I would prefer not to prefer not to: a quarter of negative negativity

As the quarter comes to a close, I find myself looking forward to delving back into a number of exciting new texts I've discovered through this course, as well as continuing to think about "Bartleby the Scrivener" and the way the text has been deployed in a contemporary context. I have also been really inspired by how everyone has received my ideas and some of the weird posts that I've churned out. You all are amazing! Anyway, here are a few thoughts to wrap up my last blog post.

"Bartleby" isn't going anywhere, and evidently, neither is the renewed interest in the story or the character. I've long thought of writing something about the Bartleby character-type, and I think I have a lot of material to work with now (thanks also to Sophia for being such a great co-author!). But I also think that this series of posts has made me think about the rhetoric surrounding the story, and that  a rhetorical analysis or a deconstruction of the debate might actually be something I'm more interested in pursuing.

I read some incredible articles that I hope to engage with more in the future. "Necropolitics" by Mbembe took me by surprise; I was inspired both by his frank writing style and the massive scope and implications of his work. Meanwhile, Christopher Nealon's "Affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry" got me thinking about the dichotomy of American and European philosophical discourse and the relationship of discourse to place. It also made me think about poetry as a form of rhetoric in a community, a mode of communication in a language outside the sphere of capital. Spivak's introduction to "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" and Foucault's "Mesh of Power" were also influential, as was The Static Hero in American Literature and Culture: Social Movements, Occupation, and Empowerment, a text I discovered through the course of my research for one of my blog posts. 

Since I've been primarily teaching film, it's been good to think through teaching literature, though I can't say that any of my blog posts about teaching were particularly realistic. It's actually been really helpful for me to read other people's takes on teaching their text. As I wrote that last sentence, I realized just how nice it's been to read everyone's posts and how much I think I've learned by reading and thinking about different styles of doing this literature thing.

Making that video with Bethany was weird, but I'm so glad we did it, and it got me thinking about how I have previously aspired to do weekly podcasty things and that those dreams have never materialized. So with the momentum of "the circle of life," I'm really hoping to brainstorm and get a gimmicky pseudo-intellectual video-based weekly-commentary thing off the ground. The question is, if I did, would you watch it?

Last Spring, when I was considering what graduate program to attend, I was not only choosing between schools, but between fields. My final choice was between the Visual Studies program at San Diego, or English at Davis. This was a "what do you want to be when you grow up moment" and I decided I would look better in a tweed jacket than a black turtleneck. No offense to any art professor who happens across this post, either in the distant future or in the infinity of the archive. But, I've been able to work in some visual studies components to a few of my posts, and it's felt really good to think in that medium while working with literature. This is something I'm really concerned with, especially because I think that both visual studies and literature have critical roles in steering social movements, and I want to think about them comparatively. So as I move forward, I have to remember how important art is to me!

Since I can't end on this note, watch this video to help you get through finals!

Interpreting *By the Sea*: A Retrospective

I was fascinated to look back through my posts from this quarter and trace the trajectory of my analysis of By the Sea. Even though the topic of each week’s post was contingent upon the random articles that comprised that week’s readings, my thinking in fact developed along a clear line. (Perhaps this is a function of my usually choosing a general idea in the novel to think about before even reading the critical essays.) Back in October I chose By the Sea as my primary text because I knew and liked the novel, and, importantly, because I had never written about it and knew that my pre-existing interpretive framework was quite basic. There was however one topic that I knew interested me in the novel, what had made me remember it from that class I took my junior year of college: the motif of maps. My first two posts of the quarter, connecting the text to Chakrabarty and Anderson, followed directly from this interest. I am not in the least surprised by the conclusion of my first post—I still hold to it, as well—that perhaps this novel is asking us to locate a common humanity only in people being “fellow children of dislocation.”

Along those lines, I'm surprised that I never got the chance to discuss a related issue: that of homes, homelessness, and inheritance. I mentioned so many times the plot wherein Saleh takes possession of Latif’s childhood home, but I guess because I didn’t find any of the secondary readings to speak quite to this question, I never got to it. Instead, my third and fourth posts show a pivot in my thinking about the novel. They reveal the point at which I started to focus more on the intersection of storytelling and resistance, connected but not limited to Saleh’s use of “Bartleby.”

The idea that most inspired me emerged in my fifth post, dealing with Spivak. Throughout the quarter I’ve been considering the implications of By the Sea’s role as a postcolonial novel, and Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism helped me clarify that thinking. Every post I wrote deals with the ambiguities and contradictions inherent to the postcolonial subject; how Saleh and Latif are constantly straddling two worlds; how they participate in, attempt to participate in, or look down upon the discourses of those two worlds. One way in which this comes out is through irony, which I point to in my first and last posts. As a critic of this text, I am constantly running up against this dichotomy and trying to figure out how the protagonists and the novel itself value Zanzibari and British systems of knowing in opposition to one another. To quote myself explicating the Spivak a few weeks back:

Her article argues that, if we read [the Subaltern Studies group’s] work against the grain, we can see them strategically essentializing the subaltern in order to confront the difficulty of giving the subaltern a voice (or locating the subaltern’s voice), which is actually the paradox of anti-humanist criticism: that it too essentializes, “the object of [its] criticism [is] irreducible” (Spivak 13). In deliberately and strategically projecting the lessons of subaltern studies onto deconstructionist criticism at large, she notes, “the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (Spivak 16). (Bamert)

This idea really helped me think through the narrating (and therefore vocal) postcolonial subject as a limit case. The constant back and forth and questioning of value systems in the novel, the hypocrisy sometimes exhibited by Saleh and Latif, can be read as part of this paradoxical critique of Western humanism. I’d probably say now that my very broad-stroke reading of By the Sea is that it is about the interpretation of stories. The novel enacts many varied interpretations, and it lends itself to yet others. I wouldn’t say that this is a big departure from how I read the novel before writing these posts, but it certainly does situate my interest in postcolonial dislocation and mapping within a broader and better defined discursive context.

(Thanks also to Tom and Katherine for some great collaborative post writing that helped me develop my interpretation of the novel!)

Refusal of the Totality

Teaching Spivak with "Bartleby"

"Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" by Gayatri Spivak and "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville is an odd couple, a complicated pairing of texts, though it might seem at first obvious how they could be read together. A lesson with both of these texts could do several things. First we can think about our perspective as readers when we approach "Bartleby" and what kind of spin our ideological dispositions bring to the table. Then, by reading Spivak against Melville, we might consider a more difficult inquiry, what are the limits of our comparison? How do postcolonial subjects differ from hegemonic subjects, even those who are oppressed?

For our first step, we could consider what Spivak proposes at the end of her introduction as the most important consequence of the Subaltern Studies collective's work, that "the agency of change is located in the insurgent or 'subaltern'" instead of colonial authorities (3). Our point of view is critical to how we read literature or history. From the perspective of capitalist ideology, the character of Bartleby might be considered a bum, which some have already suggested, and the story as a whole could be read as a cautionary tale about insubordination that reinscribes the value of work. But from a  a Marxist perspective, "Bartleby" might be read quite differently. Instead of ceding to the dominant narrative, the story would celebrate the refusal of work and stands as an allegory for successful resistance to capitalist domination. This might help us reflexively understand what Spivak is saying when she talks about "reading as active transaction between past and future" (5).

We might also think about how to go about performing this kind of reading. Without a written account from Bartleby's perspective, what material do we have to work from to reconstruct his point of view? How might we measure the effectiveness of his rebellion? Spivak writes "it is only the texts of counter-insurgency or elite documentation that give us the news of the consciousness of the subaltern" (12). Okay, so if we can view "Bartleby" as a text of counter-insurgence, that enables some interesting moves. We might read the story as the production of a moral crisis in the lawyer. The magnitude of the crisis would be the metric of Bartleby's rebellion and tell us a good deal about its effectiveness.

So far this has been pretty fun, but now the critique. First, though Bartleby is exploited, he is certainly not subaltern. I don't think Spivak really provides a definition of the subaltern subject that drives this point home for undergraduate students. In fact, she provides some evidence that might be interpreted to contrary: "What had seemed the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern can be made to become the allegory of the predicament of all thought" (12). So first, let's clarify this point. What dilemma is Spivak talking about here? Is it particularized predicament of the subaltern, or is it a generalized problem of historiography? What from this essay has broader implications, that is, what is a universal critique, and what is specifically related to postcolonial studies? Then, here's a block quote that I would make a slide of to clarify the subaltern subject, definitely not from Wikipedia:

“ . . . subaltern is not just a classy word for "oppressed", for [the] Other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie. . . . In post-colonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern. . . . Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don't need the word 'subaltern' . . . They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.”  

The excerpt above is from an interview Spivak did in 1992, and it's much more explicit than the text. With this in mind, what are the limits of our reading Spivak with "Bartleby"? Let's have a conversation about oppression vs. subalternity. What are the particular characteristics of the subaltern subject that differentiate them from Bartleby as a pastiche of exploited workers? How might we then leverage "Subaltern Studies" as a criticism of "Bartleby"?