated the identity of an elite interpretive school, one whose power lay not in the mere ability to command, but in the more rarefied capacity of producing the knowledge that would inform the commanders—recall Walter Raleigh's boast that "Reconnaissance, or observation, can never be superseded; knowledge comes before power; and the air is first of all a place to see from." Having gazed with childlike fascination into the miniaturized wonderland beneath their stereoscopes, the colleagues of Babington-Smith and Powys-Lybbe, like their Great War predecessors, produced the maps and memos that would, in turn, direct the Allied bombs. After the missions, they would confirm the destruction of the same enchanting objects that had held them in a reverie of detection. In confirming how their detective work had led to the alteration or annihilation of the terrain and structures recorded in reconnaissance photos, observers also confirmed the alteration of their own perceptual systems. To attain stereovision, they had learned to dissociate their optical reflexes of convergence and accommodation, in the process retraining their bodies to become contiguous with an elaborate weapons system that began by recording, identifying, and interpreting its objects, and ended by targeting and finally destroying them. They had become acclimated to a vertigo of scale, learning to be at least three perceptual sizes at once. Most chillingly, they had retrained themselves affectively so that an optical medium formerly invested in childhood, memory, genealogy, and fantasy could retain the force of that affective tie, but refocus it on the surveillance and obliteration of military, industrial, and eventually civilian targets. In this respect, the observer-interpreters themselves—their bodies, their reflexes, their mnemonic associations, their affective investments—were the secondary targets of their own reconnaissance work.
In turning now to consider the relationships between Great War perceptual vocabularies and cubist ones, we are entering a well-cultivated critical terrain, one in which cubism has been seen as anticipating or influencing wartime phenomena as diverse as psychological fragmentation, the rectilinearity of the trench environment, the deprivileging of perspectival centers, and spatial disorientation, along with temporal acceleration, dilation, and rupture. Some of the cubists themselves saw elements of the Great War's perceptual repertoire emanating from their work. Gertrude Stein recalled being with Picasso, on the Boulevard Raspail during the early months of the war, when he first saw camouflage painted on a truck: "It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and Picasso amazed looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism" (P, 18). More conventional accounts of the origins of camouflage point to a need to conceal troops, weapons, and supplies from longer-range guns and the extended optical range of the enemy's airborne reconnaissance, but the pragmatism of that need does not rule out the deployment of a cubist visual syntax in meeting it. Stephen Kern cites at least one account of a direct descent from cubism to camouflage: Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, an artilleryman who became the first French camoufleur, claimed that "In order to totally deform objects, I employed the means Cubists used to represent them," a decision that resulted in his hiring painters who, "because of their special vision, had an aptitude for denaturing any kind of form whatsoever." 29 Putatively developed to express a manifold but no less "real" or "essential" notion of perception, cubism had been drafted into a military function whose semiotic operations—encryption versus decryption, nature versus denaturing, form versus deformation—were far more binary than its own appeared to be. Stein wrote that "war is only a publicity agent which makes every one know what has happened"—that is, war foregrounds the perceptual sea changes that have already occurred in the culture at large and registered in its artistic vanguards (P, 45). If this is so, the Great War either caricatured cubism in publicizing it or exposed the fact that cubism had, from its inception, possessed an encryptive function that suited it to the oppositional perceptual space of the battlefield. In the latter case, the Great War would have been cubist only insofar as cubism was already combat-ready.
But if camouflage was among the war's publicizations of cubist innovation,
how could the reconnaissance techniques that helped prompt the invention
of camouflage, and that were subsequently dubbed its "worst foe," be
said to share a perceptual etiology with cubism?
As we have seen, aerial photography was initially celebrated as capturing
a plenitude of accurate data, as the photographic genre whose content
was least contaminated by rhetoric. By contrast, cubist painting was
received as extending the impressionist, postimpressionist, and fauvist
disjunctions of object and depiction, pushing representation toward the
condition of pure, nonmimetic, code. Though we have also seen that aerial
reconnaissance photos were far more coded, contingent, and "produced"
than is generally recognized, they still operated within an intelligence
context whose legitimizing narrative was one of panoptical realism. That
context used technologically enhanced modes of seeing to translate raw
visual data into targeting data, progressively narrowing the gap between
perception and destruction. Cubist painting might be said to enact, or
at least testify to, the violent refraction, attenuation, dismemberment,
and flattening of the subjects named by its often conventional, even
academic work titles (Violin, Female Nude, Still
Life with Violin and Pitcher, Guitar on Table). The 1915
critical complaint that Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase
resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory" testified, at least,
to this apparent representational violence, one that seems consonant
with the violent and changeful period (1907-1914) during which cubism
initially flourished. But can one really go so far as to link the
harmonic and representational violence of cubism to reconnaissance
techniques used to organize physical violence against an enemy army
and military-industrial complex?
By the above characterizations, the realist tenets of reconnaissance will seem, at most, to be a curative response to the perceptual disorder of cubism. The two would be etiologically related, then, only in the sense that a disorder and its treatment can be said to share an etiology. But we have also seen that the hyperrealist claims made on behalf of reconnaissance were accompanied by an internal recognition that camouflage—a distortion or concealment of an object's visual signature—was the general rather than the exceptional case of vision, and that countering it involved not so much undoing distortion as offering a counterdistortion, one that manifestly did not restore or recuperate the real. In this respect, we might say that reconnaissance administered not a medicinal dose of truth, but rather "a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand." 30 Picasso said this of art, and of cubism in particular; his recognition of the provisional nature of realizable "truth" has the syntax of an afterthought, but insofar as it acknowledges the contingency of perception, it articulates a generative condition of both cubism and Great War reconnaissance. I have described this condition above as the culmination of a nineteenth-century antiocularcentrism in physiological optics, epistemology, and aesthetic production, a current of thought crystallized in the parlor stereoscope. By 1907 this deconsecration of vision and visual metaphors had been more recently emphasized by Nietzsche and Bergson, who helped bring about what Martin Jay has schematized as a threefold revision of vision: the detranscendentalization of perspective, the recorporealization of the cognitive subject, and the revalorization of time over space (DE, 187). Though aerial reconnaissance might be assumed to reject any such deconsecration of ocular proof, we have seen that instead it capitalized on decentered optics and temporal parallax. And though cubism certainly responded to antiocular epistemology, it often did so in surprisingly eye-minded ways, preserving at least the metaphor of stereopsis in attempting to tell the story of depth, if never quite to reproduce its effects. In fact, by projecting onto a single picture plane many facets of an object not simultaneously visible to the eye (tops next to bottoms, backs adjacent to fronts), cubism made its own bid to see beneath bridges, to provide a total reconnaissance cover of its objects. To regard cubism as exclusively encryptive, and reconnaissance as exclusively decryptive, then, would be to install both within the very positivist, cryptological syntax whose rejection they embodied.
Early accounts of cubism described the movement as reckoning in new ways with an old problem: the impossibility of inducing natural stereopsis from within a two-dimensional pictorial space. 31 The parlor stereoscope had provided one solution to this problem; but even it could not induce the viewer's eyes to converge and accommodate differently at separate depth planes within the fused image, with the unlifelike result that foreground, middleground, and background depth planes in a stereogram are all simultaneously in focus. In taking up this problem, cubism might be described as a second-generation stereoscopy, trading optical illusionism in for other techniques of suggesting, narrating, or inflicting depth. In 1912, two prominent cubist painters, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, undertook in their essay Cubism to defend and publicize the movement, and above all to begin a process of reeducation, one that would address "the difficulty which even a sensible and cultivated public experiences in reading modern works." Heretofore, they argued, the public had only been looking at cubist paintings through the retina. But cubism had from the start been cognizant of the flatness of the picture plane, utterly dispensing with the notion that a painting acted as a window looking out onto Cartesian space. Such a recognition confronted the limitations of retinal perception for painting, not the least of which being that in the single depth plane of pictorial space, the reflex of focal accommodation to different depth planes was mooted, and thus "the convergence which perspective teaches us to represent cannot evoke the idea of depth." Since even a painstaking reproduction of perspectival dimensions and proportions failed to convey depth, painters had to resort to more distortive means of conveying "the fictitious depths in which the co-ordinative light resides": 32
Let us imagine a landscape. The width of the river, the thickness of the foliage, and the height of the banks, the dimensions of each object and the relations of these dimensions—these are secure guarantees. Well, if we find these intact upon the canvas, we shall have learned nothing as to the talent or the genius of the painter. River, foliage, and banks, despite a conscientious representation to scale, no longer "tell" by virtue of their width, thickness, and height, or the relations between these dimensions. Torn from natural space, they have entered a different kind of space, which does not assimilate the proportion observed. This remains an external matter. It has just so much importance as a catalogue number, or a title at the bottom of a picture frame. . . . The painter has the power of rendering as enormous things that we regard as infinitesimal, and as infinitesimal things that we know to be considerable; he changes quantity into quality. [C, 25-6]
With the stereoptic reflexes annulled by pictorial space, the painter could compensate by distorting the dimensions of natural space in such a way that they would once again "tell" as depth—i.e., by a variation on hyperstereopsis. Painters also had recourse to "tactile and motor sensations, indeed to all our faculties. It is our whole personality which, contracting or dilating, transforms the plane of the picture. As in reacting this plane reflects the personality upon the understanding of the spectator, pictorial space may be defined as a sensible passage between two subjective spaces" (C, 29-30). 33 It is no longer the iris alone, but the whole personality that contracts or dilates. Reimagined here as a synesthetic perceptual organ, the new spectator would open his or her whole sensorium to the painting even as the painter had done; painter and spectator would collaborate in the creation of a pictorial space through the fusion, not of two sightlines, but of two subjectivities. Despite its antiocularcentrism and its insistence that painters are not geometers, Cubism retains stereopsis, or rather hyperstereopsis, as its master trope, widening its parallactic baseline from an interocular to an intersubjective distance. Gleizes and Metzinger even conferred a variant of stereoptic fusion on cubist painting. Confident that even "the least intelligent" painters and spectators would eventually recalibrate their perceptual habits in accordance with cubist hyperstereoperception, they forecast a day when "the fact of moving around an object to seize several successive appearances, which, fused in a single image, reconstitute it in time, will no longer make thoughtful people indignant." Meanwhile, they declared, cubist forms must remain "sufficiently remote from the imagination of the vulgar to prevent the truth which they convey from assuming a general character," and cubism must continue to "employ its own language, in order to move, dominate, and direct the crowd, not in order to be understood" (C, 54-5, 24, 62).
The notion that the serial glances constituting a cubist painting could "fuse in a single image," as if with a sudden stereoscopic clarity, seems questionable given the sense of irretrievable dispersal conveyed by much cubist work. Besides, Gleizes and Metzinger seem here to describe the painter's, rather than the spectator's, fusion of a series of "appearances" onto a single image plane. But in other accounts of cubism, an experience very like stereoscopic fusion is clearly attributed to the spectator. In his Rise of Cubism , Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of the movement's key exhibitors and dealers, likened cubism to "stereometric drawing on the plane," adding that it can present "an analytical study of [an] object which the spectator then fuses into one again in his mind." Though Kahnweiler conceded that the fusion may lack the "closed manner of the stereometric drawing," he nonetheless bestowed on that more "open" fusion the same ontological status as the stereoscopic image: "there exists, as well, but only in the mind of the spectator, the finished product of the assimilation, the human head, for instance." 34 This "assimilation," he added, could be assisted through a painting's titular reference to familiar objects, mention of which would summon catalytic memory images in the spectator:
Naturally, with this, as with any new mode of expression in painting, the assimilation which leads to seeing the represented things objectively does not immediately take place when the spectator is unfamiliar with the new language. But for lyric painting to fulfill its purpose completely, it must be more than just a pleasure to the eye of the spectator. To be sure, assimilation always takes place finally, but in order to facilitate it, and impress its urgency upon the spectator, Cubist pictures should always be provided with descriptive titles, such as Bottle and Glass, Playing Cards and Dice and so on. In this way, the condition will arise which H. G. Lewes [sic] referred to as "preperception" and memory images connected with the title will then focus much more easily on the stimuli in the painting. [RC, 12-3]
The painting could further facilitate the spectator's "assimilation" by including recognizable details—clues, such as domestic objects or personal effects, that could help establish the scale, location, and orientation of its subject. Picasso's 1910 portrait Daniel-HenryKahnweiler ( 11), a celebrated example of analytical cubism, offsets its defamiliarizing gestures with details such as the subject's watch-chain, a bottle and glass, a table, and a piece of New Caledonian sculpture. Like the materiality and familiarity of its work titles, the cubist detail suggests the movement's residual engagement with more conventionally realist forms of representation, and its odd proximity to the detail-obsessed, decryptive, and denominative operations of reconnaissance. And as with reconnaissance, Kahnweiler insisted that despite cubism's concessions to the familiar, its spectators must, in the name of "urgency," relearn perception, becoming familiar with the movement's "new language" and enlisting their memories of more conventional perceptual acts in order to "assimilate" the cubist image. Viewers who misconstrued cubism as "Geometric Art" did so, he said, because geometry was the only memory image they could connect with the paintings. That misperception would end "as soon as the spectator familiarizes himself with the new method of expression and gains in perception" (RC, 13).
As they did in reconnaissance discourse, such prescriptions for a reeducated spectator served social as well as perceptual ends in the reception of cubism. Like Kahnweiler, Picasso likened cubism to a language that only some people understood: "The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anybody else but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" 35 By equating the viewing of a painting with various forms of translation—from one language to another, from optical dispersal to assimilation, from lies to "the truth that is given us to understand"—such directives made a two-way toggle switch of the spectator's understanding. As a result, they conferred an elite identity on those spectators who could answer one question in the affirmative: "Do you get it?" Thus, however much Great War camoufleurs like de Scévola may seem to have misappropriated cubism as a straightforwardly encryptive resource, one finds that the dichotomous logic of camouflage was immanent within cubist self-representation from the start, and furthermore that cubism partly contracted that logic from the stereoscope, only a subset of whose users could gain access to the "fictitious depths" latent in its flat images. Along with the gatekeeping question as to its spectators' [Begin Page 375] understanding, cubism also issued them a series of implicit dares, all of which point up both its adversarial tendencies and its homologies with Great War reconnaissance: can you either recover the subject named by the image from its defamiliarized form, or find the irrecuperable estrangement of that subject pleasurable, legitimate, interesting, or important? Will you assimilate work titles like Still Life and Woman with Pears, commonly found in more conventional contexts, in their reapplication to a seemingly violent dismemberment of the old optical order the titles ask you to remember? Will you be able to achieve a fusion of such paintings and their titles, perceptually unifying those two disparate informational fields? How far will you go in retraining yourself either to see anew, or to assent to not-seeing as a nobler, worthier, harder, or more contemporary act of perception?
From two spectacularly different vantages, the conscripted gazes of the reconnaissance observer and the cubist spectator converged in a single scopic regime. Both were asked to gaze on conspicuously flat image spaces and endeavor, through retraining their perceptual coordinates and reflexes, to produce a "fusion" or "assimilation" in the mind that would reveal objects in "fictitious depths" that were both deeper and more overtly fictitious than the conventions of Cartesian perspectivalism. This fictitious depth was constituted not only of spatial parallax, but of temporal as well: the cubist painting projected a series of glimpses onto a single canvas, while aerial hyperstereoscopy allowed a simultaneous fusion of stereopairs shot in sequence; both constructed a mobile rather than a fixed observer in relation to the observed. Like the parlor stereoscope of which they were rival offspring, cubism and aerial stereoscopy depicted an object in such a way as to make it seem the more present for being the result of a differential effect that took place, if it took place at all, nowhere but in the mind of the observer. They required their observers to earn that impression of presence, along with its conceit of providing a three-dimensional cover (seeing under bridges from above, say, or behind forward-facing demoiselles), through an arduous perceptual reeducation, one that forced them to confront the contingency of scalar stability, depth perception, normal dimension, and ultimately the coexistence and interpenetration of different spatial orders. But as a reward for that reeducation, they promised to admit the observer into an elite made up of those who "understood." Obviously cubism and Great War reconnaissance bore very different relations to physical violence, the latter being explicitly involved in planning, facilitating, and confirming destruction. But the chief site of that destruction proved the most hospitable climate for cubist painting during the war years: although its reputation suffered amid the formal conservatism of patriotic Paris, cubism thrived at the front. There, soldier-painters such as Fernand Léger, André Fraye, Albert Gleizes, and André Maré used cubist analytical syntax to represent the real destruction they were now helping to fend off and to wreak. 36
Although this essay has juxtaposed the observer constructed by Great War reconnaissance with the corresponding re in cubist painting, other pairings suggest themselves. To begin with, stereopsis has long been understood as integral to the rative and philosophical vocabularies of much modernist literature. The differential optics of parallax undergird meditations on both epistemology and ethics in Joyce's Ulysses, a text that also asks to be read stereoptically, challenging its readers to fuse Homeric and contemporary narratives without conflating them, remaining mindful of how each narrative consecrates or desecrates, distorts, rectifies, or relativizes the other. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is structured around a stereopsis of class and gender, pairing the upper-class Clarissa with the petit-bourgeois Great War veteran Septimus—characters who, like stereopairs, are kept adjacent but separate, throwing one another into relief. Roger Shattuck has described the chronotope of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu as binocular in its abandonment of motion for the relief effects achieved by juxtaposing arrested, temporally disjunct moments. 37 In all three cases, however, one notes that the conspicuously broad separations between various conceptual stereopairs—separations in class, gender, genre, time, and space—suggest not the subtle interocular distance and simultaneity of parlor stereograms, but the more considerable spatial and temporal intervals, the self-conscious distortion, and the equivocal interpretive mandates of reconnaissance hyperstereoscopy. The stereoptic preoccupations of such texts might be revisited in the context of a second-generation stereoptic regime, one distinct from nineteenth-century stereoscopy in its use of scalar manipulation and industrialized image production, in its role as the perceptual component of an integrated weapons system, and in its conflicted claims about its own simultaneously realist and illusionist powers.
In other registers, too, reconnaissance optics and rhetoric were homologous with a whole series of gestures that have come to seem characteristic of many interwar modernisms. As Great War reconnaissance did with aerial photography and the stereoscope, modernist texts tended to recombine nineteenth-century representational technologies, but within hyperbolized contexts that insisted on the interdependence of representation and destruction. They foregrounded the extent to which conventions of documenting the real are constructed by strategic and compensatory exaggerations that become naturalized, even normativized, over time. While indulging frequently in fantasies of comprehensive and totalizing representation, they also illustrated the dependence of such fantasies upon site-specific, partial, relativistic acts of perception. They further shifted the function of reading and viewing away from the veridical category of "vision" to "a vision," the expression of a lone artist whose worldview was so radically eccentric as to invalidate former ways of reading and seeing. Having nullified the usefulness of precedent, they asked their viewers or readers to engage in extravagant acts of rediscipline and reeducation, to devote a lifetime not just to studying, but to "studying under" a singular text or artifact (e.g., Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the Cantos, Duchamp's Large Glass with its unique physics). 38 They thereby created, and in several cases plainly set out to create, elite corps of interpreters devoted to exceeding the standards of mere accuracy in extracting meaning from every detail in a semiotic field. In doing so, they activated the oppositional dynamics of encryption/decryption, presenting themselves as puzzles for their interpreters to solve through perseverance, resourcefulness, collaboration, and the development of new interpretive protocols and technologies. This oppositional relationship recast the artist in a manner largely peculiar to the twentieth century: as an adversary whose occulted intentions the observer set out to fathom by decoding, identifying, and interrelating objects in a textual or perceptual domain, using exaggerative theoretical optics and interpretive trigonometry to take the measure of those objects by the light of social forces external to the artist's control. And by calling for interpretive schools whose work was inseparably devotional and adversarial, they helped catalyze the relation of ambivalence that is characteristic of much twentieth-century critical discourse toward its objects, a stance in which affection and aggression seem inextricably knotted, even mutually constitutive.
This last series of claims will seem to make a totalizing gesture of its own, one in which the technical, rhetorical, and social dynamics of Great War reconnaissance are put forward as the key to all modernist mythologies. This is certainly not the aim of this essay, which seeks rather to juxtapose two disjunct images of a culture wrestling with the predication of totality on locality, partiality, contingency. If these two images appear to fuse into an integrated concept, that concept is none other than the recognition of any totalizing system as illusionist, as possessed of decryptive or explanatory powers only in proportion as it exaggeratively dubs "real," "natural," "infallible," or "total" observations that it knows to be vulnerably site-specific. To bring a remote object out of flatness, the critic, like the observer, overcompensates: seeing it in any legible depth is the result of distortion—a falsified conflation or a distended separation of moments, spaces, gazes, discourses, epistemes. Yet this counterdistortion neither restores nor presupposes the dimensions of the real with any certainty, because the process of mapping the pathways of critical stereopsis reveals what formerly were "normal" dimensions to be "a normal," a highly contingent baseline rather than a fixed cardinal point. If the veridical notion of "vision" has, in the process, been forsaken for the more eccentric criterion of "a vision," the critic-observer hopes to recuperate in tactical advantage what has been lost in the waning—or sacrifice—of ocular proof, stable notions of the natural, and the fantastic certainty of a God's-eye view. A critical overview of modernist reconnaissance, if it is sufficiently attentive to its subject, will have schooled its observer to be circumspect about its own final, panoramic observation: that aerial hyperstereoscopy was paradigmatic of the dominant status of the observer in the early twentieth century.
Writing during the late 1930s of cubism and the airplane view of
America, Gertrude Stein was performing her own act of modernist cultural
reconnaissance. Two radically separate high-altitude stereopairs lay
beneath her lenses: on one side, a long-expired avant-garde movement;
on the other, a technologically sponsored view of the earth that cubism's
key exponents had never, to her knowledge, seen firsthand. The respective
images—after all, rather flattened versions of cubism and early
aerial perspective—were both spatially and temporally disjunct,
occupying different discursive spaces
and historical moments. Stein's prose juggles the stereopairs about,
uncertain whether they line up in a relation of causality, and if
so, which way that causality flows. If the two images can be said to
fuse, they do so in the elusive but suggestive notion that creators
are supercontemporary: that they are people who simply and instantly
intuit the epoch-making changes their contemporaries must register in the
fullness of time. The rhetorical majesty with which the idea is expressed
belies the spatial and temporal contingency of which it is the special
effect. Yet the illusory nature of Stein's synthesis is nothing against
its persuasive force among students of modernism, whom it has repeatedly
"come right up and hit" as a crucial formulation. That quality of being at
once theatrically distortive and revealingly (or revoltingly) accurate is
characteristic of many modernisms, and many interpretive theories about
modernism. So are the stakes concealed by this hallucinatory realism:
namely, an observer of "splendors" whose aesthetic power is indissolubly
bound not only to the potential destruction of the object but also to the
violent perceptual and ethical redisciplining of the observer. Such an
observer could experience both the annihilation of the represented object
and the trials and spectacle of her own retraining—as Stein does in
her conclusion to Picasso, and as Powys-Lybbe did in her wartime
reunion with the stereoscope—as unalloyed aspects of "splendor."
Paul K. Saint-Amour is Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination and is currently at work on a book entitled Archive, Bomb, Camera: Over the Limits of Late Modernity.
1. Ernest Hemingway, "A Paris-to-Strasbourg Flight," The Toronto Daily Star, September 9, 1922; reprinted in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, ed. William White (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), 42-3. I would like to thank Marlene Briggs, Joel Dinerstein, Frederic Gleach, Neil Hertz, Arden Reed, Ned Schantz, and Hilary Schor for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.
2. See, for example, Beaumont Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World from the Air and Outer Space (New York: Hastings House, 1969), 105; hereafter abbreviated as AC; Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 245; hereafter abbreviated as CTS; Julie H. Wosk, "The Aeroplane in Art," Art & Artists no. 219 (December 1984): 24; Margret Dreikausen, Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Comtemporary Art (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1985), 15; John Welchman, "Here there & otherwise," Artforum 27 (September 1988): 18. The association between cubism and aerial perspective has even begun to appear in broad cultural history surveys. Jacques Barzun writes: "Rather than science it was techne that affected the Cubist eye: motor-car speed and aviation, which respectively force images into each other and flatten what is rounded. There is no record of Cubist fliers, but photographs showed the earth in the geometric way now familiar to the air traveler." From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 649.
3. Waldemar George, "Vorwort zur 93. Sturm-Ausstellung," Der Sturm (Berlin), January 1921; translated and reprinted as "Foreword to an Exhibition held by Der Sturm, Berlin" in Cubism, ed. Edward F. Fry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 161.
4. George McCartney, Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 56-62.
5. Gertrude Stein, Picasso (London: B. T. Batsford, 1938); reprinted in Gertrude Stein on Picasso, ed. Edward Burns (New York: Liveright, 1970), 76; hereafter abbreviated as P.
6. Quoted in Welchman, "Here there & otherwise," 18. The photo atlas Welchman describes is Characteristics of the Ground and Landmarks in the Enemy Lines opposite the BRITISH FRONT from the Sea to St. Quentin, Branch Intelligence Section of the G.H.Q. Wing, RAF [1918?].
7. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 213-4; hereafter abbreviated as DE.
8. See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Technical Manifesto of Futurism" ; reprinted in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972). Marinetti writes that "Deep intuitions of life joined to one another, word for word according to their illogical birth, will give us the general lines of an intuitive psychology of matter. This was revealed to me when I was flying in an airplane. As I looked at objects from a new point of view, no longer head on or from behind, but straight down, foreshortened, that is, I was able to break apart the old shackles of logic and the plumb lines of the ancient way of thinking" (88-9). Jeffrey Schnapp describes how the structural peculiarities of the Voisin biplane—e.g, its deafening engine, the unobstructed forward view resulting from its rearward-facing propeller—informed the reveries and mandates of Marinetti's "Technical Manifesto." See Jeffrey Schnapp, "Propeller Talk," 1, no. 3 : 153-78.
9. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 40; italics in original.
10. The phrase "scopic regime" was apparently coined by Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 61. See also Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988).
11. Paul Virilio, La Machine de Vision (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 38, quoted in DE, 211.
12. Walter Raleigh, The War in the Air, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 446.
13. Allan Sekula, "The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War," Artforum 14 (December 1975): 28.
14. Clarence Winchester and F. L. Wills, F.R.P.S., Aerial Photography: A Comprehensive Survey of its Practice & Development (London: Chapman and Hall, 1928), 8; hereafter abbreviated as CS.
15. Maj. Edward J. Steichen, "American Aerial Photography at the Front," U.S. Air Service 1 (June 1919): 39.
16. See Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), n.p.
17. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 128.
18. Herbert E. Ives, Airplane Photography (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1920), 358; hereafter abbreviated as AP.
19. Roy Conyers Nesbit notes that the Watson Air Camera, designed in 1913 for the British Royal Flying Corps, took the Corps's first vertical photos, from the rigid airship Beta. By the summer of 1915, the C-type camera permitted a sequence of overlapping shots (eighteen per magazine) to be taken semiautomatically from airplanes. See Nesbit, Eyes of the RAF: A History of Photo-Reconnaissance (Phoenix Mill; [Washington, D.C.]: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1996), 11, 35; and Andrew J. Brookes, Photo Reconnaissance (London: Ian Allan, 1975), 20.
20. Quoted in Harold E. Porter, Aerial Observation: The Airplane Observer, the Balloon Observer, and the Army Air Corps Pilot (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1921), 163; hereafter abbreviated as AO.
21. AP, 352; AO, 179. Winchester and Wills write that the observer's duty was "to act as an aerial detective, making notes of the movements of troops and recording on maps the position of trenches, ammunition dumps and the like. He had to rely chiefly upon his visual observations and an intelligence which would grow keener only by continued experience as an observer"; see CS, 5.
22. World War I aerial reconnaissance photos were typically taken from altitudes of ten thousand feet, as the aircraft had to fly above the ranges of ground-based artillery, and hopefully high enough to elude detection.
23. AO, 179-81. Porter reproduces the anecdote from a recent but unnamed "highly technical magazine published in Chicago."
24. H. T. U. Smith, Aerial Photographs and their Applications (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1943), 74.
25. Talbert Abrams, Essentials of Aerial Surveying and Photo Interpretation (New York: McGraw Hill, 1944), 130.
26. Constance Babington-Smith, Air Spy: The Story of Photo Intelligence in World War II (New York, 1957), 78-9.
27. Ursula Powys-Lybbe, The Eye of Intelligence (London: William Kimber and Company, 1983), 47-8.
28. Sekula, "The Instrumental Image," 28.
29. Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, "Souvenirs du camouflage (1914-1918)," La revue, December 1950, 719-20, quoted in Stephen Kern, "Cubism, Camouflage, Silence, and Democracy: A Phenomenological Approach," in NowHere: Space, Time, and Modernity, ed. Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 166. See also André Ducasse, Jacques Meyer, and Gabriel Perreux, Vie et mort des Français, 1914-1918 (Paris, 1962), 510-1, quoted in CTS, 303; and Elizabeth Kahn Baldewicz, "Les Camoufleurs: The Mobilization of Art and the Artist in Wartime France, 1914-1918," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980. De Scévola's proposal led to the establishment of the French service de camouflage on February 12, 1915.
30. Pablo Picasso, interview with Marius de Zayas, 1923; translation (approved by Picasso) published as "Picasso Speaks," The Arts (New York), May 1923, quoted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 264.
31. The Englishman Charles Wheatstone, one of the inventors of the stereoscope, had been among the first to posit a physiological reason for this impossibility: "When the painting and the object are seen with both eyes, in the case of the painting two similar objects are projected on the retinas, in the case of the solid object the pictures are dissimilar; there is therefore an essential difference between the impressions on the organs of sensation in the two cases, and consequently between the perceptions formed in the mind; the painting therefore cannot be confounded with the solid object." Charles Wheatstone, "Contributions to the Physiology of Vision," in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas J. Wade (London: Academic Press, 1983), 66.
32. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme (Paris, 1912); translated as Cubism (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 21, 29, 19; hereafter abbreviated as C.
33. Robert L. Herbert's translation of the passage's final sentence is clearer: "Since in reaction this plane reflects the viewer's personality back upon his understanding, pictorial space may be defined as a sensible passage between two subjective spaces." Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, ed. Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 18.
34. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1920); translated as The Rise of Cubism by Henry Aronson (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949), 12; hereafter abbreviated as RC.
35. Picasso, "Picasso Speaks," quoted in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 264.
36. See Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 78-85.
37. Roger Shattuck, Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time and Recognition in À la recherche du temps perdu (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
38. Jean Clair has discussed Duchamp's fascination and experiments with stereoscopic photographic vision and anaglyphs in "Opticeries," October 5 (summer 1978): 101-12.
At a job interview in the 1980s, the then head of the English Department at Birmingham University opened the questions with the following remark: "I might well be accused of being anti-Semitic, but don't you think that writing about Jews is rather narrow?" Since the 1980s there has been, thankfully, a sea change in our understanding of the canon of American and European literature. For the most part, this has been an important corrective to the largely uncritical view that existed before this period which merely celebrated the canon as a bastion of universalizing (presumably "non-narrow") human values. We now have a more historically grounded and nuanced understanding of the ways in which supposedly great literary and cultural achievements can be complicit with the worst of human behavior.
There is nothing particularly new about this pessimistic view of western culture. It was first articulated in the 1930s and 40s by proponents of the Frankfurt School, especially Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, and was popularized for an Anglo-American readership by George Steiner in the 1960s. As Steiner states in his Language and Silence : "The ultimate of political barbarism grew from the core of Europe. . . . This is of obvious and appalling relevance to the study or teaching of literature. It compels us to ask whether knowledge of the best that has been thought and said does, as Matthew Arnold asserted, broaden and refine the resources of the human spirit." 1 Instead of the ideals of an Arnold or an Eliot, Benjamin's oft-quoted dictum— "there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism"— has been taken to speak for our age. One can move quite easily from Arnold to Eliot in these terms (however much Eliot disdained Arnold) in their respective roles as cultural arbiters who use the language of race to underline their authority.
I have always thought that it is a mistake to overdetermine or moralize individual writers as particularly unforgivable anti-Semites or racists as this lets the rest of the culture off the hook. Over the years, this approach has tended to marginalize the question of racial discourse in literature as it is deemed to be beyond our routine concerns, a specialism concerned only with loathsome individuals. To this extent I follow Lionel Trilling whose critical study of Matthew Arnold was the first and is still the best account of Arnold's use of race as a category in Culture and Anarchy. In his book, Trilling writes that in Arnold's day "racial theory . . . was almost undisputed" and he then goes on to list some of the many examples of those who, in his words, were "to foster and elaborate the notion of a racial constant" in the nineteenth century: "Stendhal, Meredith, . . . Carlyle, J.A. Froude, Kingsley, Taine, Renan." 2 Trilling concludes that his "list could be made to include nearly every writer of the time who generalized about human affairs" and this is also the main conclusion of my own work (MA, 234-5).
It is particularly instructive to go back to Trilling as his measured and controlled voice contrasts markedly with the sound of bombast and moral self-righteousness which informs so much of the recent debate as instigated by Anthony Julius and Tom Paulin on Eliot and anti-Semitism. To be sure, in his book on Arnold, first published in 1939, Trilling goes to the heart of one of the key questions addressed in concerning Eliot and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany:
If some used [a "racial hypothesis"] for liberalising purposes, as Arnold himself did, still, by their very assent to an unfounded assumption, they cannot wholly be dissociated from the . . . whole of official German thought in the present day (MA, 235).
Trilling argues that however liberalized Arnold's use of a racial discourse, there remains an association between Arnold's racial distinctions (between Semite and Aryan) and the institutionalization of this racial rhetoric in Nazi Germany. It goes without saying that no one in 1939 knew that such liberalized race-thinking would lead to the death camps. But it is essential, I believe, to move away from a teleological view of European anti-Semitism (culminating in the Holocaust) which immediately transforms it into an aberrant or pathological phenomenon. As Hannah Arendt has argued, once we think of Jewish literary representations as fixed "stereotypes," "myths," or "images," that have remained essentially the same across the centuries, they become merely "natural consequences of an eternal problem." 3 By decontextualizing modern anti-Semitism, the only context that is allowed—that implicitly addresses anti-Semitism as an "eternal problem"—is that of Nazi Germany. And yet, Trilling's sense that he had been working on a re whom he could not wholly dissociate from "official German thought" (MA, 235) clearly haunted him. In an exchange of letters in 1943-4, Trilling challenged Eliot's notion that Kipling was "not particularly anti-Semitic" with the following devastating retort:
As anti-Semitism goes these days, I suppose Kipling is not—to use Mr. Eliot's phrase—particularly anti-Semitic. I certainly should not think of isolating for discussion what anti-Semitism he has, but only of mentioning, as one aspect of a complex xenophobia, his queasy, resentful feelings about Jews. 4
This exchange is instructive when read next to the most recent studies of Jews in English literature published in the past decade. One approach, which is closest to my own work, views the re of "the Jew" through the lens of certain dominant discourses—whether they be empire, nation, religion or race—and therefore perceives the representation of Jews, in Trilling's terms, as a microcosm of broader concerns. 5 Other critics working in this field tend to focus on a conventional historiography of anti-Semitism and stress mainly hostile negative images and violent acts against Jews. 6 These studies reinforce Arendt's "eternal" images of Jews and focus primarily on a free-floating discourse (outside of time and space) which is, by definition, decontextualized. Anti-Semitism, in these terms, can only be understood as something that is essentially illiberal and un-British (or un-American) which automatically locates it outside of a liberal cultural context (be it late-nineteenth-century Boston or early-twentieth-century London).
The debate between Ronald Schuchard and Anthony Julius is limited, therefore, by its use of this conventional historiography of anti-Semitism. In fact, Schuchard's insistence on Eliot as an ill-defined "philo-Semite," and Julius's insistence on Eliot as an ill-defined "anti-Semite," are mirror images of each other. Both think of Eliot as either exceptionally benign or appallingly hostile (reinforcing his foundational status in the Anglo-American canon). Both also think of him as peculiarly unambivalent: with a straightforward and undifferentiated affinity or hostility towards Jews. In these terms, both are also dismissive of previous accounts of "Eliot and anti-Semitism" whether it be by "Jewish critics" (an acceptable racial category, it seems) that disagree with Julius or, in the case of Schuchard, any critic that dare suggest that Eliot uses the language of "race" (as if this language cannot also be used for "philo-Semitic" purposes). 7 Once locked into the "discourse" (pace Julius) of either "anti-Semitism" or "philo-Semitism" there is a predictability in both of their approaches as the only "adversarial" reading that is allowed is a reading that reinforces Eliot's supposedly self-evident predispositions.
For this reason, I prefer "semitic discourse"—as opposed to "anti-Semitism" or "philo-Semitism"—because this phrase has the advantage of eschewing the inherent moralizing in deciding who is, or is not, "anti-" or "philo-." Instead of employing a predetermined "anti-" or "philo-" perspective that explains any given reading, ironically the one consistent feature of literary representations of "the Jew" as a cultural signifier is its protean instability or ambivalence. The work of Zygmunt Bauman is especially important in this regard as he has rightly replaced "anti-Semitism" and/or "philo-Semitism" with what he calls "allosemitism" which utilizes the Greek word for otherness, allus, when referring to the practice of representing "the Jews" as a radically different "Other." 8 What the use of "allosemitism" or "semitic discourse" recognizes is that the terms "anti-Semitism" and "philo-Semitism" are two relatively distinct aspects of a much broader history of differentiating Jews from other human beings. The danger is that the conventional historiography continues to essentialize Jews as uniquely timeless, unchanging victims and therefore positions the history of anti-Semitism outside of the social, political, and cultural processes which gave rise to this history in the first place.
The great advantage of liberating oneself from a conventional vocabulary—which tends to be focused around moralized biographical readings—is that it enables the literary critic to conduct a genuinely open dialogue about the complex nature of racial discourse within literary texts which neither excuses nor accuses the writers under discussion. In the case of Eliot, it opens up a way of thinking about his use of racial discourse which accepts that, like Joyce, he constructed the Jew as a re of confusion; a perfect objective correlative for a modernist skepticism. But, unlike Joyce, who embraced this confusion in the re of the "greekjewish" Leopold Bloom, Eliot wished to impose distinct boundaries between Hebrew and Hellene, Aryan and Semite, which is most apparent in his social thought and less apparent in his poetry. 9 To be sure, Eliot moved further away from Joyce's Ulysses in his increasingly doctrinaire essays. Two years after his influential review of Ulysses in the Dial, Eliot was to return to Joyce's ordering "mythic method" in a 1923 Criterion commentary on "The Importance of Greek":
[T]he study of Greek is the exact study of an exact language, a language of refinement and precision . . . the study of Greek is part of the study of our own mind: Our categories of thought are largely the outcome of Greek thought; our categories of emotion are largely the outcome of Greek literature. One of the advantages of the study of a more alien language, such as one of the more highly developed oriental languages, is to throw this fact into bold relief: a mind saturated with the traditions of Indian philosophy is and must always remain very different from one saturated with the traditions of European philosophy—as is every European mind, even when untrained and unread. What analytic psychology attempts to do for the individual mind, the study of history—including language and literature—does for the collective mind. Neglect of Greek means for Europe a relapse into unconsciousness. 10
The rigid associations, in this editorial, between Greek literature and thought as the "language of [emotional] refinement and precision," on the one hand, and the inexact non-European "alien languages," on the other, are characteristic of Eliot's social thought in the Criterion. Such generalizations, however, also hark back to the rather loose references to the "mind of Europe" in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" . In this restatement of his earlier essay, Eliot fears that the collective "European mind" might potentially be superseded by "alien" traditions. By neglecting Greek—which defines "our own mind"—the exactness of "our categories of thought . . . and emotion" are fatally undermined and threatened with "a relapse into [oriental] unconsciousness." Such oppositions, which endanger the fragility of the "mind of Europe," result in what Maud Ellmann has called a "contagion of antitheses" in the work of Eliot. 11 Unlike Joyce's artful deconstruction of a racial discourse in Ulysses, Eliot's excluded oriental "alien languages" constantly return, in unexpected ways, to haunt his poetry. In striving for "classical" exactitude and canonical authority, Eliot relied upon a Semitic double—which could not, quite, be repressed—to represent the opposite of his "Greek" ideals.
What is missing from the current debate is (to use Trilling's words) the "queasy, resentful" identification which Eliot had with regard to Jews in both his poetry and social thought. Julius's dismissal of Eliot's Unitarian background—which Eliot clearly thought of as a form of Arnoldian Hebraism—is telling in this regard. 12 As late as his "American Literature and Language" , Eliot described the household of his childhood as if he had, himself, been one of the biblical Children of Israel:
The standard of conduct was that which my grandfather had set; our moral judgments, our decisions between duty and self-indulgence, were taken as if, like Moses, he had brought down the tables of the Law, any deviation from which would be sinful. Not the least of these laws, which included injunctions still more than prohibitions, was the law of Public Service: it is no doubt owing to the impress of this law upon my infant mind that. . . I have felt . . . an uncomfortable and very inconvenient obligation to serve upon committees. 13
Eliot's bathos can be compared with Arnold's famously grandiose self-fashioning at the end of "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" where he thinks of the modern critic as a Moses-re who has a Pisgah-sight of the "promised land" of culture; an image which Joyce in Ulysses was to cheerfully debunk. That Eliot encountered a very real hostility in attempting to promote the modernist avant-garde could only reinforce these forms of Jewish self-identification. Here we have, for instance, an extraordinary letter by C. S. Lewis to Eliot's friend, Paul Elmore More, written in 1935, which rewrites Eliot as part of a group of cosmopolitan aliens who threaten to cause the downfall of Western Europe:
Assuredly [Eliot] is one of the enemy: and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend. And this offence is exaggerated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance. And (you will further forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war—obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England [sic]—and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus omne, the Parisian riff-raff of denationalised Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound. 14
Here Eliot, like "the Jew," is a "disguised" enemy who wheedles his way into key financial institutions and, with a few alien co-conspirators, helps to bring about the collapse of European civilization. But this is a story of endless projection and displacement. Lewis, himself a "denationalised Irishman" (as Ricks points out), projects his own sense of foreignness onto the son of a Hebraised Unitarian liberal (T. S. Eliot) who in turn projects his own sense of alien cosmopolitanism onto what he calls "free-thinking Jews" and even the Judaised Matthew Arnold whom he could never forgive (in essay after essay) for replacing Christianity with culture. In "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service," an under-represented "quatrain" poem in these terms, the Hebraised "master of the subtle school" proliferates meaningless words (or laws) and, thus, helps to perpetuate an all-encompassing spiritual malaise. As Schuchard notes, Eliot's fear of contributing to the social degeneration which so appalled him helped shape his definition of Classicism, in a 1916 lecture, as "essentially a belief in Original Sin—the necessity for austere discipline." 15 Eliot's disciplined search for a fixed sense of tradition and a transcendent "order" took many forms—a fastidious Englishness; a devout Anglo-Catholicism; and a keen political authoritarianism—all of which were constructed to oppose his own dark Semitic double.
Once we stop shaping our responses to literature in terms of either "anti-Semitism" or "philo-Semitism," it is possible to recognize those moments in literary texts when "anti-Semitism" and "philo-Semitism" become indistinguishable and there is instead an interplay between these supposed irreconcilable states. In "The Approach to James Joyce," one of many radio broadcasts that Eliot was to give during World War II, he argued that the structure of Ulysses is realized by Joyce "introducing himself—the same Stephen Daedalus who is the hero of the Portrait—and he creates Bloom as a counterpart, an opposite to himself." 16 Bloom is conceived rather conservatively by Eliot as Joyce's "opposite" or "counterpart" who throws the self into relief. Eliot spent most of his life trying to maintain the distinction between "self" and "other," Gentile or Jew, which Joyce was to joyously subvert.
Rather than seeing Horace Kallen as Eliot's liberal Jewish opposite, as Schuchard argues, the Kallen-Eliot correspondence might be most significant in relation to their points of agreement especially with regard to the question of race and culture. After all, Kallen published a series of articles in the Nation in 1915 where he opposed the vision of an ethnic "melting pot" (soon to be popularized by Israel Zangwill) as this would negate the "group-consciousness" of American-Jews and other ethnic groups in the United States. Zangwill's ideal of the "melting pot" can be thought of as a radical continuation of the Arnoldian ideal of culture as it is designed to supersede differences of all kinds. But Kallen vigorously opposed Zangwill and instead argued that after attempting to assimilate, immigrants to the United States would inevitably discover their "permanent group distinctions" and would be finally "thrown back upon . . . [their] ancestry." As he was to state notoriously (and later repudiate): "Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or less extent; they cannot change their grandfathers." 17
As with Eliot, and a great many other Christian and Jewish thinkers before
World War II, Kallen believed that race, not culture, determines ethnic
identity. While such logic was eventually anathema to Kallen, as it is to
ourselves, it is clear why Eliot would have been attracted to his Jewish
counterpart who managed to be both progressive (as a cultural pluralist)
and reactionary (as a racial determinist) at one and the same time. Rather
than praising or condemning supposedly benign or abhorrent individuals,
what is needed is a much greater understanding of the cultural context in
which particular writers and thinkers produced their texts and utilized
racial discourse. It is symptomatic
in this regard that Julius's account eschews any archival research
and also failed to acknowledge many of the studies of "Eliot and
anti-Semitism" that preceded him. In this regard, Maud Ellmann is
absolutely right to argue that: "Without . . . attention to textual
and biographical detail, the critic, in exposing anti-Semitism, always
runs the risk of witch-hunting, of re-enacting the paranoia of the
anti-Semite towards the Jew."
18
Bryan Cheyette is Chair in Twentieth- Century Literature at the University of Southampton, U.K. He is the editor of five books and author of Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representation, 1875-1945; and Muriel Spark; and he is currently completing Diasporas of the Mind for Yale University Press. His most recent essays are on Bob Dylan, Frantz Fanon, and British-Jewish literature.
1. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 23.
2. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1939), 234-5; hereafter abbreviated MA.
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: André Deutsch, 1986), 7. See also, in this context, Lionel Trilling, "The Changing Myth of the Jew , republished in Commentary (August 1978), 24-34.
4. Cited in Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), 27.
5. See, for example, Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Michael Ragussis, res of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" and English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
6. See, for example, Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830 (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Andrea Freud Loewenstein, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene (New York: New York University Press, 1993), and Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
7. On the racism of "philo-Semitism," see Michael Ragussis, res of Conversion, and on the problem with the term "Jewish critic," see Bryan Cheyette, "On Being a Jewish Critic," Jewish Quarterly 50, no. 1 (Spring, 2003): 63-70.
8. Zygmunt Bauman, "Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern" in Modernity, Culture and "the Jew," ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1998), 143-57.
9. For this argument in full, see my Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society, chapter six.
10. T.S. Eliot, "The Importance of Greek," Criterion 3, no. 2 (April, 1925), 341-2.
11. Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 13.
12. Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, 268.
13. T.S. Eliot, "American Literature and Language" in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1965), 44.
14. Cited in Ricks, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, 198.
15. Cited in Ronald Schuchard, "T.S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer, 1916-1919," Review of English Studies 25, no. 98 : 165.
16. T. S. Eliot, "The Approach to James Joyce," The Listener (14 October 1943): 447.
17. Cited in David Biale, "The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity," Insider/Outsider: American-Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 24-6.
18. Maud Ellmann, "The Imaginary Jew: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound," Between "Race" and Culture: Representations of "the Jew" in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette, (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1996), 89.
In the last hundred years the world has changed far more quickly and completely than in many preceding centuries . . . People in a hurry travel by aeroplane; you can fly to Paris for tea and be back in London in time for dinner. First the telegraph, then the telephone, and finally the discovery of wireless, have brought the remotest parts of the earth closer and closer together. . . . The United States are, in effect, nearer to London than Scotland was one hundred years ago.The developments of science . . . are welding the world into a whole, whether its people wish it or not. 1
So wrote Maxwell Garnett, Secretary of the League of Nations Union, in 1924. 2 Today, the clock may be running faster, but the discourse of globalization is surprisingly the same. Contemporary theories, it is true, focus on the compression of the world through internet connectivity, the rise of multinational corporations, and the homogenizing work of globally marketed music and film; today economics rather than science is "welding the world into a whole." But it is doubtful whether we are much further in grasping the implications of Garnett's title, "The World Becoming One."
Globalization, although frequently hailed as a recent phenomenon, has been a long historical process. Political scientist David Held traces the development of globalization from the Roman and Mongol empires; sociologist Roland Robertson begins his schematization in the fifteenth century. Both identify a shift, in the eighteenth century, away from incipient global forms to the primacy of the nation-state; yet both mark the beginnings of a new global consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century. 3 Held designates globalization's "modern" period as 1850-1945, noting the rise of transnational secular ideologies and discourses, such as liberalism, Marxism, and modern science; Robertson calls the 1870s to the mid-1920s globalization's "Take-off Phase," citing the sharp increase in global communications, the entry of non-European societies into "international" society, the increasing diffusion and implementation of ideas at the international level (the ecumenical movement, the Olympics, the Nobel Prizes, the Gregorian calendar, and the League of Nations), and the first world war. 4 The modernist period merits attention for its significant role in the emerging global consciousness; moreover, investigating this role in its literature enables two important critical moves. First, it deflects the appropriation of "globalization" for a process driven and determined solely by economics, claiming cultural globalization as an equally important, if indeed not earlier, development. Second, it poses modernist literature's engagement of perspectivism and pluralism as a generative site for an alternative discourse of globalization—one that at the very least complicates the specters of exploitation and homogeneity that are often assumed to be the inevitable consequences of a globalized world. Early work on modernism tended to connect its fascination with subjective perceptions to philosophical relativism or psychological impressionism, but other equally strong factors include the increase in world travel (particularly to and from Asia), the rise of translation, and the growing sense of crisis regarding global conflict. Did modernist perspectivism, applied in these situations, yield insights in global understanding? Or, to pose the reverse question, did increasing encounters with cultural others help to produce the multipersonal novel? Did an expanding awareness of inter-cultural connectivity inform the new intra-cultural discourse that was beginning, at that time, to emerge? 5
To pursue a cultural discourse of globalization, however, we need first to distinguish between "globalization" and "geopolitics." Today geopolitics can be used broadly to refer to any locational approach to political issues, but historically the term was introduced with the specific connotation of location as territorially framed. Geopolitik was coined in 1899 by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén, for whom it signified a Darwinian model of state power dependent on territorial growth: stronger organisms survive by displacing the weaker. Kjellén's theories were a major influence in the developing ideology of Nazi Germany, but the geopolitical model is generally taken to be the dominant paradigm in the West until the end of the Cold War. As geographer Brian Blouet points out, geopolitics is a land-based ideology; it locates power in territorial magnitude and focuses on the carving up of earth's space. In contrast, Blouet identifies globalization as originally a maritime-based ideology deriving in large part from the Dutch; it offers an open rather than closed space paradigm, locating power in movement rather than bounded territory. 6 It is important to note that the contrast is not one of bad geopolitics versus good globalization; both paradigms can be subject to imperialist co-option. Territorial imperialism involves the annexing of space and/or of minds; globalized imperialism relies on movement—the ability of power to cross borders, to reconre itself, to maintain its exploitative role by shifting to the most vulnerable site for its goals. But in a further complexity, we should also not assume that globalization works only in imperialist ways. Economic globalization may be predatory or productive; cultural globalization may be colonizing or cooperative. Both dystopian and utopian potentialities are within, and negotiate within, both economic and cultural forms.
Geopolitics shifts to globalization as crucial technologies become increasingly based on the circulation of capital, information, goods, and services, and as the operative model shifts from bounded space to multidirectional flows. On the economic side, globalization can be succinctly defined as "the progressive integration of national economies into a global market economy, as measured by the increasing flows of trade, investment, and skilled personnel across national boundaries." 7 Cultural globalization is a much less certain process; who can measure the flow of an idea, much less track its origin or gauge its effect? The very messiness and uncertainty surrounding the issue has led many either to reject globalization as an overused and now meaningless cliché or to identify it exclusively with economic imperialism, leaving, as the only alternative, the oppositional stance of anti-globalization. A third possibility is a broad and continuing historical investigation of global currents of thought, tracing the complexities and thus the choices that animate the multidirectional experience of living in an interdependent, interactive world.
The first half of the twentieth century offers an excellent point of entry, since the period both marked the demise of the British Empire and simultaneously saw the emergence of the field of international relations. When, at the outset of World War I, Leonard Woolf wrote his pioneering proposal for international government as a first step in the prevention of global destruction, he relied almost exclusively on primary sources. As he recalled, "You could not become an authority on international government in 1915 by reading books, because the books did not exist." 8 Yet Woolf discovered that the world was not lacking in examples of international cooperation. In the postal service, for example, he noted the remarkable handling, in 1906, of an international imbalance in which the Persian government was carrying internal delivery costs for foreign bibles being shipped to them from Great Britain and the U.S., with no corresponding recovery of postage costs for equivalent external shippings of the Koran. While Western Christians displayed "a passion for sending bibles to the Persian Muhammadans," there was a notable absence of missionary zeal on the other side. Responding to the inequity, the Postal Congress authorized the Persians to impose an internal levy on all incoming foreign post. Another more amusing instance that Woolf cites involves an attempt, in Warsaw in 1913, to forge an international agreement among eighty-nine white slave traffickers; the meeting terminated with all participants being apprehended by the police. If international relations had not yet been theorized, there was nevertheless varied evidence of its emergence in practice (AA, 2: 135-6).
In larger terms, the increase in world travel, the broader dissemination of information through newspapers and broadcasting, and the openness at the time of both Russia and China all stimulated a growing awareness, on the part of the ordinary citizen, of living in global space. And, again in England, this ordinary citizen was being strenuously urged to develop a broader cooperative consciousness in relation to the world. In their popularizing, educative role, supporters of the League of Nations disseminated the message that the League was dependent for success on the support of the general public. Whatever the political reality, the materials produced for schools and general audiences emphasized the democratic, grassroots nature of the League's operation: if the League was shaped by its members, its members were in turn shaped by public opinion. In characteristically inclusive fashion, E. E. Reynolds explained, "That is where we come in; for we help, each of us, to form public opinion." 9 And the values stressed as the foundation of public support were, in the words of the essay by Garnett cited above, "mutual dependence," "international co-operation," and the rights of "minority populations." 10
Garnett's essay appeared in the journal of the Workers' Education Association, and the responsiveness of at least some of the British public to these appeals is reflected in a student's essay that appeared a few years later in the same periodical. Written by W. H. Drumm, a member of the Bradford Psychology Tutorial Class, "The Best Practical Way to Internationalism" proposed to make such theorized mutual dependence a reality: the "international ideal" could be achieved "by allocating to certain countries the job of supplying the world with those commodities for the manufacture of which each country is most suitable." 11 England would supply cloth; Germany, toys; Denmark, dairy products; and Greece, dried fruits. Competition would thus be eliminated in international markets and all countries would be bound together in interdependence and "friendly trust." Drumm's practical reality may not have been too practical, but he understood the ideological task. Advocating, in addition, foreign travel and the learning of foreign languages, Drumm concluded by urging the common goal of cultivating the cooperative spirit in individual minds. 12
That this cooperative ideal was constructed in opposition to the reigning imperial paradigm is clear in Leonard Woolf's scathing critique, Imperialism and Civilization, published the following year. Placing the root problem firmly on an economic footing, Woolf asserted that the current global tensions were not attributable to differences in nationality, race, or religion but to the descent of a "new, commercialized industrialized civilization" upon civilizations organized primarily along traditional and agricultural lines. 13 While acknowledging that the nineteenth century was not the beginning of imperial relations, he argued that it did produce an entirely new form: a "predatory" 14 technological economy that demanded a constant diet of ever-expanding markets and raw materials (IC, 9), joined to a new nationalistic patriotism that sought not only to annex territory—as older imperialisms had done—but to force the subordinated civilization to adjust or conform to the civilization of the dominant. Forcing other peoples to change in ways that previous forms of imperialism had not attempted to do, nineteenth-century imperialism exerted the double power of "economic penetration accompanied by political control" (IC, 61). The resulting disparity in power relations, Woolf argued, produced racial and religious tensions where they had not existed before; in addition, the inevitable revolt against inequality caused new, and to some extent artificial, geopolitical coalitions to be fabricated out of previous diversity. Likening the rising fear of a "Pan-Islamic movement" to the earlier "Yellow Peril" that haunted Kaiser Wilhelm II, Woolf claimed a certain poetic justice in the terror inflicted on the imperialists by "these international bogeys" of their own creation (IC, 26). For these seemingly united forces were both bogus and yet an identifiable sign:
There has been a notable revolt of Islam against the Christian States of the West, and a remarkable drawing together of Islamic peoples. But it is the revolt against imperialism, against the tyranny of the Western civilization and the hegemony of European States, which has effected this. [IC, 26]
Similarly, in Asia and Africa, Woolf continued, imperialism forced nationalisms to appear, uniting the oppressed peoples and "[teaching] them to use their new cohesion against their conquerors and rulers" (IC, 28).
There is much in this irascible and yet astonishingly prescient book that would be worth pausing over today, but what interests me here, in light of the issues I raised earlier, is the interaction in Woolf's text between the global and the geopolitical. We can mark the incipient presence of a globalized economic imperialism in the process that Woolf is recording, but then trace the way it becomes subsumed under geopolitical aims, and produces geopolitical thinking in response. For not only does Woolf delineate the emergence of geopolitical identities as a reaction against exploitation; he himself turns ultimately to the geopolitical as the only immediately viable path. Convinced of the insurmountable impasse created when radical imbalances of power define relations between an alien enclave of one people situated within a larger population (whether that enclave is the African American in the United States or the white minority in South Africa), and seeing only in South America an ameliorative intermixing and intermarrying between the "invading Europeans" and the "native inhabitants," Woolf resorts to the preservation of national purity as the only alternative to violence until an equality of peoples can be achieved. 15 The thrust of his separatist argument, it is true, is to dissuade his own government from further white settlement in Kenya, and he gestures toward a future guided by the League's alternative discourse: a "synthesis of civilizations" as interrelated parts of a vast international society, in which "[t]he forcible subjection of one people . . . by others . . . becomes an absurdity and an anachronism" (IC, 120). But he nevertheless concludes that, as long as "the whites are determined to preserve their political and economic supremacy," as long as "Europe is to be for the Europeans, and America for the Americans, and Australia for the Australians," then "Asia must be for the Asiatics, and Africa for the Africans" (IC, 103, 134-5).
Woolf's indictment of the human being as economic animal is strong, but it is precisely at this point, at the point of retrenchment into separatist isolationism, that his model needs the complication of other dimensions. Economic circumstances produce cultural attitudes; however, the flow of influence can also run in the reciprocal direction. There can be more motivating factors, even in financial matters, than materialism and testosterone. And while it would be naïve to think that all cultural attitudes work for the good, the realm of human thoughts and emotions is nevertheless the place where better motivations must be sought. Cultural globalization offers not an exclusionary sphere but a different starting point. By turning from economic to cultural forces, and from the geopolitical to the globalized imagination, we can facilitate other answers by questioning in different ways.
What, then, is cultural globalization? The authors of Global Transformations take, as their definition of culture, "the social construction, articulation and reception of meaning," which, in the processes of globalization, become subject to "the movement of objects, signs and people across regions and intercontinental space." Yet such movement is meaningless for an understanding of cultural globalization without an account of its effect—without an examination of "the stretching and deepening of cultural relationships and practices." Cultural globalization is found in "patterns of reciprocal interaction," which include, but also expand far beyond, "the global spread of corporate symbols and pop culture." The "modes of interaction" are diverse, flexible, varied—ranging through "homogenization, contestation, hybridization and indifference" (GT, 328-31).
The definitive quality of cultural globalization thus lies in interactivity and interdependency. The flows of influence are multidirectional; nothing is static or fixed. Arjun Appadurai defines the new form of "global cultural processes" as "an organized field of social practices, a form of work . . . and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility." 16 Delineating the various areas in which such negotiation takes place (categorized as ideoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ethnoscapes, and mediascapes), Appadurai shows, at the same time, how these "scapes" exist in interaction with each other. Approaching the world as "one large, interactive system, composed of many complex subsystems," Appadurai's recourse is to chaos theory and "complex, overlapping fractal shapes" to image the whole (ML, 41, 46). Fractals, as stochastic and unpredictable and yet with detectable repetitive patterns, serve well to represent the nature of "disjunctive global flows" (ML, 47).
Chaos, it should be noted, while unpredictable is not indescribable and, from what I have observed, globalization, in both economic and cultural forms, is marked by at least four characteristics. Disjunctive global flows are:
Globalization thus does not exclude identity as conceived in terms of geopolitical boundaries; but it situates those constructs within a multidirectional, global space. The geopolitical and the global will always coexist; furthermore, within the global, there will always be both imperializing and liberating tendencies at play. In E. M. Forster's Passage to India, when pushed to respond to the question why he is in India filling a post that an Indian would otherwise have, Fielding answers, "I take up some other fellow's air, don't I, whenever I breathe?"—a remark that is both insensitively facetious and ruthlessly to the point. 17 John Updike's early poem "Trees Eat Sunshine" is another succinct reminder that our mutual inhabiting of the globe is always a consuming of someone else's resources—a brutal reality that, once recognized, argues for the ethical realism of balancing our needs as inevitable consumers against our need—again a basic need for survival—to maintain, both cognitively and physically, an ecologically balanced world. 18 And to do that, we must be self-reflexively aware of our cultural locations and understand these cultural locations not as autonomous countries but as regions of the world. For some cultures, that may involve thinking themselves out of positions of dominance and into mutually dependent forms. Critiquing the patriarchal and militaristic professor of literature, Sir Walter Raleigh, Virginia Woolf wrote, "He never pressed on over the ruins of his own culture to the discovery of something better." 19 It is that impetus or "pressing on" in modernist literature that I seek to trace.
In the next section of this paper, I turn to an analysis of various "modes of interaction" that constitute modernist global flows (GT, 330). My approach is to categorize different tropic structures, or "res of thought," in order to explain some of the ways in which global connectivity entered into literary, and hence public, discourse during the early twentieth century. 20 Without suggesting a comprehensive schematic, I distinguish four strands of globalized thinking in modernist texts, which, for ease of discussion, I call critical, syncretic, cohabiting, and runaway modes. There is, of course, an extreme irony in logically separating identifiable units out of a fluid, chaotic, and kinetic process. These modes are not as distinct as rational division makes them appear. Nevertheless, by dipping into literary texts and scooping up particular narrative events, we can isolate some distinctive characteristics of cultural encounters before returning them to the flow.
My approach, it should be noted, in many ways echoes Susan Stanford Friedman's delineation of five "tropic patterns"—which she names nation, borders, migration, "glocation," and conjuncture. 21 But I find it revelatory of the nature of globalization that the logical relation between our different categorizations is difficult if not impossible to fix: they overlap but are not collapsible; neither can be construed as subsets of the other. To some extent, Friedman's tropic patterns are at a broader theoretical level; they refer perhaps to the materials of transcultural thinking whereas mine refer more to resulting effects. But our schematizations relate to each other—to borrow Friedman's term—paratactically; I hope they will be read side by side.
What our projects have perhaps most in common is an attempt not to systematize but to use systematic understanding to open up the multiple possibilities in transcultural encounters. If Orientalism is the dominant formation of the geopolitical imagination, we need a corresponding understanding of the global imagination, even though it may be less amenable to a singular approach. In the following examples, I attempt to delineate the transformative possibilities arising when the self is resituated out in the world of global flows. Such reformation of the self constitutes merely one aspect of globalization, but an aspect, I submit, whose consideration could not be more pertinent to the global problems confronting us today.
Critical globalization uses knowledge of other regions or countries to disrupt habitual perceptions and practices, and to prompt a self-reflexive repositioning of the self in the global sphere. 22 It resembles the typical learning experience of the traveler but the transformative experience arises, not through an encounter with the foreign, but through the imagined adoption of the other's point of view. 23 The trope for this perspectival shift is chiasmus, sometimes enacted in a literal shift to another's eyes. In the following passage from Heart of Darkness, for example, Marlow's reversing perspective, as he walks toward an approaching African, inverts the racial cliché: "He had a uniform jacket with one button off and seeing a white man on the path hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be." 24 The shift merely gestures to the African's point of view, but it effects a change in the white intruder from seeing to being seen, from privileged individual to the unknown mass. The mirror of self-ethnography thus critically disrupts the complacency of self-location, as in this 1929 critique of the teaching of history in the British schools: "Many of us grow up knowing nothing of China but pigtails, and that the women's feet were cruelly bound there (the teachers who told us were at the waist tightly corseted themselves)." 25
This reversing gaze is the foundational trope in Letters from John Chinaman, in which Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson adopts a Chinese persona to construct the English as the foreigners in the text. 26 The genre is the Oriental Tale, in the tradition of Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World, where the voice of an Asian observer is employed to distance and satirize English customs; but Dickinson goes further to inhabit the body of the other, locating himself within a different system of belief. According to Forster's biography, Dickinson once told a group of students that "in a previous existence, [he] actually was a Chinaman!" 27 The claim might appear to be fanciful teasing, except for its congruency with a line from one of Dickinson's private letters: "It's a curious thing to have a woman's soul shut up in a man's body, but that seems to be my case." 28 Dickinson's ability to slide between gendered and cultural locations becomes a way of achieving critical globalization in his own imaginative space. Posing anonymously as John Chinaman, he enacts—on the analogy of cross-dressing—a cross-culturing that exhibits the multidirectionality characteristic of global flows.
The letters are forerunners to Leonard Woolf's attacks on predatory imperialism and indeed to Dickinson's formulation of the initial scheme for a League of Nations, in August 1914. 29 In this earlier work, international tensions are evoked in the lightly sketched political background of the crisis that the British called the Boxer Rebellion, but which John Chinaman describes as "the recent attack of the Western Powers on China" (LJC, 52). But the focus shifts from immediate events to underlying causes, mounting a disparaging critique of the primacy given in the West to the "cash-nexus" (LJC, 7), the naïve belief in international trade as a stimulant to global relations (LJC, 15), the violence and lawlessness of imperialist behavior in occupied lands (LJC, 17, 52-3), and the correspondingly ironic "mission" to "civilize the world" (LJC, 10). 30 In contrast, Chinese society is shown to display the alternative values of a rational, humane, moral, and democratic approach. But cultural contrast on its own does not make the global imagination; the sense of multidirectional flows derives from the dialogic relation between writer and reader. The anonymous Chinese official encodes the voice of the other—meaning the English reader—in his text, considering and answering his reader's objections, admitting imperfections in China, acknowledging the value of Western inventions, allowing for the possibility that long absence has caused him to idealize home. The writer presents a balanced, self-reflexive view, and he does so through an ongoing response to an encoded "you" in his text. As he admits, "I am too well aware of the complexity of all human affairs to deny that there may be something in your point of view" (LJC, 59). While the situating of narrator and narratee inscribes the geopolitical idea of opposing cultures, the dialogic treatment breaks down oppositional relations. Even the title of the work is difficult to fix: as the phrase of an English writer, it inscribes Anglo-centrism; as a phrase from a Chinese pen, it parodies and critiques the colonizing English mind. Ultimately the one significant difference is between monocentric and global views: the writer attributes Christianity's failure to produce an adequate social model to its origins in the "untravelled imagination" of a "mild Oriental enthusiast," whose knowledge of other cultures and languages was not very great (LJC, 26, 48). John Chinaman, by contrast, has a broader understanding, not simply because he is Chinese, but because he has also lived in England for some time. For it is the traveled imagination that grasps the chiasmic twist: "Learn to understand us, and in doing so learn better to understand yourselves" (LJC, 63).
The traveled imagination perfectly describes Yoshio Markino, a Japanese artist who lived in London for well over forty years. Markino was well versed in ancient Chinese philosophy, history, and poetry, and in the literature and history of Japan; he read extensively in English, publishing an essay, for example, on "Chaucer and Chinese Odes." 31 He lived in Japan, America, and England, and he painted in England, Paris, and Rome. But in Markino's work, the globalized imagination works syncretically rather than critically. Syncretic globalization refers to processes of accrual, expansion, or extension—but not merger: The American Heritage Dictionary defines syncretic as "a reconciliation or fusion . . . especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous." 32 In A Japanese Artist in London, Markino's title is deliberate. His writing identity is not hyphenated Japanese-English, but "Japanese in England and in English," indicating the self situated in global flows.
Yoshio Markino was born into a Samurai family at the time of the Meiji restoration and the advent of modernization in Japan. Like Dickinson, Markino fit uneasily into his society's gender roles, being—though apparently heterosexual—as much like a girl as a boy. A sensitive child and close to his parents, he suffered the loss of his father's Samurai position, the death of his mother, and a somewhat unhappy adoption into a family of cousins. Avoiding an arranged marriage, he "ran away" to the West in the hope of becoming an English poet. Convinced by friends to shift to the study of painting, Markino spent an unpalatable four years in San Francisco, after which he moved to London (in 1897), where he lived on his painting and writing until his return to Japan in 1942. Whereas Dickinson lived as a Cambridge don under the adopted sign of a Chinese cap, 33 Markino inhabited an adopted name. "Yoshio" was the name given to him after his mother's death, to avoid confusing him with a cousin; the spelling "Markino" altered the usual transliteration "Makino," by adding an "r" to ensure an English pronunciation closer to the original. Forced in part to respond to a naming by others, Markino nevertheless used the floating sign to construct a Japanese self in global terms. Once signing an art gallery guest book, "Whole world is my home," Markino turned dislocation from a sorrow into a freedom. 34 At the same time, selective syncretism provided points of cultural contact through which he became a self-appointed cultural ambassador, negotiating friendship between East and West.
In his written English, Markino believed he was inventing a "new style"—an attempt "to express [his] emotion in the way of ancient Chinese rhetoric," while simultaneously striking a corresponding "sympathetic emotion" in the English reader. 35 The emotional connection depends, as he says, on both "sympathy" and "wisdom," thus requiring from his readers an active response (RR, 123). For the writing is both delightfully simple and perceptually demanding. 36 Markino presents himself with a humility, a childlike trust, a naïvete that, in its apparent lack of concern for self-preservation, is easy to misidentify—as English critics often did—as artlessness, as "charm," as picturesquely quaint. Yet his writing is charged with a complexity that is at once disrupting and affiliating in effect. The title of one of his books, for example, My Idealed John Bullesses, plays with the English stereotype with even further twists than Dickinson's "John Chinaman." At the same time, Markino recuperates the stereotype through his kindness and affection, presenting the Englishwomen as neither ideal nor idealized, but idealed. 37 His courtesy denotes a highly sophisticated ethics requiring a shift in English positionality to understand its implications; it also functions as a mirror asking his audience to respond in kind. His words are formed for "friend making," and designed to "win the hearts" (RR, 127, 125). His dream is to create global harmony and a better world, by advancing what I might term "the ethics of a circulating spiritual economy."
An ordinary incident readily illustrates his approach. Although habitually poor, whenever he could afford to eat in a restaurant, he did so in order to study the people. On one occasion, leaving what he believed to be three pennies on the table, he mistakenly left a ten-shilling piece as well. When the waitress ran after him to correct his error, Markino—despite his poverty—immediately divided the amount into five shillings each. And he explains, "I was much appreciative with her faithfulness." 38 The unidiomatic words are semantically exacting: honesty appreciates in repeated giving, for the waitress was literally faithful to the "sacred conscience" common to us all (JAL, 72). Money and generosity must be freely given into sacred circulation, but the functioning of the system depends on constant return.  "What a broad mind he had!" writes Markino, both capturing the shopkeeper's own variety of English and generously refraining from any comment on the imperialist phrasing or the ignorance of Britain's relations with Japan. The challenge to the reader, however, is not to underestimate Markino's implications. He "charms" by being grateful and appreciative, but he seeks to elicit a corresponding appreciation of his own generosity to the English, and to stimulate an ever-expanding generosity in return. And his syncretic writing, which Douglas Sladen describes as "a medium using the capabilities of both languages," expertly articulates his combinatory cultural approach. 39
Dickinson's rational critique and Markino's empathetic appeal work in different ways to pull the reader into the global dynamics of the text—one a Western text in disguise as an Eastern text, one an Eastern text in Western disguise. What they establish is reciprocal rather than oppositional relations (between East and West, between writer and reader), and a desire to move into the stream of cultural flows. But if critical and syncretic globalizations attempt in different ways to put cultures into relation with each other, the third mode involves a perception that understands them as separate and distinct. However, unlike Orientalism, this mode of globalized perception understands difference as operating from a different center; the other culture remains unpredictable, uncircumscribable, because it originates elsewhere. Cast as "cohabiting globalization," this mode acknowledges the autonomous, independent being of the other. It treats the "unknown" in the foreign culture not as an inherently mysterious and exotic element but as a condition of the necessarily limited understanding of the viewer; and it resists the assimilation of difference into one "normative" language. As an apprehension of alterity that refrains from positing essence, it imagines a world of separate, complex individuals who inhabit and share mutual space.
My informing example here is a short story by Joyce Cary, first published in 1950, but most likely written in 1938-39, and originating still earlier, in Cary's experience as a lieutenant in the Nigerian Regiment in World War I. 40 Set in a temporary camp in the Cameroons, the story recounts a late-night conversation between an Irish-British subaltern, named Corner, and Umaru, a Hausa sergeant. The exchange is neither a sentimental sharing—which would appropriate Umaru into Corner's world—nor an epiphany of mystic otherness—which would construct Umaru as an exoticized foreigner. Instead, Corner apprehends Umaru as another human being in the world.
Set within the cultural crisis of war, the subsidiary setting of an army camp internalizes a further "contact zone"—what Mary Louise Pratt defines as a "social space where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other." 41 But whereas Pratt notes that such zones often display "radically asymmetrical relations of power," the power dynamics in Cary's story reveal multiple orderings at work. 42 Army hierarchy subordinates the sergeant to the commissioned officer, but the ordinary soldiers, shy of both Corner and Umaru, isolate their superiors together on one side of the giant canvas that shelters their rest. But equitable relations among all the men are red in the domestic imagery that converts the scene to "a vast family bed with one white and nineteen black faces sticking out all round a large patchwork quilt" ("U," 20). The domestic analogy furthermore implies an alternative hierarchy—the precedence of age: "Sergeant Umaru, thirty-year veteran, called often Father Umaru by the men" is credited with clear seniority in experience ("U," 19).
On this particular night, Corner lies awake grappling with the cataclysmic disruption of the war and troubled by existential angst. Unable to sleep, he attempts to engage Umaru in conversation, but every assumption he makes about Umaru's thinking turns out rather comically to be wrong. A pattern emerges in which Corner advances a hypothesis which Umaru then disproves, or Corner invokes consensus only to encounter Umaru's dissent. Corner assumes that Umaru's second name—Bauchi—refers to his place of origin; Umaru dryly remarks that the name is simply an identifying tag in the Army. Corner, seeking sympathetic understanding, ventures that it isn't good to be lonely; Umaru asserts his solitary independence. Corner, a Protestant, blunders in taking Umaru's comment that it is good to live like a Haji to mean that Umaru, a Muslim, regards God familiarly as a friend; and finally Corner's digressions on the beauty of the clouds are rejected in wondering contempt by the old sergeant who reads in the clouds a coming storm. But rather than plunging Corner further into troubled anxiety, the imperturbable stability of the older man brings the younger ecstatic relief. The reversing view of his own inexperience releases Corner from the burden of his attempts to understand—either Umaru or the world. Corner's inability to "know" Umaru is cathartic, confirming that the universe is not coterminous with his own limited self, and relieving the burden of alienation through a non-appropriative or non-assimilated epiphany of another man. 43
The experience of cohabitation is then realized through the sense of touch. The conversation ends when Umaru leads in a traditional Hausa blessing for sleep and good health, and turns his back to go to sleep. But one tiny part of their bodies remains in contact. Lying still for another hour, Corner is aware of "the place where his elbow touched Umaru's back" and that one tiny point generates a steady flow of affection and pleasure ("U," 24). Corner experiences a moment of being in touch—ratively and literally—but the experience is not one he requires his conscious mind to possess. The native "Other" in this narrative is still limited to a role in the British—or in this case, Irish—man's experience, since Umaru's own narrative is only lightly glimpsed from the outside. However, in this particular mode of global imagining, that is the very point. The autonomy of the other person is asserted by recognizing the real existence of other subjective worlds.
Cohabiting globalization fosters the construction of home identity not as a center but as a region of the world; it correspondingly promotes an understanding of the world as a pluralistic home of diverse individuals. I have referred elsewhere to "universal individualism" as a pivotal modernist concept, deriving the term from Leonard Woolf. 44 As Woolf asserts, the democratic ideals of the French Revolution "only translate into social and political terms the consciousness of universal individuality and the right of everyone to be treated as an individual, a free fellow-human being" (emphasis added; AA, 2: 386). In perceiving the "I" of "the Other," the traditional opposition between individualism and collectivity is diffused. Encounters with individual voices from elsewhere situate the self relationally and equally with others in the world.
If cohabiting globalization signals the positive potential in modernist pluralism, a pluralistic vision nevertheless runs the risk of losing an effective interventionist stance. The posture of extreme tolerance can become an accommodating mode of passivity; more problematically, it begs the question of how far tolerance should be extended to the intolerant. Unlimited pluralism leads to the problem of runaway globalization, to use a term borrowed from Anthony Giddens's Runaway World. 45 For Giddens, the loss of control is closely associated with the vast destabilizing forces of electronic money; in cultural globalization, the loss posed by an excessive submersion in disjunctive flows is one of ethical and emotional commitment.
Runaway globalization is evocative of the Gatsby era and, perhaps even more strongly, of the rootless cosmopolitan society of Berlin in the years leading up to World War II. The fascination of this free-floating era is captured in Christopher Isherwood'sBerlin novels: Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. 46 Set in the last days of the Weimer Republic, the novels present a world in which identities and desires are unbound, crossing both literal borders and socially constructed boundaries of gender, sexuality, politics, and the law. And for the narrator William Bradshaw (a fictional-autobiographical crosser, bearing Isherwood's two middle names), one significant crossed border runs between England (where homosexuality was still criminalized) and Berlin (city, in the 1920s, of de-territorialized sexual expression). But this freedom, though liberating and even hypnotizing in Mr. Norris Changes Trains, is ultimately runaway. Sexual and political promiscuity become merely another capitalist coin—or electronic sign—in circulating exchange. 47 The penultimate of the linked short stories that make up Goodbye to Berlin concerns the relation of the narrator (now named Christopher Isherwood)—an impoverished writer and language teacher with vaguely communist sympathies—and the Landauers—a wealthy capitalist Jewish family, and owners of a high-class department store.  Although the territorialized oppositions of English/German, Aryan/Jew, Occidentalist/Orientalist, Communist/Capitalist threaten to divide the two men, a stronger and more compelling connection is implied through their common lack of fixity in any one position. But despite the positive implications of their fluid subjectivities, the disturbing weakness of this open world is exposed in their last conversation, in which Bernhard makes the sudden, and deliberately fantastic, proposition that the two of them leave (elope?) immediately that night for China. Despite their previous, intimate contacts of touch, in moments when Bernhard rests his hand on the narrator's shoulder, Bernhard's proposal is treated by both men with an ironic blend of politeness and mockery that exposes a fundamental self-mockery at its roots. The daring proposal is of course not taken up; detachment from the territorial, it seems, rests on a personal aloofness from commitment, a constant multiple performative that makes a serious pledge too dangerous a risk. But the unacted narrative disrupts the focalization for which this work is well known ("I am a camera") with the alternative possibilities of what might have happened had the narrator come out from behind his lens. 48 As it is, eighteen months later, the narrator learns of Bernhard's mysterious disappearance and death; the Third Reich begins; and the narrator retreats to his English "home." Despite the unspoken bond between Christopher and Bernhard (for by 1933, both Jews and homosexuals were victims of Nazi persecution), in the world of nomadic nonjudgmental detachment, tolerance has no ethical force. Runaway globalization is routed by the power of the returning geopolitical.
What I have outlined here is merely a beginning, but I hope it will be enough to suggest further worthwhile directions to pursue. There is, however, an obvious question that must be addressed. Will seeking a global consciousness in the modernist period ground our study once again in the perspectives of white, Western, and privileged groups? Consciousness of the whole needs to aim for inclusiveness of voice. The examples I discussed above are admittedly all by male writers, but the selection was deliberately made to represent various ethnicities and regions: Chinese, Japanese, Nigerian Muslim, and German Jew. In addition, these writers indicate a range of forms that globalized voices might take: cross-culturing and performative (Dickinson), autobiographical (Markino), and fictional (Cary and Isherwood). My earlier reference to an essay by a student in working-class education suggests a further way to extend our scope, and there is a rich field to explore in the prolific work of modernist translation, including the translation of little-known works into English and the translation of English modernist works into other languages. 49
In addition, cultural globalization, as I have defined it, involves not only the movement of people but also the movement of objects and signs. Literal travelers enact one form of global contact but objects and artifacts speak in a different way to the complex imbrications of cultural ties. Willa Cather's novels, for example, quite apart from their numerous immigrant journeys, abound in markers of embedded travel—the "traveling-in-dwelling" which James Clifford argues is always already encoded in any putatively fixed cultural site. 50 Objects have traveling histories: witness the bell, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, which has come to New Mexico from Mexico, but whose medieval Spanish inscription hearkens back to the time when it was reputedly cast from silver melted down from household objects, pledged by the Spanish during their war with the Moors. Furthermore, this seemingly monolinear lineage is complicated by the information that the ringing of the Angelus descended from a Moslem custom and that the Spaniards learned everything they knew about working silver from the Moors—a knowledge then passed on to the Mexicans, who in turn taught the Navajos their art. 51 The path running back to past origins leaps the rails, so to speak, to become, in reverse, a trajectory of skills moving into the present. But what is important for my argument here is the way an ordinary artifact embodies the complexities and contradictions of cultural crossings, here encoding the paradoxical entanglements of hostilities and indebtedness that define our relations in the globe.
Additionally, global consciousness can be accessed not only through the life of common objects but also through a tie to the land. Cultural globalization is distinguished by a consciousness of dwelling in the world, and a conception of that world as a fluid, interconnected, conflicted, and dynamic whole. At its best, perhaps, it manifests itself as an ecological imagination, and in this form can be found in Native American writers like Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin). In her essay, "Why I am a Pagan," Zitkala-Sa defines her "Paganism" not as belief in pagan gods, but as "a compassion for all echoes in human guise," a compassion emanating from a conception of the globe as animated by the Great Spirit flowing through us all. 52 Although critical of the white Christian culture that inserts its antithetical values into her world, she images the larger construct of human community as "a living mosaic of human beings" or as "the ivory keys of one instrument where each resembles all the rest, yet varies from them in pitch and quality of voice" ("WIP," 802-3). If we take the global imagination as signifying the ability to conceive of one's own identity as part of an interrelated and interdependent world space, and that space as multiform and contradictory, then imaginings such as Zitkala-Sa's form part of the complex intersections that constitute modernist cultural globalization. 53
The critical challenge for this project may therefore lie not in the exclusivity of globalization but in the need to establish certain definitional parameters: not every cultural encounter should be taken as a form of cultural globalization. Fundamentally, what is at issue is not a prescribed feature of a text but a distinctive form of consciousness. And it is this peculiar consciousness that relates so strongly to the kinetic, heterogeneous fluidity that is a frequent characteristic of modernist texts. For, in all my examples above, the narrative focalization is subjected to a wobble—one that frustrates a fixed and exclusive identification between the self and a home location, and constructs a self that depends for its identity on being situated in the world. The result is epistemic instability, but the accompanying gesture is toward a "stability-of-process"— a continuously decomposing and recomposing equilibrium created through negotiations with views from other eyes. The paradigmatic shift traced in outline replaces the ideal of cognitive certainty with the broader value of cognitive mobility.
In thus bridging the aesthetic and the social, my analysis relates the modernist effects of destabilized focalization to a growing awareness of cultural heteroglossia. Equally crucial, and indeed deriving from modernism's self-reflexive awareness of positionality, is a modernist engagement with the ethical implications of living in an interdependent, interactive world. For the question we continue to face is whether cognitive mobility will be passive, or predatory, or productive of a liberating, cooperating world. Today, calls for ethical commitment are part of globalized discourse; they inhere in the process that Richard Falk discusses as "globalization-from-below" (CG, 192), or that Richard Sandbrook more broadly names "civilizing" or "humanizing" globalization (CG, 2). But in economic globalization, ethical intervention is most often framed as reactive and oppositional; in the larger schematic, as Sandbrook indeed recognizes, we need to effect a change in the way the world thinks (CG, 10).
It is my argument here that humanists have a role in humanizing globalization, and that achieving a "culturally sensitive global economy" requires culturally sensitive thought (CG, 266). The extent to which ideas have the power to move economic and social realities is, of course, debatable, as is the question whether a way of thinking could ever be globally shared. The sobering effect of working in a historical area such as modernism is the constant realization of how little has changed. I have long been convinced of the Red Queen's command to Alice, "here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place." 54 Yet the battlefields of Europe in the modernist period have been replaced, as I write, by communal forums working to forge a Constitution of the European Union; 55 and the Dutch, who in the seventeenth century denoted the globalizing imperialism of a seaborne empire, went on to provide a model, in the 1990s, for the mutually supportive structure of a cooperative welfare state. 56 As for the power of ideas, I balance their frustrating ineffectuality with another view I encountered long ago—that the Industrial Revolution was "technically possible" long before it happened, and it required the presence of an enabling philosophical system to actualize its birth. 57 By recognizing at least the potential for the cultural imagination to guide and direct economic forces, we open up a space beyond materialist determinants for the vitally enabling role of human thought.
I began this essay by quoting Maxwell Garnett's words, in 1924, on
the world becoming one. In 1932, at approximately the same time as the
ending of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, Nowell Charles Smith,
writing on the League in collaboration with Garnett, identified two
aspects of the changing world: in addition to contraction or the
shrinking of the globe, he named sensitization—the process
of being affected by what is happening elsewhere in the world.
58
Smith coined the latter term from the verb to sensitize in
photography—the action of "render[ing] (a plate, film or paper)
sensitive to the influence of light"
59
—a meaning that he wanted to "transfer by metaphor to the human
race."
60
We need to seek, in modernist literature, a history of that
sensitization, charting its rapids, eddies, and flows. It is unlikely
to be the utopian project hailed in
Smith's title, "The Dawn of a World Order"
61
but, if it can help us to understand the complexities, the variations,
and even the failures of cultural globalization, it will contribute
its share to the foundation of a sustainable world.
Melba Cuddy-Keane is Associate Professor and Northrop Frye Scholar at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
1. J. C. Maxwell Garnett, "The World Becoming One," The Highway: A Journal of Adult Education 17 : 26.
2. The League of Nations Union, "the largest and most influential society in the British peace movement," formed in 1918 specifically "to popularize the League and the new principles of international relations which came with it." Douglas S. Birn, The League of Nations Union, 1918-1945, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1, 3.
3. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); hereafter abbreviated GT; Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992); hereafter abbreviated G.
4. (GT, 341; GT, 59) For Held, the primary development following the modern period is the filtering down of transculturalism from the elite to the popular levels; for Robertson, the subsequent period replaces globalization with a return to the struggle for hegemony.
5. For a recent discussion making precisely such connections between modernist narrative and new imaginings of community based on "partial, non-national affiliations" , see Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
6. See Brian W. Blouet, Geopolitics and Globalization in the Twentieth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).
7. Richard Sandbrook, "Envisioning a Civilized Globalization," in Civilizing Globalization: A Survival Guide, ed. Richard Sandbrook (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press), 13; hereafter abbreviated CG.
8. Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2: 135; hereafter abbreviated AA.
9. E. E. Reynolds, The League Experiment (London: Thomas Nelson, 1939), 11.
10. Garnett, World Becoming One, 26, 28. The League of Nations was the first major movement to recognize the issue of minority rights. See "The Protection of Minorities," Geneva Special Studies (Geneva Research Information Committee) 2, no. 9 (September 1931). The franchise was really an issue of majority rights—those of the working class and women.
11. W. H. Drumm, "The Best Practical Way Towards Internationalism," The Highway (March 1927): 114.
12. Drumm, "Best Practical," 114-5.
13. Leonard Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 33; hereafter abbreviated IC.
14. Many years later, Richard Falk uses this term in his Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
15. (IC, 47, 133-4) Woolf's listing and then rejecting, on the grounds of impracticality, the alternative of "extermination" has to be read as a Swiftian outburst (IC, 100). As his autobiography makes clear, not only did Woolf identify slavery with the Jewish progroms; he felt a profound sympathy with all victims of "senseless savagery," and responded with emotions of "acute pain," "disappointment," "horror," "discomfort," and "disgust" (AA, 2: 200-1, 487-8). Sudden outbursts of satire or sarcasm are not uncommon in his writing and it is certainly debatable whether he was really the calm, rational "Other" in his marriage to Virginia Woolf.
16. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31; hereafter abbreviated ML.
17. E. M. Forster, Passage to India, intro.Oliver Stallybrass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 113.
18. John Updike, "Trees Eat Sunshine," in Telephone Poles and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1965), 70.
19. Virginia Woolf, "A Professor of Life," in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 4th vol., ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), 345.
20. The terminology follows the Hellenistic division of rhetoric into res of words and res of thought. See Peter Dixon, Rhetoric (London: Methuen, 1971), 37.
21. See Susan Stanford Friedman, "Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy," Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, ed. Marianne DeKoven (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 13-36; hereafter abbreviated "LF." In this work, and in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), Friedman both analyzes and theorizes textual transculturalism with a comprehensive grasp of possibility and a penetrating sensitivity to political implication. Although she refers to her subject as "geopolitical," feminism, in her analysis, acts on geopolitics in ways that produce the pluralistic, relational, contradictory, and interactive processes I refer to as cultural globalization.
22. I use "critical" here in the older sense of inviting comparison and judgment, implying not that all judgment will be negative, but rather that it is essential to judge from different views.