question

Riley, Denise

Introduction

Riley, Denise, (2000) "Introduction" from Riley, Denise, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony pp.1-21, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press ©

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Introduction

Welike [he worldbecause wedo.

\\'AllACE STEVESS 1

'Who do you think you are?', whether solicitous inquiry or derisive chant, is a familiar enough interrogation; but this essay is. in parr, a defence of having nothing to say for oneself. It wonders why the requirement to bea something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner which is con- vincing to its subject; itdecides thathesitations in inhabitingacategoryare neither psychological weaknesses nor failures of authenticity or solidarity. Instead, it suggests that as mutating identifications, sharpened by the syn- tactical peculiarities of self-description's passage to collectivity, decisively mark the historical workings of political language, a more helpful politics will recognise a useful provisionaliry in the categories ofsocial being. The fairly recent appearance ofa qualified sociological vocabulary such as that of 'hybridiry' does admit the shortfalls, detected precisely by those they claimed to embrace. of the older bloc identities such as 'black', but it im- plies that refining those massive categories will allay the weaknesses ofself- description. I suspect that they will remain recalcitrant. The following pages puzzle about why this should be so.

2 INTRODUCTI ON

Naturally a great deal ofself-presentation is asking, if somewhat hope- lessly, 'Love me'. But first the ident ifications which go into my self-portrayal have exerted a kind of productive alienation, for I find my affiniry with something outside me only by moving towards and accepting some exter- nally given account ofa self, which I then take home as mine.This can be a happy acquisition: Later I may burnish myself up a bit, until I can see the gleam of my own reflection in myself. But these ordinary acts of ident ifica- tion, as everyday structuresof fantasy, also possess a characteristic syntacti- cal shape. A brief scenario of identification, which could be imagined as a linguistic arc, curves outwards from the self. Bur irs hopeful reach, and the ambitious smoothness of irs rrajecrory, are jarred by perplexities which ob- stinately inhabit the languageofself-description (a language which includes, but is wider than, the diction of ident ification alone). T his essay will con- centrate on these perplexities. incarnated asa felt unease. But itdoes not en- terrain any notions of language as a thing which guilefully leads astray the speakers caught in irs roils. It will suggest that while this discomfort needs to be fully registered-and registered as both linguistic and affective-it needs also ro be cheerfully tolerated. Self-description is undoubtedly an area oftrouble, bur irsdisquiet is vivid. Its greatly preferable ro the costs incurred through any arrernpred anaesthesia against this doubt lodged in it. If the business ofbeing called something, and being positioned by that calling- that is, interpellation-is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer some ef- fective therapy. Self-presenta tion and irony, so readily pulled into intimacy, will be offered throughout the coming chapters as illustrations ofa linguis- tic emotionality at work. Both being called, and actively taking on or dis- carding a name, encompass two conspicuous kinds of affect which areem- bedded in some ordinary fundamental workings oflanguage; so while there's an inescapable failure ro thoroughly be, involving a demurral, a discomfort, or a guilt which is linguistic, this failure may be relieved and brightened by an irony, which may well itself inflect a politics. I may feel linguistic unease as I am necessarily and constantly displaced

from my centrality ro my own utterance. Bur I suffer something that I am tempted ro call linguistic guilt when I am dethroned aurhorially by being spoken across by words (by the words' anarchic sound associations, by their echoing ofothers' speech, which I can never adequately acknowledge, within my own speech) and whenever I am understood to occupy a position soci-

INTRODUCTION 3

erally, that of the originary writer, which I cannor occupy linguistically. Wirhin some structures oflanguage I am indeed a displaced person, yer my situation is not reallyso melancholic. It has released me into a democratic freedom ro wander, alrhough nor without guides. Verbal irony-anorher af- fect of language-offers me its spontaneous running commentary on my situation as it observes and remarks. unabashed, on the great categories of being as they sriffen or sag. IIIuminaring the hisroriciry as well as the arbi- trariness ofthe caregorical words thar consolidate me, ir affords me a way of analysing and accepring the inventively productive displacemenrs I suffer wirh a measure of relief, and with good grace. If rhis work of language also embraces irs prinred convenrions and pres-

entation, it'sno news to anyone that a sentence's punctuation, layout, and typography carry some of irs aflecr, and can be contrived to carry all of ir. Just to glance at punctuation: the exclamation mark, a directannotation of tone, is uninteresting because it is blatant, but other markers which arenot such overt signals ofemorion srill quierly operare as such-rhe arch or the sarcastic apostrophes or 'scare quotes' ro highlighr a vexing word (and which, roo liberally sprinkled, only vex irs readers), the punchy or triumphant colon, the theatrical hesirancy ofthe dash, the demurring bracker which may hedge irs bets, the self-importanr or nagging italicisation-while the very look ofa semicolon is Nietzsche'swalrus moustache in profile.' A rypeface it- selfalso speaks; there is a coolly democraric air ro Gill sans serif, an elegance in Garamond. Here alone a whole school of rheroric in miniarure could be revived; while irs long demise an art is wirnessed by the fact that all such prosaic considerations, as well as a great number of loftier ones, are now hived off to the territory of 'prosody' as the study ofversification, yer are usu- ally ignored as active e1emenrs within rhe everyday prose they animate. Bur there are also lessconringenr and more deeply inherenr aspects oflan-

guage which do nor refer and yer whichthemselves act: and this essay's ten- tative proposals stem from its conviction that the very architecture of lan- guage in irself carries some of the affeer common to all speech. Synrax itself bearsa formative as well asan informative impulse. At least some of the at- tributes of that famously vexed rubric of ,ideology' (which is nor so much the label for a thing, as a geSlure towards an open, always unfinished series ofexplications') might be reascribed ro rhis possibility rhar a language also( works ar the pervasive level of its musculature, quierly but powerfully,

4 INTRODUCTION

through its grammatical and syntactic joints. Syntax is also affective. and Ithat ideology which positions its addressees is-to some extent-syntactic; this perhaps curious and counterintuitive assertion will be elaborated in rhe succeeding chapters, including through their test case of interpellation. I don't mean to imply that to be ungrammatical is to bemerrily liberated from constraint- rather, that the very articulations and bonds oflanguage them- selves enact productive constraints, which include what we may call ideo- logical effects. If the affect of language extends to its formal structures, then the intr icacies of self-description, which is laced through with strange tem- poralities. can offeracritical testing ground for this intuition. I'madvancing it hesitantly, conscious that the proposal that there may sometimes be an in- herent emotionaliry to grammar, that supposedly cool operator, may ring bizarrely. Certainly it's a quite different suggestion from that familiar suspi- cion that we are all prey to the 'seductions of grammar'.' Yet even that, if true. would be no matter forlament, since language 'seduces'only insofaras one needs to beseduced by life, in order to live. Or is it simply that the arrangements of language are-undramatically

and unsurprisingly- impure, since such a great machinery is likely to nurse a few small flaws? Or again, to translate that doubt into quite another dic- tion, is Being bound to be fuller than its verbal representation?To counter such objections, these chapters won't exactly propose a monolith oflanguage as an unbroken monument, but rhey will offer an alternative thought : that where a necessarily rigorous grammar and syntax is imbued with its own brand ofaffect, this affect may be strong enough to convey a disquiet which runs under what is being said. It might pursue, whisperingly, a perverse or an arteriosclerotic course. Yet this makes fora lively unease. A tangibleemo- tionaliry is enacted at the very level of language itself, and in such a way as to make that old question of 'how do words conveyor express feelings?' in part redundant. If words are accorded thei r own head, it's often hastily as- sumed that speakers must be rendered abject, as ifany consideration oflan- guage's own affect must lead straight to human dejection. This false choice of loyalties- either to the word or else to the speaker-is encapsulated for easy swallowing. Fast thought has, like fast food, its uses-but, by a lan- guorous fatalism, prer-a-penser may slide prematurely into prer-a-rnourir, Yet if I'msometimes tempted to lingerover linguistic malaise, what might be said about linguistic happiness?And something of this may well up in

IN T RODUCTION

unexpected quarters.since irony's hopefulness begins. not in innovation, but in the unmitigated monmony ofreiteration. Writing in and about only one language, I'm gloomily aware that my re-

marks must be parochial. Within thisgrave limit, it's clear that the whole ten- dentious affairofself-presentation-pardy because of its extraordinaryover- determination oflinguistic with phenomenological peculiarities-is a site of strain. One could have no quarrel with it, if it did work satisfyingly and on the side of the angels. But it's readily observable that some self-naming in- duces little lasting satisfaction in irs speaker-and that's unsurprising. Wordy manoeuvres, periodically driven in vain ro span the inescapable gap between my political being and my social being, appear as the common unease with 'being a subject'.The resulting politicsofidentity are, by their nature, bound ro fall shorr of their promised redemption, but this need not cause dismay. On the contraty: A lack of fit between my self-description as a social subject and my presence asa political subject is not disappointing bur benevolent, in- sofar as the subject ofpolitical language actually requires a cerrain imperson- ality, or a nonidentiry, ro be able ro circulate productively at all. In this sense, my awkward navigations to become,coupled with my constitutional failure ro fully be, are what actually enable political thinking and language, rather than marking some lamentable shortcoming in my 'poliricisarion'. This makes briefly for an air ofparadox: that some lack ofpoliricisarion (where that term is taken in its contemporary sense, to imply the keen embraceofsome pro- gressive identity) might be needed, in order for there to be mobility, and life, within political thought. This string of mildly reassuring remarks can only reach so far, though.

Two corollaries of hazard soon follow. If a category is, historically, poorly brought to voice (as it were), there's roo much lack: an obliterating under- polir icisarion , productive of nothing bur solitary misery. Conversely, plung- ing into a category and getting mired down in it, in an exaggerated bring and an overpoliticisarion, also mark our unhappier aspects of the political, yet usually will not completely swamp it-unless there is a one-to-one cor- respondence between the social subject which has undergone its politicisa- rion , and the relatively impersonal subject moving as a figure in the sphere ofpolit ics, for instance under forms offascism or in the poliricisarion ofa supposed 'ethnic identity'. Then grave trouble ensues.

6 IKTRODUCTlO!'

Self-description is the broadest ofchurches while conspicuously prey to sectarianism. The self might find itself announcing its physical or tempera- mental individuations, its national genesis, its willed affiliations, its adop- tions ofsome religiousor political creed. So a long taxonomy ofself-reference would be needed to distinguish between such very different incarnations; what , if anything, is there in common between 'I am white trash', ' In this household we are God-fearing people', 'I survived some years ofbeing held in Dachau', and 'Vivaldi's "Stabar Mater" is sublime'-which are arguably all forms ofself-presentation? These chapters do not attempt the necessary if inexhaustible classification of self-classifications. In practice, they touch largely on the more formal designations of the social person, such as 'being Han Chinese' or 'being a heterosexual man', but they must inevitably slide into the idiosyncratic traits that a self may ascribe to itself: 'I'm shy' 0; 'I am postsexual'. Each category ofa self, too, owns its distinct evolutionary his- tory. Sharply differing accounts of the settlement, the flourishing or the de- cay ofsuch attributions as, let's say, 'I am Welsh Methodist, 'I'm in domes- tic service', or 'Iam a depressive'. would need to be drawn up. Some markers are relatively steady in [heir neutrality, such as 'I am five feet five' (although one can always dream up counterexamples: say,ofvoicing aloud that height in Lilliput), Others, dragged in the wake ofthe great icebergs oflarger shifts, are con-

spicuouslyvolatile. 'I am Latvian' bears a weight greatly changed by whether its uttered before, during, or after my country's fights for autonomy or its absorption within the former USSR. Yetother categories are haunted by a lingering semantic unsteadiness: 'I am a woman'. Each will also have some markedly altered standing in relation to whatever notion ofa social whole its declined against. (So to make much useofa newer term for the fusion of categorical wholes, such as 'hybridiry', one would need the knack ofprising apart its soldered elements to gauge their uneven thickness and the points of fatigue, as it were, at their joins.) The collectivity which appears sealed and fully rounded is the outcome ofa struggle in which its articulation might have been no triumph of progressive thought but an accident, a compro- mise, something which has sprung up between casual cracks in the slabs of earlier monoliths, like a weed. Formed perhaps in amagonism or perhaps in self-defence, only once the fresh species has triumphed can its internal dif- ferences tearopen again, in a snuggle 'of egoisms rurned against each other,

ISTRODUCTION 7

each bursting in a splintering of forces and a general striving for the sun and for light'.' Which self-description is to count as broadly societal, Ot which is to be

assessedas a private quirk or an idiosyncratic characteristic, depends largely on the inrensiry of its potential 'politicisarion' in playat anyone momem- now taking that term. poliricisation, (Q mean the rendering collective of some condirion or amicrion formerly understood as a merely personal and private contingency. If rhe voluntary relling ofmy life illustrates rhe intrica- cies of autobiography, irs extracted and catalogued account highlights the riddles of sociology. Few artribures will appear for long as mechanically straightforward: we readily jib at rhe boxes were insrrucred to rick for the purposes of census-raking, passports, or schooling because rhey so readily topple into contentious placings of rhe self. Am I to agree to be designated as 'Black British', or do I refuse rhis designation as in itselfunwirringly racist because 1am in fact 'English' and as English a cirizen as everyone else, what- ever my skin colour, and I don't want that racialised difference; do I sett le for 'Afro-Caribbean' or for 'British, of African descent', or should I fighr, tongue in cheek, to introduce 'Afro-Saxon', or had I better specify 'born in Holloway, London, ofan Anriguan-born mother and a farher from Jamaica? Or do I give up, and rick, wryly, that final small square for all categorical residues which is marked 'Other?' A pick-n-rnix gaiety here may also be sar- donic-and wilful, in rhe faceofrhe contingency ofwhat counts ascasually incidental, or what counts as critical forassessing my social being." Iam in- deed minimally secured by the dares ofmy death and my birth, and usually I'll need ro have confidence in rhe latter, Yer for many in rhe world, their ex- act dare ofbirth can be questionable if rhey are born in shrouded circum- stances into a society ofweak record-keeping. Unless my remains are losr in some devastated warzone or in a massacre, or to a murder which has been successfully concealed, on ly rhe dare of my death is certain. Bur that in- scription on my rornbstone is one form of interpellation whose certainty I shall, unhappily, nor be there to enjoy. Meanwhile, my characterisation will often subside into my categorisation. and with uncertain results. It's rarefor the self, in an untramrnelled agony of exquisite choice. ro invent its own names.The daily facrofsocietal descriprion 'from the outside-c-how I'm re- ported by others. what's expectantly in place, already chatting about me be- fore 1appear on stage-is integral to rhe dialectic ofself-description. Exrer-

8 ISTRODUCTION

nal imposition of a harsher sort-above all, the force of political change, which is always a linguistic violence-may wring from me some new self- description as well as utter its own hostile naming against me. In the early '990S I might, under harassment from Serbian nationalism, have militantly discovered myself to be Albanian, whereas only a decade earlier, that char- acterisation, although certainly in play, wouldn't have been so peremptory" Under duress, I may take on an 'ethnic' self-categorisation only as a counter- nationalism-not triumphantly, but wearily, reluctan tly, cynically, and with a suspension ofany real consent. A historical phenomenology ofself-naming would fill the world; the vul-

nerability or the impregnabilityofa category marks its history asthe history of attempts to establish it and get it solidly installed, to politicise it, to dissolve it, to shred it. In the teeth of this, this solitary student quails. and only some narrow slivers of self-description's limited occurrences as self- identification are mentioned in this essay,Then wouldn't 'self-identification' or 'self-categorising' have been more precise terms for me to have used here, since with them comes a telling layer oflinguistic compulsion, a forcible ad- mission into the political sphere equipped with ones passport of identity? The noun 'identity' does stand at some semantic distance from the related noun 'idenrification'<c-irself a hot spot at which psychoanalytic and socio- logical arguments cluster thickly- yet I keep to the less precise but less fraught 'self-description', I've stuck to this wider term largely on the grounds that its everyday hesitations are actually compounded and not relieved in the formal massifications ofself-categorisation, even though the latter may aim benignly to serve some finer self-specification. For the same inadequa- cies commonly haunt each and any effort, systematic or personal, at de- scribing the self. None of this, though , is to deny that real jubilation may colour its initial embrace. Vet even though some freshly named self might feel itself to be a family happily all alike within its discovered identification , if this should falter, an unnecessary wordless shame can seep back in. What Adorno characterised as the authoritarian sympathies with in 'the ex-

pression "as a , . . , I . .. ,''' have resounded oflate.' Much energy has been expended on (to use the mildly pejorative term) identity politics. Was there some misplaced nostalgia for wholeness about this relatively recent turn to collectivised personal identities, succeeding as it did a different historical moment with its own broader understanding ofsolidarity?One precondi-

INTRODUCTION 9

rion, though, for effective solidarity may well be that critique ofan identity which rises from within it. 'Solidarity' as an ideal of a political altruism is rooted in some degree of identification, which it will also transcend. But its invocation is immensely delicate. Forsolidarity can veerbetween progressive warmth, pious constraint, narrowly tactical calculation, imaginative generos- ity,and unwarranted familiarity. Some lesshelpful versions ofsolidarity pro- - mote illusory centres, the seeming results ofa consensus, yet where no one wasever consulted.Then solidarities inevitably fray into dispersal; now there can be no democratically settled agreement to, say, just what goes under the rubric of feminism, no agreed centra] affiliation. There are markedly differ- ing periods in the solidarities ofeven apparently spontaneous visual percep- tions, such as the recognition ofanother's physical appearance as also bodily damaged or also beautiful, or of the similarities of the skin's coloration. It depends on who is seeing whom and from where: so someone fairly light- skinned finds herself classified as 'red' in Kingston, her birthplace; yet once she arrives in Brixron in south London. she becomes for her non-Jamaican neighbours an undifferentiated 'black'.Then the question ofhow 'blackness' is understood, let alone 'whiteness', will take on a bitterly different taste for, say, the inhabitants ofJasper County, Texas, or of Eltham in Greenwich,' than for those placed to speak confidentlyofmultiracial north London. The impulse ofthe following pages isbroadlyanri-identificarory onlyasa

counter to the hazards ofzealous overind usiveness. It doesn'tpromote a rad- ical individualism to stand against all categorising (onlya rabid ahistoricism might attempt that), and this isn't a manifesto ofpreferring the individual to the group. Instead, it tries to assert the influential daily ordinariness of that volatile disquiet which dwells in self-description. As that celebrated post- modernist, Hegel, observed in 1817, 'Everyone isa whole world of represen- tations, which are buried in the night ofthe "]"'.10My claim here is that the hesitancy, the qualifications, the awkwardness, and the degreesofsecret re- serve which will oflen shadow a self-description aren't manifestations ofan individual weakness, a failureofsolidarity, but that such hesitancies reallydo lodge in self-categorisation's peculiarly fused linguistic-political nature.They \ need to be admitted.The virtue of those sociological categoriesof the per- son, enshrined as. say. antidiscrimination law, is nor in the least diminished by considering the unspoken disappointments of trying exhaustively to live I those categories from the inside. Meanwhile, some realistic dilemma as to

10 I NTRODUCTION

how [ should speak about myself will rarely get resolved for long by means ofan 'identity'. So often conceived as a thing to be unearthed, my identity (if I am forced to locate such an object at all) may turn out to be not so much a matter ofwhat it is. but ofwhere it is;and some idea ofan identity which is founded largely in dispersal- although without melancholy- is de- scribed in the last two chapters. These take tacit issue with the conviction that it's polit ically impera tive to hang onto an asserted category, since any time spent reading in archives or through old newspapers (or simply living long enough) demonstrates that the collisions and shattering of identities have been as decisive for progress as their consolidations-while the latter have so frequently been disastrous that one could make a counterclaim for the historical necessityofthe strongest identity to the most reactionarycause. It'shardly necessary to declare here that imperiously rigid categorising, in the name ofgroup emancipation, may well reinvent the very unhappiness it has sought to assuage-that its newly bestowed categories of the self, in their purported embrace ofcommunality, may lead, not to solidarity, but to a soli- tary dissatisfaction all the worse because it is what reallydare nor speak its name-indeed. has no name to speak. If hailed or interpellated in the name ofmy destiny, [ turn my head in an

irrepressible hope. My horoscope in any newspaper column sings out to me, asdoes my fortune inside any Chinese cookie or {he printed account ofmy character and fate which the elderly Parisian who signs himself as a deaf- mute drops at my cafe table to supplement his living. Their siren addresses to me are alwayssomehow true, and theyalwayswork-s-quire irrespectiveof my very real and unshakable scepticism. On more serious occasions. to be described is to be located and singled out, which is rarely good news. A less philosophical way ofconsidering how becoming a subject entails subjection is to reposition this slightly, now as a question ofhow identification is close neighbour to accusation. It's not only those lined up in the policestation for an official identity parade who realise this.There's a proximity between 'be- ing called' as a description and 'being called' as an aggression. Being 'called names' in the school playground means being called harsh names. Admit- tedly, being identified asa form ofaccusation isoccasionally replaced by be- ing interpellated as a form ofsanctification; bur this singularity is quite as risky as any other, for being inscribed in a good and noble category is apt to prove an unreliable bliss. Perhaps self-naming owes something of its com-

INTRODUCTIOS II

pulsive populariry ro an undersrandable impression that if one is alwaysgo- ing ro be called a such-and-such from the outside, one might as well ger in first, ro deflect the imposirion by puning up one's own account ofoneself likean umbrella against a hard rain ofattributes.That, though, would afford a poor protection, since language does not possess that kind ofan 'outside'. This essay is nor a lonely howl against 'ident ity polit ics' (although out

there the wolves have been gradually gathering). It does carry some impli- cation of a need to recognise a complementary anri-idenrity politics. The hopewhich animates asserted personal identities isevident: Instead ofbeing spoken for or glossed over, the misnamed, the forgonen, or the oppressed would speak their own truths. would articulate their common situation. would gain power through their own consolidation of their obliterated or rravesried needs and interests. Historically, such movements have had pro- foundly liberating ourcomes (however periodically ambiguous; however much, for example. those of us attached to earlier versions of feminism mightbemoan its recent incarnations). But if an emancipatoryRow eventu- ally becomes congealed through mechanical reiteration. its osrensible sub- jects, now subjected to categorical overkill, can't recognise themselves; then its categories must take notice and move, or be washed up into a backwater ofobsolescence. Perhaps, though, it is enough ro rely unperturbed on the hisrorical dialectics ofdescription here, on the guaranteed mobilities ofpo- Iiticallanguage?Hisrorical semantics roner-but their insrabiliry and where they may fall can't be foretold. It may be hard ro await, equably, the eventual and merciful collapseof some current unhelpful rnassificarion. In the mean- time, roo readily formulated, roo suffocatingly inclusive. or roo piously ex- clusive categorieswill induce. not their intended comfort. hut an increasein private misery. That tidy self-categorisation now on otTermay entail an ac- tual descriptive impoverishment, concealed under the banner ofa reforming collectivity, If intricate and fine-grained accounts are thickened inro a single sanirised 'identification', then histories, under the kindly guise ofbeing fa- cilitated, are obliterated. That even the most progressive self-description can make an ambiguous

kind ofa weapon is nor only hisrorically clear but is anchored in its StrUC- rure, Temporaliry and affect are also embodied as the synracric musculature oflanguage itself and together these support its forcefulness. But the mean- ings of the unquiet language of the self are liable ro be corroded through re-

12 INTRODUCTION

iteration, and in that lies its own undoing, aswhat should underline and re- inforce ir may, gradually, ear away at it. Syntax's affect emerges through its very regularity and predictability, which also hold its potential for ironic de- flation; then the shape of the sentence becomes devalued and tarnished through its repetitions, and the old cadences begin to ring mechanically and without conviction, such as furious exchanges of 'Is! Isn't!' 'Will! Won't!', which carry on with no content other than a childish antagonism, at once both real and a parody ofitself.lfit is in the nature of 'the media' ro repeat and repeat, it's also in the more dignified nature ofthe archive and ofthe hal- lowed litany ofpersonal types, including the trip tych of race, class, sex. Not that the structural affects ofspeech and writing usually have the strength ro overwhelm semantic meaning-yet they do bring to bear a pressure, a tor- sion, sometimes a malaise. They can also engender a disquiet which is posi- tively useful, and may be lived with good humour. In this sense they form an element of 'the unconscious of language'; its tendency to undercut or to overreach itself, to crazily ramify, or to make itself unexpectedly heard within some other meaning." The intuition of the following pages is that the often profoundly politicised wir ofself-description offers a broad and vulnerable rerrain which is open for such affects to exert themselves strongly. They Cut both ways: in the uncomfortable fit ofa benevolently meant categoty aswell as in the harshness of an angry interpellation, so hard to shake off. These chapterswon't tty either to supplant or to embellish the srandard psycholog- ical account ofwhy a bad name sricks-rhat is, because ir chimeswith some internal and prior sentence, a damaging sentence that the self has already passed on itself-but they must trample across the familiar bounds of two pitched camps, the linguistic and the psychologicaL" 'The unconscious' is mentioned here neither through that analogy in La-

can's aphorism, as structured likea language, nor, solely, as a mole busy be- neath the rational surface, heaving away, but implicitly and simply as the structure of language: aslanguage. That's because all language in use (that which might be allocated by psychoanalysis to the domain of the uncon- scious, plus that which standardly wouldn't be) b...,th is and isn't under me control of its speakersand writers. (One could speak, too, about 'an uncon- scious ofthe body', and bodies nurse and guard their own histories as mem- ories;but here it'swords thatareat srake.) If there is 'an unconscious'which is in part language, but if language itselfcan also be argued to have an un-

I N TRO D UCTIO N I}

conscious of its veryown and to possess a remainder. to be at the mercy of the invasive determinations of sound associations. of the wild and fruitful propagations of metaphor, and so on-then the speaker and the writer be- come even less the masters of their utterance.' ! For both the irrational and the reasoned elements in language escape from quarantine. to go running everywhere together, My self-description may well be my self-fantasy. Perhaps each and every

act of identification is fantastical-and not only such an evident candidate for the status offantasy as that ofa 'sexual difference' uninflected by history, Some apprehension that it constituted the Code Napoleon of the uncon- scious might vex an insistence on 'sexualdifference'as fundamental. Forfan- tasy issustained metaphoriciry.To be in fantasy is 10 live 'as if '. Some scene is being played out; and any act of identification necessarily entails a sce- nario. That celebrated script, 'a child is being beaten', suggests that if the structure of psychic identification invites a substitution (somewhere the hearer inserts him- or herself into the action, takes up a role in the scene), then such a substitution is so heavily engineered by syntax as 10 constitute a strong argument for theordinarily fantastic nature ofall identifications. Here each common act of imagination need not be characterised as in its nature either unconscious orasespecially conscious. Perhaps. then, it's the verysyn- tax of the sentence of identification which is enacting me. 'A child is being beaten'-but I could change the content of this sentence 10 avoid irs sado- masochistic incitement yet still retain its syntaxofpassivity: 'Acake is being eaten'. But whether I am the devourer or the apfelsrrudel, I have some kind ofpositioned interest in the thing. Next, I could try 10 overcome this indo- lent construction by forcing some energetic meaning into the still-passive mood of the verb: 'Tonight the world heavyweight champion is being chal- lenged'. But even this journalistic preamble still impatientlyawaits the entry of irs subject, waving aloft irs gloves. Whether as boxer or as cake, there is ample room for me to find my true self in the architecture of thesesentences. As I project myself as being a such-and-such, 1 tacitly envisage myself

participating in the wider social scene through some new identity category as I step, gingerly or proudly, across irs threshold. Any act of identification is systematically askew, since I'm envisaging what I presume that I'm sup- posed, in the eyesofothers, 10 really be. All is vicarious. Bya consent which I could not anyway withhold, I become a voyeur ofmyself in the guiseof a

14 INTRODUCTION

such-and-such. recognising that I'm looking at what I must look like. and through refracting lenses. Yet such identification fantasies-incarnate as they must be in language-are thereby very far from being ahisrorical. They are heavily subject to time: to the hisrorical mutations ofwords. to the al- tering production ofsocial caregories including classes. and to an altering expressiviry of syntax as well as of semantics. History may. spasmodically. conspire with language to depict acts offantastic identification as matter of fact and self-evident. but this air ofsociological realism proves Aeeting.That there is no timelessness ensures, mercifully, that no one can claim mastery. If affect is shot right through the forms ofwords. and if ideology is in pan reiterated 'habits ofspeech (to adopt Peirce's term"). then ideology. includ- ing the ideology of identifications. might be considered asan affective habit. yet a habit neither purely imposed nor purely obeyed-nor Houred, For what releaseslanguage from the suspicion that itsoverarching emotional ar- chitecture should be considered as a constraint is another of its inherent el- ements: its blessed capacity for self-reflecrion. Irony is one manifestation of speech which notices itself out loud. There are many other possible out- comes of this linguistic self-refiexiveness, ranging from comedy to boredom to irritation, but here irony will be ventured as the saving counterpart to an- other verbal phenomenon: linguistic shame. Despite its spasmodically poor reputation. irony does operate ethically. although necessarily without a man- ifesto. This is not irony as a deliberating parody or as the irritating know- ingness which so easily tips into being arch-but irony as language present- ing itself to itself The guilt ofwriting. discussed below. is only a facet. sharp enough. ofa

much broader linguistic unease. Given by what T shall call itself and be called, this acts in the same moment through an emotional grammar and a linguistic psychology. Here again the integrity ofthe category of 'psychology' isdisaggregared, and at leastsome ofit isdispatched to 'language- although this isn't at all to imply that the linguistic unconscious exhausts the entire do- main ofemotionality. And then while the Lacanian psychoanalytic subject is indeed constituted 'in division',what one might want to seeadmitted isayet more ubiquitous division. Not only that formulaicdivision through language operaring at the level of the unconscious, but division made convex. as it were. folded upwards and outwards to the surface. in a far more prolific but a stolid and quotidian scission. to be tolerantly grasped aseverywhere in play.

INTRODUCTION 15

This isn't to advance an aesthetic and perverse longing for fragmenraeion, bur onlya sanguine acknowledgement of how thingsdo seem to be. Just how. or if, this sits with claimants {Q the vexed terrain of the unconscious is another question; and is rhis speculation merely a shaky spin ofa Lacanian wheel? One certainly couldn't marshal any systematic opposirion to rhis idea ofdi- vided unconscious from the side committed {Q analysing social forms of po- sirioning selves. and Althusser himself sympathetically characterised Lacan's 'paradox, formally familiar to linguistics, ofadouble yet single discourse. un- conscious yer verbal. having for irs double field only a single field. wirh no beyond except in irself: the field of the "signifying chain'". " Alrhusser went on to assert what he was willing to call 'the lawof language'; the coming sug- gesrions here will have more to do with the pragmaric but violently lawless materialiry of words. Maybe there's more of an intimate link berween 'lan- guage' and 'the unconscious' than tharafforded by that customary analogy- and which. in the manner ofmosr intimate links. blurs the characrerofborh pallners to the arrangement. In pall. the unconscious iswhat the language does. Perhaps the unconscious hangs our there, between people. as the speech that rhey produce berween rhem and are produced by. Mighr it be interest- ing to consider 'the unconscious' aslanguage. through a grand act ofcom- pression. fusing some present conceprs of the psychic unconscious with the ideaoflanguage-and-its-remainders, although without even the intervention of any scribe of the unconscious (to borrow Mousrapha Safouan's meta- phor!") to wrire down irs idiosyncratic syntax as dreams?Indeed, Safouan has observed that 'today we can move on to the statement that the unconscious is nothing other rhan the language as ir withdraws from. and overtakes, the intentions of the subjecr'''- yet rhis economical and engaging srance has al- ready sidesrepped those violent complications which erupr if we go on to scrutinise rhis vexed inrentionaliry, including the impacr of language's own unconscious, its inventive constraints, and its separability from its utterer's intenrions."This is a linguistic unconscious. not a psychic unconsciousofa collecriviry ofspeakers. I am not hinting ar a gigantic and rhrobbing world- soul of languages. Nevertheless, that very invocation of language's own un- conscious does start to erase the lines between these two, the psychic and the linguistic, and to recasr their whole partition, Jean-Claude Milner almost. yet not quite, makes the elision between language and the unconscious when he glosses Lacans lalangueas 'thar by which. wirh one and the samestroke, there

16 INTRODUCTION

is language (or beings who can be qualified as speaking, which comes down to the same thing) and there is an unconscious' and again that 'Language is then whar in practice the unconscious is, lending itself 10 all imaginable games, so that truth, under the sway ofwords, speaks'," Lacan'sown remarks stop, as rhey have 10, at the verge ofsuch an elision, for his conception of language as symbolic function is exterior and yet also internalised: 'This ex- rerioriry of the symbolic in relation to man is the very notion of the uncon- scious'." Conversely, while ir is the interior of the subject, it must be exter- nally realised. The symbolic order oflanguage may 'decentre' the subject, yel it does not drain from him this ambiguous interiority. even if that arrives from the outside." This maintains a retrospective, mutually consrirutive di- alectic berween inner and outer, Across all gymnaslic contortions (and even allowing for the qualification that this 'subject' is simply not the same as the individual), a subject is still being consrituted.P But the rather different con- ception rhar 'the unconscious' is language itself-c-or rather that all language is always haunted by a degree ofunconsciousness' which is alwaysexrernally given-would dirch this problem of the built-up subject, 10 step clear of its structuring geology of insides and outsides. Sometimes it seems attractive to be completely Hal.

Nervously defensive or archly self-congrarularing, the ambiguous question 'Who, me?' furnishes a motto for the earlier chapters below, which glance ar what they treat as the linguistic psychology of laking on a description. Self- naming may function asa sortof communicative intent. What I have to say about myself is also a confession offeeling, which cannot help but sound as if, like a declaration of love, it's soliciting a respons ive echo. The geslUres of adopting a self-characterisation, or demurring from it, may well sink into in- advertent self-description, The contentious ideal ofsolidarity can't help here for long. Indeed, the long history ofarnorflui forces some reflections on the concept ofbad faith. A furious will to be, as self-perperuarion, may be coun- tered by a drive 10 an impossible authenticity or integrity, which, it's sug- gested, comes to a head over some unrealised ethics ofauthorship. The urge 10 instead dedrarnarise the described self may induce a longing for trans- parency, 10 be without qualities. Ar the mercy ofan intricate anrerioriry, self-description also has an oddly

projected topography: JUSI where out there are my self-caregorisings felr 10

INTRODUCT ION 17

lean, [0 become animated, to circulate?There's also the oldest topographical metaphor, of that place where speech is formed: bur the unconscious as the unconscious of language cannot be internal, deep and half-hidden, like some modern version of the soul. If it is linguistic, then it is external-yet this externality need not imply that it's either fully conttolled or uncon- ttolled by irs speakers, Instead of this opposition, a profound superficiality is ventured. (Only a superficial profundity may result here.) A history of some conceptions of'being spoken'would embrace those convictions about the seductions oflanguage, so strangely held in common by both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and these will be considered in the first chapter below as Aowetings ofa Venus Ay-ttap school of language. The second chapter, 'Linguistic Unease', marshals a defence ofthat affect

as naturally endemic to self-depiction: ordinary, defensible, and distinct from any reprehensible psychology of self-immolation. Unease lies on the vetge of guilt, a condition elastic enough to encompass all too many defini- tions, of which one is that gnawing feeling of having failed according to rules that I did not make myself. Under this last heading (an altogether dif- ferent affair from making grammatical mistakes), mightn't the very con- straints of language-use induce this sensation that 'I' lies? I labour under what must be a common compulsion; that once I'm forced to speak about myself at all, I must through my own efforts make it sharply ttue- yet can- not. As ifeven the most subdued self-reference steered close to a demand for precision it must dangerously fail. In the same breath I fear and feel irs fun- damental lie. The verygrammarofartriburion enacts this uncertainty. De- fensive lie and defensive truth are both couched in the same syntax ofdenial, 'I'm not an x', while both the well-meant ident ification and the harsh accu- sation share the common syntax ofbad naming, 'You are an x' ,The thing which is invoked only to be denied still hovers around ominously, by virtue ofbeing voiced at all. Grammar, then, carries irs weight of affect. Bur is it morbidly exaggerated-a linguistic hypochondria , or else an overblown synaesthesia-to speculate that one can feel grammar? If this were exagger- ated into a 'linguistic-ontological' guilt-'I speak, therefore I am culpable of falling into the ttaps ofgrammatical quirks and syntactical snags-and taken solemnly, overlirerally, it would follow that any speaker is always al- ready guilty, dogged by unease with no Cute until death StopSher mouth. Avoiding that Aorid generalisation, I cannot avoid the fact that there's a dif-

18 INTRODUCTION

ference between [he diffused disquier which shadows lived language (for which I can't be held to account) and the 'real guilt' of my private convic- tion of failure. Certainly I must ask whether a linguistic malaise is merely fancied, or is actually, although undercharacrerised, solidly felt. At sensitive historical momenrs of linguistic-political change, it is (l think) felt, and acutely so. The strains of describing the self are also acute within those literary gen-

res reliant on a coven self-presenrarion: hence i.t is a liarwho writes, a liar who tries lyric. Wishing nor to take credit where credit isn't due, the aptly worried poet finds that the working conviction of 'being written' de- mands an oblique or a transverse account, in which neither the text nor the author wins outright. The absence ofany ethic ofalluding gives rise to yet anotherrendering of 'Who, me?' It's suggested here that another incarnation ofguilt's strange temporality arisesthrough interpellation, in the sense ofbe- ing described forcefully from the outside.That accounts for some ofthe un- easeendemic to that self-description which is a grudging assenr to interpel- lation, while any confiding 'let me tell you about myself' must herald a blatanr lie. Robert Frost, asked what one of his poems had meant, is said to have

replied, 'You want me to say it worse?' In a possible reversal of this ratio, some lines which directlyargue thesequestionsofnationalistic, literary,and 'narcissistic' self-description are wheeled out in my third chapter, since they chew over some preoccupations (rehearsed throughout other chapters in prose) with Echo, with anrerioriry, and with the limits of notions of self- knowledge, all in [he light of the follies ofaesthetic self-presentation. The polemical aim here is to cut a so-called creative writing'sdiplomatic immu- nity to critique and to render its claims less distinct from those granted to any language. Poetry often reduces to a decorative feature those elements which prose has suppressed within itself If poetry's stance-what it's actu- ally proposing about the world-is rarely examined, conversely the consid- eration ofprose's affect is instead redirected towards poetry.There's an inex- plicable reverence for the narcotic adjective 'poetic', whose arrival on the scene heralds the death of thought; any dealer in the diazepam ofthe poetic nor only slips by but is allowed free passage instead ofbeing shot on sight. Perhaps this is because ofpoetry's status as prose's alibi, so that poetry can function as the unexplo red but sanctified repository for whatever irrational

I!"TRODUCTION 19

elements prose may suspect it harbours within its own confines. and may wish to evacuate. An intention in these pages is to render the domainofpo- etry less artificially protected. Such a status rather resembles that protection once granted to certain classes ofwomen: a respectful contempt. Lucretius' vivid maxim 'the wounded fall in the direction oftheir wound'

furnishes the motto for my fourth chapter, which moves from linguistic wounding and the forms of its horrified contemplation to the possibilitiesof linguistic healing. Here the fixity ofwhat I am, in the notion of my self- ascribed 'character', hovers strongly. Vet Aristotle, tough-minded, would have cut clean through such niceties by insisting that character ishabitual action-so that to be a good information technologist consists in comput- ing data well (although what it is to be a good husband may resist such briskness). Bytheir fruits ye shall know them. for thequestion ofacting well isdetermined retrospectively, on results, and not byany appeal to the nature of the doer. Reiteration's impact makes an appearance here. in the effects, not ofany character's 'obscure hurt' of the sort which troubled HenryJames. but ofdeterminedly inhabiting some injury to found a whole identity The last chapter introduces irony's possible work, not as a satirist, bur as a pow- erfully productive contributor to the political. It suggests that verbal irony (not that ofa situation or a temperament) is. far from being a mark ofdis- engagement. vital-this. despite its historically doubtful reputation . and ir- respective of its endless possibilities as costume. Since there are likely to be perpetually irritated 'identities' and only ambiguousgains in fresh categories oftheself. there is politicaladvantage in irony. It offersan antidote to lonely disappointment. while it both mimes and enunciates a hope ofchange for the better. If an apt rejoinder to some aggressive interpellation might be, 'But what interest do you yourself have in consigning me to that harsh cat- egory; why do you want me to be that bad thing?'. such a rurning of my at- tention towards my accuser's frameof mind would demand an extraordinary and competent detachment ofme. But irony,which emerges in the oddness ofsome reiterated name as it rears up for scrutiny. might offer a less fortu- itous route to emancipation .: Language, luckily. cannot bear to stand on its own dignity for long. No

sooner have I fumbled my way towards The Word< ofSelves as my somewhat ponderous title for this volume than, of its own accord. it has happily som- ersaulted into The Swords ofElves-apt enough for the puny defences af-

20 INTRODUCTION

forded to us through brandishing personal identities, My sole justification for so porrenrousa title is this criss-crossing ofits letters. a felicitousaccident which enacts a theme of the essay by becoming apparem to me only in ret- rospect and not as a result ofany authorial ingenui ty, but of the sheer inge- puiry ofthe language. Or, apart from the ever-presem chance ofsuch spon- taneous verbal corruption, even the inflection allowed to a single word will change the sense of the whole sentence, bored children must still mentally run through a sentence to alter its meaning by heavily emphasising each of its words one by one. But what, in practice, does the reiteration of the word itself bring about? We talk and listen at a time of idenrificarory rage and of confessional directives, even if this gratifies no one for very long. What may cause this will to be to falter, if it overhears itselfenough? The categories of the self, repeated a thousandfold, pass through early consolidation and set- tlement, and gradually fan out towards disinregrarion , via folly. Rehearsed enough, any identification may come to sound increasingly bizarre and strangely rhinglike, much in the way that any common word primed too many times on one page will leap Out, absurd, its sense suddenly drained out of it. But th is effect of absurdity, which may helpfully puncture a bloated category. will only corneabout within the particularhistorical circumstances enfolding it. T hen a politics ofirony makes itself felt, if namelessly. Irony, as the rhetorical form ofself-reflexiveness, is also turned outwards to the world. T he sheer irerabiliry of names, including typologies ofpeople, may generate an ironic recoil in theirostensible subjects. Notalways; remorseless hammer- blowsofaggressive speech. or the corrosive slow dripping of venomous nam- ing. may weardown their targets but not themselves. Irony's failuremay, at times. be marked as racism. Yet- although. to reiterate the mantra, only un- der part icular historical and therefore linguistic conditions-Echo herself may generate the ironic.This is anotherofthose enticing moments at which a tangible materiality oflanguage floods into its referents. For irony, as a pos- sible outcome of the excessively repeated word, does not rise th rough this sonorousness alone but through a critical crossover point at which the sheer noise ofthe word's reiterated sound clashes with both the established mem- ory and the anticipation of its semantic sense. This irony embodies the rec- ognition, driven by Echo, that something is going wrong once the word's reoccurrences come to erode its former meaning. Echo is my figureoftrans- formative reiteration.This phenomenon is not onlyofaesthetic interest: it is

INTRO DUCTION 21

as evident in the history of the degeneration and crumbling ofpolitical cat- egories as it is in theirpresent. Nothing can be guaranteed about the time of such ruination. Sluggishnessand torpor may long hold sway. Yet even within them, an abruptly effective work for the ironised subject may be to counter some false politicisation of the immediately 'ethnicised' subject. It is within the earsof its own speakers that reiteration will first start to

ring hollow and perhaps to hint at the uses of its own corruption orsenes- cence. Adequate exemplification here would be endless. An earlier attempt played our one long illustration-ofthe category of 'women' as both an in- escapablyambiguous irritant to, yet the ground for, feminist politics and the corresponding need to tolerate and exploit this ambiguity through a tactical agility and foxiness." Here Ican onlyhint at a few more possibilities, ifscat- tered over a broader ground. The reader is also asked to tolerate some fluc- tuations in the 'I' used in the following pages. Usually this is the impersonal orgeneric first person. but sometimes it will seep into the personal form, and where I've noticed that it's done so, I've exaggerated the slippage, in or- der to make it undefended. A blurred indeterminate ! runs counter to a common tendency to erect a strong partition between those academic and psychoanalytic theories that interrogare the concept of identity, and the tacit supposition that sustained doubt about the conceptual integrity of my per- sonal! is merely neurotic. Acuriouslyschizoid division oflabour has arisen, in which the theoretical! has to be cross-examined in the name of intellec- tual vigour at the very same moment that the personal! has to be affirmed in the name ofemotional health. Thesepages propose, instead, that the per- sonal ! will suffer its endemic misgivings and instabilities, but for the sound- est historical-linguistic reasons (there is a continuum between these two), while the theoretically conceived self, if it stays indifferent to the impact of this everyday linguistic fact, must remain ahistorical and limply inadequate to the task it has set itself. Bur this 'subject' of theory might be animated by historicising the first person: admitting both its semantic and its syntactical quirks, its anxieties of identification, and its fertile constraints.