b2o: boundary 2 online

Category: Uncategorized

  • From Latin America to Abya Yala: A Review of Latinamericanism after 9/11

    From Latin America to Abya Yala: A Review of Latinamericanism after 9/11

    A Review of John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11

    Click here for Spanish text/ Clic aqui para leer en español

    by Emilio del Valle Escalante (Maya k’iche’, iximulew)

    In the wake of the September 11 attacks on U.S. soil in 2001, Latin American nation-states united behind George W. Bush’s policies toward denying “terrorist groups the capacity to operate in this Hemisphere.”1 Through the Organization of American States Bush stated: “This American family stands united” (Youngers, 151). However, instead of nurturing this support, the Bush administration turned its back on Latin America and launched a “war on terror” in the Middle East (particularly Iraq) that ignited a long and divisive conflict whose consequences are still felt today, particularly with the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). U.S. distancing from Latin America, some have argued, led to the emergence of Left-leaning politics that through democracy have taken control of the nation-state, a phenomenon that is known as the Marea rosada or “Pink Tide” politics. Indeed, after September 11, 2001, we see the establishment of the governments of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Cristina Fernández in Argentina, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, governments that mark a transition from neoliberal capitalist economies to “socialist” oriented ones.

    Taking this context as a point of departure, John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11 explores the significance of the Marea rosada governments for Latin American studies, arguing that these Left-leaning governments open up a “new, unforeseen, and unforeseeable series of possibilities and determinations.”2 With their bet on socialism, these governments mark a decline of the Washington Consensus in the region and a shift away from identification with U.S. power. Beverley sees these political processes as unfolding a necessary confrontation between Latin America and the United States that provides an opportunity to redefine and assert Latinamericanism’s “ideological and geopolitical force” (Beverley, 7). The book includes an Introduction and seven chapters where Beverley engages in discussions and debates with various sectors of the Latinamericanist intelligentsia in order to re-examine, conciliate, transcend and establish a new critical “post-subalternist” framework that validates the nation-state as a site of struggle and proposes a “new” Latinamericanism that in its engagement with social movements can potentially lead to political and social change (Beverley, 15).

    In the chapters “Latinamericanism after 9/11” and “Between Ariel and Caliban,” Beverley maps the debates between Latinamericanists who claim to speak from Latin America and those who speak of Latin America outside its geopolitical boundaries. In these chapters, he develops a critique of neo-Arielist intellectuals like Mabel Moraña, Hugo Achugar, and Nelly Richard who propose a critical stance that instead of embracing the new politics and demands of social movements, seem more interested in rearticulating a form of critique that values high culture and the authority of the criollo-mestizo intellectual as a carrier of knowledge and cultural memory.3 Neo-Arielist arguments against Latin Americanists in the U.S., according to Beverley, have three components: 1) Latin American studies from the U.S. concentrate on identity politics and multiculturalism, discussions that have been “transferred” to Latin America and misrepresent diverse histories and social-cultural formations; 2) Latin American Studies occludes the prior engagement by Latin American intellectuals on “native grounds,” and in doing so, they subalternize the contributions of thinkers from Latin America; 3) theoretical frameworks such as Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies from the North contribute to diminish Latin America’s ability to implement its own projects of national or regional identity and development (Beverley, 62-63)

    Beverley points out that by constructing an argument that situates Latin America against Latinamericanists in the United States and other parts of the world, neo-Arielists offer an inadequate response to cultural and economic U.S. hegemony. By claiming to speak “from” Latin America, or “on the ground,” these intellectuals not only overlook the orientalization that operates within the Latin American lettered city, but also reassert their own cultural and political authority and that of literature and literary criticism (Beverley, 61). In doing so, they end up reaffirming their own criollo-mestizo European origins and bourgeois or middle class status and articulate a discursive position incapable of producing a “national-popular appeal”(Beverley, 20) Instead, Beverley proposes a new form of Latinamericanism that recovers the “space of cultural dehierarchization ceded to the market and neoliberalism” and is “capable of both inspiring and nourishing itself from new forms of political and social practice from below” (Beverley, 22-23). This would entail recognizing the multiethnic and multinational nature of Latin America, the demands of Latin American social movements and the populations threatened by globalization and neoliberalism, the forms of territoriality that go beyond the nation-state (e.g. Hispanics in the United States), the struggles against male chauvinism, racism, homophobia, and those of women and sexual minorities for gender equality (Beverley, 24). Given that all of these demands and struggles are constitutive of Latin America itself, it is now time, Beverley argues, to develop critical approaches that can incorporate these populations’ demands in order to affirm Latin America as its own civilizational project, “capable of confronting U.S. hegemony and expressing an alternative future for the peoples of the Americas” (Beverley, 18).

    In the third chapter, entitled “The Persistence of the Nation,” Beverley offers a critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2001). Since Hardt and Negri argue that we live in a sort of Roman Empire where there is no “center” and/or “periphery,” Beverley asks: who in the world today represents a logic of resistance that can bring down Empire and propose alternatives to its logic? Beverley’s critique concentrates on Hardt and Negri’s idea of the “multitude” by which they mean the “many-faced, hydra-headed, hybrid collective subject conjured up by globalization and cultural deterritorialization” (Beverley, 26-27). For Beverley, however, the multitude is an expanded way of naming the proletariat as a hybrid or heterogeneous and “universal” subject that dismisses the specific demands—many times nationalistic—of the subaltern. For example, the social movements that Hardt and Negri themselves evoke, like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, or the Intifada in Palestine, are characterized by identity politics and the necessity to change the nature of the nation-state. Hardt and Negri want to imagine—Beverley indicates—a form of “politics that would go beyond the limits of both the nation and the forms of political and cultural representation traditionally bound up with the idea of hegemony” (Beverley, 27-28).

    In chapter four, “Deconstruction and Latinamericanism,” Beverley concentrates on Alberto Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference which he reads as a “new” form of Latinamericanism that uses deconstruction as a theoretical framework capable of renewing “if not the Left in a traditional sense, then certainly an emancipatory politics to come in the emerging new world order of globalization” (Beverley, 44-45). Moreiras, according to Beverley, is concerned with the politics of knowledge involved in the representation of Latin American culture, and aims “to bring into crisis and radicalize the ideological and conceptual space of Latin American cultural studies” (Beverley, 45). Given that Moreiras depends on the appropriation and privileging of certain kinds of knowledge (usually that of high culture, or the baroque), like the neo-Arielists, he ends up re-signifying the authority of the intellectual, failing to interrogate his own critical position and authority, as well as other forms of subaltern knowledge that fall outside the metropolitan Latinamericanism he proposes. In this sense, Moreiras articulates a critical space of cosmopolitan critical theory “which is itself produced by and feeds back into the logic of globalization” (Beverley, 54).

    In “The Neoconservative Turn,” Beverley sees that alongside the re-emergence of the Left as a political force after 9/11, there is also a critical tendency within the Latin American Left that “is characterizing itself, or turning ‘conservative’ in cultural matters but ‘liberal’ in political and economic ones” (Beverley, 91).  This critical tendency, similar to neo-Arielism and deconstruction, is represented by a middle- and upper-middle-class, university-educated, and what is essentially a white, Criollo-Ladino/Mestizo intelligentsia that attempts to recapture “the space of cultural and hermeneutic authority” (Beverley, 93).  This intellectual class is exemplified by, among others, Mario Roberto Morales, Mabel Moraña and Beatriz Sarlo who develop critiques, respectively, of the Maya movement in Guatemala, the field of Latin American literary criticism against postcolonial and Subaltern studies theoretical frameworks, and testimonio and witness literatures. In their respective discussions, these critics display a strong discomfort with multiculturalism and identity politics, which they see as fetishizing and Orientalizing their subaltern object of study. These authors speak “in the name of the authority of literature to disqualify the effort of indigenous and subaltern subjects to write themselves into history” (Beverley, 83). From these readings, Beverley concludes that the neoconservative turn in Latin America is characterized by 1) a rejection of the authority of the subaltern voice and experience, and an extreme dissatisfaction with or skepticism about multiculturalism or interculturalidad and identity politics; 2) defense of the authority of the writer-critic as the bearer of knowledge; 3) reaffirmation of their criollo-mestizo identity; 4) failure to recognize the persistence of racism and gender hierarchies; 5) expression of a “disavowal of the project of the armed revolutionary struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, in favor of a more considered and cautious Left” , and 6) a “reterritorialization of the academic disciplines—particularly the field of literature and cultural criticism” (Beverley, 89). Beverley’s concern is that this group “has the potential to divide unnecessarily the new Latin American Left and inhibit its emerging hegemonic force at both the national and the continental levels” (Beverley, 91).

    In chapter six, “Beyond the Paradigm of Dissolution,” Beverley discusses the question of armed struggle in Latin America. He contends that the accounts of the armed rebellions, such as Jorge Castañeda’s Utopia Unarmed (1994), provide a negative view of insurgency that is “more inclined to see where we went wrong than what we did right” (Beverley, 109). These negative perspectives develop a “paradigm of disillusion” where critics retrospectively speak of armed insurgency as “equivocation,” or romantic, immature, “ill-conceived” movements “doomed to failure,” “prone to excess, error, irresponsibility and moral anarchy”(Beverley, 98-99). Despite the fact that with the defeat of many of these movements, previous forms of capitalist domination were “restored” (now under the banners of “neoliberalism” and “globalization”), to view the armed struggles in these negative terms obliterates the fact that they paved the way to current political and social activism in the present (e.g. EZLN or other ethnic mobilizations in Latin America). In this sense, current social movements confront similar challenges as those of the 1960s: how to “transform the state and begin to transform society from the state” (Beverley, 107). Moreover, “many of the people involved in the governments of the Marea rosada or in the movements that brought them to power, cut their political teeth in the period of the armed struggle” (Beverley, 98). The “experience of armed struggle in Latin America, including Cuba—Beverley argues—went in the direction of democracy, and brought into politics a new spirit of hope for change that had been missing since the 1930s and new possibilities for direct participation” (Beverley, 105.)

    Beverley closes his book with “The Subaltern and the State,” arguing for the need of a “post-subaltern” paradigm; that is, a critical perspective that in its critical approach to the nation-state reveals its debt to, but in turn, displaces subaltern critical frameworks. Beverley finds at least two limitations with Subaltern Studies. First, it conceptualizes the subaltern as outside and constitutively opposed to the state and modernity since these institutions have been the result of colonialism. Second, Subaltern Studies imagine civil society as completely independent from the nation-state. What the Marea rosada governments have shown, however, is that the subaltern and the state can be compatible. He indicates that “Chavismo was precisely the result of the crystallization of a variety of social movements operating in Venezuela in the wake of the Caracazo into a new political bloc” (Beverley, 114). Similarly, the success of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia was the result of Indigenous social movements that sought to and successfully modified economic relations and established a leadership that is “predominantly indigenous” (Beverley, 109). In this sense, Marea rosada governments, according to Beverley, allow us to envision a state that can bring “into it demands, values, experiences from the popular-subaltern sectors (which would require a prior process of hegemonic articulation of a new political bloc capable of addressing the state), and how in turn, from the state, society can be remade in a more redistributive, egalitarian, culturally diverse way (how hegemony might be constructed from the state, in other words)” (Beverley, 115-116).

    While I find relevance in Beverley’s critique of neo-Arielism and deconstruction, his assessment of the armed struggle, the importance of the nation-state and identity politics in a “globalized world,” and his call for an intellectual political project that engages with social movements, I also find some significant shortcomings in his arguments. Let me address them here.

    As we can see, Beverley’s main critique of Latinamericanism has to do with its failure to recognize and incorporate the demands of social movements and the populations threatened by globalization and neoliberalism. However, if the idea is to incorporate into hegemonic institutional spaces—dominated by middle- and upper-middle-class, university-educated, and essentially a white, Criollo-Ladino/Mestizo Latin American intelligentsia—the “demands, values, experiences of the popular-subaltern sectors,” to what extent isn’t Beverley complicit in preventing “the effort of indigenous and subaltern subjects to write themselves into history?”(Beverley, 83).

    Beverley recognizes that the civilizational project of Latin America has historically entailed the suppression and marginalization of Indigenous “languages and ways of thinking and being” (Beverley, 59) on the assumption that Indigenous life and culture are “inadequate” or “backwards.” Because of these assumptions, “Indigenous Peoples or peasants or workers or the urban poor may not identify themselves with the project” (Beverley, 48). But while Beverley underscores these limitations, he does not have a problem advocating for a “new Latinamericanism.” In doing so, he rejects and obliterates some of the categories and alternative projects being proposed by social movements, in particular, those of Indigenous and Afro-descendant intellectuals.4 I am surprised, for instance, that Beverley does not reflect or consider the category and civilizational project of Abya Yala 5 which has been proposed by some Indigenous scholars and activists since the 1980s, and has been theorized by Beverley’s former student, the Kichwa scholar Armando Muyolema.6 Muyolema challenges the idea of Latin America precisely because it is and continues to be constitutive of an ethnocentric and colonialist project that, for the most part, endorses the aspirations of the white, and criollo-mestizo intellectual sectors Beverley criticizes. Latin America is not merely a “name” or category, but rather a geopolitical project that embodies and confirms the historically enduring regime of colonialism in the region. Indigenous Peoples can only be a part of Latin America as long as we give up our lands, languages, and cultural and religious specificities. Contrary to the civilizational project of Latin America, Abya Yala, according to Muyolema, would represent our own civilizational project and locus of political enunciation.

    Indeed, for many Indigenous and non-Indigenous sectors, the possibility of “alliance politics between social groups” and the formation of “a new historical block at national, continental, and intercontinental levels” (Beverley, 83) does not lie so much in a “new” Latin American or Latinamericanist project anymore, but rather, in Abya Yala. For us to recognize and endorse the former, in my view, will contribute to affirming a colonialist logic that overlooks our needs as Indigenous Nations: in particular, our continued efforts to recover and defend our territories, and restitute our linguistic, cultural and religious specificities, efforts that Latinamericanism in all of its forms has failed to deeply address and understand. Because of these, I would venture to say that the efforts of subaltern-popular Indigenous rights movements would be better invested in first developing an Indigenous and even global historical block that while it addresses internal and external oppressions also manages to bring us together as diverse Indigenous Nations struggling to overcome external and internal/settler colonialisms. Our positioning as Indigenous subjects will not only allow the hegemonic articulation of our demands, but also negotiate with non-Indigenous others the constitution of multicultural or intercultural national models based on our own Indigenous perspectives.

    With regards to Beverley’s discussion of the Marea rosada, there is no doubt that these Left-leaning governments have brought economic and political benefits to important sectors of disenfranchised populations. However, what do we make of Michelle Bachelet’s re-enactment of Augusto Pinochet’s 1984 “anti-terrorist law” which has been used to incarcerate Mapuche activists in the northern region of the Araucania in Chile? Or Rafael Correa’s efforts to shoot down the offices of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), an organization that supported Correa’s presidential election? (Not to mention the incarceration and assassination of several environmental Indigenous activists and peasant leaders in the Amazonian regions of Ecuador). Or the Evo Morales administration invading Amazonian Indigenous territories (the so-called “TIPNIS” affair) to build roads, bridges and electrical power systems to economically favor sectors of his constituency? In my view, what Marea rosada governments show is that while they have constituted the nation-state as a site of struggle that proposes socialism, and in one case, established a leadership that is “predominantly indigenous,” at the same time they demonstrate how they are capable of reproducing colonialism, often becoming—as suggested by Nicholas Dirks—“as repressive as the worst colonial regime.”7

    By pointing this out, I am by no means suggesting that we don’t see the nation-state or modernity as sites of political possibilities. Like Beverley, I believe that the nation and its hegemonic institutions are clearly necessary sites of struggle that with our participation and critique will eventually change the rules of the game in favor of a “popular-subaltern block,” and the construction of a “society that is at once egalitarian and diverse” (Beverley, 79). Unlike him, however, I don’t believe that the work of social movements should be understood as complete once their efforts culminate in the occupation of the State. Instead, social movements and their hegemonic articulations should be the guiding force in continuing to redefine the nation-state, and the transformation of society, changes that can only occur from below, instead of above.

    Emilio del Valle Escalante (K’iche’ Maya, Iximulew) is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He is the author of Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala (SAR Press, 2009).

    NOTES

    1. Coletta Youngers, “Latin America,” in Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11, ed. John Feffer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 151.

    2. John Beverley, Latinamericanism after 9/11 (London-Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 7.

    3. Arielism in Latin America refers to an intellectual class at the beginning of the twentieth century that developed a political stance and discourse against the United States’ imperial expansionism after the Spanish-American war of 1898. Figures like Uruguayan José Enrique Rodo evoked the figure of Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to suggest that while Latin America embodied noble, intellectual, harmonious and sensible virtues, the U.S. represented insensible and material ones. Besides Rodo, this group included Argentinian Manuel Baldomero Ugarte and Mexican José Vasconcelos.

    4. For a discussion about the relationships between Afro-descendants and the nation state in Latin America, see Agustín Lao-Montes, “Decolonial Moves. Trans-Locating African Diaspora Spaces,” Cultural Studies. 21:2-3 (March-May 2007): 309-339.

    5. For those unfamiliar with the term Abya Yala, the concept emerged toward the end of the 1970s in Dulenega, or what, for others, is today San Blas, Panama, a Kuna Tule territory. Abya Yala in the Kuna language means “land in its full maturity.” After the Kuna won a lawsuit to stop the construction of a shopping mall in Dulenega, they told a group of reporters that they employed the term Abya Yala to refer to the Western Hemisphere or the Americas in its totality. After listening to this story, the Bolivian Aymara leader, Takir Mamani suggested that indigenous peoples and indigenous organizations use the term Abya Yala in their official declarations to refer to the American continent. Since the 1980s, many indigenous activists, writers, and organizations have embraced Mamani’s suggestion.

    6. See Armando Muyolema’s “De la cuestión indígena a lo indígena como cuestionamiento. Hacia una crítica del latinoamericanismo, el indigenismo y el mestiz(o)aje,” ed. Rodríguez, Ileana, in Convergencia de tiempos: estudios subalternos/contextos latinoamericanos estado, cultura, subalternidad (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 327-363.

    7. Nicholas Dirks, Colonialism and Culture, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 15.

  • Announcing a Special Issue on Race and Innovation

    This dossier on race and innovation collects some of the most compelling poets writing today who experiment otherhow, thereby enacting a range of poetics from the lexical to the visual intervention attending to this thing we call, “race.” What emerge from this special issue are, in Erica Hunt’s words, “new tropes,” “new rope a dopes,” toward a future that has yet to be imagined. Together, in a kind of protest against the horrific real, these poets say, we will not be reduced to merely documenting history. If, as Charles Bernstein notes, there is a new American avant-garde, this is it.

    Contributors include Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Douglas Kearney, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, Cathy Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Tonya Foster, Shane McRae, Hoa Nguyen, John Keene, Evie Shockley, Daniel Borzutzky, Vanessa Place, Fred Moten, Lauren Russell, Farid Matuk, Daniel Tiffany, Duriel Estelle Harris, Erica Hunt, Prageeta Sharma, Jayson Smith, Simone White, Lucas de Lima, and Tyrone Williams.

    —Guest Editor Dawn Lundy Martin

  • Governed by Chance: On War, Disorder, and Representation

    by Anders Engberg-Pedersen

    In his unfinished magnum opus, On War, Carl von Clausewitz writes: In war “the light of reason moves through different media, it is broken into different rays than during speculative contemplation.” Clausewitz knew what he was talking about. He was only twelve years old when he entered the army in 1792, and the following year he experienced the matrix of war from the inside. First for Prussia and later for Russia he fought against the French armies in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which put Europe into an almost permanent state of war from 1792-1815. What Clausewitz did not know was how he should describe that state. The enormous reach and intensity of the wars had so profoundly changed the way the world normally functions that the state of war could neither be described nor understood and certainly not managed with the means inherited from the past. For Clausewitz, the wars seemed to be a prism that deflected the light of reason and splintered fundamental categories of time, space, and knowledge. Back at his desk after the wars ended, he attempted to draw the outlines of this prism in the many historical and theoretical works he wrote until he succumbed to cholera in 1831.

    He wasn’t alone in this endeavor. A generation of writers, philosophers, cartographers, pedagogues and inventors, who had all spent several years of their lives inside the war matrix, had run into a similar problem: how do you describe let alone manage a phenomenon that seemed devoid of any kind of order? What is the state of knowledge, how do you make decisions, how do you act?

    In the eighteenth century military theory had been guided by geometry. Early in the century leading theorists such as Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban and Menno van Coehoorn had developed the highly intricate star-shaped fortifications that can still be found protecting the old core of many modern cities. In their treatises the carefully calculated architectural shapes emerge directly from simple geometrical forms. Readers of Tristram Shandy will remember Laurence Sterne’s satire of such complex calculations in the form of Uncle Toby, who runs around on a bowling green playing at war. He first builds a three-dimensional model of the fortifications in the War of the Spanish Succession, and proceeds to play through the siege with a pair of jackboots as mortars and two Turkish tobacco pipes as smoke generators. Sterne satirizes not just contemporary treatises of fortification, but also their implicit belief that military theory was a fully developed science – the belief that with the aid of the rules of geometry war as a phenomenon could be rationalized and brought under control.

    Nevertheless, the geometrical principle, as Clausewitz labeled it, was widespread. In a treatise from 1748, the French military theorist Marquis de Puysegur wrote that it was easy to teach the art of warfare “without war, without troops, without an army, without having to leave one’s home, simply by means of study, with a little geometry and geography.” With the notoriously well-disciplined Prussian troops of Frederick the Great, which on his command could move around on the battlefield in a complex military choreography, geometry had not disappeared, it had simply migrated from dead matter to living matter, from buildings to people.

    It is this crystalline order that breaks down around 1800. The minor, tactical battles and sieges of the eighteenth century were replaced by enormous armies that spread out across a theater of war stretching from Madrid to Moscow. Even though only about 10.000 soldiers made it back alive, Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with an army numbering between 4-500.000 men. When war was waged on such a scale and with so many unknown factors, the geometrical order seemed to belong to a past age.
    What came in its place? That was the question military theorists, writers, and inventors all grappled with at the turn of the century. In 1797 a retired Prussian general by the name of Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst set the stage for an important shift in the thinking of war. He published a book in three volumes entitled Observations on the Art of War, on its Progress, its Contradictions and its Reliability. It quickly attracted attention due to its radical theory of knowledge. According to Berenhorst the recent expansion of military activities had transformed war into an “empire of chance,” an amorphous, random, chaotic phenomenon where chance reigns supreme. As such, war can neither be understood nor controlled. Only, no one will admit it. As he writes: “No teacher can make themselves begin with the confession: his science lacks all elements, the entire field is governed by chance.”

    Not everyone bought Berenhorst’s radical scepticism, but with his provocative treatise he formulated the challenge that contemporary thinkers all had to deal with: if war can no longer be subjected to a geometrical order, but does not consist entirely of chance events either, then how can it be described? Clausewitz is most famous for his statement that war is the continuation of politics by other means. But more interesting is what he has to say about war and knowledge, about which knowledge order obtains in a state of war. Clausewitz’s all-important move is to replace Wahrheit—truth–with Wahrscheinlichkeit – probability. Yes, war is indeed pervaded by chance, and yes, you are often forced to act on the basis of uncertain or lacking information, so you won’t make it far if you insist on acting only on certain knowledge. If, however, you conceive of the state of war through the lens of the probability theories that were being developed at the same time in France by people such as Pierre-Simon Laplace, then you will wield a tool that is perhaps less noble than truth, but extremely practical and useful for dealing with uncertainty and chance. In other words, in the state of war truth does not exist, only probabilities that together produce an “average truth.”

    G.W.F. Hegel was not happy. For this towering figure of philosophy probability was a weak form of knowledge and, as he put it, “nothing compared to truth.” But for a number of thinkers and writers whose military experience was not limited—as Hegel’s was–to a brief glimpse of Napoleon on the evening before the battle of Jena, and who did not thereby believe to have seen the “World Soul on horseback,” that kind of statement was metaphysical nonsense. In a direct challenge to the leading German philosophers – to Kant’s critical philosophy and in particular to the speculative idealism in Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling – they took their starting point in the state of war and sought to develop a more world-oriented thought that could describe and navigate the mutable empirical world they inhabited. As Clausewitz put it, it was time to become “unlost in philosophical dreams.” And in order to wake up, truth had to be replaced with probability, certain, well-grounded knowledge with a groundless non-knowledge, with calculable uncertainty.
    How do you make such a complex calculation? The at times dreamy, unworldly fascination with the subconscious in the Romantic period is here given a new twist. Since it is far beyond the capacities of conscious thought to calculate with so many uncertainties, you should instead leave the calculation to an intuitive sense that the military thinkers called the “tact of judgment.” In other words, the subconscious was seen as an extremely potent mathematician who with lightning speed weighed all the relevant probabilities and improbabilities against each other and in the obscure recesses of the mind almost immediately delivered the best of all possible average truths to consciousness.

    Heinrich von Kleist, the tragic and brilliant Prussian poet, thought that the new understanding of the state of war and the new means of dealing with it were of such importance that he wrote an entire play about it. The Prince of Homburg, in the drama of the same name, suddenly abandons the superior commander’s predetermined battle plan and rushes into the fray with his troops when he intuitively senses that the moment for action has come. In the commander’s carefully planned choreography of troops and in Homburg’s groundless tact, the military theory of the eighteenth century clashes with the new way of thinking war around 1800. Of course Kleist complicates matters, for even though Homburg emerges victorious, it is mentioned in passing that he has twice before deprived the commander of victory by acting intuitively. The truth average of Homburg’s subconscious mathematician is merely 33 percent.
    But could tact be trained? Was it possible to learn how to navigate the empire of chance? This was the problem that several inventors around Europe now tried to solve. The Napoleonic Wars coincide with the development of the modern war game. The advanced hi-tech virtual reality simulations used by the military today can be traced back to forgotten names such as Venturini, Chamblanc, and Opiz around 1800. Before then, the war game was not much more than a variation on chess, but their predictability and abstract form appeared increasingly obsolete when compared to the inventors’ own experiences in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1806 a man by the name of Johann Ferdinand Opiz therefore made contingency into the central operative principle of war when he introduced two dice into his war game. All actions were now associated with different degrees of probability, and whether they succeeded depended on the yes or no of the dice. Opiz reprinted a gushing review of the war game in the accompanying manual: “What a difference! What incomparably more important, far superior advantage compared to chess!—which admittedly practices the mind immensely in reflection, but in no way teaches the soldier the various and often mind-boggling impediments in an operation.” It may well be that Opiz wrote the review himself. Regardless, his war game constituted an innovative simulation of the contingent knowledge order that Kleist and Clausewitz would later describe in their literary and theoretical works.

    The novelists faced a perhaps even greater problem. For where the theorist and the military commander ‘only’ had to describe and manage the state of war, literary authors were forced to create the state of war from scratch. They could not simply include a pair of dice along with a manual of when and how to use them in the novel. Instead they had to develop other means for simulating a phenomenon where chance, contingency, and uncertainty were not peripheral elements, but constituted its very core. Indeed, the first serious attempt to describe the state of war ends in an utter failure. But at first it looked quite promising. Toward the end of the 1820s, Honoré de Balzac had laid down a clear battle plan. In his notebooks we read the following entry: “To write a novel with the title The Battle (La Bataille), in which you hear the canon roaring on the first page and the cry of victory on the last one.” Balzac intended to describe one of the great Napoleonic battles from beginning to end. The novel had already been announced, and Balzac’s correspondence during the summer and fall of 1832 give the impression of an enthusiastic and industrious writer who can soon deliver his manuscript. But the publication date is repeatedly postponed and his reassuring letters about the state of the novel is replaced by frustrated confessions that he suffers from writer’s block. The topic is too big and the state of war too complex. In October he finally owns up to a friend: “You have won! I haven’t written a line of La Bataille. But I spent so much energy on it!” After further deadline extensions he finally calls it quits, and the novel ends where it began with the grandiose intention. The product of his hard toil remains a minimal fragment scribbled on the verso of another manuscript. It reads: “La Bataille. First Chapter: Gross-Aspern, 16 May 1809, toward noon.”

    To get a better grasp of his topic, Balzac had turned to a different medium of war that had become the sine qua non for the management of the enormous military operations of the day: the topographical map. With his corps of topographical engineers Napoleon established an extended cartographic network across Europe and thereby started a two-dimensional arms race between the major nations. For the empires had to an unprecedented degree become dependent on their symbolic doubles, on the extent and precision of their paper empires. Thus when the Russians invaded Paris in 1812, they were quick to loot the Dépôt de la guerre – the central depot for military maps.

    Cartography did not help Balzac solve his literary problem, but it became such an important part of Napoleonic warfare that the one medium ended up migrating into the other. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace the military map appears every time the Russian generals plan a battle. Tolstoy is less interest in the war against the French, however, and more in criticizing the knowledge order of the military map. He repeatedly reduces the map to a symbol of a pseudo-scientific military theory that excludes time, probability, and chance. While the map is often connected to a divine omniscience, Tolstoy preaches a kind of epistemic atheism. For him, as for Berenhorst, the state of war consists of ‘one hundred million contingent factors” impervious to any kind of control and management. Where Opiz and other inventors of war games designed simulations for the purpose of training officers to handle the contingencies of war, Tolstoy, in his mammoth novel, designs a number of literary simulations that place the reader in the midst of a phenomenon that appears so irrational and shapeless and that creates such a pervasive disorder that it can never be controlled or even conceived. For Tolstoy, war is the essence of incomprehensibility.

    War is fundamentally about destruction. But war is also an aesthetic phenomenon. Our understanding of it is inextricably tied to the ways in which we build our representations of it. In the symbolic order – in the operational logic of the war games, in the topographical image of military cartography, in the forms of literary texts – we can decode the shifting historical conceptions of the state of war and its complex knowledge order. And there we find an understanding of war that reaches beyond the extensive, but nevertheless historically limited terrain of the Napoleonic Wars. When a number of French philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Debord ask whether civil society is itself a latent state of war, whether our everyday lives are not a continuation of warfare by other means then they find support in the world picture that was articulated by people such as Kleist and Clausewitz. The state of war, which a generation of thinkers had tried to see clearly, ends up as a prism that reflects back on civil society and reveals a fundamental disorder of things underneath the civilized façade. However far one wants to follow that theory, one will do well to follow the French philosophers back to the military thinkers, inventors, and writers of the nineteenth century to get a better understanding of the phenomenon that has pursued us like a shadow up through history and is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

     

    Anders Engberg-Pedersen is the author of Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Harvard University Press, March 2015).

  • Empson’s “Sacred Mountain”: Poetry, Criticism, and Love

    By Q.S. Tong ~

    Empson (second row, right of center) with colleagues and guests at Peking University

    William Empson (second row, right of center) with colleagues and guests at Peking University. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    We do not fly when we are clay. We hope to fly when we are dust.

    William Empson, “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 91.

    When he is free he knows that he is free, that rebirth is at an end, that virtue is accomplished, that duty is done, and that there is no more returning to this world; thus he knows.

    William Empson, “The Fire Sermon,” The Complete Poems, 3.

    “Inertia and apathy,” says Raymond Williams, “have always been employed by the governed as a comparatively safe weapon against their governors.”1 Following the loss of confidence in one’s formative society and in the possibility of meaningful and productive human relationship in it, escape enacts a personal decision that one must take after a sustained period of inertia and apathy in order to imagine a radical change and to live a different life. Escape is thus “an honest substitute for revolution,” “a drastic change without external compulsion to make it.”2 Unless there is a willingness to see the self and others differently, to see one’s own country and the world differently, it would be difficult to imagine any real social and moral progress. “To become morally independent of one’s formative society,” asserts William Empson, “is the grandest theme of all literature, because it is the only means of moral progress, the establishment of some higher ethical concept.”3 It’s difficult to know whether Empson had himself in mind when he made this grand statement about the ethical aspiration of literature. Empson was not a revolutionary, nor was he committed to any radical political doctrine; but he was a rebel in his own way, a dissenting mind, and an idiosyncratic presence in twentieth century literature and criticism.

    This essay does not intend to reassess Empson.4 Rather, it offers a critical narrative of how the new realities of his time affected his life and how he reacted to them through work in wartime China. Empson manifests his intellectual qualities in his relation to China. His visits to China were not initially motivated by an explicit political agenda or an ideological program, but by the necessities of life. Although he had already achieved considerable critical reputation with the publication of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), he did not have a fulltime teaching position in England until he was offered the Chair of English at the University of Sheffield in 1955. It had been more than two decades since he graduated from Cambridge. For Empson, understanding and dealing with difficulties and failures of life was both a practical challenge and an intellectual question. In the face of growing influence and power of the institutionalized life, it seemed necessary to devise his own method of resistance and technique of self-care. To seek a new community, a new modality of life, would make it possible to envision the desired change in life and to create the possibilities of self-renewal. China in the 1930s was still able to offer the opportunities of escape from home and a new communal life in which Empson could hope to develop an understanding of the profession of literature and to turn that understanding into a positive and productive force of life.

    “Courage means Running”5

    From 1937 to 1938 and again from 1947 to 1953, Empson lived and worked in China, straddling the crucial historical moment of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. In “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” (1940), the longest and most biographical of his poems recording his experience of teaching English in China, Empson admits that China is his chosen place of exile: “it is true I flew, I fled” (19).6 He explains the poem’s pre-occupation with the imagery of “flying” thus: “‘Flying’ … is being used here for escaping ordinary troubles as well as other things.”7 It’s not just life-threatening dangers that would compel one into exile from one’s native land; ordinary troubles are the manifestation of a routine hostility against thinking, freedom, and life. “I ran about on hope, on trust,” declares Empson (“Nan-Yűeh,” 20). “Flying,” as a method by which the self seeks possibilities of protection, preservation, and survival, is not only a recurrent topos in Empson’s poetical and critical writings, but also a defining character of his early professional life. Empson flew and ran, literally and figuratively, from forms of vulgarity and snobbery permeating academic society where life was reduced to a protracted process of endurance. To be away from one’s formative society would be like leaving behind a whole system of constraints and prohibitions and trying to achieve a degree of freedom, however incomplete it might be.

    Good life is self-sustainment through endurance. Central to Empson’s concern is the development of an understanding of the human capacity “to take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one,” and “one must do this with all life, because the normal is itself limited.”8 This is an Empsonian paradox that resonates with his favorite critical concept: ambiguity. Writing for him is perhaps also a form of escape – from its normative mode of articulation, its accepted procedure, and its shared methodology. Escape may well be understood to be a critical posture adopted in response to the radical inadequacies and hostilities of life by disengaging from them through self-displacement. This posture requires courage, partly because it is an act of self-denial and renunciation of what one has had in terms of one’s social formation, and partly because it entails isolation and solitude. The inescapable loneliness presents itself as a consequence of the uncompromising alienation one has to endure, but it is a necessary condition of life and experience for the restoration of a limited degree of self-respect and self-esteem. “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” begins with the memorable poetic epigraph from W.B. Yeats:

    The soul remembering its loneliness Shudders in many cradles …
    … soldier, honest wife by turns,
    Cradle within cradle, and all in flight, and all Deformed because there is no deformity
    But saves us from a dream.9

    Empson composed the poem while the Faculty of Arts of Peking National University was taking temporary shelter in the Sacred Mountain, Nan-Yűeh (the Southern Mountain) in Hunan Province.10 The inaccuracies in the citation from Yeats, understandable due to the unavailability of library resources, are uncannily potent and suggestive for its unintended amplification of loneliness into a shared quality of life.

    The holy mountain where I live
    Has got some bearing on the Yeats.
    Sacred to Buddha, and a god
    Itself, it straddles the two fates…. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 27–30)

    To be sacred, it is necessary to accept isolation and loneliness. “The rule for a sacred mountain,” Empson explains, is that “it must be isolated so that people from all round can see the home town.”11 The dialectic of the two fates would be another example of Empsonian paradox: “the opposed ideals of personal immortality and of extinguishing yourself or merging into a world soul.”12 But these ideals are nearly impossible to realize in reality. One must “fly” in order to merge into a “world soul,” and one could only achieve eternity after one’s death. Empson accepted the challenge to understand this radical ambiguity of life, thus transforming the lived loneliness, in the figure of the Sacred Mountain, Nan-Yűeh, into an experience of the emotional and intellectual sublime in wartime China.

    Ambiguity and the Politics of Tact

    Empson’s critical reputation rests on the development of the concept of “ambiguity” in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Based on his observation of insufficiently studied textual behaviour, Empson defines ambiguity as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”13 Though primarily concerned with literary language, “ambiguity” is understood and used by Empson in an extended and slightly metaphorical sense. The term is, he explains, “descriptive,” and it suggests “the analytical mode of approach” (Ambiguity 1). The idea of ambiguity espouses no critical principle and proposes no theory about itself, but it presents an inescapable experience of poetry, language, and life as multifaceted, inconsistent, contradictory, and unstable. For “the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” and of social and intellectual life with which Empson was concerned, despite his apparent formalistic tendency (Ambiguity 3). It couldn’t be farther from the truth to subscribe his critical work to the practice of the New Criticism, which Empson once described as a “self-blinding theory,” a “print-centred or tea-tasting outlook,” and an “ugly movement.”14

    Never meant to be just a work of literary criticism, therefore, the book is a shrewd and controlled development of the author’s worldview. The classification of ambiguity into seven types allows him to construct a critical nexus and to demonstrate inherent semantic indeterminacies in poetic expression as well as in human experience. There are “social ambiguities” that yield less readily to analysis but throb on the page (Ambiguity 2). As far as Empson is concerned, the need to recognize and accept ambiguity as the essential quality of language and poetry is the only intelligent point of departure for serious intellectual work. Literature is an immense complex of language, as life must necessarily be an experience of radical ambiguities. It would be only honest to recognize and deal with that complex and those ambiguities. Empson’s elaborations, meditations, reflections, amplifications, or seemingly wilful digressions, mingled with interpretative textual examples, are beyond the accepted scope of interpretative responsibilities and established protocols of academic criticism. This is, however, what Empson intended to do. Criticism must break free from the singularity of meaning; “the writer is at root the critic” and should be “at odds with his society, and with official doctrine.”15 Seven Types of Ambiguity is a critical record of the pain and joy in understanding what Empson calls “the logical disorder” inherent in language and life.16 Paradoxes and contradictions characterize life and literature; disorder is a necessary other to life’s order, logic, and end. What Empson seeks to understand is a whole range of possibilities that radical ambiguity would create for the expansion of analytical freedom and interpretive agency.

    Life is paradoxical, not just because it is punctuated with endless moments of contradiction and ambiguity, but because it will need to encounter life’s ultimate other: death. Criticism and poetry, the two most important literary genres of self-expression for Empson, offer a unique form in which to engage with life’s other: death, and the fear of death, which is constitutive of the knowledge and experience of life itself. At the time he was working on the book, Empson was an undergraduate student at Cambridge and had no real connection with China. Nevertheless, his employment of the Chinese sources in the book offers an interesting example of Empsonian ambiguity that would reveal the classical Chinese poetic view on life and death. Quoting Arthur Waley’s translation of the fifth century poet Tao Qian, Empson ruminates on the paradox of the two human scales of time measurement:

    Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
    Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.

    The observation of the ambiguity revealed in these two lines: the rapid receding and disappearing of a life-long span and the permanence of “a spot of time,”17 radiates into a set of reflections on the dialectic of life and death:

    The repose and self-command given by the use of the first are contrasted with the speed at which it shows the years to be passing from you, and therefore with the fear of death; the fever and multiplicity of life, as known by the use of the second, are contrasted with the calm of the external space of which it gives consciousness, with the absolute or extra-temporal value attached to the brief moments of self-knowledge with which it is concerned, and with a sense of security in that it makes death so far off. (Ambiguity 24)

    These musings triggered off by the two lines from Waley’s translation of the Chinese poem are not just a textual commentary; they are, as Roger Sale notes, a critique of “the whole dramatic idea of life” in Western literature that “[w]hen life must be seen from a peaceable and fatalistic point of view it is not dramatic.”18 Again, Empson misquotes the Waley translation of the poem: “fair morning” in the original is silently transformed into “spring morning.”19 But this would be another example of“intelligent and illuminating”20 misquotation that enables interpretation to foray into a moment of splendid optimism to overcome the fear of death:

    Contradictory as they stand, critics almost must conceive them in different ways; we are enabled, therefore, to meet the open skies with an answering stability of self-knowledge; to meet the brevity of human life with an ironical sense that it is morning and springtime, that there is a whole summer before winter, a whole day before night. (Ambiguity 24)

    Despite that unavoidable eventuality of human life, there is a whole summer we can, and should, enjoy before winter. Such insistence on the contradictions of life and their value for an understanding and interpretation of the mysteries of life and inevitability of death would be an effective method of self-protection, for “life involves,” says Empson, “maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.”21 Developed in terms of inescapable contradiction, opposition, and inconsistency, therefore, the conceptualization of ambiguity presents a distillation of Empson’s philosophy about the predicament of life, or rather life as predicament. Seven Types of Ambiguity, in documenting literary and historical responses to various types of ambiguity, may thus be appropriately considered to be a book about the history of human efforts to understand irresolvable contradictions in language and life.22 John Haffenden draws attention to a constellation of keywords in Empson’s writing that have shaped and defined his critical language: “clash, conflict, contradiction, subplot, outsider, scapegoat, resistance, hidden, secret, dissent, isolation.” These keywords begin to outline a critical history of digression, disruption, non-conformity, resistance, and “flight” which Empson narrates through a rich array of poetic examples in the book.

    In the Preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson spells out his intention in writing the book thus: “My attitude in writing it was that an honest man erected the ignoring of ‘tact’ into a point of honour” (Ambiguity vii). In this admission of the critical impulse to reject academic tact, Empson defines the book in terms of its intended challenge to some of the most commonly held critical positions in the academy. The book, therefore, is an attack on different types of authority: sanctified and fetishized literary meaning and academic masters. His refusal to accept tact in the practice of criticism is considered to be a distinctive mark of the Empsonian style of articulation.23 Empson could be difficult or even rude especially when “argufying,” a word he used to describe the mode of engagement he preferred,24 but, as Paul A. Bové reminds us, in discussion of Empson’s critical practice, there is the need to understand “what it was about Empson that made him intolerant and sometimes intolerable.”25

    The practice of tact is already a social irony, a situational paradox. Representing what is lost, missing, or fragmented, tact, Adorno says, “lives on only parody of forms,” and it is “an arbitrarily devised or recollected etiquette for the ignorant.” It is, he continues, a modern invention and a bourgeois norm:

    For tact, we know now, has its precise historical hour. It was the hour when the bourgeois individual rid himself of absolutist compulsion. Free and solitary, he answers for himself, while the forms of hierarchical respect and consideration developed by absolutism, divested of their economic basis and their menacing power, are still just sufficiently present to make living together within privileged groups bearable.26

    As a modern social ethic, tact at once serves the bourgeois notion of individualism and destabilizes that individualism by its discrimination and exclusion of the different. In proposing a new social order in place of that of absolutism, it “mimicked traditional courtesy, manners – modes of honouring others – without formalism,”27 and as such it continued its regulatory authority in governing local relationships. In academic criticism, tact – what a communal majority considered and accepted to be good manners of speaking, writing, and thinking – quickly becomes a substitute for genuine human relationship, social or intellectual. “[A] certain kind of politeness,” notes Adorno, “gives [individuals] less the feeling of being addressed as human beings, than an inkling of their inhuman conditions.”28 But the abolition of tact would make “existence” “still more unbearable;” and the necessity of tact shows only “how impossible [existence] has become for people to co-exist under present conditions.”29

    Empson dislikes tact. Good manners are, he claims in Some Versions of Pastoral, “an absurd confession of human limitations.”30 In a brisk analytical leap, Empson makes a significant connection between tact and snobbery. Like tact, literary snobbery is an expression of the common and standard; in the context of social relations, it’s an attitude taken to hide human limitations. Empson cites Aldous Huxley who has written substantially about “snob interest” in literature and art. The common form of academic snobbery that Huxley singles out is the dilettantish exhibition of literary knowledge – “that delicious thing old Uncle Virgil said, you remember” – and “puzzle interest” as a branch of “snob interest.” Literary snobbery of this kind, Empson notes, is the product of the historical practice of “general knowledge” required for an educated person. One consequence of specialization of criticism is the rapid reduction of “the field of ‘general knowledge’ that old Uncle Virgil used to inhabit, because there are now more interesting things to know than anybody (or any poet) knows. There is no longer therefore a justification for snob treatment of them.”31 Huxley provides a catalogue of common literary snobberies, including “hostesses [hunting] literary lions” and “enriched button manufacturers … [collecting] pictures and first editions.”32 The pervasiveness of such literary snobbery, which is part of general social snobbery, replenishes the academic profession of literature with snobs. “It is the snobbery which renders it absolutely necessary for a large class of people to have read all the latest books…, to have seen the latest exhibitions and plays, heard the latest music.” In essence, “snobbery is a tribute paid by inferiority to superiority…. In the world of the spirit, snobbery is the tribute which philistinism pays to art, ignorance to learning, and stupidity to talent.”33

    It begins to make sense that Seven Types of Ambiguity takes pride in its contempt for the practice of tact in the academy. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the study of “Eng. Lit.,” especially at his alma mater, the University of Cambridge, was in effect the study and practice of Eng. Lit. Crit.34 Nothing would be more damaging to the vital force of criticism than its total institutionalization, which would entail not only expert knowledge, but also prejudice and snobbery, protected by what Empson has contemptuously called “the Lit. Crit. Establishment.”35 To reduce criticism to a routinized procedure or to ascribe it to an understanding of literary studies as a privileged site of professional exhibition and performance is to alienate it from its historical soil and social intention. Nothing is more important than the acceptance of criticism’s main task: to engage with what truly matters in literature and life. Looking back at his work in 1978, Empson could be reasonably satisfied with his practice of that understanding of the function of criticism. Since his undergraduate work on ambiguity, he had not “even felt a change in [his] line of interest” and “continued to try to handle the most important work that came to hand.”36

    It’s perhaps easier to write against tact and forms of vulgarity by setting a distance between oneself and the institutional establishment. In China, outside that establishment of “Eng. Lit.,” Empson seemed to have had a positional advantage in thinking and writing about the academic profession of literary criticism. He could easily ignore“the sound of contended munching from a field of academic critics, and the perpetual swish-swish of their white-wash brush.”37 This is probably why Empson would find it hard to adjust to the academic life of Britain after his extended stay in China. He noted the revival of Christianity in the academy to which he was to respond with Milton’s God.38 He would have to “attend to the opinion in Eng. Lit. Crit., if only because of its effects upon the students,”39 and he was unable to persuade his colleagues that critical work required no standardization of writing and thinking. He began his famous essay “Volpone” (1968) with these remarks:

    A good deal of standardization of opinion and critical method became necessary when Eng. Lit. became a large profession, and I think the results are often mistaken; but it is naturally hard to make my colleagues agree with any such judgment.40

    Academic parochialism, reinforced by the insistence on the unquestioned sense of disciplinary identity, adoption of received methodology, and compliance with professional tact must be rejected before criticism could become a meaningful exercise of mind and an act of public intervention. Beginning his university education as a student of mathematics, Empson developed a special interest in the impact of new scientific discoveries on literature and in “the world-picture of the scientists” he believed the poet had much to learn from. Disciplinary formations in the literary studies blinded many to the creativity of the scientific world. “I have always found the worldpicture of the scientists much more stimulating and useable than that of any ‘literary influence,’” Empson said to a Chinese colleague. In this admission of literature’s limitations, there was a quiet turning-away from the kind of academic politics that had reduced critical thinking to snobbery: “it seems to me trivial to say that scientific thought isn’t real thought; it only suggests a quarrel between different faculties in a university about which should get more money and better buildings.”41

    Empson’s intellectual idiosyncrasy constituted a professional anomaly. His critics have accused him of being unprofessional in his critical approach and mode of expression, in his carelessness in the use of sources and references. Yet, he “flew” to a place where such professionalism was not only practically impossible, but also quite absurd. Empson enjoyed himself in the convenience of finding regulations, critical schemas, or academic tact inconvenient. To quote from memory, for instance, was an organic act of writing, and “this idea of checking your quotations as an absolute duty,” writes Empson, “is fairly recent, and not always relevant.” He invokes the example of Hazlitt “who habitually quoted from memory, and commonly a bit wrong, but he was writing very good criticism.”42 There had been Coleridge before Hazlitt who had been criticized for non-identification of German sources and references he cited and used liberally.43 His defense of misquotation was manifestly not so much about intellectual integrity or honesty as about what position one should take in face of the disabling effect of professionalization and standardization in thinking and writing.

    Community of sympathy

    To ignore academic protocols would be Empson’s statement on the function of criticism as a committed form of engagement with ambiguities in literature and life. Physical immobility, like linguistic non-ambiguity, reflects a state of intellectual status quoism. Empson’s choice of escape was consistent with such forms of resistance as Charles Baudelaire’s dandyism and Victor Segalen’s exoticism. Harootunian notes the similarities between these apparently unrelated responses to a common aesthetic and poetic enemy. Dandyism, Baudelaire contends, is the “best element in human pride” and an effective weapon in “combat[ing] and destroy[ing] triviality” “in the struggle with a social conformism that threatened to install homogeneity everywhere that industrial capitalism has established its regime in the nineteenth century.” 44 And Segalen viewed exoticism “as the candidate best suited to protect contemporary life from the relentless banality wrought by the transformation of capitalism into mass-society imperialism and colonialism.”45 Two decades before Empson took up his teaching position in China, Segalen had lived in China for an extended period of time, from 1909 to 1914, and again in 1917. Empson and Segalen might have gone to China for different reasons, but for each the country offered the possibilities of self-renewal and liberation from the banalities of “an everyday life landlocked in repetitive routine.”46

    One may hope to live a “self-centred emotional life imposed by the detached intelligence””47 through a voluntary relinquishing of one’s formative society. Satire, cynicism, or political activism were not Empson’s measures of self-help and self-protection. He could not accept “the comforts of Christianity accepted by T.S. Eliot, or later by Auden and preferred “the special loneliness of the atheistic rationalist who places no particular trust even in the mind.”48 Virtue and intelligence, two qualities essential for honest and meaningful critical work, “are alike lonely,”49 rare, and unaccepted. Escape was both reaction and action: “‘Thank God I left’” (“Nan-Yűeh,” 60). Empson’s allusion to Peter Walsh in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a textual act of self-affirmation. Walsh departed for India, leaving behind his formative society with all its trivialities: “the snobbery, stuffiness and gossip of little England.”50

    I felt I had escaped from They
    Who sat on pedestals and fussed. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 21-22)

    Empson understood and sympathized with this feeling of relief. China for him, like British India for Peter Walsh, provided the opportunity to reject the metropolitan life. Empson’s political commitment was non-commitment, and his political involvement was the choice of disengagement. Once he had decided to leave, his emotional relief was palpable. Appropriately about flight, escape, courage, and commitment, “The Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” records the joy derived from the sense of liberation and freedom in its “relaxed and conversational phrases of his later style” and in its “unhurried comment on his thoughts and experiences in wartime China.”51

    Before he decided to work and live in China, Empson knew only that he “should want to get away from the English.”52 I. A. Richards, who had already been in China since the late 1920s, inspired Empson. In January 1931, Empson wrote to Richards: “I want to travel, and, as you see, it is now fixed in my mind that I want to go to China.”53 In the 1930s, serious graduates of literature considered it a rewarding job to teach English, and an attractive alternative to unimaginative office work, not just because “jobs are rare,” but because teaching provided the young minds the possibilities of continuing to be “Clever young men of liberal opinions.”54

    What was awaiting Empson in China in the autumn of 1937, however, was a massive evacuation of the universities from Beijing to the country’s inland for shelter from Japanese brutalities. He joined the faculty of Peking National University in Changsha, Hunan Province in central China, which, together with Tsinghua and Nankai Universities, had just formed the wartime Temporary University, which would move to Kunming, Yunnan Province and be renamed the National Southwest Associated Universities, abbreviated in Chinese as Lianda. The nine-year history of Lianda spanned the entire period of the Resistance War (1937–1945). In Hunan, the Faculty of Arts of the Temporary University was housed in a missionary school on the Nan-Yűeh Mountain and stayed there for one semester from November 1937 to February 1938. Empson had escaped England only to run again from the immediate dangers of the war in China.

    The journey from Changsha to Kunming was a heroic odyssey. In his Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution, John Israel wrote: “The official overland distance …was 1,033.7 miles (1,663.6 kilometers), of which more than 800 miles were covered on foot, an average in excess of twenty miles a day for forty days of walking. Much of the trek was over rugged terrain in bad weather.”55 It was an epic journey many Lianda faculty members and students remembered, perhaps not without nostalgia, as an enduring modern academic romance. Those who participated in the long march were acutely aware of its historical significance, and started to circulate their memoirs as soon as the journey was completed.56 Empson, too, realized the historical significance of this remarkable experience and produced a sizeable amount of writings about it. “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” is a poetic memoir of his reflections on life and literature, politics and war, fear and loneliness, courage and heroism during his time of teaching in China. His short essay “Chinese Bandits” (1938-39) records the danger, and excitement, in his encountering with the bandits who remained active and operative in the mountainous recesses outside Mengzi, Kunming.57 “A Chinese University” (1940) pays tribute to Lianda as a symbol of courage, confidence, and optimism in enduring and confronting the brutality and barbarism of Japanese aggression. This experience of teaching in China would become the centerpiece of his inaugural speech “Teaching English in the Far East” at the University of Sheffield.58

    In the midst of the war, with unstable student populations, limited supplies of classroom materials, and Japanese air raids, academic work could not remain normal; teaching and learning had to be practiced differently. Teachers had to invent syllabus materials as they went along; sometimes they taught classes without textbooks. But teaching never stopped: “The lectures went on sturdily from memory.”59 Some of Empson’s Chinese colleagues found it hard to teach from memory, but Empson enjoyed it. legendary and has become part of the history of Lianda:

    The abandoned libraries entomb
    What all the lectures still go through,
    And men get curiously non-plussed
    Searching the memory for a clue.
    ……
    Remembering prose is quite a trouble
    His phenomenal memory was
    But of Mrs. Woolf one tatter
    Many years have failed to smother.
    As a piece of classroom patter
    It would not repay me double.
    Empire-builder reads the yatter
    In one monthly, then another. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 43 – 59)

    Empson taught English literature and later a course on modern English poetry at Lianda. Teaching was meaningful and rewarding and became part of life:

    The proper Pegasi to groom
    Are those your mind is willing to. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 49–50).

    Poetry must be experimented and experienced, and it began to develop an organic link with the realities of life: “We teach a poem as it grew” (“Nan-Yűeh,” 52). The young minds, too, grew with the growth of poetry. Empson’s influence on his Chinese students was immense, especially on those young poetic minds who were to become the first generation of modernist poets in China, including, notably, Mu Dan (1918–1977).60 Many of them were to recall emotionally those exciting and happy days with their poet-teacher Empson at Lianda.61

    Empson was admired by his Chinese students as an “abstract” and “modernist” poet, but he had a special understanding of himself as a poet.62 Poetry is not life’s decoration, nor is it a means of intellectual narcissism and self-indulgence; it is a procedure through which to develop self-knowledge and to strengthen and solidify emotional life.63 Poetry is insincere unless it’s capable of resolving the conflicts in the poet and thus preventing him or her from sinking into total despair and irremediable insanity.64 Poetry, in other words, becomes a laboratory for the development of self-knowledge, and like Empson’s critical writing, it should ideally capture, understand, and interpret life’s ambiguities. Some of his best poems are “complicated in the way that life really is.”65 In face of the immense complexities and radical ambiguities of life, especially when poetry proves inadequate for the lived feelings of loneliness, waste, and loss during the time of war, one could only become poetic by stopping writing poetry. Starting to see other possibilities that life might offer, Empson was keen on exploring his intellectual life in different spheres of experience. In a letter to I. A. Richards in early 1933, Empson wrote: “I am stopping trying to do literary work; it seems too hollow for some reason.”66 His poem “Let It Go” (1949) is “about stopping writing poetry”:

    It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
    The more things happen to you the more you can’t
    Tell or remember even what they were.

    The contradictions cover such a range.
    The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
    You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.67

    If this is partly about his decision to write no more poetry, we must understand that the dangers of the “madhouse and the whole thing there” lie in the direction of poetry, and writing more poetry might lead to things going “so far aslant.”68

    The mode of teaching and the physical environment on Nan-Yűeh suited Empson’s temperament. Teaching at Lianda at the time of war could not possibly be a model of professionalized and specialized literary studies. In a community of scholars and students like Lianda, tact would be out of place, and teaching could not be the performance of a professional task, a repetition of “[t]hat pernicious hubble-bubble,” or “classroom patter” which dominated, and continues to dominate, the academic platform of “Eng. Lit.” There would be no condition to standardize teaching at Lianda; teaching was literally fieldwork carried out away from the institutionalized space of academy, on the mountains and later in the rural area of Kunming. It was a profoundly personal experience.

    Empson reported that his time at Lianda was a period of remarkable intellectual fecundity, productivity, and creativity, despite, or rather because of, the difficult circumstances. The perils of war and shortage of daily supplies, for example, imposed on Empson and his colleagues an extraordinary sense of responsibility, and at the same time helped to create a community of sympathy that would render the profession of teaching and practice of literature purposeful and rewarding. The refugee universities, Empson says, “really are universities,” and Lianda was “not a bad place for an inquisitive mind to live.”69 During this period of exile, Empson was working with an exceptional array of minds engaged in writing some of their most important works. On Nan-Yűeh, Empson began The Structure of Complex Words; Jin Yűe Lin completed his seminal book On the Tao; Tang Yongtong drafted the first part of the History of Chinese Buddhism; and Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-Lan) finished Neo-Confucianism (Xin lixue).70 “Those few months at Nan-Yűeh,” recalls Feng, “were the most intellectual. We devoted all of our daytime to writing, except the time for teaching and eating. … We might seem to be detached from the national calamity and have hidden in our ivory tower. But this is so only because we didn’t know how to express and let out our anger and grief, and we had to concentrate on our work.”71 Many of Empson’s colleagues were educated in Europe and the US and returned to serve, defend, or reform their country. Just as they were “intellectually cosmopolitans and politically nationalists,” they, like Empson, were perhaps all “elitists.”72 “I felt I was in very good company,” Empson recalls.73 Empson’s life with the refugee universities, first on Nan-Yűeh and then in Mengzi, Kunming was characterized by confidence, optimism, and gaiety, and these sentiments, vividly manifest in “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh,” define a remarkable community of intellectual sympathy formed and consolidated by a shared sense of commitment, a community that was bound by “a noble heritage and common mandate”:74

    The souls aren’t lonely now; this room
    Beds four and as I write holds two. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 41-2)

    Isolated, aloof, and sacred, Nan-Yűeh was the sanctuary of intellectual integrity and a symbol of the intellectual sublime. Empson “would always think of the mountain as his ideal of the academic community.”75 Lianda was where he ended his exile.

    If “the idea of solidarity is potentially the real basis of a society” in times of peace,76 the idea of community must be even more firmly grounded in the development of solidarity in times of war. Empson endured the hardships of the journey across the rough terrains with Lianda and survived the perils of war. His students and colleagues respected him because of his unwavering dedication to his work in China and his solidarity with colleagues and students in defiance of aggression and oppression. This is perhaps where Empson differed from his mentor Richards. The difference between them lies in their practice of criticism and in their understanding of intellectual commitment and communal solidarity at the time of war and hardship. While China, for Empson, was a place of exile and serious intellectual work, it was, for Richards, a site of linguistic experiment with Basic English. Empson considered Richards’s departure for the U.S. at the outbreak of the war as an act of betrayal, and he would not forgive Richards for deserting not only his Chinese friends but also his project of Basic English in China, which he had promoted with evangelical zeal before the Sino-Japanese war. “You had let the Chinese down,” he told Richards bluntly.77 Empson was especially contemptuous of those orientalist Westerners, those “beastly little Lovers of the Far East,” who thought it “dignified to be in China,” but “have slunk off leaving only man namely me” in China.78

    “Chinese Ballad”: Love and Continuity

    In 1952 when he was about to leave China for his position at the University of Sheffield, Empson published his last poetic work “Chinese Ballad.” In his Inaugural speech at Sheffield, Empson used his experience of teaching in wartime China in the 1930s to outline his understanding of intellectual work and teaching. His experience of China contributed substantially to his understanding of the use and value of literature and of the role of the critical intellectual. “Chinese Ballad” is a poetic fragment extracted from a long revolutionary narrative poem by the Communist poet Li Ji (Li Chi), Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang (Hsiang- Hsiang) (1946). Empson made an effort to be close to the original in translating the poem into English. He says: “The translation is word for word, so far as I can know from simply being given the meanings of the characters.”79 Of course, the “translation” of the Chinese poem had to be in the tradition of Ezra Pound – Empson had little Chinese.

    The poem depicts the pathos of two lovers who must part each other by the imperatives of the revolutionary task. Setting off to the frontline fighting the Japanese, Wang Gui encounters a rare moment of tender love and restrained emotional torrent with his lover Hsiang-Hsiang, who could not imagine herself being separate from her soldier-lover. Standing by the stream in the valley, where they must bid final farewell to each other, Hsiang-Hsiang points at the “deep” and “thick” mud beneath their feet and beseeches Wang Gui to perform an extraordinary symbolic act of human union:

    Make me two models out of this,
    That clutches as it yearns.

    Make one of me and one of you,
    And both shall be alive.
    Were there no magic in the dolls
    The children could not thrive.

    When you have made them smash them back:
    They yet shall live again.
    Again make dolls of you and me
    But mix them grain by grain.

    So your flesh shall be part of mine
    And part of mine be yours.
    Brother and sister we shall be
    Whose unity endures.80

    The poem records the emotional turbulence characterizing love in the time of war and the poignancy of the need for self-sacrifice. What is moving about the poem is its “respect for courage and for decision,”81 its understanding of the need to accept the conditions of the present, and its optimistic longing for an imagined future of reunion. The poem rehearses the Empsonian question about life as an experience of possibilities and impossibilities. At the heart of the poem lies the symbol of a more radical paradox of the desire for physical inseparability and the pathos that follows the realization of its impossibility. In the process of creating the doll-couple, Hsiang-Hsiang performs a symbolic marriage and thereby expresses her unreserved love for her soldier-lover, which is disrupted by the painful realization of the need to part. The poem’s internal rhymes and repetitions create the effect that “the lines seem to circle around themselves in a way that eerily suggests their futility.”82 The utopian quality of human love is vividly figured in the fusion of the dolls, an image which reminds one of what Roland Barthes calls “engulfment” as love’s necessary illusion: “we die together: an open death, by dilution into the either, a closed death of the shared grave.”83

    The final stanza of the poem crystallizes Hsiang-Hsiang’s difficulties to come to terms with the necessity of her lover’s departure for the frontline:

    Always the sister doll will cry,
    Made in these careful ways,
    Cry on and on, Come back to me,
    Come back, in a few days.

    These lines are not in the original; they are Empson’s addition.84 With this poetic coda, the “fullness of the poem’s respect for what it contemplates,” says Christopher Ricks, “is achieved because the subject so fully reconciles so much in Empson’s thinking and feeling.”85

    As much attracted to the poem’s celebration of love, Empson was intrigued by its balladic form, which, he notes, “had been used in classical style.”86 The poetic fragment is intertextually derived from a poem by the thirteenth-century woman poet Guan Daosheng (1262–1319), who made this poetic effort to hold back her husband’s departing passion. Li Ji’s ballad successfully “transposed or restored” the classical theme “into popular style.”87 The original is richly suggestive of a total physical union and a willingness to renounce the self for the achievement of that union. In Li Ji’s appropriation of the classical poem, the implied sexuality of love is transformed, enlarged, and elevated into a political form of human relationship in the revolutionary class of peasant-soldiers, and a shared idealism, as embodied by the Chinese Communist Party’s wartime capital Yan’an, which looms large in the background of Li Ji’s poetic narrative.

    It’s difficult to ascertain whether Empson was fully aware of the political implications of the poem, and I’m not aware of any personal relationship between Li Ji and Empson. But it was perhaps unnecessary for him to know Li Ji or that much about the poem. If there is anything in common between them, it is this understanding of literature as organically connected with life and reality. Empson’s sympathy with the Chinese revolution is well known. His decision to stay on teaching in Peking after the Communist victory in 1949 was evidence of his solidarity with this new nation. On October 1, 1949, Empson witnessed the founding of the PRC in Peking. He was moved by the spectacle of the military parade and civilian processions, which he described as a symbolic act of people’s will:

    I did not expect to be more than bored, but found myself extremely moved almost at once. You may believe that what is being celebrated will turn out a delusion, but history is full of gloomy afterthoughts. Here you have celebrated victory of revolt against tyrants, supported by the countryside alone, practically their bare hands, against a government drawing on the full terrors of modern equipment with medieval or fascist police methods into the bargain. If anything in history is impressive you are bound to feel that is.88

    Unlike his wife Hetta, who accompanied him throughout the period of his appointment at Peking, Empson was not formally a member of the British Communist Party. His leftist political sympathy was not just a political ideology, but also a critical and aesthetic response to the realities in China that fell far short of the minimum standard of human decency. Prior to his translation of “Chinese Ballad,” his sympathy with the Chinese revolution had already shown itself in his special interest in Chinese revolutionary art.

    In late 1948, Empson went to see the performance of the “Yellow River Cantata” on the campus of Peking University. The Cantata, composed by the French-educated artist Xian Xinghai who traveled to Yan’an in 1938, the same year as Li Ji did, was thematically related to Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang. Its performance at the Square of Democracy of the University was “a bold step,” because, Empson explains, it “was forbidden in Chiang Kai- shek’s Peking, and could only happen within the barbed wire”:

    [The Cantata] is about guerilla resistance to the Japanese in North China, using a lot of indigenous folk-tunes, and using Western instruments. The peasant singing is faintly like Russian singing, and very unlike the strained voice of the Chinese ruling- class music, popular in the cities through opera. Basing the revolution on the peasants thus gave a fair case for letting in European techniques; but even so the Cantata … always keeps voice and orchestra separate…. I thought it hauntingly beautiful, all the more in the late dusk in the great square with a tense audience waiting for the liberation of the city.89

    Empson’s sympathy with the CCP’s revolutionary literature is both political and aesthetic. He was drawn to the egalitarian harmony and organic love in “Chinese Ballad”; for the poem, or the translation of it, was “an assurance that though life may be essentially inadequate to the human spirit, the human spirit is essentially adequate to life.”90 The poem’s “simple dignity, clear-sighted and touching,” and its “particular kind of conclusive triumph,” which is realized in love, serve as a suitable poetic conclusion to Empson’s reflections on ambiguity as the condition of life.91

    From his first book on ambiguity to his last poetic composition “Chinese Ballad,” there seems to be a consistent pattern in Empson’s thinking and writing. The concept of ambiguity recognizes the potentialities of diversity and multiplicity in language and the value of literature as knowledge of possibilities and impossibilities in life, and in practice, it makes possible a democratic form of criticism in analysis and interpretation. Empson’s decision to teach in China was a choice of disengagement from things and people he had decided not to engage at home. Escape is not exactly a struggle against a specific government policy, a particular ideology, a political authority, or even an identifiable external object, but neither is it non- action, passivity, or non-resistance. One has to be outside one’s formative society in order to be a critic of it. Empson’s “Sacred Mountain,” intended to be a substitute for his formative society, may well be an idealized community in which he was able to imagine a new type of human relationship and “interpersonal fusion in love”92 against alienation, pessimism, and despair.

    1. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 – 1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 304. Back to essay

    2.  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), vol. i, 368, 370. Back to essay

    3. William Empson, “Volpone,” in Essays on Renaissance Literature, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), v. 2, 72. Back to essay

    4. Biographical and critical studies of Empson are copious. John Haffenden’s William Empson: Among the Mandarins and William Empson: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) are indispensable biographical studies of Empson. Critical studies which have particularly helped me in thinking about the significance of Empson’s work in China include: Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), Paul H. Frye, William Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991), Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Athlone Press, 1978). Critical Essays on William Empson, edited by John Constable (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1993), is a useful collection of critical essays and reviews of Empson’s works. Back to essay

    5. This is the title of a poem by Empson published in 1936: “Courage Means Running,” collected in William Empson, The Complete Poems, edited with Introduction and Notes by John Haffenden (London: Penguin Press, 2000). Back to essay

    6. William Empson, “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” in The Complete Poems, 91. Hereafter this work is cited parenthetically as “Nan‐ Yűeh.” Back to essay

    7.  Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐ Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 380. Back to essay

    8.  William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986), 114‐5. Back to essay

    9.  W. B. Yeats’s “The Phase of the Moon” reads:

    The soul remembering its loneliness
    Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,
    ….
    Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,
    Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all
    Deformed, because there is no deformity
    But saves us from a dream. (88‐102)

    W.B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1983), 165‐6. Back to essay

    10.  Empson notes:

    Nan‐yueh is a sacred mountain about seventy miles southwest of Changsha; the Arts Departments of the Combined Universities were housed on it for a term in 1937, and then we moved further back to Yunnan.
    Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 379. 

    Back to essay

    11.  John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 456. Back to essay

    12.  Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 379. Back to essay

    13.  William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 1; hereafter this work is cited parenthetically as Ambiguity. Back to essay

    14.  William Empson, Letter to Philip Hobsbaum, 2 August 1969, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 477, 481, 480. For Empson, the acceptance of intention is the beginning of responsible criticism, and “the effects of renouncing it … produces dirty nonsense all the time, with a sort of tireless unconscious inventiveness for new kinds of nonsense.” Empson, Letter to Philip Hobsbaum, 2 August 1969, Selected Letters of William Empson, 477. Back to essay

    15.  Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 5. Back to essay

    16.  The seven types of ambiguity, Empson explains, are “intended as stages of advancing logical disorder” (Ambiguity 48). For a reading of the ambiguity of this formulation, see Paul H. Fry, Chapter 3, “Advancing Logical Disorder: Empson on Method,” William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991). Back to essay

    17. William Wordsworth, The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, OUP, 1970), xi:258, 213. Back to essay

    18. Roger Sale, Modern Heroism: Essays on D.H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J.R.R Tolkien (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973), 122. Back to essay

    19. The poem by Tao Qian, in the Waley translation, is as follows:

    Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
    Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.
    I will clothe myself in spring‐clothing
    And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.
    By the mountain‐stream a mist hovers,
    Hovers a moment, then scatters.
    There comes a wind blowing from the south
    That brushes the fields of new corn.

    Tao Qian (372‐427), “New Corn.”
    A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), 116. Back to essay

    20. These are Empson’s words for a misprint that occurred in the eleventh edition of Philip Sidney’s “You Gote‐heard Gods” that the original “morning” is replaced with “mourning”:

    At whose approach the sun rose in the evening,
    Who where she went bore in her forehead mourning,
    Is gone, is gone, from these our spoiled forests,
    Turning to deserts our best pastor’d mountains.

    See Seven Types of Ambiguity, 38. Back to essay

    21.  Empson, Note to “Bacchus,” The Complete Poems, 290. Back to essay

    22.  See Sale, Modern Heroism, 117. Back to essay

    23.  Matthew Creasy, “Empson’s Tact,” in Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Clarendon). Back to essay

    24. Empson explains his use of the word thus: “Argufying is the kind of arguing we do in ordinary life, usually to get our own way; I do not mean nagging by it, but just a not especially dignified sort of arguing. This has always been one of the things people enjoy in poems; and it can be found in every period of English literature.” See William Empson, “Argufying in Poetry,” in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffendon (London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), 167. Back to essay

    25.  Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2008), 118. Back to essay

    26.  Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 36. Back to essay

    27.  J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 64. Back to essay

    28.  Adorno, Minima Moralia, 37. Back to essay

    29.  Adorno, Minima Moralia, 37. Back to essay

    30.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 293. Back to essay

    31.  Empson, “Note on Notes”, Empson, The Complete Poems, 113. Back to essay

    32.  Aldous Huxley, “Snobs,” in Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 7 (2007), 88. Back to essay

    33.  Aldous Huxley, “Snobs,” in Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 7(2007), 87. Back to essay

    34.  For critical reflections on the academic genealogy of Cambridge English, see Raymond Williams, “Cambridge English, Past and Present” and “Crisis in English Studies,” in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1991). Back to essay

    35. William Empson, “Postscript” to Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: The Athlone Press, 1978), 206. Back to essay

    36. Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205. Back to essay

    37.  Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205. Back to essay

    38.  Empson explains in the book how his experience of teaching at government universities in the Far East made it harder for him to adjust to the revival of Christianity in the British academy: “Having had ten years teaching in Japan and China, and having been interested only in propaganda during the war, halfway through them, I am still rather ill‐adjusted to the change of atmosphere. Lecturing at the Government universities in the Far East, which means firmly non‐missionary ones, was not likely to prepare me for it; I gathered that those of my students who became interested in Paradise Lost, though too polite to express their opinion to me quite directly, thought ‘Well, if they worship such a monstrously wicked God as all that, no wonder that they themselves are so monstrously wicked as we have traditionally found them.’” Empson, Milton’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 10. Back to essay

    39.  Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205 – 6. Back to essay

    40.  Empson, “Volpone,” Essays on Renaissance Literature, v. 2, 66. Back to essay

    41.  Empson, Letter to Chien Hsueh‐hsi, 7 September 1947, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 151. Back to essay

    42. See John Constable, “Preface,” Critical Essays on William Empson, ed. John Constable (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 4. Back to essay

    43. Coleridge considered plagiarism to be “intentional imitation.” Simple similarities between authors should not be held as proof of plagiarism, and true plagiarism did not typically show itself in textual parallelism, but was often covered by textual dissimilitude. Referring to an unidentified volume of poetry “completely made up of gross plagiarisms from Akenside, Thomson, Bowles, Southey, and Lyrical Ballads,” Coleridge noted a range of “artifices” the poet employed to “disguise the theft, – transpositions, dilutions, substitutions of synonyms, etc. etc. – and yet not the least resemblance to any one of the poets whom he pillaged.” An “intentional plagiarist,” wrote Coleridge, “would have translated, not transcribed.” What was important for Coleridge was whether or not the mind in the text was (or intended to be) original. Coleridge called for the need to judge by “the original spirit.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Letter on Plagiarism (December 15, 1811), in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London: Dent, 1960), vol. 2, 184 – 191. Back to essay

    44. Harry Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” Foreword to Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, trans. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2002), vii. Back to essay

    45.  Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” vii. Back to essay

    46.  Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” viii. Back to essay

    47.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 273. Back to essay

    48.  Willis, William Empson (New York and London: Columbia University press, 1969), 44. Back to essay

    49.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 293. Back to essay

    50.  Haffenden, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐ Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 388.  Back to essay

    51.  Willis, William Empson, 44. Back to essay

    52.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards [early December 1929], Selected Letters of William Empson, 13. Back to essay

    53.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards, 29th January [? 1930], Selected Letters of William Empson,16. The letter is inaccurately dated. In the letter Empson reported to Richards that he had met Wu Mi, Dean of Tsinghua University, and expressed to him his interesting in teaching in China. Wu Mi recorded the meeting in his diary on January 25 1931. Empson’s letter should be dated 29th January 1931. See Wu Mi, Wu Mi riji (Wu Mi’s diaries), vol. 5 (1930 – 1933), ed. Wu Xuezhao (Beijing: Joint Publications, 1998), 176. Back to essay

    54. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron,” Auden, Collected Poems, 99. Neal Wood notes that a whole group of graduates joined the teaching profession in the 1930s: “Some of the most promising university graduates turned to teaching and tutoring for want of better opportunity. W.H. Auden, Arthur Calder‐Marshall, G. Day Lewis, Michael Redgrave, Edward Upward, and Christopher Isherwood are but a few. Positions in foreign colleges were taken by Rex Warner, Malcom Muggeridge, Jullian Bell, William Empson, and William Plomer.” Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (New York: Columbia UP, 1959), 38. Back to essay

    55.  John Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford: SUP, 1998), 56 ‐7. Back to essay

    56.  Qian Nengxin, for example, published in 1939 his Xinan sanqianwubai li (Three thousand and five hundred lis through south‐west China) with the Commercial Press. Recently, there has been a spate of publications about Lianda in China, including memoirs, historical and academic studies, and archival records. Back to essay

    57. Mengzi was a rural county not yet touched by the advance of modernity, a frontier region that, though providing shelter from the cruelty and brutality of the war, had its pre‐modern dangers and risks. “Even by day, it was risky to walk in the countryside, for widespread possession of arms reflected the prevalence of banditry in a frontier region. The young English poet William Empson … was robbed several times during rural strolls. The library in the customs compound was open after dark, but every hour a bell rang to alert students who had finished their studies that an armed escort was ready to accompany them back to their dormitories.” Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution, 67. Back to essay

    58. Empson’s memoirs of teaching in wartime China are collected in his The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Back to essay

    59.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” in The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 190. Back to essay

    60.  Mu Dan emerged as a leading modernist poet in the 1940s. He entered the Department of Foreign Languages, Tsinghua University in 1935 and after the outbreak of the Sino‐Japanese war, travelled to Hunan and Kunming with Lianda. In the course on modern English poetry, Mu Dan read with Empson contemporary Anglo‐American poets including some of Empson’s friends such as T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Mu Dan was profoundly influenced by Auden, who had just been to China to report on the war. In 1942, Mu Dan joined the China Expeditionary Force fighting the Japanese in the mountainous terrain between Berman and Yunnan. Some of his best known poems such as “The Demon of the Forest” (1945) record the wrenching grief, pain, despair, and anguish in response to the unbelievable brutalities of war he had experienced. He left China for postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1948. Back to essay

    61. Wang Zuoliang, who studied with Empson at Lianda in those two “mobile years,” writes: Empson “traveled with the Universities, and us, by way of Hong Kong and Hanoi, to Mengzi and finally to Kunming. As if cheered up by the city’s beauty and its breezes, he mounted a course on Modern English Poetry. What was unique about this course was that the teacher himself was a modern English poet. …And it was also a course taught by a literary critic famous for his quick and agile mind. … The fact that we had a modernist poet teach us was more attractive than any readings we did. As a result, a new literary trend was being formed among his students and his students’ students.” Wang Zuoliang, “Remembering Empson,” Waiguo wenxue (Foreign literature), no 1, 1980, 3. See also Zhao Ruihong’s essay: “Remembering the Modernist English Poet Mr. Empson,” in Zhao Ruihong, Linuan xiange yi jiuyou (Fragments about old friends in the time of war) (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 2000), 25‐45. Back to essay

    62. Empson’s two poetic collections Poems (1935) and The Gathering Storm (1940) were published symmetrically before and after his first stint of teaching in China between 1937 and 38. “The first volume … was mainly ‘love poems about boy being too afraid of girl to tell her anything,’ whereas the second…. was more political, written in the midst of a war which he could see was going to become global.” See Paul Dean, “The Critic as Poet: Empson’s Contradictions,” The New Criterion, October 2001, 25. Back to essay

    63. Empson, “A London Letter,” Poetry 49 (January 1937), quoted in Haffenden, “Introduction” to The Complete Poems, xi. Back to essay

    64.  See Adam Phillips, “No Reason for Not Asking,” London Review of Books, 28:15 (Aug. 26, 2006). Back to essay

    65.  See Haffenden, Introduction to The Complete Poems, xxxix. Back to essay

    66.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards, February 18, 1933, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 55. Back to essay

    67.  Empson, The Complete Poems, 99. Back to essay

    68.  See Ian Tromp, “A Poet Duly Noted,” The Nation, December 31 2001, 37. Back to essay

    69.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 191. Back to essay

    70.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 190. Back to essay

    71.  Fong Youlan, “Huailian Jin Yuelin xiansheng” (Remembering Mr. Jin Yuelin), Lianda jiaoshou (Lianda’s Professors) (Beijing: New Star Press, 2010), 91. Back to essay

    72.  Israel, Lianda, 84. Back to essay

    73.  Empson, Note to The Complete Poems, 380. One of his roommates was the U.S. educated flamboyant George Ye who proposed Empson’s elegant Chinese name 燕卜荪. See Fu Guoyong (傅国涌), Ye Gongchao zhuan (Ye Gongchao: a biography) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2004). Back to essay

    74.  Israel, Lianda, 2. Back to essay

    75.  Haffenden, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 382. Back to essay

    76.  Williams, Culture and Society, 318. Back to essay

    77.  Quoted in Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 504. Back to essay

    78.  See Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 502. Back to essay

    79.  Empson, Note to “Chinese Ballad,” The Complete Poems, 400. Back to essay

    80.  Empson, “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 103. Back to essay

    81.  Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in Roma Gill, ed., William Empson: The Man and His Work (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 206 – 7. Back to essay

    82. Lewin, Review of The Complete Poems of William Empson, ANQ, 15:4 (Fall 2002), 49. Back to essay

    83.  Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin, 1990), 11. Back to essay

    84.  Empson said: “I added the bit about children, but I understand that is only like working a footnote into the text, because the term specifically means dolls for children.” Note to “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 400. Back to essay

    85. Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in Roma Gill, ed., William Empson: The Man and His Work (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 207. Back to essay

    86.  Empson’s note to the poem. Back to essay

    87.  Empson, Note to “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 400. The original poem in Chinese reads:

    《我侬词》元·管道
    昇你侬我侬,忒煞情多。
    情多处,热如火。
    把一块泥,捻一个你,塑一个我
    将咱两个,一齐打破,用水调和。
    再捻一个你,再塑一个我。
    我泥中有你,你泥中有我。
    与你生同一个衾,死同一个椁。

    The Kungfu film star Bruce Lee had a rendering of the poem in English under the title “Parting”:

    Who knows when meeting shall ever be.
    It might be for years or
    It might be forever.

    Let us then take a lump of clay,
    Wet it, pat it,
    And make an image of you
    And an image of me.
    Then smash them, crash them,
    And, with a little water,
    Knead them together.

    And out of the clay we’ll remake
    An image of you, and an image of me.
    Thus in my clay,
    there’s a little of you,
    And in your clay,
    there’s a little of me.

    And nothing will ever set us apart.
    Living, we’ll be forever in each other’s heart,
    And dead, we’ll be buried together.

    Bruce Lee, Artist of Life, ed. John Little (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001), 116. Back to essay

    88. Empson, “Red on Red: William Empson Witness the Inauguration of the People’s Republic of China,” London Review of Books, 30th September 1999. Back to essay

    89. Empson, “Pei‐Ta before the Siege,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 198. Back to essay

    90.  Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in William Empson: The Man and His Work, 207. Back to essay

    91. Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” 206 – 7. Back to essay

    92.  Erich Fromm defines love as “interpersonal fusion.” See his The Art of Loving (Penguin Classics, 2000), 17. Back to essay

  • on Greek Left, Governing, by Stathis Gourgouris 

    https://opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/stathis-gourgouris/syriza-problem-radical-democracy-and-left-governmentality-in-g

  • Library of Congress Interview with Dawn Lundy Martin, editor of forthcoming dossier in boundary2 vol. 52, no. 4 (November 2015)

    Poet, essayist, and multimedia artist Dawn Lundy Martin, editor of “On Race and Innovation,” a boundary2 dossier forthcoming in vol. 42, no. 5 (November 2015), was recently interviewed by the Library of Congress.  Below is a small excerpt of the interview:

    “In contrast to conventional images of the black female body, your poems are stark in their physicality; they also speak of the body in a conceptualized way. Can you talk about this duality?

    The black female body is an invention of conventional thought. It has been conceived, at least in the West, via a series of manipulations, perceptions, and racist interventions by institutions—intellectual, political, and popular alike. I believe in the black female body only in so far as one is an individual who might make certain claims about their own legitimate being in the world. But that is difficult. How do we know ourselves except through the eyes of the other? How to claim something legitimately and intimately given the cultural representations of the black female body that have nothing to do with our interiorities? It’s a fraught intersection—femaleness and blackness—one that should not be easily articulated or regurgitated. Hence, what might be understood as a conceptualized means of approaching and speaking the black female body. I want to resist being put into your box of recognizability. I want to give the finger to those eyes of knowing/creating.”

    If you wish to read the interview in its entirety, please visit the Library of Congress website.

  • Neoliberal Moralism and the Fiction of Europe: A Postcolonial Perspective by Sadia Abbas

    Neoliberal Moralism and the Fiction of Europe: A Postcolonial Perspective
    by Sadia Abbas

    15803772084_f89a59763c_z

    “Both in and out of Greece, much has been made in recent weeks of the amateurishness of the current Greek government, of its brinksmanship, of its confrontational style, of its inability to understand rules, of it’s squandering of trust. Let’s grant all this for a moment. However, if we take this critique seriously, then EU officials look worse not better than before.”

    To read on, please visit: Open Democracy

  • Colin Dayan Joins B2 Masthead . . .

    from Lecture flier

    The Editorial Collective happily welcomes Colin Dayan to our editorial board.

    Colin Dayan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.  She has held Guggenheim as well as other distinguished fellowships.

    Her areas of expertise include American literature, English and French Caribbean Literatures, Haitian historiography, and American legal scholarship.  In 1977, she introduced the writings of René Depestre to the English-speaking world.  She has published major books on Edgar Allan Poe and the colonial history of Haiti “from the composite perspectives of legal and religious texts, letters, fiction, and my own knowledge of the country.”  Her more recent books include The Story of Cruel and Unusual, a study of the legal and practical implications of the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution, and The Law Is a White Dog:  How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.  Her journalism appears in The Boston Review and she can be heard on NPR.  There is much more about her at colindayan.com.

  • "The Lyrics Theory Reader: A Discussion" with Virginia Jackson, Michael Cohen, Aamir Mufti

    "The Lyrics Theory Reader: A Discussion" with Virginia Jackson, Michael Cohen, Aamir Mufti

    boundary2, in association with The Social Life of Poetic Language conference at UCLA, is privileged to present a discussion with Virginia Jackson, Michael Cohen, Aamir Mufti.

  • Transgender Studies Today: An Interview with Susan Stryker

    Transgender Studies Today: An Interview with Susan Stryker

    _____________________________________________________________________________________

    Petra Dierkes-Thrun interviews Susan Stryker, leader of an unprecedented initiative in transgender studies at the University of Arizona, and one of two founding co-editors of the new journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (together with Paisley Currah). Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona. The author or editor of numerous books and articles on transgender and queer topics for popular and scholarly audiences alike, she won an Emmy Award for the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a Lambda Literary Award for The Transgender Studies Reader, and the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for The Transgender Studies Reader 2.
    _____________________________________________________________________________________

    Transgender Studies initiative at the University of Arizona. Left to Right (Front): Paisley Currah, Susan Stryker, Monica Casper, Francisco Galarte; (Back): Eric Plemons, Max Strassfeld, Eva Hayward. Not pictured: TC Tolbert.
    Transgender Studies initiative at the University of Arizona. Left to Right (Front): Paisley Currah, Susan Stryker, Monica Casper, Francisco Galarte; (Back): Eric Plemons, Max Strassfeld, Eva Hayward. Not pictured: TC Tolbert. Photo by Paisley Currah.

     

    DIERKES-THRUN:  The University of Arizona recently initiated an unprecedented cluster hire in transgender studies and is actively working towards a graduate degree program in transgender studies. Can you tell us a bit more about the history and the thinking behind this strong, coordinated move at your institution?

    STRYKER: After the University of Arizona (UA) recruited me away from my previous job to direct the Institute for LGBT Studies in 2011, I came in saying that I wanted to put equal emphasis on the “T” in that acronym, and they were supportive of that. But none of us anticipated that the T was going to become the tail that wagged the dog, so to speak. It would not have happened had I not been courted by another, much more prestigious university during my second year on the job. UA asked what it would take to retain me, and I said I wanted to do something unprecedented, something I would not be able to do at that other university, something that would transform my field, while also putting UA on the map in a bold new way. I said I wanted to launch a transgender studies initiative, which represents my vision of the field’s need to grow. The institution said yes to what I proposed, and to the upper administration’s credit, they saw an opportunity in what I pitched.

    The truly unprecedented institutional commitment came in the form of strategic hiring support for a transgender studies faculty cluster. As UA has been quick to point out to conservative critics of this initiative, no new funds were identified to create these faculty lines—they came from existing pools of discretionary funds, and represent a shifting towards emerging areas of study of faculty lines freed up by retirement or resignation. That said, no university anywhere in the world has ever conducted a faculty cluster hire in transgender studies. Four lines were made available: two in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and two in colleges elsewhere in the University. We wound up filling three of those positions last year—hiring in medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and religious studies—and are in negotiations about where to place the remaining line.

    UA has a strong institutional culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as a good track record of supporting LGBT issues, so this fit right in. They understand that transgender issues have a lot of cultural saliency at the moment, and that studying the rapid shifts in contemporary gender systems, including the emergence of historically new forms of gender expression, particularly in the context of the biomedical technologization of “life itself,” is a legitimate field of study and research. Pragmatically, they saw the initiative as a way to attract and retain innovative and diverse faculty members, to bring in out-of-state tuition dollars, to compete for external research grants, and to push back against the popular misconception that Arizona is only a politically reactionary place. From the institution’s perspective, there was no advocacy agenda at work here, just an opportunity to increase the bottom line by building on existing faculty and research strengths.

    The lowest-hanging fruit, which can be accomplished with relatively little bureaucracy, is a graduate concentration, minor, or designated emphasis in transgender studies, and there is definitely support for that. We hope to have that in place within a year. It is also possible that a currently existing MA program in Gender and Women’s Studies could be adapted relatively easily to accommodate a transgender studies emphasis, but that involves a lot of inside-the-ballpark negotiation with current GWS faculty. Actually creating a new, stand-alone graduate program at the state’s land grant university would require approval by the Arizona Board of Regents, and ultimately by the Governor’s Office, so that will be a longer and tougher row to hoe.

    The final element of the initiative is approval to pursue establishing a new research enterprise called the “Center for Critical Studies of the Body.” The rationale here was to provide a non-identitarian rubric that could bring transgender studies into dialog with other interdisciplinary fields, such as the study of disability, trauma, sports, medical humanities, etc. No funds were provided for this, just a green light for starting the process of cobbling a center together.

    Of course, it’s vital to ask the question why, in an era when the teaching of Chicano/a studies is literally being outlawed in Arizona public schools, when xenophobic attitudes inform the state’s border politics, attention to transgender identities and practices can appear palatable. How does institutional investment in transgender studies at this particular historical juncture play into a deep logic of “managing difference” through expert knowledges, or get positioned as less threatening than calls for racial and economic justice? As the person heading up this initiative, I want to be attentive to ways I can use trans studies to advance other concerns that currently have a harder time getting traction in Arizona. I think my deepest challenge in trying to spearhead this initiative lies in resisting the ways that transgender studies can be co-opted for neoliberal uses that fall short of its radical transformative potential.

    DIERKES-THRUN: The University of Arizona also provided financial and logistical support for the establishment of a new journal of record for the field of transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, published by Duke University Press in 2014, with you and Paisley Currah (Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center) as founding co-editors. How did that come about?

    STRYKER: Launching this journal had been a long-term project of mine and Paisley’s and was already well underway before the opportunity to launch the broader transgender studies initiative came up, but it nevertheless constitutes an important element of what has become the bigger project. UA has significantly supported the establishment of  TSQ by contributing about one-third of the start-up costs. Those funds were cobbled together from a lot of different institutional sources, including the Provost’s Office, the office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for LGBT Studies.

    DIERKES-THRUN: For our readers who are just now becoming acquainted with transgender studies as a diverse intellectual and academic field, how would you summarize its most important constants and changes over the past two decades? What are some important subareas and affiliated fields for transgender studies?

    STRYKER: I’d recommend taking a look at the tables of contents in the two volumes of The Transgender Studies Reader. The first volume, from 2006, offers a genealogy of field formation, highlighting historical ties to scientific sexology, feminism, and poststructuralist theory.

    It includes work from the “transgender moment” of the early 1990s that changed the conversation on trans issues and tackles many of the topics that were of interest in the field’s first decade—questions of self-representation, diversity within trans communities, the increasing visibility of trans-masculinities. The second volume, from 2013, showcases the rapid evolution of the field in the 21st century, which is self-consciously moving in strongly transnational directions away from the Anglophone North American biases of the field’s first decade. There has been much more attention paid to the relationship between transgender issues and other structural forms of inequality and injustice, and, post 9/11, to questions about borders, surveillance, and security—and the ways that non-conventionally gendered bodies experience heightened scrutiny and limitations on movement, and can be seen as posing a terroristic threat to the body politic. There are increasing affinities with posthumanist work, as well as with animal studies, critical life studies, and the so-called “new materialism.” The first several issues of TSQ suggest something of current directions in the field: they address decolonization, cultural production, population studies, transanimalities, higher education studies, archives, transfeminism, political economy, sex classification, translation, surgery, sinophone studies, and psychoanalytic theory.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Can you say something about the trans- and international context of transgender studies today? What are the most important challenges there and why should we be thinking about them?

    STRYKER: The field has indeed been moving in a strongly transnational direction for more than a decade. I was particularly pleased that The Transgender Studies Reader 2 was awarded the 2013 Ruth Benedict Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology/American Anthropological Association, precisely because the field of transgender studies challenges us to think anew about how we understand sex/gender/identity cross-culturally. I think one of the biggest intellectual challenges has to do with fully acknowledging that some of the fundamental categories that we use to understand “human being”—like man and woman—are not ontologically given, but rather are themselves historically and cultural variable and contingent. Translation is also a huge problem—how do we facilitate the exchange of knowledge across language and culture, when the very categories we use to organize and recognize our own being and that of others can be so deeply incommensurable?

    DIERKES-THRUN: In the introduction to the inaugural issue of TSQ, the editors write, “Transgender studies promises to make a significant intellectual and political intervention into contemporary knowledge production in much the same manner that queer theory did twenty years ago.” What are some of the most needed intellectual and political interventions that you anticipate transgender studies can and will make?

    TSQ coverSTRYKER: First and foremost, I see it creating more space for critical conversations that involve transgender speakers. Bringing trans studies into the academy is one way of bringing more trans people into the academy. Of course I’m not arguing that trans studies is something that on trans people can participate in. Far from it—anybody can develop an expertise in this area, or feel that they have some sort of stake in it. But just as disability activists said in the 70s and 80, “nothing about us without us.” What’s most significant is creating an opportunity for the privileged and powerful kinds of knowledge production that takes place in the academy (about trans topics or any other area that involves people) to be not just objectifying knowledge, what we might call “knowledge of,” but also “knowledge with,” knowledge that emerges from a dialog that includes trans people who bring an additional kind of experiential or embodied knowledge along with their formal, expert knowledges. It’s the same rationale for any kind of diversity hiring initiative. People have different kinds of “situated knowledges” that derive from how they live their bodily differences in the world. It’s important to have people in critical conversations who come from different perspectives based on race/ethnicity, gender, ability, national origin, first languages, etc. Transgender represents a different kind of difference that offers a novel perspective on how gender systems, and therefore society, work.

    DIERKES-THRUN: You also say, in the same TSQ introduction, that transgender studies “offers fertile ground for conversations about what the posthuman might practically entail (as well as what, historically, it has already been).” The posthuman is a topic of interest to many of our readers. Could you map out for us what specific or broader contributions transgender studies can make to past and future discussions of the posthuman?

    STRYKER: The first thing we say of a new child is “It’s a girl” or It’s a boy.” Through the operation of language, we move a body across the line that separates mere biological organism from human community, transforming the status of a nonhuman “it” into a person through the conferral of a gender status. It has been very difficult to think of the human without thinking of it through the binary gender schema. I think a lot of the violence and discrimination trans people face derives from a fundamental inability on the part of others to see us as fully human because we are considered improperly gendered, and thus lower on the animacy hierarchy, therefore closer to death and inanimacy, therefore more expendable and less valuable than humans. A transgender will to life thus serves as a point from which to critique the human as a universal status attributed to all members of the species, and to reveal it instead as a narrower set of criteria wielded by some to dehumanize others.

    DIERKES-THRUN: The journal description announces that TSQ “will publish interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship.” What have been some of feminist and queer theory’s most important blind spots when it comes to thinking about the transgender experience?

    STRYKER: Transgender Studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field in the early 1990s, at roughly the same time as queer theory. There’s been a robust conversation about the relationship between the two, especially given the simultaneous formation of what’s come to be called the “LGBT” community. I contend that trans studies, as it was first articulated, shared an agenda with queer studies in the sense that it critiqued heteronormative society from a place of oppositional difference. It argued that “queer” was not just a five letter word for homosexual, but rather that queer encompassed a range of “different differences” that all had a stake in contesting various sorts of oppressive and coercive normativities related to sex, sexuality, identity, and embodiment. As queer theory developed, however, issues of sexuality really did remain in the forefront. From a transgender studies perspective, the whole distinction between homo and hetero sexualities depends on a prior agreement about what constitutes “sex,” on who’s a man and who’s a woman. Destabilizing those material referents, or needing to account for their sequentiality, their fuzzy boundaries, their historicity or cultural specificity, or their hybridity really opens up a whole different set of questions. In addition, trans studies is not organized primarily around issues of sexuality; equally important are questions of gender, bodily difference, heath care provision, technology studies, and a host of other things that have not been central to queer studies. So the debate between queer and trans studies has been about whether they are different parts of the same big intellectual and critical project, employing the same transversal methodologies for bringing into analytical focus and contesting oppressive normativities, or whether they overlap with one another—sharing some interests but not others—or whether they are really two different enterprises, concerned with different objects of study.

    My personal answer is all of the above, sometimes. At its most radical, trans studies offers a critique of the ways in which gay and lesbian liberation and civil rights struggles have advanced themselves by securing greater access to citizenship for homosexuals precisely through the reproduction of gender normativities—the liberal “I’m just like a straight person except for who I have sex with” argument. What actually provides the commonality there between homo and hetero is an agreement about who is a man and who is a woman, and how we can tell the difference between the two. Trans studies puts pressure on that tacit agreement.

    With regard to feminism, I think the major innovation transgender studies offers has to do with how gender hierarchies operate. In the most conventional feminist frameworks, what has seemed most important is to better understand and thereby better resist the subordination of women to men. Without contesting that basic tenet, transgender studies suggests that it is also necessary to understand how contesting the hierarchized gender binary itself can increase vulnerabilities to structural oppression for those people who don’t fit in, or who refuse to be fixed in place. That is, in addition to needing to address power structures that privilege normatively gendered men and masculinity over normatively gendered women and femininity, we also need to address a wide range of gender nonnormativities, atypicalities, transitivities, and fluidities. I see this as extending, rather than challenging, fundamental feminist insights.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Many of our readers may not know this, but traditionally, the relationship between queer theory and transgender studies and activism has been quite contentious. Is the fact that there is now a separate academic journal for trans studies indicative of an ongoing divide with queer studies, despite what you call the recent “transgender turn”?

    STRYKER: There’s a big enough and deep enough conversation on trans topics to merit and sustain an independent journal for the field, that’s all. There is more publishable scholarship on trans issues and topic than will ever fit into GLQ, given that journal’s broader scope, or that can ever fit into one-off special issues of disciplinary or interdisciplinary journals devoted to trans topics. Worrying that the advent of TSQ signals a divergence or parting of the ways between queer and trans studies is an overblown concern. Personally, I’d hate to see queer and trans studies drift further apart, because I feel strongly committed to both. I think trans studies is expansive enough to encompass a lot of queer scholarship on sex/gender nonnormativity, while also advancing scholarship on transgender-related topics that queer studies has never been particularly interested in.

    DIERKES-THRUN: As someone who has worked as a historian, social activist for trans rights and documentary filmmaker on trans history, how would you describe the state of our society’s understanding and attitudes towards transgender today? Does it feel like the tide has finally shifted?

    STRYKER: I think it is a mixed bag. Pretty much everybody today knows that there is this thing called “transgender”, but they can’t say exactly what it is. They know if they want to be considered progressive they are supposed to be OK with it, even if they secretly feel squeamish or judgmental or confused. That’s an improvement over the situation in decades past, when pretty much everybody agreed that there were these sick people and freaks and weirdoes who wanted to cross-dress or take hormones or cut up their genitals, but they were not important, and society really didn’t have to pay any attention to such a marginal and stigmatized phenomenon. So yes, there has been a shift, but yes, there is still a long way to go.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Which projects are you working on now?

    STRYKER: I have a really heavy administrative load right now. I was already trying to run a research institute, teach, commute between my job in Tucson and my home in San Francisco, and launch a new peer-reviewed journal, before the trans studies initiative became a possibility. That has definitely been a “be careful what you ask for” lesson, in terms of workload. I feel like I don’t write anything these days that doesn’t start with the words “Executive Summary” and end with the words “Total Budget.” It will probably be like that for a couple more years, especially until I complete my agreed-upon term of service as director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the end of 2016.

    But there are a couple of projects percolating along on the back burner. At the time I came to Arizona, I was working on an experimental media project called Christine in the Cutting Room, about the 1950s transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, who burst onto the global stage when news of her sex-change surgery made headlines around the world. The project was sparked for me by a comment Jorgensen made in an interview with television journalist Mike Wallace. She was talking about her pre-fame job as a film cutter in the newsreel division at RKO Studios in New York, and said that she “used to work on one side of the camera” because she “didn’t know how to appear on the other side.” That gave me the idea of approaching the question of transsexuality from an aesthetic perspective, as a technique of visualization, accomplished through media manipulation. I saw Jorgensen using cinematic techniques of media cutting, suturing, image creation, and projection to move her from one side of the camera to the other, by moving herself from one kind of “cutting room” to another. I have always been interested in ways of exploring trans experience outside the pervasive psychomedical framework, and this project lets me do that. I mix archival audiovisual media of Jorgensen herself, found sound and images, electronic glitch music, and a scripted voice-over narration performed by an actress playing Jorgensen. At some point I hope to edit this material into a narrative film, but I have found it also works well as a multimedia installation in galleries and clubs.

    I am also trying to write a book. I’ve finally hit on a way to piece together into one overarching argument lots of fragments of abandoned or incomplete projects on embodiment and technology, the early Mormons, members of San Francisco’s elite Bohemian Club, transsexuals, urban history, and popular music. My working title is Identity is a War Machine: The Somatechnics of Gender, Race, and Whiteness. It’s about the processes through which we incorporate—literally somaticize—culturally specific and historically revisable categories of individual identity within biopolitical regimes of governmentality. I won’t say any more about it at this time, because this book itself could be one of my many unfinished projects.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Transgender as a topic of public curiosity seems to be everywhere in U.S. media culture these days, from Laverne Cox and Orange Is the New Black to Chelsea Manning, Andreja Pejic and others. (There is also a lot of naïve conflation with drag and cross-dressing, as the media treatment of Conchita Wurst illustrates.) Do you worry about the glamorization and commodification of certain kinds of trans bodies in the media and the silence around others? Are famous celebrity spokespeople like Laverne Cox or Janet Mock good or bad for the movement, from your perspective?

    STRYKER: In the wake of the repeal of the U.S. military’s Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy regarding homosexual service members, and after the Supreme Court decisions on marriage equality, transgender has emerged in some quarters as the “next big thing” in minority rights. I have a lot of problems with that way of framing things, and am very leery of the ways that story functions as a neoliberal progress narrative, and of the ways in which protecting trans people (now that gays have been taken care of) can exemplify the values of inclusivity and diversity, so that the US or the West can use support for trans rights to assert influence over other parts of the world who purportedly do not do as good a job on this front. What is truly amazing to me, after having been out as trans for nearly a quarter century, is the extent to which it is now becoming possible for some trans people to access what I call “transnormative citizenship,” while at the same time truly horrific life circumstances persist for other trans people. Race really does seem to be the dividing line that allows some trans people to be cultivated for life, invested in, recognized, and enfolded into the biopolitical state, while allowing others to be consigned to malignant neglect or lethal violence. The contemporary celebrity culture of transgender plays to both sides of this dichotomy. It’s increasingly possible to see trans people represented as successful, beautiful, productive, or innovative (and I salute those trans people who have accomplished those things). At the same time, you see people like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock using their platform to call attention the persistence of injustices, particularly for trans women of color. I am truly inspired by the way they both speak out on race, classism, the prison-industrial complex, and sex-work.