Postmodern Politics: The Rhetoric of the Referent & the Performance of Identity
Sol Luckman
One of the most influential critical assumptions in the poststructuralist era is that linguistic theory since the Enlightenment can be divided into three distinct periods: 1) a nomenclatural or Aristotelian phase corresponding to realism, in which objects and concepts were thought to enter language as preconstituted or nonlinguistic facts; 2) a second structuralist phase corresponding to modernism inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model in which the sign was severed from its referent; and 3) the current phase corresponding to poststructuralism and postmodernism in which signifier and signified have been separated, giving rise to contemporary notions of semantic slippage and différance. Terry Eagleton neatly summarizes this standard chronology when he writes, “If structuralism divided the sign from the referent, post-structuralism goes a step further: it divides the signifier from the signified.”
My theory of postmodernism follows from the realization that this neat chronology, however useful as a conceptual framework, is critically flawed. To claim that structuralism severs all ties between sign and referent is to ignore that the referent exists as an embarrassing surplus in Saussure’s linguistic model. We glimpse the referent’s posthumous existence toward the beginning of the second part of the COURS DE LINGUISTIQUE GENERALE, where Saussure undertakes a brief recapitulation of his theory of the signifier-signified binary. Reiterating that “[l]’entité linguistique n’existe que par l’association du signifiant et du signfié,” he explains how “[u]ne suite de sons n’est linguistique que si elle est le support d’une idée.” In parallel fashion: “Il en est de même du signifié, dès qu’on le sépare de son signifiant. Des concepts tels que ‘maison,’ ‘blanc,’ ‘voir,’ etc., considérés en eux-mêmes, appartiennent à la psychologie; ils ne deviennent entités linguistiques que par association avec des images acoustiques.”
The very fact that Saussure could affirm the possibility of concepts existing outside their expression in language–“concepts … considérés en eux-mêmes”–distinguishes his theory from that of the poststructuralists (for whom discourse, while historically contextualized, is all-encompassing). In other words, Saussure’s theory incorporates a latent strain of transcendental phenomenology which attempts to keep certain unadulterated experiences free from linguistic taint.
Perhaps this phenomenology, this residual belief in “essence” haunting the periphery of Saussure’s otherwise purely semiological model has been responsible for the many contradictory labels attached to his theory: psychologizing and scientific, idealist and positivist, bourgeois spiritualist and Marxist materialist. In any case I interpret Saussure’s simultaneous rejection of the real and unadmitted attachment to it as very much in keeping with the contradictions of his historical moment.
Such an internally conflicted relation to the real, I propose, is the classic modernist gesture: a rejection of realism that nevertheless aims at a kind of mimesis. Despite modernism’s rhetoric of breaking free of the past and waking up from the nightmare of history, modernist writers consistently travel back in time in search of the lost “real.” “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Thomas Wolfe’s anthologized lament from LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL is exemplary, transforming into poetic nostalgia the incongruous desire to gain back that which is always already a figment or “ghost.” Similarly, William Faulkner, for all his investment in textuality, in the loom of language on which we’re simultaneously woven and entangled, never completely abandons his quest for the “real” that is blood, the transcendental and originary “central I-Am’s private own.”
The consequences of this “residual realism” for postmodernism have been dismal. I define postmodernism as that literature which once and for all rejects realist epistemology in favor of a theoretical framework which considers the real a product of discourse, not the other way around. In the best of cases, postmodernism’s thoroughgoing (con)textualization of reality has led to a view of it as superficial, ludic and, ultimately, frivolous. In the worst of scenarios, critics like Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Charles Newman have identified the postmodern with bad faith, the murder of the subject, self-defeating irony and a retreat from history.
In one of the seminal essays of the postmodern debate, Jameson has written of postmodernism that in “faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.” For Jameson, this process of historical (con)textualization–accompanied by the fragmentation of the subject–is entirely negative, representing a “waning of affect” symptomatic of pandemic cultural apathy. One of postmodernism’s principal characteristics, according to Jameson, is “intertextuality,” defined as “a deliberate, built-in feature of the [postmodern] aesthetic effect, and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history.”
In such passages Jameson clearly betrays his materialist bias, as well as his belief in a historical or factual real existing independent of its expression in language. Like Saussure, Jameson assumes that essence comes first, and that the signifier naturally follows. But it’s just as plausible–in fact, more so–to turn the tables and assume that language in a profound sense creates the reality it describes. Roland Barthes has written, “Le fait n’a jamais qu’une existence linguistique,” a maxim used by Hayden White as the epigraph to his groundbreaking study of historiographic narrative (THE CONTENT OF THE FORM) which, in my opinion, definitively explodes the “natural” boundaries between fact and fiction.
I’m far from implying that White denies the existence of history. To the contrary, history remains just as real as it ever was, people are born and die, make love and war just as they always have. My point is that the only way we can know about these activities is through discourse–there’s no unmediated experience of “reality,” not even of our own. Contrary, then, to the opinions of the majority of postmodernism’s detractors (and even of many of its apologists), history did not suddenly vanish in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Instead, history began being rethought as a human construct, but this makes it no less “real” and the issues faced by and informing the subject no less matters of life and death.
For liberal humanists, the “illusions” of postmodernism, to borrow Eagleton’s phrase, begin with a confusion between effective political action and empty theoretical discourse. Today many theorists are challenging this conventional binary which relegates anything short of full-scale revolution to the ivory tower. Judith Butler is one such theorist. Combining Foucault’s genealogical approach with the postmodern critique of liberal humanism, Butler’s model (outlined in GENDER TROUBLE: FEMINISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITY) articulates a new kind of radical feminist politics.
This “postmodern feminism,” to use Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson’s expression, directs its polemic not only against obviously patriarchal structures, but also against traditional feminist identity politics which locates resistance in the gendered female body. Butler argues that the “foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed.” It requires little imagination to understand why such a theory of subjectivity would be troubling not only to a certain kind of feminism, but also to Marxist thinkers, whose “revolution” depends on a coherent world historical subject.
And yet Butler’s model is at once resolutely antifoundational and overtly political. This point needs to be stressed. For Butler, the subject cannot preexist because “signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects.” Butler views agency not as the possession or expression of an ontologically stable “self,” but as a subversive modification of naturalized discursive practices.
Revolution is replaced by subversion, a subversion (in this case, of hierarchical gender “norms”) which occurs within and as signification. In Butler’s words: “There is no self … who maintains ‘integrity’ prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there.”
Play is the form resistance takes, a performance on the surface (exemplified by cross-dressing) which exposes not only gender, but sex itself as “constructed,” “unnatural.” Agency “happens” by bending the rules of existing discourse–not by creating alternative or radically new discursive strategies (the impossible goal of both Marxism and liberal feminism). Thus Butler’s focus on the “subversive laughter” of pastiche and parody “in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effects.” Explicit in this theory is the very postmodern injunction to attend to the particular, to think globally perhaps, but to act locally.
Butler’s critics have persisted in misreading her theory as an example of hedonistic pleasure-seeking, vapid performativity, or cynical resignation. It is, I would argue, none of these. Such interpretations ignore the fact, explicitly stated, that maintaining a discursive subjectivity can be a very fatiguing (as well as dangerous) business–especially if your subjectivity happens to run counter to society’s dominant identity codes. Reversing Noam Chomsky’s metaphor, we might speak of subversion as the grueling “manufacture of dissent.”
Butler’s redefinition of subversive parody as political action flies in the face of a theorist like Jameson, for whom postmodern pastiche is merely a degraded avatar of modernist irony and which he calls “blank parody,” likened to “a statue with blind eyeballs” that criticizes nothing in particular. For my purposes, the most important ramifications of Butler’s theory can be summarized as follows:
1) Categories are created;
2) Despite their ontological status as fictions, categories operate as socially determinant forces; and
3) Categories cannot be escaped, but they can be modified.
While subjectivity, functioning within or in opposition to these dominant categories, does display a certain degree of discursive freedom, it’s equally true that some performances are more coercive than others. Consider Robert Coover’s “Rosenbergs,” whose moving rendition of themselves is topped only by the spectacle of the cold war feeding frenzy that is the Sam Slick Show. The point is that categories can kill: the fictional Rosenbergs, like their historical counterparts, are duly electrocuted, while Uncle Sam incarnates himself in “Nixon,” whose real world original was less than a decade away from ascending to the presidency of the United States.
Butler’s notion of subversive parody, like Coover’s THE PUBLIC BURNING, has many affinities with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, a genre which he likens to Rabelais’ Gargantua in its wholesale consumption and appropriation of all other genres into its heteroclite body: “The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates them into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them.”
This is a perfect description of what happens in many postmodern novels, which appropriate everything from newspaper clippings to advertising copy, historical documents to political speeches in order to “re-accentuate” them as non-naturalized discourse. In this way the formalist technique of defamiliarization is employed in the service of sociopolitical critique. Just as novelistic laughter, for Bakhtin, destroys epic’s “hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance,” the postmodern novel deflates and denaturalizes official political ideology (the “official story” which might be considered a contemporary distanced and valorized “epic”).
Postmodernism, like Butler’s new feminism, is structured on an epistemology in which the historical and the fictional are neither mutually exclusive nor dialectically entwined: they are one and the same. The emphasis is no longer on mimesis, but on paraphrasis. In other words: discourse. The postmodern aesthetic follows from the assumption that historiography and fiction are both forms of narrative, and as such neither can be privileged over, or neatly differentiated from, the other. E. L. Doctorow puts it this way: “a visitor from another planet could not by study of the techniques of discourse distinguish composed fiction from composed history.” This kind of increasingly widespread thinking signals a decisive break from modernism, a postmodern rupture empowered by the liquidation of the referent and the reconfiguration of the real as discourse.
At present, the nature of this rupture is far from being universally understood. Even Linda Hutcheon, whose concept of “historiographic metafiction” is based on a discursive model similar to the one I’ve been articulating, refuses to admit that postmodernism constitutes a true break from modernism. Hutcheon maintains that in postmodernism the referent is posited only to be taken away, which is indeed the case, but I’d like to point out that such give and take in postmodernist fiction is always already rhetorical. There’s no lingering suspicion that an unmediated reality might be “out there.” Historiographic metafiction’s rhetoric of the referent is a self-conscious strategy designed precisely to demonstrate that the “real” never existed, cannot exist outside its expression in and as discourse.
Postmodernism’s conflation of the historical and the fictional betrays an ironic self-consciousness in a way that much modernist fiction, equally self-contradictory but for different reasons, does not. Postmodern “reference” distinguishes itself from its modernist precursor to the extent that it has relinquished all legitimated or legitimizing claims to referentiality. The postmodern paradox is, of course, that in doing so, contemporary fiction has become a great deal more historically minded than modernism ever was–witness the meteoric rise over the past four decades of the new historical novel.
In the United States, a leading proponent of this new type of fiction is E. L. Doctorow. Not surprisingly, Doctorow is Jameson’s primary target when the latter seeks to illustrate postmodernism’s purportedly ahistorical historicism. Jameson’s criticism boils down to the fact that Doctorow, despite his Leftist leanings, has consistently problematized the past, suggesting that the past is ineluctably a matter of interpretation, whereas Jameson longs for historical grounding in the factual real, for the old “solid historiographic formation on the reader’s part.”
Doctorow–whose fiction is nothing if not about history–is thus far from being “the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past,” as Jameson claims. Instead, he might be thought of as a (typical if singularly eloquent) postmodern exponent of the past-existing-in-and-through-discourse. Jameson correctly perceives, however, that the expansion of culture into the social, resulting in the postmodern erasure of “critical distance,” negates traditional Marxist political resistance. Whereas Marxism, much like the modernist avant-garde, depends for its social critique on a hypothetical “autonomous” position outside the social, postmodernism recognizes that such autonomy is an illusion: there is no outside, only a choice among figurative or signifying devices.
Postmodern novels foreground–indeed, depend on–the very discursive strategies formulated by postmodern feminists like Judith Butler. In these novels the real is transformed into narrative, the self is shown to be constructed through discursive forces, and political resistance necessarily occurs as a disruptive performance inscribed within the very discourse(s) under critique.
Such strategies are often ambivalent, and even paradoxical, but never quietistic. As I hope to demonstrate in readings of Doctorow’s THE BOOK OF DANIEL and the Brazilian novelist Ivan Ângelo’s A FESTA, calling attention to the instrinsically performative nature of what we call reality and the ways categories are produced and maintained is itself a political act.
Doctorow summarizes this point beautifully when he argues that the “imagination obviously imposes itself on the world, composes a world which, in turn, affects what is imagined … [A] book can affect consciousness–affect the way people think and therefore the way they act. Books create constituencies that have their own effect on history.”
Postmodern fiction, far from being irresponsible, takes on the very serious task of urging the reader to avoid the mindless replication of sometimes empowering but often pernicious categories–categories which have no basis in objective reality precisely because reality is never objective. Until we as a people become conscious of this fundamental truth, postmodernism maintains, the nightmare of history will most assuredly continue.
Copyright (c) 2008 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is author of the internationally acclaimed nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the Beginner's Luke Series of novels. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Currently, the author is giving away FREE copies of Beginner's Luke. To take advantage of this special offer, click here.]
