Writing Places and Mapping Words

Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu lqskiego vv Katowicach nr 1561

Writing Places and Mapping Words

Readings in British Cultural Studies

Edited by David Jarrett, Tadeusz Rachwal and Tadeusz Slawek

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sl^skiego

Katowice 1996

Editor of the Series History of Foreign Literatures ALEKSANDER ABLAMOWICZ

Reviewer EMMA HARRIS

On the cover Illustration by George Cruikshank from More Hints on Etiquette, 1838 included in UCLA Center for 17th- and 18thcentury Studies William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Los Angeles, University of California), p. 30

Executive Editor Jerzy Stencel Technical Editor Alicja Zaj^czkowska Proof-reader Lidia Szumigala

Copyright 1996 by Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sl^skiego All rights reserved

ISSN 0208-6336 ISBN 83-226-0668-0

Published by Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sl^skiego ul. Bankowa 12B, 40-007 Katowice

First impression. Edition: 200 + 50 copies. Printed sheets: 14.25. Publishing sheets: 20. Passed to the Printing House in September 1996. Signed for printing and printing finished in December 1996. Order No. 438/96 Price zl 10,

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Table of Contents

Introduction John Storey Francis B. Curtis Popular Culture and British Cultural Studies . . . .

7 11

What's in a Name? The Linguistic Role of Educational Discourse in Defining the Field of British Studies . Four Clichs and a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies Geography' . . .

27

David Jarrett

51 69 82

Linden Peach Martin Thomasson Tadeusz Rachwal

Internal Difference and the 'New

Me and My Tribe: Some Thoughts on Community for the Twenty-first Century ' M y Tongue Is My Paper'. On Philadelphus Inodorus and on Mapping Indian Territories in the Eighteenth Century Gender gland The Identity and Garden Design in Victorian En-

93

Susan Ford

106 of Scotland Ian Hamilton Finlay, the 135 117

Donald Wesling Tadeusz Slawek

Matter

Aphrodite and USS Enterprise. Garden, the Suburban

Ian Bell

A People in Question. Perceived Contradictions in the Political Language of Ulster Unionism Against graph Photography. Reading Barthes on the Photo-

157

Robert Jensen

169

Adrian Page

Creativity as Cultural Studies: The Transition from Media Studies to Media Practices

183

Table of Contents

Mary Kehiliy and Anoop Nayak George Hyde Nol Gray

The Geometry of Man: New Angles on the Male Body? .

192

Approaching Edges Streszczenie Rsum

The

Waste Land

206 215 225 227

Introduction

Harold Bloom declares in a Newsweek interview of November 7, 1994 that 'Literary studies have been taken over by the astonishing garbage called cultural criticism'.1 Such apocalyptic assertions are not unusual in academic controversy in the US. They are predicated on two significant assumptions: one is the Arnoldian belief in the dichotomy of high versus low culture, and in Bloom's terminology literary studies would belong to the former, appropriately located at the University, to the exclusion of the popular concerns of cultural criticism. The second assumption belongs to a wider philosophical agenda which announces the collapse of Western value systems that have invigorated arts and pedagogical traditions. Bloom continues: 'I am fighting a rear-guard action and [I am aware] that the war is over and we have lost.' This nostalgic terminology of the lost battle seems inappropriate from the perspective of the present volume which, as we perceive it, does not position itself at any of Bloom's polarities and does not exclude, as Bloom would suggest, traditional fields of study without simultaneously annexing them. Central to this problematic is the question of boundary, border, or edge which figures repeatedly and variously in this volume, though without the rhetoric of conquest and defeat. We focus on the notion of boundary also for ethical reasons as we reject Bloom's philosophy of culture according to which 'the utility of literature is to teach us not how to talk to others, but how to talk to ourselves'. Rather than learning, or teaching, how to talk to oneself, this volume opens up spheres of the other in the realm of culture and reading.

David Jarrett, Tadeusz Rachwal, Tadeusz Stawek

From the perspective of the humanities in particular, practices and theories associated with cultural studies in Britain are generally accommodated in educational structures, often modifying, rather than simply opposing, the conventions of traditional disciplines. Course development in institutions of higher education (notably but not exclusively in what are known as 'new universities') from the 1970s on has played a part in rendering the modifications less apocalyptic than Bloom's scenario, though the 'theory wars' still cast shadows into present practice. This potential for revisioning of traditional academic fields is particularly useful in the context of a rigid academic and institutional structure of a central European university with its rigorous division into specialties and disciplines. One of the reasons why we have decided to publish this book in Poland is to demonstrate two major aspects of cultural studies. One, more general, emphasises the necessity of theoretical work aiming at the ability to decode, particularly in a dramatically changing political and economic context, cultural artefacts and processes not restricted to a canonically defined domain of high arts. The other aspect deals with the way in which this theoretical work must find a reflection in university curricula. The task is crucial at a time when so far homogenous and relatively uniform culture is being constantly challenged and infiltrated by cultural models previously alien to it. So, this book addresses at least three types of audience. First, those already engaged in any kind of cultural analysis in Britain and elsewhere; second, those in Poland and Central Europe seeking cultural redefinitions; third, those trapped on either flank of Bloom's binary divide. Of course, the same person could figure in each of the above categories. The figure of the map appears in several essays included in the volume, which in itself is an attempt at mapping the territories of cultural studies and their practices. Such an undertaking always emphasizes multiplicity, provisionality and heterogeneity. The notion of culture which surfaces from the papers is not a static and stabilizing concept. The notorious ambiguity of the idea of culture is critically recognized by Herder's statement: 'Nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods.'2 The refusal of cultural essentialism and universalism is thus a part of the project of cultural studies; the 'map' which the volume offers is more an image of process than an administratively charted domain of a discipline. Hence disruptive questions are asked in the discourse of cultural studies concerning the very notion of border, allowing for re-reading of the texts which construct the reality of the everyday. In this volume, Nol Gray turns the 'border' into a key notion of his thinking about culture which, located either in the ideal, imagination-defying realm of the

Introduction

Platonic ideality or precisely at the level of the imagination, never presents itself as the ultimate demarcation line (beyond which culture 'ends') but, rather, as continuous movements of 'edges' and 'borders'. As Linden Peach argues in his paper, the postmodern project inverts the modernist hierarchy (in part defended by George Hyde's essay) which privileged history over geography and wants to see society in terms of the socio-spatial rather than the socio-temporal where space is not merely a background of social relations, but constitutes a dense network of 'microgeography of human interaction and exchange'. Peach, as well as Martin Thomasson, seems to endorse Henri Lefebvre's vision of social space as 'an encounter, assembly, simultaneity', the territory where 'everything [meets] that there is in space, everything that is produced either by nature or by society'.3 As David Jarrett and Francis B. Curtis demonstrate, this kind of encounter of diverse forces can take place in such specific realms as the formation of a British Studies curriculum for a Polish university as well as in administrative and ideological assumptions detectable in the act of naming and renaming of educational institutions in Britain. Tadeusz Rachwal engages the same problematic in the context of colonial appropriation of nature by language as part and parcel of Europe's cultural expansion while Susan Ford reads Victorian garden design as a space where gender identity is inscribed. The domain of popular culture, grandiosely dismissed by Bloom, is surveyed in John Storey's investigation of various approaches to mass culture from Matthew Arnold to the postmodern. Storey's remarks on 'misrecognition' as the main mechanism of advertisment are enlarged upon by Mary Kehilly's and Anoop Nayak's study of representations of the male body in advertising. The attention paid in cultural studies to the techniques of advertising and the production of public icons can produce, according to Adrian Page, the empowerment to transform cultural contexts. Page explores the radicalizing potential of Delia Grace's photography and Madonna's challenging manipulation of the media. The emergence of popular culture and the everyday, including the public discourses of advertising and private disourses of biography and emotion, have been influenced formatively by Roland Barthes' reworking of approaches to culture qua semiotic theory. Robert Jensen's essay characterizes the tensions between the public and the private dimensions of photography through a critical appraisal of Barthes' notions of 'studium' and 'punctum' and in his aesthetics of loss and mourning. The notion of loss comes back in Donald Wesling's essay on contemporary Scottish experience which embodies various narratives of a 'state-

10

David Jarrett, Tadeusz Rachwal, Tadeusz Siawek

less nation' whose culture has been all too often 'mapped' by others. This implies also a further project of escaping, through the theoretical work done with Bakhtin's concept of dialogue, the monological closure of 'essentialist' Scotland. In an essay which, like Tadeusz Rachwal's, offers a model for kinds of inquiry which could be undertaken in the field of cultural studies, Tadeusz Slawek analyses Ian Hamilton Finlay's reworkings of pastoral traditions as well as political tensions implicated in them.Political issues are more directly and polemically approached by Ian Bell who critiques the validity of rhetorical and administrative strategies by which consecutive British governments have justified the constitutional position of Ulster within the UK. The variety of essays is then in itself a rejection of Bloom's rhetoric of war which is for him a dominating metaphor for the thinking practiced in academia. The multiplicity of positions and the range of subjects represented here disallow Bloom's campaign map which reduces the varieties of intellectual inquiry to two monolithic and monologic groups characterized, with Augustan loftiness, as the 'civilized', sedentary elite, and the nomadic, mobile 'rabble'. We believe that the field of cultural studies can thrive on forms of 'conflict' and 'struggle' without 'entrenching' itself along an intellectual Maginot line. David Jarrett, Tadeusz Rachwal, Tadeusz Slawek

Notes
Time constraints as well as the diversity of style sheets use have made the complete standardization of referencing conventions impossible. For this reason two standards are used throughout the present volume. 1 'We Have Lost the War', an interview with Harold Bloom, Newsweek, November 7 (1994), p. 60. 2 Quoted in R. Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1976), p. 89. 3 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 101.

John Storey

Popular Culture and British Cultural Studies

The study of popular culture has changed enormously over the last thirty or so years. In short, it has become academically respectable to study popular culture. Moreover, its entry into academia has broadened the range of texts and practices deemed worthy of study, and changed many pedagogic practices along the way. This process is evident in the disciplines of history, literary studies, and art history, for example. But the study of popular culture has also been central to the formation (in Britain) of new academic disciplines; communication studies, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, media studies, women's studies, etc. The aim of this essay1 is to suggest a map of the development of the study of popular culture within British cultural studies. It is of course difficult to draw a clear borderline between the study of popular culture within cultural studies and, say, the study of popular culture within historical studies, literary studies, anthropology or sociology. Some of the examples of work I shall refer to here might, for example, just as easily be used to chart the development of the study of popular culture within another academic discipline; history, for example. However, although the borderline might be difficult to draw, it does, nevertheless, exist. Perhaps the best way to register this difference is to describe the specific history and assumptions of British cultural studies. Although it is possible to point to degree programmes, to journals, to conferences and associations, there is no simple answer to this guestion. The first problem any attempt at definition encounters is whether or not cultural studies is simply the study of contemporary culture. Richard Johnson (former Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,

12

John Storey

University of Birmingham), for example, describes cultural studies as 'a process, a kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge; codify it and you might halt its reaction'.2 However, in recent years it has become increasingly fashionable for the term cultural studies to be used to describe any approach to the study of culture. At the risk of seeming sectarian (and out of step with the interdisciplinary aims and spirit of cultural studies), I find it very difficult to accept this usage.3 I think there is a difference between cultural studies and other ways to study culture (for example, 'culture studies' or the 'sociology of culture'. Traditionally, an academic discipline is defined by three criteria: first, there is the object of study; second, there are the basic assumptions which underpin the method(s) of approach to the object of study; third, there is the history of the discipline itself.

The Object of Study: 'Culture' in British Cultural Studies

John Fiske, a leading figure in the study of popular culture within British cultural studies, maintains that 'culture' in cultural studies, is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political'.4 What he means by this is that the object of study in cultural studies is not culture defined in the narrow sense, as the objects of aesthetic excellence ('high art'); nor, in an equally narrow sense, as a process of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual development; but culture understood, in Raymond Williams's famous appropriation from anthropology, as 'a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group'. 5 This is a definition of culture which can embrace the first two definitions, but also, and crucially, it can range beyond the social exclusivity and narrowness of these, to include the study of popular culture. Therefore, although cultural studies cannot (or should not) be reduced to the study of popular culture, it is certainly the case that the study of popular culture is central to the project of Britisli cultural studies. Finally, cultural studies regards culture as political in another sense, one which reveals the dominant political position within British cultural studies. Here is part of the conclusion to Stuart Hall's essay, 'Notes on Deconstructing "The Popular"
Popular culture . . . is an arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist

Popular Culture and British Cultural Studies

13

culture already fully formedmight be simply 'expressed'. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why 'popular culture' matters.4

Others within British cultural studies might not express their attitude to popular culture quite in these terms, but they would certainly share Hall's concern to think culture politically.

A Brief History of Popular Culture and British Cultural Studies

According to Hall's influential account of the formation and development of British cultural studies (written when he was himself the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham), the key point to understand is that 'there are no "absolute beginnings" and few unbroken continuities. . . . What is important are the significant breakswhere old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes'.7 What follows is an attempt to chart the history of the study of popular culture within British cultural studies, making particular reference to four significant breaks: culturalism, structuralism (including poststructuralism), Gramscianism (the rediscovery of the work of the Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci), and postmodernism. I will begin, however, with an approach to popular culture which in many ways constitutes the prehistory of British cultural studies, the so-called 'culture and civilisation' tradition. The 'culture and civilisation' tradition is founded on the assumptions of Matthew Arnold and elaborated in the theory and practice of F. R. Leavis and the Leavisites gathered around the English journal Scrutiny. Arnold's attitude to culture is organised around the binary opposition, which is also the title of his most famous work, Culture and Anarchy.8 Although Arnold had very little to say directly about popular culture, his importance for an understanding of the formation and history of British cultural studies is that he inaugurates a particular way of seeing, a particular way of mapping the field of culture. Arnold established a cultural agenda which remained dominant from the 1860s to the 1950s. At the centre of the Arnoldian perspective is his celebrated definition of culture as 'the best that has been thought and said'. The work of the men and women of culture is to know the best, and then to make the best prevail. Knowledge of the best will result from 'disinterested and active use of reading, reflection,

14

John Storey

and observation'. Once this is achieved, the men and women of culture must endeavour to get 'our countrymen to seek culture'. However, when we read Arnold closely, it becomes increasingly clear that the real function of culture (premised on a very limited definition of 'our countrymen') is to produce a cultured middle class; a class with the necessary cultural authority to be hegemonic. The working class are always to be on the side of 'anarchy', always in a relation of binary opposition to 'culture'. All that is required of them is that they recognize their cultural difference and acknowledge cultural deference. Arnold is very clear on this point. Here is Arnold in 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time':
The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

And here is Arnold in 'The Bishop and the Philosopher':

The highly-instructed few, and not the scantily-instructed many, will ever be the organ of the human race of knowledge and truth. Knowledge and truth in the full sense of the words, are not attainable by the great mass of the human race at all. 10

If the mass of humankind is to be always satisfied with inadequate ideas, never able to attain truth and knowledge, for whom are the small circle working? And what of the adequate ideas they will make currentcurrent for whom? Culture, as the best that has been thought and said, will never be embraced by all, its true function is to police through strategies of difference and deference, the unruly and disruptive forces of the popular. F. R. Lea vis takes these Arnoldian assumptions and develops them in actual accounts of, and encounters with, popular culture. Although his work spans a forty-year period, his attitude to popular culture is formed in the 1930s, with the publication of three works: Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, Fiction and the Reading Public (by Q. D. Leavis) and Culture and Environment (written with Denys Thompson).11 Together these three books establish the basis of the Leavisite approach to popular culture. Like Arnold, the Leavisites believe that 'culture has always been a minority keeping'. The problem, however, is that the cultured minority can no longer command deference for its values and its judgements. There has been what Q. D. Leavis refers to as a 'collapse of authority'. The minority find themselves in 'a hostile environment'. The Arnoldian project has faltered: 'mass civilisation' and its 'mass culture' pose a subversive challenge, threatening 'to land us in

Popular Culture and British Cultural Studies irreparable

15

chaos'. It is against this threat that Leavisism proposes 'resistance by an armed and active minority'. 12 It is easy to be critical of the 'culture and civilisation' tradition's approach to popular culture. Given the recent developments in the field of cultural theory* it is almost enough to present a narrative of its approach to condemn it to 'populist' disapproval. However, it must be remembered that from a historical point of view, the tradition's work is absolutely foundational to the project of the study of popular culture within British cultural studies. Moreover, the impact of the tradition is difficult to underestimate: for almost one hundred years it was undoubtedly the dominant paradigm in cultural analysis. Indeed, it could be argued that it still forms a kind of repressed 'common sense' in certain areas of British and American academic and non-academic life. Culturalism was born in critical dialogue with both Leavisism and mechanistic and economistic versions of Marxism. 13 The educational space opened up by the Leavisites was occupied by the culturalists in ways which eventually challenged many of the basic assumptions of Leavisism. Taken together as a body of work, the contributions of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson and the early work of Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel,14 clearly mark the emergence into partial visibility of a significant part of what is now known as the British cultural studies approach to popular culture. The early institutional home of these developments was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, established in 1964, at the University of Birmingham. The founding text of culturalism is undoubtedly Williams's T h e Analysis of Culture', from The Long Revolution.ls Its detailed attention to the category of culture has had enormous influence. Williams distinguishes between three ways of thinking about culture. First, there is 'the "ideal" in which culture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values'. Second, there is the 'documentary' record; the recorded texts and practices of culture. Third, 'there is the "social" definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a particular way of life'. It is the third definition which proved fundamental to the founding of culturalism. On the basis of the 'social' definition of culture, Williams introduces three new ways of thinking about contemporary urban culture. First, the 'anthropological' claim that culture is a description of a particular way of life. Second, the claim that culture 'expresses certain meanings and values'. Third, the claim that the work of cultural analysis should be the 'clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture'. In addressing the 'complex organisation' of culture as a particular way of life, the purpose of cultural analysis is always to understand what a cul-

ture is saying, what a culture is expressing: 'the actual experience through which a culture was lived'; the 'important common element'; 'a particular community of experience'. In brief, to reconstitute what Williams calls the 'structure of feeling': the shared values of a particular group, class or society. Taken together, the three aspects embodied in the 'social' definition of cultureculture as a particular way of life, culture as an expression of a particular way of life, and cultural analysis as a method of reconstituting a particular way of lifeestablish both the general perspective and the basic procedures of culturalism. Moreover, Williams's 'social' definition of culture made the study of popular culture a central concern of cultural analysis. Structuralism is a method of approaching cultural texts and practices which is derived from the theoretical work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.16 Certain key ideas and a particular vocabulary from Saussure have passed from linguistics into British cultural studies. Roland Barthes's Mythologies17 represents the most significant attempt to bring the methodology of semiology (the structuralist study of 'signs') to bear on popular culture. It is also, like Williams's 'The Analysis of Culture', one of the founding texts of British cultural studies. The book is a collection of essays on French popular culture, written by Barthes in the 1950s. The aim of the book is to make explicit what too often remains implicit and unnoticed in the texts and practices of popular culture. Its guiding principle is to always interrogate 'the falsely obvious', the 'what-goes-without-saying'. As the 'Preface' makes clear, Barthes 'resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn'. Barthes's method is an elaboration of Saussure's model of language. He takes the schema 'signifier/signified = sign' and adds to it a second level of signification. The first level of signification (identified by Saussure) he calls 'primary signification' or 'denotation', the second level he calls 'secondary signification' or 'connotation'. He then maintains that it is at the second level of signification that what he calls 'myth' is produced and consumed. By myth, Barthes means ideology understood as ideas and practices which defend the status quo the 'bourgeois norm' and actively promote the interests and values of the dominant classes in society. Myth is the turning of the cultural and the historical into the natural, the taken-for-granted. Like structuralism, post-structuralism is largely a French importation into British cultural studies. Marxist poststructuralism entered British cultural studies in the early 1970s with the translation into English of the work of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.18 In a poststructuralist re-reading of Marx, Althusser formulated two new concepts: the 'problematic' and the 'symptomatic reading'. The task of an Althusserian critical practice is to deconstruct the text's problematic; to perform a 'symptomatic reading'.

Popular Culture and British Cultural Studies

17

is Pierre Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production.19 In the essay, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses',20 Althusser retheorizes the Marxist concept of ideology as a material practice reproduced in and through the practices and productions of the Ideological State A p p a r a t u s e s . In this formulation, 'all ideology has the function (which defines it) of "constructing" concrete individuals as subjects'. Ideological subjects are generated by acts of 'hailing' or 'interpellation': made subjects of, and s u b j e c t e d to, specific ideological discourses and subject positions. When, for example, I am told by an advertisement that 'people like you' are turning to t h i s or that product, I am being interpellated as a member of a group, but, more importantly, as an individual 'you' of that group. I am addressed as an individual who can recognize myself in the imaginary space opened up by the pronoun 'you'. Thus I am invited to become the 'you' spoken to in the advertisement. But for Althusser, my response to the advertisement's invitation is an act of ideological 'misrecognition'. First, it is an act of misrecognition in the sense that in order for the advertisement to work, it must invite many o t h e r s who must also (mis)recognize themselves in the 'you' of its discourse. Second, it is a misrecognition in another sense: the 'you' I (mis)recognize in the advertisement is in fact a 'you' created by the advertisement. Thus the advertisement flatters me into thinking I am the special 'you' of its discourse and by so doing interpellates me as subject of, and subjected to, its material practices. By the late 1970s the influence of Althusserianism began to wane. Paradoxically, the challenge came from the writings of a man who had died while Althusser was himself still a student, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. The change begins with the translation into English of Selections From Prison Notebooks in 1971.21 The key concept in the British cultural studies reading of Gramsci is undoubtedly 'hegemony'. Since the mid-1970s it has been the central concept within British cultural studies. Part of the appeal of hegemony is that it seems to enable a dialectical coming together of the strengths of culturalism ('we make culture') and the strengths structuralism ('we are made by culture').22 I will say more about 'hegemony theory', shortly, when I discuss the 'basic assumptions' of British cultural studies. In recent years there have been attempts to develop and elaborate Gramsci's concept of hegemony by fusing it with the work of Michel Foucault, especially the Foucault of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.23 Of particular interest has been Foucault's understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power. Like Gramsci, Foucault does not see power as a negative force, something which denies, represses, negates; power is for Foucault a productive force. As he claims in Discipline and Punish:
2 Writing Places

Undoubtedly the most sustained attempt to apply this method of reading

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John Storey

'power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth'. Postmodernism has many meanings, in many different debates and different discourses. Although the term has been in circulation since the 1870s, it is only in the 1960s that we see emerging what, at least in terms of the study of popular culture, is now understood as postmodernism. It is in the 1960s that we find the celebration of what was then called a 'new sensibility'. Central to the new (postmodernist) sensibility is a refusal of what the German critic Andreas Huyssen24 calls 'the great divide', the categorical distinction between high art and popular culture. It is a sensibility in revolt against the canonization of modernism as 'official' culture. No longer scandalous and bohemian, modernism had lost its ability to shock and disgust the bourgeoisie. Instead of outraging from the critical margins of bourgeois society, the work of Bertolt Brecht, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, etc. has not only lost the ability to shock and disturb, it has become central, classical, the canon. Modernism's incorporation lead to a re-evaluation of popular culture. This can be seen in the pop art movement which developed in Britain and America in the 1950s and early 1960s. It is even more evident in the cultural attitudes and practices of both the American counterculture and the British underground of the 1960s. However, by the time the discourse of postmodernism crossed from mainly describing a set of cultural practices, and an accompanying sensibility, to become a description of a cultural condition (i.e. from Britain and America to France), in the 1970s, its tone had grown less optimistic. In The Postmodern Condition,2S Jean-Franois Lyotard defines postmodernism as 'incredulity towards metanarratives'. Thus postmodernism is said to signal the collapse of all universalist metanarratives with their privileged truth to tell, and to herald instead the increasing sound of a plurality of voices from the margins, with their insistence on difference, on cultural diversity, and the claims of heterogeneity over homogeneity. Angela McRobbie,26 a leading figure in British cultural studies, claims that this has enfranchised a whole 'new generation of intellectuals (often black, female, or working class)'. These voices from the margins, speaking from positions of difference, have challenged theoretically (and by their very presence in academia) the metanarrative of the categorical distinction between high and popular culture. This is the metanarrative that all postmodernists agree has collapsed, the Arnoldian distinction between high culture as 'culture' and the culture of everyone else as 'anarchy'. According to the French sociologist, Jean Baudrillard,27 the western capitalist democracies have ceased to be economies based on the production of things and have become economies based on the production of images

Culture and British Cultural Studies

19

and information. These are societies of the 'simulacrum'. In the realm of the postmodern, the distinction between simulation and the 'real' continually implodes; the real and the imaginary continually collapse into each other. The result is hyperrealism: the real and the simulated are experienced as without difference. These are societies in which men and women regularly make offers of marriage to characters in soap operas; where television villains are regularly confronted in the street and warned about the possible future consequences of their villainous behaviour; where television doctors, television lawyers and television detectives regularly receive requests for help and advice. In a very influential essay, 'Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism',28 the American Marxist Fredric Jameson distances himself from the positions of Lyotard and Baudrillard when he insists that only Marxism can explain postmodernism. For Jameson postmodernism is more than just a particular cultural style, it is above all 'the cultural dominant' of late or multinational capitalism. This is capitalism in its purest form, reaching the parts of the social formation that other stages of capitalism were unable to reach. According to Jameson, postmodernism is marked by pastiche, depthless intertextuality, and schizophrenia. It is a culture in which 'real' history is displaced by the history of aesthetic styles. The result is a discontinuous flow of perpetual presents. Moreover, according to Jameson, the postmodern collapse of the distinction between high and popular culture has been gained at the cost of modernism's critical distance. Postmodern culture is a culture complicit with the aims of capitalism. This is Frankfurt School pessimism at its most pessimistic. The challenge of postmodernism to British cultural studies (Jameson excluded) is at its most critical in its critique of the practice of ideological analysis. According to some theorists, postmodernism challenges the very notion of ideology. Baudrillard, for example, claims that modernity was the era of what he calls the 'hermenuetics of suspicion', the search for meaning in the underlying reality of appearances. Marx and Freud are cited as examples of this mode of thinking. However, the hyperreality of the postmodern calls into question the claims of ideology (and the connected claims of 'representation'). There is no 'real' behind the appearance, no beyond or beneath, where ideological critique can take hold to deconstruct representation. For example, Rambo doesn't represent a type of American thinking on Vietnam, it is a type of American thinking on Vietnam. Representation does not stand at one remove from reality, to conceal or distort, it is reality. Thus the revolution of postmodernism is a revolution against ideological analysis and the claims of representation, and thus-it challenges one of the fundamental assumptions of British cultural studies.
2

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John Storey

Some Basic Assumptions in British Cultural Studies

All the basic assumptions of British cultural studies are Marxist. This is not to say that all practitioners of cultural studies are Marxists, but that cultural studies is itself grounded in Marxism. All its major texts are informed, in one way or another, by Marxism; whether or not their authors regard themselves as Marxist, post-Marxist or rhetorical Marxists (using the rhetoric, vocabulary, models, etc. without, necessarily, having a commitment to the politics). Marxism informs British cultural studies in three basic ways. First, to understand the meanings of culture we must analyse it in relation to the social structure and its historical contingency. Although constituted by a particular social structure with a particular history, culture is not studied as a reflection of this structure and history. On the contrary, British cultural studies argues that culture's importance derives from the fact that it helps constitute the structure and shape the history. Second, cultural studies assumes that capitalist industrial societies are societies divided unequally along ethnic, gender and class lines. It is argued that culture is one of the principal sites where this division is established and contested: culture is a terrain on which there takes place a continual struggle over meaning, in which subordinate groups attempt to resist the imposition of meanings which bear the interests of dominant groups. It is this which makes culture ideological. Ideology is without doubt the central concept in the methodology of British cultural studies. The American theorist James W. Carey has even suggested that 'British cultural studies could be described just as easily and perhaps more accurately as ideological studies'.29 (This is why Baudrillard's critique of ideological analysis is, potentially, so damaging.) There are many competing definitions of ideology, but it is the formulation established by Stuart Hall in the 1980s,30 which is generally accepted as the dominant working definition within British cultural studies. Working within a framework of Gramsci's concept of hegemony, Hall developed a theory of 'articulation' to explain the processes of ideological struggle (Hall's use of 'articulation' plays on the term's double meaning: to express and to join together). He argues that cultural texts and practices are not inscribed with meaning, guaranteed once and for all by the intentions of production; meaning is always the result of an act of 'articulation' (an active process of production in use) within specific social relations. Together with Gramsci, the other principal influence here is the Russian theorist Valentin Volosinov. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,31 Volosinov argues that meaning is determined by the social context in which

jwtnlar Culture and British Cultural Studies

21

it is articulated. Cultural texts and practices are 'multiaccentual'; that is, they c a Q be articulated with different 'accents' by different people in different contexts for different politics. When, for example, the Black British rap group, the Ruthless Rap Assassins32 use the word 'nigger' to attack an embedded institutional racism, it is articulated with an 'accent' very different from the 'accent' given the word in, say, the Neanderthal ramblings of a neo-Nazi. This is, of course, not simply a question of linguistic struggle a conflict over s e m a n t i c s b u t a sign of political struggle about who can claim the power and the authority to define social reality. The cultural field is defined by this struggle to articulate, disarticulate and rearticulate cultural texts and practices for particular ideologies, particular politics. In this sense 'meaning is always a social production, a practice. The world has to be made to mean'.33 Therefore, because different meanings can be ascribed to the same cultural text or practice, meaning is always the site and the result of struggle. A key question for British cultural studies is: why do particular meanings get regularly constructed around particular cultural texts and practices and thereby achieve the status of 'commonsense', acquire a certain taken-for-granted quality? However, although the cultural industries are a major site of ideological production, constructing powerful images, descriptions, definitions, frames of reference for understanding the world, British cultural studies rejects the view that ordinary people who consume these productions are 'cultural dopes' victims of 'an up-dated form of the opium of the people'. As Hall insists,
That judgement may make us feel right, decent and self-satisfied about our denunciations of the agents of mass manipulation and deceptionthe capitalist cultural industries: but I don't know that it is a view which can survive for long as an adequate account of cultural relationships; and even less as a socialist perspective on the culture and nature of the working class. Ultimately, the notion of the people as a purely passive, outline force is a deeply unsocialist perspective.34

In contrast, the field of culture is for British cultural studies a major site of ideological struggle; a terrain of 'incorporation' and 'resistance'; one of the sites where hegemony is to be won or lost. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,35 the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, argues that distinctions of 'culture' (whether understood as text, practice or way of living) are a significant aspect of the struggle between dominant and subordinate groups in society. Through the course of the book he shows how arbitrary tastes and arbitrary ways of living are continually transmuted into legitimate taste and the legitimate way of life. Bourdieu writes of 'the power of the dominant to impose, by their very existence, a definition of excellence which, being nothing other than their own way of existing'. Taste, is for Bourdieu, a profoundly ideological discourse: it

functions as a marker of 'class' (using the term in the double sense to mean both socio-economic category and a particular level of quality). The consumption of culture is 'predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social difference'.
Bourdieu's purpose is not to prove the self-evident, that different classes have different lifestyles, different tastes in culture, but to interrogate the processes by which the making of cultural distinctions secures and legitimates forms of power and control rooted in economic inequalities. He is interested not so much in the actual differences, but in how these differences are used by the dominant class as a means of social reproduction.

As I suggested earlier, British cultural studies maintains that the field of culture is always a site of ideological struggle. Part of this struggle takes the form of a vigilant policing of the boundaries between dominant and popular culture. British cultural studies maintains that the difference between dominant and popular is a matter of 'form' rather than 'content'. What must be policed is the categoriesthe categorical differences. The content of these categories can change, and does change; it is the distinction between them, and more importantly, the distinction between their occupants (for these are, ultimately, 'social' rather than aesthetic' categories), which is of crucial importance and must be policed at all cost. There are those, within and without cultural studies, who believe that British cultural studies's model of ideological struggle leads (in some versions almost inevitably) to an uncritical celebration of popular culture: 'resistance' is endlessly elaborated in terms of empowerment and pleasure, while 'incorporation' is quietly forgotten. The most recent advocate of this thesis is Jim McGuigan in a book called Cultural Populism (1992).36 The focus of McGuigan's critique is what he describes as 'an uncritical populist drift in the study of popular culture'. His principal example is the work of John Fiske.37 McGuigan contends that Fiske's work has reduced the study of popular culture within British cultural studies to an uncritical celebration of the 'popular' reading. Although McGuigan is careful not to suggest this, the logic of his position would seem to dictate that a certain school of feminism within British cultural studies (perhaps the dominant school)38 should also be singled out for his critique. Feminist work within British cultural studies has made an enormous contribution to the study of popular culture. More than any other approach, it is feminism which has made the final break with the assumption explicit in the 'culture and civilisation' tradition (but implicit elsewhere) that the study of popular culture is always the study (from a 'respectable' distance) of the culture of 'other people'. Rosalind Coward's Female Desire,39 for example, does not approach women's pleasure in popular culture as an 'outsider . . . a stranger. . . . The pleasures I describe are often my pleasures. . . . I don't approach

Popular Culture and British Cultural Studies

23

these things as a distant critic but as someone examining myself, examining my own life under a microscope'. This is a discourse about 'our' culture. Another example (one that has become central to the concerns of British 40 c u l t u r a l studies) is Ien Ang's Watching Dallas, an analysis of a segment of the Dutch audience for the American prime time soap Dallas. Ang is also c o n c e r n e d with female pleasure. Again, like Coward, she writes as 'an intellectual and a feminist', but also as someone who has 'always particularly l i k e d watching soap operas like Dallas'. As she explains, 'The admission of the reality of this pleasure . . . formed the starting point for this study I wanted in the first place to understand this pleasure, without having to pass judgement on whether Dallas is good or bad.' This is a debate between what might be called 'cultural populism' and 'cultural pessimism' (between cultural populists and cultural pessimists). My own view (and I draw attention to it because it has almost certainly informed the construction of this narrative) is that people make popular culture from the repertoire of commodities supplied by the cultural industries. I also believe that making popular culture ('production in use') can be empowering to subordinate and resistant to dominant understandings of the world. But this is not to say that popular culture is always empowering and resistant. To deny the passivity of consumption is not to deny that sometimes consumption is passive; to deny that the consumers of popular culture are not cultural dopes is not to deny that at times we can all be taken in. But it is to deny that popular culture is little more than 'a degraded landscape of schlock' (to quote Fredric Jameson,41) imposed from above in order to make profit and secure ideological control. The best of British cultural studies insists that to decide these matters requires vigilance and attention to the details of the production, distribution and consumption of culture. These are not matters that can be decided once and for all (outside the contingencies of history and politics) with an elitist glance and a condescending sneer. Nor can they be read off from the moment of production (locating meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, etc. in, variously, the intention, the means of production or the production itself); these are only aspects of the context(s) for 'production in use' and it is, ultimately, in 'production in use' that questions of meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, etc., can be (contingently) decided.

British Cultural Studies: A Contested Terrain

Any attempt to map the development of a specific field of study will always tell a particular story, establish a particular narrative path. This essay is no dif-

24 ferent. there

John Storey

Although I am satisfied with the general details here, I am aware that are other ways to tell this story, other routes through the material. I am also aware that although you may recognize the general features of the map this essay suggests, you may not at times feel entirely satisfied with the details. Other essays (with other details) will tell it differently. As many others have pointed out, British cultural studies has always been, and continues to be, a contested terrain.42

Notes
This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the Universidade de Evora and later published in The European English Messenger, 3:2 (1994). I would like to take this opportunity to thank Sandi Michele de Oliveira, President of the Organizing Committee of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies, for inviting me and the British Council for funding my visit. 1 For a fuller version of this analysis, see John Storey, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993); John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, A Reader (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994); John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). 2 Richard Johnson, 'What is Cultural Studies Anyway?', Social Text, 16 (1986/87). 3 As Lawrence Grossberg points out: 'Many of those now describing their work as cultural studies were attacking cultural studies only a few years ago although they have not changed their project in the interim. Many of those who now appropriate the term want to read only very selectively in the tradition. While I do not believe one has to read everything, it is helpful to read enough to orient oneself.' We Gotta Get Out Of This Place (New York: Routledge, 1992). See also Cary Nelson, 'Always Already Cultural Studies: Two Conferences and a Manifesto', Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association, 24:1 (1991). 4 John Fiske, 'British Cultural Studies and Television', in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1992). 5 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). 6 Stuart Hall, 'Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular"', in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Ralphael Samuel (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). 7 Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms', in Culture, Ideology and Social Process: A Reader, ed. Tony Bennett et al. (London: Batsford, 1981). 8 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 9 Matthew Arnold, Poetry and Prose (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1954). 10 Matthew Arnold, Complete Prose Works, Vol. Ill (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77). 11 F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930); R. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977); Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978). 12 Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public.

Popular Culture and British Cultural Studies

25

13 Culturalism also rejects the 'cultural pessimism' of Frankfurt School Marxism. The Frankfurt School's work on popular culture is mainly associated with the writings of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, because of his distance from the critical mainstream of the School, is usually excluded from general critique). The term 'culture industry' was coined by Adorno and Horkheimer to describe the processes and products of mass culture as uniform, predictable, and to the trained ear or eye, transparent. Unfortunately, for most people it is culture. The culture industry produces culture which the 'masses' consume unthinkingly and are thus confirmed as unthinking. It is a culture which produces satisfaction in the here and now, depoliticizing the working class, limiting its horizon to political and economic goals that can be achieved within the oppressive and exploitative framework of capitalist society. The culture industry manipulates and indoctrinates. 14 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990); Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (London: Hutchinson, 1964); Williams, The Long Revolution-, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). 15 Williams, The Long Revolution. 16 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Fontana, 1974). 17 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973). 18 Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1969); Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar) (London: Verso, 1970), and Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 19 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 20 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy. 21 Antonio Gramsci, Selections From Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). 22 See Tony Bennett, 'Introduction: Popular Culture and the Turn to Gramsci', in Popular Culture and Social Relations, ed. Tony Bennett et al. (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), and Hall, 'Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms'. 23 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), and The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (Harmondsworth, London, 1981). 24 Andreas Huyssen, After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1986). 25 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 26 Angela MacRobbie, 'Postmodernism and Popular Culture', in Postmodernismu ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: ICA, 1986). 27 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). 28 Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitaism', New Left Review, 146 (1984), and 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto, 1985). 29 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 30 Stuart Hall, 'The Rediscovery of Ideology: the Return of the Repressed in Media Studies', in Subjectivity and Social Relations, ed. Veronica Beechey, James Donald (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), and 'On Postmodernism and Articulation', Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10:2 (1986). 31 Valentin Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press, 1973). 32 Ruthless Rap Assassins, Killer Album (Murdertone/EMI, 1990). 33 Hall, T h e Rediscovery of Ideology'.

26

John Storey

34 Hall, 'Notes on Deconstructing "The Popular"'. 35 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984). 36 Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London: Routledge, 1992). Other recent critiques include David Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure (London: Routledge, 1992); Keith Tester, Media, Culture and Morality (London: Routledge, 1994); David Chaney, The Cultural Turn (London: Routledge, 1994). 37 See John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987); Reading the Popular (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), and Understanding Popular Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 38 See, for example, Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies (London: Comedia, 1993): Janice Winship, Inside Women's Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987); Christine Geraghty, Women and Soap Opera (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 39 Rosalind Coward, Female Desire: Women's Sexuality Today (London: Paladin, 1984). 40 Ien Ang, Watching Dallas (London: Methuen, 1985). 41 Jameson, 'Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'. 42 See John Storey (ed.), What Is Cultural Studies? (London: Edward Arnold, 1996).

Francis B. Curtis

What's in a Name? The Linguistic Role of Educational Discourse in Defining the Field of British Studies

Introduction
Imagine you are a prospective British Studies student considering several UK universities, colleges or institutes of Higher Education for further study. Irrespective of whether you come from within or outside the UK your decision where to study will be mediated by a variety of factors, both personal and public. The classified advertisements, institution brochures and prospectusus piling up on your desk claim to offer British Studies curricula to suit your needs: The British Electoral System? Privacy and Press? British Sport Today? British Food? Contemporary British Writing? The nature of your ultimate curriculum choice, however, is by no means customised on the one hand or objectively stable on the other, i.e. it does matter where you study, Preston or Portsmouth. The discipline boundaries of your British Studies curriculum have already been, and continue to be formed within a powerful set of national and institutional discursive practices. The national discourses originate crucially in the 1988 Education Reform Act, the first in a series of statutes which have transformed the national education landscape by constructing specific 'British' identities through the funding and management of Higher Education and also through the establishment of a National. Curriculum for schools. The institutional discourses relate to the specificities of place, name organizational and curricular culture represented by the actual university, college or institute

28

Francis B. CurtisIWh^

of Higher Education where you register to study. I will consider the Chichester Institute of Higher Education, my own non-university but Higher Education institution on the coast of a maritime county, West Sussex, to illustrate these specificities. Here I have the impetus of both Pierre Bourdieu's classic study of French academic life, Homo Academicus and Tony Becher's examination in Academic Tribes and Their Territories of British academics and their perceptions of discipline territorialities. This paper will argue that the linguistic signifying practices of national statutory bodies in education, e.g. the Higher Education Funding Councils and the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority embody particular notions of Britishness as do the linguistic signifying practices of local Higher Education institutions like the Chichester Institute of Higher Education. My understanding of 'text' in the discusssion is an expanded one, including written discourse but also more versatile cultural practices familiar from the work of Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur and Clifford Geertz. Sources and participant observation methodology will relate, therefore, not only to what Ian Hodder terms the 'mute evidence' (393) of documents but also to institutional artefacts, rites and rituals. The intertextualities between the national educational discourses of heritage, managerialism, manufacturing, finance, delivery and charters and the local, institutional discourses operating at the Chichester Institute of Higher Education will be interpreted as recursive phenomena demonstrating that national discourses are subject to confirmation, challenge and negotiation locally in intertextual play. In broadly Foucauldian (1971) terms I will want to argue that these discursive transformations lead to a number of possibly unsettling conclusions for the prospective British Studies student e.g. that defining British Studies today in the United Kingdom involves recognising a State-preferred definition emanating from the centre but contested and confirmed locally and institutionally. Defining the field of British Studies, therefore, implies a constant tension and instability deriving from different pressures of legitimization. These are national, e.g. Department for Education and local, e.g. Chichester Institute of Higher Education, with a network of discourses already constructing any curriculum for British Studies. An analysis of the range of register variation and discourse genres (Montgomery, 1993) in operation yields valuable insights into how British Studies is represented. I hope the ensuing discussion will show that British Studies curricula, like Fichte's 'Philosophy' quoted below, are not portable, substitutable or disposable: they are rooted, if not in the archeology of the individual soul, at least in the cultural and linguistic archeology of Higher Education territories:
The philosophy someone chooses depends on what kind of person they are: because a philosophical system is not like some dead mouse at home which we can sweep

yyhlt'fina Name? The Linguistic Role of Educational Discourse...

29

aside or let be at our whim. No, it is rather shot through with the soul of the person who believes in it.
(Fidite, 1797, my trant.)

I refer throughout to 'British' Studies and 'Britishness', recognizing t h a t m o s t o f the statutory legislation quoted has force in England (where my own institution is located) and Wales. Comparable legislation is in force in

Northern Ireland and Scotland, however.

British Studies and National Discourses: The Funding of Teaching and Research
At national level in the United Kingdom since the early 1990s seismic changes in the educational landscape have been taking place as a result of legislation. The Education Reform Act (1988) created, for the first time in British history, a National Curriculum for schools. The Further and Higher Education Act (1992) abolished the so-called 'binary' system of funding Higher Education which had operated up to then: those institutions designated 'universities', i.e. the traditional universities, had been funded separately from the other higher education institutions designated polytechnics or colleges. This Act brought all of H.E. under a single funding structure with funding councils set up for institiutions in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The funding council responsible for England, and hence for the Chichester Institute of Higher Education, is the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The Act also permitted the polytechnics to apply for re-designation as universities, with new names, providing they satisfied certain criteria of size, level of work etc. I shall discuss the significance of this naming development in the latter part of this paper when discussing British Studies and the Chichester Institute of Higher Education. Two sets of discourses may be identified as characteristic of, and flowing from, this legislation. They are part of a 'discursive network' (De Bolla, 1989:9) fundamental to United Kingdom education in the early 1990s and are to a degree oppositional, evidence that defining British Studies is an exercise in negotiation and change. The first set is grounded in the discrete discourses of consumerism, enterprise, competition, managerialism, delivery, finance and quality. The second set defines itself through the discourses of heritage, tradition, charters and autonomy. While both sets constitute a network discernible throughout all national sectors of educational provision it is noteworthy that elements of the first are emphasized more in Further and

30

Francis B.CurtisIWh

Higher Education and those of the second more in the school sector. This could indicate a central government political perception that it is necessary to invest the years of mandatory schooling with a hegemonic culture of Britishness in terms of familiar, comfortable stereotypes, i.e. continuity, evolution, homogeneity. What is striking about the 1988-94 period, however, is the rapid and tempestuous pace which has occurred in institutional change and the speedy, pervasive adoption in speech and print of these discourses. All this in a Kingdom whose citizens generally like to believe that their institutions evolve gradually over lengthy periods of time. I would like to deal initially, from a national perspective, with those discrete discourses which have penetrated the practices of funding Higher Education. The starting point here is consumerism, a political and ideological commitment to make publically funded services like Education responsive to its so-called 'customers' or 'clients'. While one of the constant difficulties in Higher Education is to sort out who exactly is 'the customer' (student? government? taxpayer? employer?) the metaphorical shift from e.g. 'student' to 'customer' discloses a linguistic framework whose implications for power, control and definition I have explored elsewhere within a technological, educational context (Curtis, 1993:96-113). In the United Kingdom this preoccupation with consumer power has led to the emergence of a government initiated phenomena known as 'chartism'. Numerous 'charters', which detail the rights of consumers in terms of e.g. compensation should the services they use not meet specific performance standards, have been produced. Over 20 of these have been created by H. M. Government, applicable to 'customers' of organizations like British Rail and the National Health Service. In 1993 the Government issued its Higher Quality and Choice: the Charter for Higher Education. All Higher Education institutions were asked to produce charters appropriate for their own students. The University of Wolverhampton, for instance, established its corporate identity early by setting up a higher education shop and became the first university to win a Charter Mark from the Citizen's Charter Unit at the Cabinet Office. One of the shop counsellors is reported as saying 'We are the living prospectus, the window on the university' in an article entitled 'Charter Marks' published by The Guardian (December 6, 1994). The resonances of 'charter' are nostalgiac and stereotypically British Magna Carta, natural justice, the curbing of oligarchic power a term that belongs to the second set of discourses while 'consumerism' belongs firmly to the first. The Romantic poet William Blake, countering in his poetic-visual discourse the ownership charters of the eighteenth century, suggested that 'charters' operate rather by exclusion than by enforcing universal rights <n his poem 'London'.

yyhlt'f in a Name? The Linguistic Role of Educational Discourse... I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
(line. 1-2)

31

This position, adopted by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man in 1791-2 a g a i n s t Edmund Burke, interpreted 'charters' as monopoly power ceding concessions only:
It is a perversion Of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effectthat of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few . . . The only persons on whom they operate are the persons whom they exclude . . . Therefore, all charters have no other than indirect operation.
(242)

On this reading, 'charters' actually work deferentially and provisionally. Blake was just sixteen years old when the thriving colony of New England faced commercial disaster following the withdrawal of its charter by Lord North's government in December, following the Boston Tea Party. This action by Britain precipitated the Declaration of Independence. Higher Education charters, which are entirely laudable, are still essentially guidelines to good practice invariably qualified in their language by references to the constraints of funding. The market idea of 'student as consumer' has affected the funding and management of Higher Education in the United Kingdom quite profoundly with a profusion of discourses derived from business and commerce. The development of a management ideology has been documented elsewhere (e.g. Holmes, 1993:4-8) and needs no rehearsal here. Key words in these discourses are 'delivery' and 'quality'. The delivery metaphor is now common, both in oral and written form, in Education. It is to be found in writing
Task 3: Evaluation of Quality of Teaching at Point of Delivery
(Ellington and Ron, 1993:18)

In making their assessments, assessors will be concerned with the management and delivery of the curriculum
(HEFCE Circular 3/93, 13)

and in oral utterances:

How do we make sure that the delivery of the research is at the right level, that the results are actually being delivered?
(CIHE December 7, 1994)

'Delivery' will certainly be recorded in both a present and future corpus as a 1990s word. As Ronald Carter noted in his inaugural lecture at the University of Nottingham on December 3, 1992:
Language simultaneously reflects and encodes social and cultural patterns . . . Words always move into semantic spaces left vacant or created by shifts in ideology and cultural practices.

The conceptual model implicated by the word 'delivery' is of course that of transportation with its connotations of destination (hence the contemporary preoccupation with 'learning outcomes'), speed and delivery as related items in the lexical field. If Education, in its processes and practices, can be represented discursively in terms of 'delivery' then the implications for teaching and learning but particularly for curriculum design e.g. in British Studies are clear. Definite boundary markers, geographical and historical, are likely; curriculum content and assessment will be coupled but separated from teaching method as the norm, i.e. 'the vehicle of delivery', teaching by teachers, becomes divorced from, not integrated with a separately and externally defined curriculum content. Railtrack owns the track and stations, Southern Central the rolling stock. The alternative metaphorical resonance of'delivery' within the discourse of childbirth is not used. Unpredictability of outcome and duration, struggle, and commitment are not predicated of teaching and learning processes even though they are fundamentally characteristic of them. It is in the funding of Higher Education and in the assessment of Quality, whether of teaching or of research, that a managerialist discourse is particularly evident but significantly, terms from the first set of discoursesconsumerism, enterprise, competition, delivery, managerialism, finance and quality exist with those from the second set, i.e. heritage, tradition, charters and autonomy. The design of degree-level, award bearing curricula in British Studies is subject to a number of pressures arising from national legislative requirements for quality control. These pressures have obliged curriculum designers to focus increasingly on single-subject perspectives which might indeed be part of multi-disciplinary schemes of study but which discourage interdisciplinarity. Quality Audit, which focuses on an institution's own procedures for ensuring quality assurance, is the responsibility of the Higher Education Quality Council, a company set up by the traditional universities in May, 1992. However, scrutiny of the quality of teaching provision in a specific disciplinary or subject area is the statutory responsibility of the three regionally based Higher Education Funding Councils. In England, HEFCE assessors evaluate the quality of provision in different subjects on the basis of reading a self-assessment document

yyhlt'f in a Name? The Linguistic Role of Educational Discourse . . . prepared by the four day visit to

33

subject department in possible conjunction with a three to the Department. Quality is defined as 'fitness for purpose' and grades awarded are 'Excellent', 'Satisfactory' or 'Unsatisfactory'. This enables comparisons between departments to be made public and league tables to be published. While the methodology is by peer evaluation, a significant proportion (to date, nearly 20%) of the assessors are not academics but are subject professionals drawn from nonacademic environments. The methodology is kept constantly under review and has changed substantially since April 1995, yet whatever the definition of 'Quality' the process involves a series of quality checks with a public result easily publishable by the media as a league table result. Where departments are visited, assessors have, effectively, three days to gather and sift further evidence to judge the quality of provision. It is easier to cut than to weed: on these timescales, complex interdisciplinary curricula are less easy to evaluate. Compression has the familiar distorting effect of simplifying responses when evaluating 'Quality' in curriculum areas which are generated from more than one discipline. The risk that British Studies curriculum planners will tend towards incremental and separatist modes of design are greater rather than lesser within a discursive space whose lexicon of quality includes 'criteria', 'academic management and control' and 'delivery'. A further pressure comes in the form of the national Research Assessment Exercise which determines the amount of funding which each higher education institution, subject by subject, receives for the quality of its research. Again, based on numerical ratings from 1 to 5, derived from publications or equivalent, subject departments receive funding corresponding to their research rating, the higher the rating figure, the more funding they receive. The 1996 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) will have 69 Units of Assessment: the language used in the HEFC November 1994 Circular describing these articulates a discourse of packaging and mensuration. Academic subjects and disciplines are defined as 'units' which require to be separated clearly from each other like packets: 'The description of UOAs, in order that these might be amended to ensure that the boundaries between UOAs might be more clearly marked.' Present here also is the discourse of geographical mapping and territoriality with the word 'boundaries' and the header 'Mapping onto 1992 UOAs' (3,5). Although there is a UOA for American Studies there is none for British Studies or Cultural Studies. Instead, Celtic Studies (UOA 49) is separate from English Language and Literature (UOA 50). Therefore Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities are nostalgically positioned as 'Celtic': nonGaelic cultural territory is absorbed into English Language and Literature. A particular orientation of Britishness is being subtlely defined. Add to this the tendency now to hire staff on the basis of their research record and the role of the RAE in staking out British Studies curriculum territory is
3 Writing Places .

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Francis B. CurtisIWh^

pivotal. Interdisciplinary, representing the flux, change and networking of past and contemporary Britain, becomes harder to achieve in a finance-led environment where teaching staff cannot be entered for more than one Unit of Assessment. The managerialist discourses in the quality assessment of Teaching and Research have produced a widespread lexicon expressing change, instability, competition and market segmentation when it comes to decision-making and allocation of funds. The principles underlying the processes leading to these decisions, nevertheless, are constantly portrayed in discursive language stressing stability, partnership and balance. Sir Ron Dearing, first Chairperson of the HEFCE, stated in the Annual Report 1992-93 that HEFC's initial task was 'to provide a unified funding method which while dealing even-handedly with institutions will allow them to pursue their distinctive missions'. Professor Graeme Davies, former Chief Executive of the Universities Funding Council and the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council became the HEFCE Chief Executive. He stated HEFCE policy in relation to the institutions it funded as 'We see the colleges and universities as partners'. He characterised the outcome of the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise as 'representing a fair and balanced assessment of the relative research strengths of different departments' and, looking back over the Council's 1992/3 year, concluded ' . . . the Council has taken care to provide stability and to ensure that no institution has to face unmanageable change in the level of its funding' (1, 8-9). It is undoubtedly true that e.g. the HEFCE has and does consult widely, disseminate ideas and information and discharge its statutory duties with robustness and transparency. Its relations with national professional and academic associations, e.g. the Council for College and University English are developing with mutual respect and greater partnership overall in its methodology, which is kept constantly under review. The network of discourses within which the discrete discourse of partnership is held includes, nonetheless, reverse discourses of competition and hierarchy. I have argued so far that the winds of national educational discourse in Higher Education do shift but the prevailing direction continues towards a curriculum ideology which privileges single discipline curriculum design, assessment and single subject research focus. This, I suggest, has significant implications for the funding, design and teaching of degree-level British Studies programmes. Working its way up the age range in the United Kingdom is a national curriculum for schools which raises additional issues concerning the power of discourse. These deserve some analysis with reference to the specific subjects of English and History. I will consider English first.

in a Name? The Linguistic Role of Educational Discourse . . .

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British Studies and National Discourses: The National Curriculum for Schools
There are ten subjects in the National Curriculum of which English is compulsory until the age of 16 and History compulsory until age 14. There is not space here to document the turbulent political, social and educational development of the National Curriculum since its genesis in the 1988 Education Reform Act. The National Curriculum Council established in 1988 was reformed and renamed the School Curriculum and Asssessment Authority in 1994. English, a core subject, has been the focus of two controversial, major reports on the identity of English by Professor Cox and Sir John Kingman during the life of the National Curriculum Council and an intense debate has been conducted through the British media between teacher professionals, ministers and other public figures on it. Only relatively recently have academic staff teaching English in Higher Education seen any connection between English National Curriculum developments and the future of English in Higher Education. This has led to e.g. co-operation between members of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) and the Council for College and University English (CCUE). The cardinal points of the debate about English on 'content' or Programmes of Study, have revolved around the notion of Standard English, written and spoken, and proposals defining what reading students ought to undertake during the statutory years of schooling. Successive English committees appointed either by the NCC or the SCAA have kept the teaching of written and spoken Standard English in the Programmes of Study for English and have defined, by specification, the identity of prescribed reading for 7-16 year olds. The references and text to the Programmes of Study in English and History which follow have all been taken from the final version of the National Curriculum Orders. Reading at certain stages and levels should, for example, include works from 'the (my italics) English literary heritage', two plays by Shakespeare and fiction/poetry of 'high quality' by writers 'with well established critical reputations' (20). These Programmes of Study for English have been constantly attacked from various quarters of the English teaching community across all sectors of provision. Tony Burgess, for example, has described the English proposals as: 'an ignoramus's curriculum, ill-informed, traditionalist, minimalist, predicated on exclusions'(45). It is not difficult to see the force of these points when presented with the detail of Attainment Target 2: Reading with its discourse of heritage and discursive resonance of charters. The list of writers and texts presented in the Reading Programme of Study has already been produced by a process of filtration,
3

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as it were, whose sediment has been hidden from public view and is now discarded. In one respect the list is another exponent of charter discourse which I have discussed earlier, citing William Blake's poem 'London'. Blake's city is a chartered territory of the river and streets. The poem supports Tom Paine's arguments on rights and liberties directed against Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in the context of political agitation in Britain during 1791-3. The 1995 reading list, published almost exactly two hundred years later, is a disturbing echo of Burke's position: reading cannot be claimed as a right but is bestowed upon school-age readers and their teachers by the authority of the SCAA and Department for Education. Several linguistic and rhetorical features of the list referring to reading at Key Stages 3 and 4 deserve mention. The list reads:
In the course of Key Stages 3 and 4, pupils' reading should include: two plays by Shakespeare

drama by major playwrights, e.g. Christopher Marlowe, J. B. Priestley, G. B. Shaw, R. B. Sheridan-, two works of fiction of high quality by major writers, published before 1900, drawn from those by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, John Bunyan, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Anthony Trollope, H. G. Wells; two works of fiction of high quality by major writers with well established critical reputations, whose works were published after 1900, e.g. William Golding, Graham Greene, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark; poems of high quality by four major poets, whose works were published before 1900, drawn from those by Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Blake, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Qare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Donne, John Dryden, Thomas Gray, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare (sonnets), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edmund Spenser, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry Vaughan, William Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Wyatt; poems of high quality by four major poets with well established critical reputations, whose works were published after 1900, e.g. T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas, W. B. Yeats. e Pupils should be introduced to a wide range of non-fiction texts, e.g. autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries, letters, travel writing, leaflets. They should be given opportunities to read texts that show quality in language use, and portray information, issues and events relating to contemporary life or past experience in ways that are interesting and challenging. f Pupils should be introduced to a wide range of media, e.g. magazines, newspapers, radio, television, film. They should be given opportunities to analyse and evaluate

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37

such material, which should be of high quality and represent a range of forms and purposes, and different structural and presentational devices. (20)

discriminates between required, or statutory reading and or non-statutory reading. Roman type functions to identify the former and italics the latter. The non-statutory reading still conceals forms o f 'chartered' authority, nevertheless, as I shall indicate presently. The list is differentiated typographically with the effect of focussing squarely upon, in Roman type, 'the English literary heritage in previous centuries'. Two plays by Shakespeare have to be read whereas the choice of other drama is discretionary. Fiction and poetry writers before 1900 are fixed in Roman, reader autonomy is restricted to the act of selection from a prepared list. Post 1900 fiction and poetry appears to offer discretion with italicised e x a m p l e s but roman type fences off autonomy by specifying the criteria of 'high quality . . . well established critical reputations'. The media material e x e m p l i f i e d in italics under T , similarly, should be of 'high quality'. The discursive field of heritage is represented here grammatically, lexically and t y p o g r a p h i c a l l y . Grammatically, the use of the definite article in 'the English literary heritage' defines a boundary which is constituted historically. Lexically, 'heritage', 'major', 'high quality', 'well-established critical reputations' betoken values achieved diachronically over lengthy periods of time. Typographically, the foundation Roman type is reserved for pre-1900 statutory prescriptions and italics, a later Rennaissance development, used for non-statutory examples. The concept of 'quality' throughout is either Darwinian or, in the case of media texts, apodictic. Either way, writers using English are included only if their work has stood the test of considerable time and their English is British English rather than Afro-American, Caribbean, Asian or Southern Hemisphere English. The discourse of heritage embedded in the English Programme of Study is to be found pervasively in the Curriculum Orders for History also. Explicit references to the learning of British history is a feature of the British focussed history curriculum for pupils aged 11-14: 'b aspects of the histories of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales; where appropriate, the history of Britain should be set in its European and world context' (4). The phrase 'where appropriate' denies any necessary link between Britain and other countries or their peoples. Of the 13 Study Units available, 8 are based firmly on British history: Life in Tudor Britain, Victorian Britain, Crowns, Parliaments and Peoples are all present in a curriculum which skims the twentieth century, i.e. near contemporary history rather than studying it in some depth as in e.g. Victorian Britain. Neither has the economic relevance of British heritage in the National Curriculum been lost sight of by commentators working within consumerism discourse. Laurie Taylor, General Education Advisor for the
The list non-required

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W h ^ J P a Name? The Linguistic Role of Educational Discourse WhaXJ

Department of Employment, writes in a recent issue of Teaching History. "Yet Britain does have an economically very important "heritage" industry i which depends on people with interests, knowledge and expertise in this country's history and culture. Heritage needs to be developed, managed and marketed just like any other industry' (8). The economic discourse of heritage, to apply Peter Bolla's distinction (9-10), thus assimilates the educational discourse on heritage in a network of discursive pracitice which, potentially, threatens attempts to develop British Studies curricula dealing with the complexities of Britain's past. As Robert Hewison remarks in The Heritage Industry 'Hypnotised by images of the past, we risk losing the capacity for creative change' (10). The National Curriculum subjects of English and History are discursively aligned somewhat in parallel as regards the framework of heritage. The focussing effects of tradition, chronology and geographical boundary marking in the day to day teaching/learning of these key school subjects are by no means incidental to the processes of higher education British Studies curriculum development. In conjunction with the discursive signifying practices I have discussed so far in the funding of higher education teaching and research they are telling cultural influences in forming concepts of national identity. I turn now, for the second part of this paper, to the role of institutional culture in defining the field of British Studies.

British Studies and Institutional Culture

My focus here, as participant observer, is the recently re-named Chichester Institute of Higher Education, formerly the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education. I will consider the significance of the new name and the process which led up to it, together with dimensions of its organizational culture and subject discipline curricula. The Institute is currently in the early stages of planning a British Studies routeway to add to its BA modular degree portfolio. This latter part of the paper therefore, reflects aspects of the discussions which British Studies curriculum design at the Institute have considered. At the time of writing (January 1995) the Institute is preparing its documentation for the 1996 RAE and the 1996 Quality Audit from the Higher Education Quality Council. The departments of History, English, Music and Geography have been assessed for Teaching Quality by HEFCE and the Office for Standards in Education assessed the quality of teacher-training provision in Autumn 1994: approximately 40% of the Institute's full-time students are registered for teacher-training awards. The national discourses discussed so

far interpellate Institute academic life, particularly curriculum design, to a significant degree. It was possible in 1989 for Maurice Kogan to conclude that in Higher Education 'managerial, centralising and instrumental rhetoric [has] had some effects on structure and on the disposition and content of courses. It is not evident, however, that the underlying knowledge rules or intellectual ambitions have changed. Teaching in this respect may change whilst research and scholarship continue to change less in response to system d e m a n d s ' (134-5). We have already seen, however, that the strategic discursive frameworks in the early 1990s are only naively to be represented as e x t r a n e o u s to institutional practices. As Peter McLaren notes in his foreword to Ivor Goodson's School Subjects and Curriculum Change 'Disciplines do not possess a transparent logic but create meanings only insofar as they are discursively constituted in social/material practices' (x). One of these practices has been the re-naming of the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education to the new Chichester Institute of Higher Education. The change of name, while undertaken for the purpose of marketing the Institute and establishing a new effective corporate identity 'the new name reflects a new identity' (Prospectus, 2) has been part of a nationwide re-naming process in naming higher education institutions. The impact of these re-namings on defining and identifying the context for British Studies in individual institutions is of consequence. Since January 1992 all the Higher Education institutions previously called 'polytechnics' and some institutions known as 'colleges' or 'institutes' have changed their names. In the case of the former polytechnics and one institute this re-naming followed achievement of university status to match that of the so-called 'traditional' universities. The locii of authority for this re-naming has been analysed by John Wyatt, whose paper 'Re-labelling of English in H. E.' demonstrates the tension between the State-directed bureaucratic and academic peer forms of legitimation involved. The specific linguistic patterns of re-naming are revealing when the national picture is examined because what emerges is an overall orientation towards high prestige clusters of lexical items constituting many of the revised names. The toponymie phrases by which numbers of institutions have relabelled themselves resonate with cultural associations of personage, architecture, landscape feature, religion, urban particularity: these signify detailed features of British history and geography. They have been constructed from discourses of architecture, national biography, landscape, urban geography and religion. There were constraints imposed from the Privy Council on the choice of name, in order to avoid e.g. ambiguity of identity with a neighbouring institution (Wyatt, 1994:12). However, legitimation through the relative autonomy of each institution, what Bourdieu terms 'the viewpoint of perfect coincidence which it [the institution] adopts

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towards itself (27) has taken place. This shows consistent striving towards, if not exactly 'linguistic Utopias' (Pratt, 1987:67) at least legitimation through positive 'British' associations. Excluding Colleges of Art & Design and those colleges offering predominantly Further Education courses, 43 institutions have changed their names between 1992 and January 1995. Table 1 below shows five major categories of name change: the percentage of institutions in each category is given in brackets in the table below:
Table l Old Name 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Region Place Place Place or Region Place New Name Place (16%) Region (9%) Focussed name (19%) Addition of 'University' (49%) Addition of 'Metropolitan' (7%)

It has been widely assumed, following recent research into the perceptions of young UK applicants, that prospective higher education students identify more readily with places rather than regions. (Keen & Higgins). The figures above bear this out, yet some institutions have consciously marketed themselves by region, nonetheless. The institutions in category 3, for instance in Table 2 below are worthy of comment since their names are deliberately nuanced metonymically to produce particular associations of Britishness:
Table 2 Old Name Leicester Polytechnic Leeds Polytechnic Liverpool Polytechnic City of London Polytechnic Manchester Polytechnic Nottingham Polytechnic Oxford Polytechnic Sheffield City Polytechnic Thames Polytechnic Polytechnic of Central London New Name De Montfort University Leeds Metropolitan University Liverpool John Moores University London Guildhall University Manchester Metropolitan University Nottingham Trent University Oxford Brooks University Sheffield Hallam University University of Greenwich University of Westminster

The lexical items 'Metropolitan', 'John Moores', 'Brooks', 'Hallam', Trent', 'Thames Valley', 'Guildhall', 'Greenwich' and 'Westminster' all have positive, proud and prestigious connotations within British national, regional and urban histories.

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The 16% of institutions which have displaced their identity from a regional icon to a place name have, similarly, sought to promote specific histories l o c a t e d within a heritage tradition. My own institution, now re-named the C h i c h e s t e r Institute of Higher Education, is justly proud of the particular history relating to one of its two constituent colleges, the Bishop Otter College. Founded as an Anglican College in 1839 to provide higher education training for the Church's mission both at home and overseas, the College preserves a distinctive historical and architectural identity in the City of Chichester. The Chichester Institute of Higher Education is developing a parallel history to the genesis of the University of Southampton, as the Institute Prospectus makes clear: 'The University of Southampton has its origins in the Hartley Institute which was founded in 1862 and which in 1902 became a College of the University of London. In 1952 the University of Southampton was formed when it was granted a Royal Charter to award its own degree'(2). The Chichester Institute became a College of the University of Southampton with accreditation status in 1991 and is planning to achieve University status. These re-naming strategies by institutions have to be seen, nevertheless, within the contexts of the other national discourses penetrating the intellectual fabric of British higher education institutions in the 1990s. The managerialist and competitive hierarchical discourses consequent upon the funding methodologies in higher education work to buffet and erode institutional stabilities and notions of heritage. The tensions and pressures have been signalled in the non-educational national press 'Dons angry as colleges get above themselves' ran a headline in The Independent on Sunday for December 18, 1994 with the report that 'Vice-chancellors of the longer-established universities have written to Gillian Shephard, the Education Secretary, insisting that she should take action against higher education colleges which call themselves "university college" or use the subtitle "a college in the university sector'" (2). With the emergence of a mass system of Education in Britain without historical levels of resource being maintained the linguistics of naming take on greater significance in the moulding of institutional identities and missions. These in turn, of course, affect curriculum design and British Studies curricula are sited at a busy cross-roads. It remains to be seen what the future direction from these cross-roads the current naming patterns will take. As Hugh, the polyglot in Brian Friel's play Translations remarks 'But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happento use an image you'll understand it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact' (Act Two, Scene One). Imprisonment is not forever: parole, release and escape are all possible. I turn now to discussing some cultural and organizational characteristics of the Chichester

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Institute of Higher Education in order to highlight discursive practices relevant to British Studies.

British Studies at CIHE: The Organizational Culture

The West Sussex Institute of Higher Education renamed itself The Chichester Institute of Higher Education' with effect from January 1995. The new name digs deep into the discourse of heritage because it identifies the Institute culturally with the ancient Cathedral City of Chichester and the founding of Higher Education in the City with the establishment of Bishop Otter College from 1839. Any observer of 'the landscape of fact' will note that the Institute is sited on two campuses, one at Chichester and one at Bognor Regis, some seven miles to the east. Bognor Regis town is equally firmly identified in popular British culture as the source of frequent comic allusions since the death of George V. On his deathbed, refusing to be consoled by a reminder of former pleasant days at Bognor, George is alleged to have expired with the less than complimentary phrase 'B . . . Bognor' on his lips. Ever since a double-edged form of Royal Assent has been associated with Bognor Regis. WSIHE was formed in 1977 from two teacher-training colleges: Bishop Otter College, Chichester and Bognor Regis College, Bognor Regis. Amalgamation resulted from the national rationalization of teacher-training provision under the 1974-9 Labour Government. Bishop Otter College originated as a Church College of the Anglican Church and Bognor Regis College was established in 1945 as an emergency teacher-training college to train the teachers required by the 1944 Education Act. The Bognor Regis College buildings were concentrated initially upon a fine Regency Crescent dedicated to their founder, Sir Richard Hotham, who came to Bognor in first in 1787. Sir Richard gave his name to the location of a prestigious eighteenth-century bathing resort known during the period as Hothampton. In 1977 WSIHE was based physically and architecturally on a foundation of aristocracy and Anglicanism represented by its Regency and Victorian artefacts. The materiality of this architecture, carefully restored, renovated and tastefully adapted to modern needs, breathes a palpable historical presence. The architectural and decorative language is a material discourse of heritage whose aesthetics represent cultural values. Patrick Wright, who has commented extensively on Britain's architectural heritage, writes: 'In decisions about whether to "list" buildings as protected or not, or in the development of popular taste related to buildings, we were not just talking about buildings any more. Architectural

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had become a metaphor for the whole question of what culture is and where it is going and where it has been' (2). This architectural aspect of heritage discourse in the organizational culture is simultaneously endorsed but also modified by other features of institutional ethnography. I will comment now on other language manifestations of organizational culture: rituals and rites, the CIHE logo, and its Prospectus. Rites and Rituals are notable indicators of organizational culture (Trice and Beyer). They are repetitive community behavious which reveal the values and attitudes of the organization. At CIHE the induction of new students includes a ritual deriving from a Bishop Otter College tradition. This is the Trundle Walk' on the Sunday morning before the beginning of the Autumn Term. The College is situated a mile of so away from The Trundle', an iron-age hill fort site 670 feet above sea level which commands the countryside and coast for some considerable distance: it offers substantial views of the Isle of Wight across the Solent and also the Sussex Downs inland. The phrase Trundle Walk' embraces a long established tradition in which both students and staff walk from the College to the top of The Trundle in an atmosphere of sharing, co-operative endeavour. This sharing ritual is an emblem of commitment and community which symbolises the CIHE continuing ethos of care and concern for the individual student. The annual degree awarding ceremony which takes place each October is also expressive of these values. The event is held in the nationally renowned Chichester Festival Theatre, opened in 1962 in Oaklands Park, adjacent to Bishop Otter College. The Theatre, with its ampitheatre design and thrust stage, can accommodate a versatile range of traditional and contemporary productions. The degree ceremony itself is conducted so that every award is conferred individually in an atmosphere of quiet congratulation. The National Anthem is played and sung at the close of the ceremony, which is a significant discursive endorsement of heritage and national identity. This ritual is by no means widespread now at degree-awarding ceremonies and has been discontinued by many Higher Education insitutions. Its presence or absence stirs strong emotions: the Times Higher recently reported that the House of Commons M. P. George Carson has returned his Ph. D and Master's degree scrolls to Queen's University, Belfast because of its decision not to play the National Anthem at degree-awarding ceremonies in future. He wrote to Chancellor Sir David Orr, saying 'a militant minority and their non-academic abettors have triumphed' (January 6, 1994 : 2). Another ritual which has become familiar in Higher Education is the 'touching base' meeting: a variety of staff, often drawn from different Departments, are asked to produce a document on some aspect of the organization's operation. The 'touching base' metaphor is American and

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refers of course to the game of baseball, the archetypal communal and populist American sport. At CIHE the 'touching base' ritual is antedated by the beginning of year address to the staff by the Director, who takes care to introduce each new member of staff personally to the established staff. This form of 'touching base' continues with other forms of community sharing by staff of Institute-wide issues. A recent example (December 1994) included discussion of CIHE's Student Charter. Its title, 'A Commitment Charter' takes its discursive tone from the value of tradition and heritage in a Christian continuity and an early draft of the Charter stated: 'As the world is "fallen", no earthly institution is always right, no student is always right'. Significantly, this sentence has disappeared from the final draft because of a request from the Humanities and Arts Programme. The national education discourse of charters is interpreted, then, in terms of a local and specific institutional ethos, itself in oppositional debate. The language of the CIHE Prospectus and its new logo reveal a local organizational culture which endorses a heritage discourse yet at the same time signals a development from it. This is achieved lingistically through careful lexis choice and refined typographical signalling. The title page of the Prospectus, for instance, is dominated by the coloured and graphic CIHE achievement with its Latin motto 'DOCENDO DISCAMUS' (let us learn from teaching). This icon of tradition and heritage is flanked on each side by a set of print giving name and address information. On the left, italicised, is the phrase 'Chichester campus' and beneath in Roman type name 'Bishop Otter College' followed by the postal address 'College Lane, Chichester, West Sussex P019 4PE' and telephone number. On the left, italicised, is the phrase 'Bognor Regis campus' and beneath, in Roman type, the following:
The Dome Upper Bognor Road Bognor Regis West Sussex PO 21 1HR

Printed above the achievement in upper case bold letters is CHICHESTER INSTITUTE with 'of HIGHER EDUCATION' and 'A College of the University of Southampton' in smaller point type below. The discourses of heritage and Amricanisation mingle here, created by signifiers of tradition and modernity. Lexically, the word 'College' is capitalized and distributed attributively both as a pre-modifier for 'The University of Southampton' and as part of the noun phrases 'Bishop Otter College' and 'College Lane'. The linkages here are to heritage distinctiveness in topographical ownership ('College Lane'), ecclesiastical status ('Bishop Otter College') and established

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educational prestige ('University of Southampton'). The 'landscape o f fact', which is d u a l collegiality, is shifted westwards towards Chichester and

Southampton. The identity of Bognor Regis College is partly effaced by removing any reference to it as a College: it has post-1994 status as a 'campus' in the discourse of Amricanisation. The lexis representing Bishop Otter College positions it within both heritage and Amricanisation discourses, especially since the CIHE signboard in blue and gold at the bottom of College Lane also reads 'Bishop Otter Campus'. A final glance, now, at the typography of the new CIHE logo will conclude my comments on organizational culture. The logo, reproduced below, is an innovatory example of typographic signalling which promotes CIHE as both traditional and progressive in its educational ethos. The type is a digitally produced set of characters from an ornamental type family which has been modified by hand to represent values of continuity and change. The combination of serif and non-serif within individual characters, ligature effect and varying point size are designed to promote the image of an institute which is moving into the future whilst drawing upon its roots and traditions. This discussion of CIHE organizational culture deals only with limited aspects of its ethnography, with they are indicative. I will turn presently, in concluding the final section of this paper, to considering subject discipline auricula. In this consideration of organizational culture, however, it can be seen that CIHE has been positioned culturally within a heritage discourse long before the impact of e.g. the National Curriculum or Charters. Yet its marketing strategies, as evidenced by the Prospectus and logo are manifestations of a managerialism discourse operating within an education market. Colin Evans, in his ethnographic study English People of the teaching and learning of English in universities and polytechnics, characterizes Oxford University and North London Polytechnic as Traum and Wirklichkeit, respectively (99-109). The discursive formations at CIHE, discussed from the perspective of organizational culture, appear to have a share in both. The extent to which a future British Studies curriculum might be similarly positioned is developed now in the final section of this paper.

British Studies at CIHE: Academic Tribes and Territories

This final section will pay attention to some discourse strands in the curricula offered by English, History, Geography and Sports Studies at CIHE. I intend to comment on the implications for the identity of a British Studies

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curriculum in the light of curricula currently on offer. This discussion is necessarily somewhat uneven and highly selective in scope because of the complex range of curricula studied but, as with organizational culture, useful indicators do emerged/At the time of writing (January 1995) it is clear that a British Studies degree route at CIHE would be based on a core element provided by the Humanities Programme. English, History and Geography modules would contribute to this core and other disciplines from other Programmes, e.g. Sports Studies, could involve themselves. The traditions and curriculum histories of e.g. English and History, give some idea of how their modules might be constructed with reference to a British Studies core. When Bishop Otter College and Bognor Regis College joined together in 1977 to form WSIHE English at Chichester was already part of an interdisciplinary BA scheme with Religious Studies. The teacher-training philosophy of Bishop Otter College continued an interdisciplinary tradition in e.g. English, Art, Music and Religious Studies which was a distinctive feature of its provision. In 1982 a BA Related Arts degree with Literature, Dance, Art and Music was established and this development culminated in 1994 with the validation of an MA in Related Arts. The developing curriculum culture of English from 1977 onwards has been performative and creative in character. A Creative Writing Fellowship was established as early as 1979 and a Drama Fellowship followed in 1983. Patrick Garland, Director, Novelist, Actor and Teacher has forged enduring creative relationships between CIHE and the Festival Theatre, for example, English Studies at CIHE has bee embedded within a culture of production and action. Its curriculum debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s centred on the critical/creative dichotomy. The curriculum now offered by English to undergraduates permits various routeways with critical, creative or balanced paths. Many different types of writing are taught; assessment modes are diverse across all modules and include group projects, simulations, oral presentations as well as more familiar modes. This brief geneology shows roads not taken. There have been no initiatives from English staff to define English in terms of separate fields from linguistic, cultural studies, media, women's studies or literatures in English perspectives. These elements are incorporated pluralistically into English modules with e.g. Media Studies is a separate field which arose outside English. Several discourse strands in English, i.e. in English curriculum validation documents and in the voices of English teaching staff reveal the English ethos. Tony Becher's study Academic Tribes and Territories has amply demonstrated that 'the professional language and literature of a disciplinary group play a key role in establishing its cultural identity' (24). English staff signal their essentially active stance to the discipline in these terms, taken from the 1992 accreditation document Modular Scheme for BA Humanities Degree:

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Within these constraints, English has now determined that its proper focus is to provide opportunities such that every stage of learning literature is perceived as and becomes in reality 'a verb, not a noun . . . It has to be incarnated' (116) T h e voices of what Colin Evans calls 'English People' (Preface, xi) and the lexis of what Tony Becher calls 'Praising and Blaming' (1987:263) evince similar values: it is characteristic for English staff to praise the 'energy' of writing and

the 'passion' of critical and creative engagement with it. The curriculum history of History and Geography at CIHE from their genesis in the two separate teacher-training colleges have been influenced by national developments in teacher-training over the last decade and consequently by the National Curriculum issues discussed earlier. These disciplines do offer significant BA curricula, with several routeways. Recent innovations of significance in the context of British Studies deserve attention. In History, three Honours level modules have been designed and taught since 1992: 'Constructing National Pasts', 'Heritage and the Nation', 'Modernisation and Westernisation in China'. The recognition given to the contemporary world of Asia is a conscious response to a hitherto Eurocentric History curriculum. The other two modules engage with the controversial concepts of 'heritage' and 'nation'. The points I raised previously when discussing National Curriculum History are analyzed in a scholarly and critical manner. In Geography a range of modules offers challenging perspectives for a British Studies routeway. While 'Sussex Studies', 'North America' and 'Literary Landscapes' are appropriately critical and highly- motivating, they tread more familiar territory perhaps than 'Divided Britain', and 'Nations and Borders': these modules bring a cutting edge to more comforting stereotypes of Britain. The emergence of a prestigious BSc in Sports Studies with a national reputation offers the potential British Studies student considerable opportunities to test out, in practical and intellectual terms, the validity of enduring images in British sport. The six strands which comprise the four chief routeways are: Physiology & Biomechanics, Psychology, Recreation and Leisure Management, Sociology, Research Philosophy and Sports Analysis. Again, as with the History and Geography curricula, familiar territory is counterpointed by more novel featufes. The Sociology strand, for example, includes the modules 'The State, Sport and Leisure', 'Sport and Leisure and Cultural Relations', 'Sport and Leisure as Form of Social Intervention'all material which raises a critique of many perennial normalizations which typically represent British Sport. This consideration of various CIHE modular curricula across various disciplines manifests English as a discipline whose discursive boundaries, in

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tenns of British Studies project an echoing stability consistent with the continuing relevance of English Literature and Language. The active orientation of work in English is distinctive in the context of national provision. History, Geography and Sports Studies offer curricula which, in terms of British Studies, contest and endorse numerous stereotypical images of British national identity. A future British Studies BA routeway applied within a modular curriculum design would be the product of planning teams whose own tribes and territories continue to exercise a diverse hold on concepts of nation and identity.

Conclusion
Defining the field of British Studies in the U.K. today means, in practice, paying detailed attention to a multiplicity of interwoven and historically specific discourses operating across national and local contours. These relate to ideologies and ways of thinking actually embodied linguistically and ethnographically so that language usage neither simply mirrors nor 'carries' reality but may be regarded as constitutive of it. Hence the national discourses discussed e.g. heritage, managerialism, consumerism and charterism exert powerful influences on Higher Education institutional life. Universities, Colleges and Institutes of Higher Education, with their own specific histories, in turn construct curricula which both confirm and challenge the values embodied by e.g. national educational legislation. I have argued that current national discourses define British national identity within boundaries more recognizable to observers of Britain's past than to her contemporary condition. Yet the past is but prologue and individual Higher Education sites of teaching and learning contribute their own versions of British national identity through an Orphic song of linguistic signifying practices. Discourses and reverse discourses are at work to ensure that there are as many Englands, Irelands, Wales and Scotlands as there are Higher Education territories in the United Kingdom.

yyhlt'fina

Name? The Linguistic Role of Educational Discourse . . .

49

References
Abbreviations
QHE Chichester Institute of Higher Education HEFCE Higher Education Funding Council Barthes, Roland. 1981. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. R. Miller. New York: Hill & Wang. Becher, Tony. 1987. 'Disciplinary Discourse', Studies in Higher Education, 1, No. 3 : 261-74. 1989: Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines. Buckingham & Bristol: SRHE and Open University Press. Blake, William. 1968. 'London', in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Homo Academicus. Trans. Peter Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burgess, Tony. 1994. Towards a New Curriculum', Changing English, 2, No. 1 :44-55. Carter. Ronald. 1993. 'Proper English: Language, Culture and Curriculum', English in Education 27, No. 3. CIHE. Modular Scheme for BA Humanities Degree, 1990. Cox, Brian: 1989. English for Ages 5-16. London: DES, June. Curtis, Francis. 1993. 'Computer Discourse: Language Imprisoned or Empowered?", in Computers and Language. Ed. Moira Monteith. Oxford: Intellect Books. De Bolla, Peter. 1989. The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History. Aesthetics and the Subject. New York: Blackwell. Department For Education. English in the National Curriculum. London: HMSO, January. 1995. History in the National Curriculum. London: HMSO, January 1995. Ellington, Henry and Ross, Gavin. 1993. 'Chasing the Chimera of Academic Quality', Quality Assurance in Education, 1, No. 1 : 15-20. Evans, Colin. 1993. English People: The Experience of Teaching and Learning English in British Universities. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Opeb University Press. Fichte. 1797. Foreword, First and Second Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge. Trans. A Sheridan. London: Tavistock. Friel, Brian. 1981. Translations. London: Faber. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity Press. HEFC. RAE 96 3/94 1996 Research Assessment Exercise: Units of Assessment, November 1994. HEFCE Circular 3/93 Assessment of the Quality of Education. February 1993. Promoting Quality and Opportunity: Higher Education Funding Council for England Annual Report 1992-93. June 1993. Hodder, Ian. 1994. 'The Interpretation of Documents and Material Culture', Handbook of Qualitative Research. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonne S. Lincoln. London: Sage Publications.
4 Writing Placcs .

50

Francis B.CurtisIWh^J

Holmes, George. 1993. 'Quality Assurance in Further and Higher Education: A Sacrificial Lamb on the Altar of Managerialism', Quality Assurance in Education 1, No. 1 :4-8. Keen, C and Higgins, T. 1990. Young People's Knowledge of Higher Education: Findings of a Research Programme into the Perceptions of 'Traditional' Applicants. HEIST/PCAS. Kingman, Sir John. 1988. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language. London: HMSO, March. McLaren, Peter. 1993. Foreword, School Subjects and Curriculum Change: Studies in Curriculum History. Ivor Goodson. Lewes: Falmer Press. Montgomery, Martin. 1993. 'Institutions and Discourse', British Studies, July : 1-2. Paine, Tom. 1979. The Rights of Man (1791-92). Ed. Henry Collins. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1987. 'Linguistic Utopias'. The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature. Ed. Nigel Fabb and Alan Durant. Manchester University Press, pp. 48-67. Ricoeur, Paul. 1971. The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as Text', Social Research, 38 : 529-62. Taylor, Laurie. 1994. 'Response to th Dearing Report: History Post-16', Teaching History, 75, April : 6-8. Trice, H. M. and Beyer, J. M. 1984. 'Studying Organisational Culture through Rites and Ceremonials', Academy of Management Review, 9, October : 653-9. Wright, Patrick. 1994. 'Radioactive Anecdotes', British Studies, August : 1-2. Wyatt, John. 1994. 'How to Become a University: The Re-labelling of English Higher Education', Reflections on Higher Education, 6, August : 6-23.

David Jarrett

Four Clichs and a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies

Culture is Special: Sorting Trash from Treasure

Arthur Marwick ends his Introduction to Culture in Britain Since 1945 (1991) with this sentence: 'If the reader wishes I were addressing different questions, let him or her turn to a different book; there are plenty of them.'1 Indeed there are! As I write I am surrounded by many of them; they enable me to teach a British Studies course at the Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun, in Poland, at a time when the country is experiencing diverse, multitudinous and variously motivated influences from abroad as it constructs new models of society and government. The course is given resources by the British Council, and it is part of the Council's wider initiative in promoting British Studies in Poland and elsewhere. In the university the course helps to provide new models with reference to the coming reorganisation of higher education. Its institutional framework is thus complex. It would be possible to build such a course, which stretches over five years here, out of updated materials from offerings which used to be called 'British Life and Institutions', from Literature and History courses, adding elements of, for example, Media Studies. The resulting structure would have its uses; but, given the nature of that plenitude of books to which Marwick acerbically refers, it would run the risk of being backward-looking (irrespective of what is on offer in the way of 'period coverage'), lacking in theoretical justification, and damagingly narrow in its definition of 'culture', which Raymond Williams calls 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language'.2

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Marwick asserts that the questions addressed by his 'little book' 3 are 'basic and old-fashioned',4 which implies that they are not in need of much definition and that they will be widely accepted by the expected readership. This is very close to that concept of 'common sense', seeming so self-evidently true that it appears less socially constructed than natural, which writers in the field of Cultural Studies have been interrogating variously for many years. His commonsensical approach is contrasted teasingly with those of 'cultural and linguistic theorists', who are represented as a 'new clerisy'5 whose work is a 'fashion'. 6 Such language is easy and accessible, and it makes for easy targets. Of course, Marwick is making of himself an easy target. That is the tease. It anticipates my kind of response so as to confirm its commonsensical grounding, as if his approach can be somehow sealed from the arguments of 'theory'. Still, I read Marwick's book with some pleasure, though that pleasure consists largely in being reminded of certain 'landmarks' in the terrain of a narrow definition of culture, which, though I shall continue to teach courses which focus on the artefacts which are traditionally positioned within that terrain, I find an exhausted definition. Though acknowledging that 'culture' is often used in an expanded sense which, in loaded phrasing, he characterises as 'the whole of society in all its aspects',7 Marwick opts for 'the arts, intellectual activities, entertainments and leisure pursuits'8 for his definition; and he excludes, for example, science, academic pursuits, and sport from his survey. His approach is evaluative, though recognising that evaluations must be provisional, and it draws a line, without much overt reflection on the implications of the division, between 'serious art' and 'junk'. 9 Marwick's conclusion, couched in a throwaway conversational tone which is not reminiscent of Matthew Arnold, is thoroughly Arnoldian in its ranking of artefacts which will have permanent value, which will be admitted to the museum or canon where cultural value resides. Typically he does not claim timeless status for his list, just that its items 'will be remembered in fifty years time'. 10
I put my money on (in alphabetical order more or less): Amis K. and Amis M. (pairs are always more easily remembered than singles); Bacon, Francis; the Beatles, Britten and Tippett; the Rolling Stones; Carter, Angela and Weldon, Fay (two of the most compelling of the feminist writers); Frink, Elizabeth (perhaps the most complete of all the artists I have discussed); Greene, Graham (evergreen in topicality and the striking of deep human chords); Pinter, Harold and Potter, Dennis; The Third Man; Till Death Us Do Part; The Long Good Friday; The Red Shoes; the Lloyds Building.11

_ ^ g f r - h e s and a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies Formative

voices in the development of Cultural Studies closer to the present than ArnoldF. R. Leavis and those associated with the Frankfurt School, for examplehave erected pantheons of cultural 'greatness' and pandemon i u m s of its opposite. But what can we do with such a list as Marwick's in terms of defining or understanding culture? Assent to it? Add to it? Suggest deletions and substitutions? Such engagement is the critical equivalent of Desert Island Discs, The Tingle Factor, or much of the output of Classic pjrf. -a collection of 'our favourite bits' interspersed with 'chat', involving a b b r e v i a t e d gestures which evoke the 'highbrow' and redemptive nods toward the 'popular'. There are staggering omissions not just from this list, but from the book as a whole; for example, black cultural production in Britain, even in the world of popular music, is ignored. And one might ask 'What is a complete artist? I s there a difference between a complete artist and a complete artist?' I w o n d e r whether the grounding of Marwick's list in a metaphor relating to e c o n o m i c gain or loss in games of chance might tell us more about the o p e r a t i o n s of the culture which is concern, and that which is not, than the definitions in his Introduction. Or perhaps I should turn, as directed, to a different book; 'there are plenty of them'.

Maps of Meaning
These bus stop was outside the cathedral. I had been looking at the Mappa Mundi, with its rivers out of Paradise, and at the chained library, where a party of clergymen had got in easily, but where I had waited an hour and cajoled a verger before I even saw the chains. 12

These telling images of bus stop and cathedral, Paradise, books, maps and chains, of elite access to high culture and the struggle of the aspirant outsider for admission, contain in little all that is explored in what follows them in Raymond Williams's essay 'Culture is ordinary' and in the evolving project of his writing career. They are marked by contrasts and exclusions which require the critical mapping of new networks of relation, linking the Mappa Mundi, chained in the complexities of its own historical and institutional contexts, to new maps of the world, which may start in the farming valley half-way along that bus journey out of Hereford. The metaphor of the map has been given wider currency in the discourses of Cultural Studies by, in particular, Stuart Hall, who talks, in The Television AudienceEncoding and Decoding', of 'maps of meaning' and 'maps of

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social reality' which 'have the whole range of social meanings, practices and usages, power and interest "written" into them'. 13 Such usage has been much quoted, by, for example, Graeme Turner 14 and Fred Inglis,15 and variously echoed. Dick Hebdige undertakes 'to specify the conditions under which a project as elusive and forbidding as a "cartography of taste" might be developed';16 while Steven Connor, in discussing 'Jameson's and Clifford's mapping of the field of cultural value', repeats the map image three times in as many consecutive sentences.17 Ben Agger, having suggested that 'the distinction between poststructuralism and postmodernism is too arcane or simply idiosyncratic to matter', declares himself uninterested 'in producing a cognitive map of the cultural studies terrain because this terrain changes too quickly'.18 But even the negation testifies to the currency of the image of the map. These are not surprising or original images, but they are characteristic in the same way as are such words as 'field', 'terrain', 'site', 'domain', or 'landscape' when used in the context of Cultural Studies. The map might suggest the territorial ambitions of Cultural Studies in their encounters with, and operations within, traditional institutions and disciplines. It might suggest the breadth and multiplicity of developing areas and methods of enquiry, the sense of discovery in delineating new, possible, or formerly unregarded worlds. And it might imbue the discourses of critical theory with a sense of the scientific exactitude of cartographic symbolic representation. Maps have the appearance of fixity, bespeak the assurance of objective-seeming empirical procedures. But they are unstable things. I have written elsewhere about the protean historical map of Poland,19 continually shifting in shape and sometimes disappearing altogether, and about Polish writers as various as Joseph Conrad, Bruno Schulz, and Stanislaw Lem, whose fictions unpick the official maps of culture, history and politics. And these charts, teeming with symbols or blank as the Bellman's map, were in my mind when I carried a map labelled BRITAIN into my first British Cultural Studies class in Torun. It was a map which, I know, had seen service in other classes in which its signifying systems had been taken for granted, so familiar were its codes, so natural- or neutral-seeming the relation between the complex, crowded cartographic text and the 'Britain' it sought to represent, which was to be our starting point in interrogating each of the key terms in the formulation 'British Cultural Studies'. Thus it was an occasion for a version of another Cultural Studies cliche the reading of the bus ticket and, indeed, many narratives flowed from that reading. Even those at the back of the class could see that certain roads, few in number compared with the wriggling webwork which was more difficult to decipher at a distance, were defined by thick blue lines which seemed decisive and direct, apart from one, circling London, which went nowhere; that these lines were not equally distributed about the map, petering out in the north and the west, for example; that

_^gfr-hesand a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies

the y

were more prominent than the faint tracings which divided the island into what one had to look very closely to see were England, Wales and Scotland. Those well-trained English speakers, some of whom gain modest extra income by giving private tuition in English in a small town where there are numerous institutions offering English language classes, were unable to pronounce the name of the village where I first went to school and church (of England)Llanfrechfa; and they might have had the same problem with the natal sites of their other two British lecturers, both from Scotland. That seductive notion of an 'island race' was quickly called into question by the depiction of another land mass, part on, but mostly off, the left hand side of the map. Inscription clustered in the north-west corner of that semi-presence, fading southwards into near blankness. By far the largest verbal sign on the map asserted that here was an entity called 'Britain'. After an hour of observation and narrative it began to seem more like one of those melting maps from the pages of Conrad, Schulz or Lem. It is not difficult to see how similar scrutiny of 'Cultural' and even 'Studies' could lead to the same destabilising result. Nor is it difficult to see how one can then pull back and assert that there is something (or there are some things) called 'British Cultural Studies', and that it has (they have) a history, or rather a range of possible histories, and a future, or . . . There figure on my map a few short definitions of the various names by which the area it represents is known. These are oversimplifications. Bernard Crick begins his contribution to a book called National Identities (1991) by saying: 'I am a citizen of a country with no agreed colloquial name. Its official name is the most rarely used.' 20 He goes on to examine how 'Britain' is defined by an annual publication of the Central Office of Information, called Britain, and by the Oxford English Dictionary, concluding that the 'CIO is surely wrong and the OED confused or evasive'.21 Crick later cites an example of a common tendency to collapse 'British' into 'English' in a volume, edited by Lord Blake, called The English World: History, Character and People (1982). Blake, having suggested that English character has been formed by the English coastline, says: 'We come back to the clich that Britain is an island . . . ' 2 2 Another essay in National Identities draws attention to how Margaret Thatcher's declaration that 'children should know the great landmarks of British history' slid without pause into a demand for 'the new national curriculum to concentrate on the kings and queens of England'. 23 'Perhaps,' says Hugh Kearney, 'we do not have a single national history'. 24 'Suppose,' he continues, 'that the United Kingdom is not a nation state . . . but a multi-national state like Belgium, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Unionin fact like the great majority, perhaps, of so-called "nationstates".'25 Retrospectively the names 'Yugoslavia' and 'Soviet Union' carry disturbing resonances. They remind us of the instability of maps, of the

56

David Jairett P P " ' FourJ fgffS^^

C o n c l u s i o n : Cart

graPhies

of

British Cultural Studies

57

ferocity which accompanies their redrawing, and of the necessity of moderating cartographic lust by the informed generation of alternative maps. National Identities is not one of those books, of which Marwick says defensively 'there are plenty', concerned strictly with Cultural Studies. Its contributors are not a new poststructuralist 'clerisy', nor do they, for the most part, subscribe to the Marxist determinisms of which Marwick complains. There are some angry voices among them, contesting maps of meaning old and new, as one would expect given the brief which the contributors received.26 But the sense of urgency and engagement evident in the book, and the processes through which it evolved,27 seem to me models for those working in Cultural Studiesmodels which might supplement, not replace, those unspecified books mentioned and marginalised by Marwick. Maps make territory. There is no empire unless there is a map of it, though there are more ways of making maps than I learned in geography lessons. Taking his cue from the Borges story of the Empire and the Empire-sized map which covers it, Jean Baudrillard asserts:
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territoryPRECESSION OF SIMULACRAit is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. 28

However novel may seem Baudrillard's concept as a defining feature of the postmodern condition of the dissolution of the 'representational imaginary', what he asserts in the above passage is, for the most part, truism rather than a witty inversion of Borges' text. And there is a conventional inevitability about his own mapping of a direct line from such remarks to the soft target of Disneyland. It embodies a long tradition of fine-phrased and fascinated contempt of old Europe for America, and, as such, is chained to antique maps of meaning even as it offers one more version of the challenge to which Cultural Studies are always respondingthat of the failure of connectedness, and the consequent hope or despair of reconnection. Given the spread of traditional disciplines from which Cultural Studies emerge, one might anticipate the generation of innumerable maps which generate their territory. Yet there are always formations which limit such production. By now a kind of consensus may be perceived in the headings and sub-headings of the chapters and sections of introductory guides and anthologies aimed at consumers of writing concerned with Cultural Studies and their subdivisions, which develop through the exigencies of the publishing and academic industries.29 And the diversity of anthologised readings may be domesticated by the firm editorial control of the anthologists, offering, in, for example, the case of Easthope and McGowah, multiple introductions,

summaries and biographies. Looking back now at the textual production erated s u c h enterprises as Routledge's New Accents series, one m a y be struck by the amount of repetition, of a kind more often associated ^ t b the establishment of orthodoxy, in a field so assertive of the breadth of its possibilities. There is an almost universal tendency to explain Saussure, Barthes, Althusser, Hoggart, Williams et al. Hebdige explains Cohen, 30 Fiske recycles d e Certeau, and a n d Turner explains Hebdige and Cohen. 31 Turner recycles de Certeau and Fiske. Then readings are re-read by such as R a d w a y 3 2 and Morley.33 For students raised on literary study the old distinction between primary and secondary sources become blurred, leading to the welcome result that the work of, say, Raymond Williams will not be read as 'background' in the w a y that it once w a s . 3 4 There are other consequences w h i c h , though not particularly serious, are symptomatic. For example, it is not uncommon for a student, perhaps on an over-assessed modular degree scheme in which the word 'Studies' may signal to administrators the means by which large numbers of consumers may be processed economically, to attribute to Belsey what ought to be attributed to Macherey. (If I have a target here, it is a system, not a student.) Some local, provisional forms of consensus are as necessary to the development of Cultural Studies as debate and difference, just as it is appropriate that the discourses of the field should cast repeated critical glances at the theoretical bases on which they are constructed. The literature of Cultural Studies throws up examples of the adoption of theoretical and methodological 'discoveries' which are then repetitively circulated with a keen proselytising edge, though the joinery may show signs of awkward instability,35 or, damagingly, the potentially redemptive theory may seem to the worker in the field 'confused and confusing and at such a high level of abstraction as to be of little immediate relevance'.36 Qualified consensus may be seen emerging through the influence of so-called 'new' or 'critical' Marxism, through efforts to build bridges between culturalism and structuralism, through the modification of the pessimistic determinism of Althusser by the influence of Gramsci's theory of the working of hegemony these are familiar narratives in the discourses of Cultural Studies. Similarly there are necessary 'myths of progress' in the field, pre-eminently, perhaps, the evolving struggle to articulate appropriate theoretical frameworks through the writing career of Raymond Williams. But there is no single authoritative map. Contestation over issues which crucially affect our lives, of the sort identified in, for example, Ben Agger's Cultural Studies as Critical Theory (1992), remains a feature of the field; and, though a phrase like 'theory wars' may now evoke something like nostalgia, we take sides whether we wish to or not.

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'The bus stop was outside the cathedral. I had been looking at the Mapp a Mundi, with its rivers out of Paradise, and at the chained library. . . .' There are many feasible starting points for Cultural Studies. One may begin, like Graeme Turner, with language, semiotics and signification; like Fred Inglis, with the 'heavy machine guns of August 1914';37 like Tony Dunn, with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke;38 like Antony Easthope, with Thomas Kuhn's paradigm theory.39 There is a kind of nostalgia in so much British Cultural Studies writingnot just the familiar nostalgia of Hoggart or Williams, but in work on bikers, punks, rock n'rolland I may be indulging in some version of this in asserting that the implied map involving bus stop, cathedral and library, and incorporating the image of a totalising cartographic fiction, is as good a place as any to begin constructing maps of meaning. The other above-mentioned starting points are all repeatable, whereas anyone following Williams will have to find his or her own singular equivalents of the bus stop, cathedral and Mappa Mundi.

The Buildings in Which We Work

A new map of the world in relation to the cosmos and a shift of paradigm in scientific knowledge are associated with the name which identifies the university where I workMikolaja Kopernika, or Nicholas Copernicus. The building in which I teach, dating from the nineteenth century, looks back in its choice of architectural form to the redbrick Gothic of the nearby fourteenth-century church of St Mary, whose cosmic imagery is closer to Hereford's Mappa Mundi than to that of the Copernican revolution. A triangular architectural arrangement, involving church and university, is completed by the castellated round brick tower of the local prison, walled and overlooked by watchtowers manned by guards with sub-machine guns. The prisoners' cells have little barred windows which look down on two streets, and the forbidding carceral imagery of walls, bars, guns and uniforms sits strangely with the day-long conversations, shouted or in sign-language, between figures on the pavement, predominantly female and often with children, and faces at the windows, all male. Church, university, and prison the student of Cultural Studies will not need encouragement to bring Michel Foucault's evocation of the disciplinary society, in Discipline and Punish (1977), to bear upon the map of this corner of Torun, and upon, perhaps, the irony inherent in carrying the authoritative yet evasive map of 'Britain' into formally arranged lecture halls, with raked seating for students facing the fixed podium and lectern of the lecturer, in a medievalised nineteenth-

j ^ ^ g i c h e s and a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies century structure other disciplines

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housing the Katedra Filologii Angielskiej on one floor and at different levels. The express train which carries me from Warsaw to Torun is called the Kopernik, and the cab which I take from the station to my flat is blazoned with his name. The gingerbread manufactured locally is named after him, and the gift shop in the old square, where the statue of Copernicus is a dominant landmark (used as the point of reference in giving directions to strangers in the town), gingerbread images of Copernicus are on sale. They look like images of saints. There is a Copernicus Museum, a street, and the name proliferates throughout the town. Local Polish history is mapped through reference to the name, though we have no evidence that he ever spoke Polish. But, then, this is a nation which has lived with different maps, and no maps, of itself, and whose national epic begins: 'Litwo! Ojczyzno moja' ('Lithuania! My homeland!'). The resemblance between the six-inch gingerbread Copernicus and the stiff formality of a saint is a symptomatic detail of a map of cultural meaning, in which the cosmic enterprise negotiates its place with local structures like universities, churches and prisons. It is, according to Louis Althusser, 'as structures' that the representations of ideology 'impose on the vast majority of men, not via their "consciousness" \ 4 0 Dick Hebdige, in Subculture, illustrates Althusser's insight by analysing some of the 'implicit ideological assumptions which are literally structured into the architecture' of institutions of higher education.41 Foucault does not figure in Hebdige's bibliography, but it is as if a space has been created for him here. Antony Easthope takes a question posed by Foucault as his epigraph for a chapter in Literary into Cultural Studies: 'Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, factories, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?'42 The chapter begins: 'The building I work in was built in 1881',43 and it proceeds to read the architectural text until Easthope is able to conclude, concerning the educational system in which he works : 'Through institutions and discursive practices the disciplinary society persists in its aim of constituting concrete individuals as subjects.44 Frederic Jameson does not work in the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, but we may regard his treatment of it in 'Postmodernism and the Consumer Society' as fitting the category with which I am concerned in this section. Through analysis of the Bonaventure Jameson offers another version of his mourning the loss or displacement, characteristic of the postmodern condition, of 'real history' and critical space. The building represents for him a
mutation in spacepostmodern hyperspace . . . [which] has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.45

David Jarrett t

: r

'

p Fg n^ u O i c h s and a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies

These carcral images of where we work and live evoke a world where traditional, stable-seeming mapping of societies and subjectivities have become unpinned. They are characteristic of textual production in the field of Cultural Studies. But they have a long history. They are variations on the theme of Elsinorewhere official discourses of power, claiming 'naturalness', and the specialised languages of art, straining after the same, are seen to have a vexed relation to the language experiments of the quester after truth or liberation, whose discourse may be mistaken for, or may actually articulate, madness; where the power of the fathers generates 'words, words, words' which accompany coercive action; where the spheres of Paris, Wittenberg and Elsinore itself offer conflicting world views which suggest fracture between old and new ways of life; and where the quester is repeatedly trapped in outworn discourses and courses of action. For many years, in Duke Humphrey's Library, in the British Library and elsewhere, I have sought and written about such architectural structures, and their garden, landscape or cityscape contexts, in a wide range of English and American fiction. That search, prefaced by examinations in Bibliography, Palaeography and Textual Criticism, began before words like 'ideology', 'discourse', 'hegemony', or 'cultural studies' became a regular part of my vocabulary, and I do not consider their appearance a fracture in the piecemeal narrative which continues to emerge. Those students who read the map of Britain with me at our first meeting this year went on to chart routes between, for example, houses and gardens in texts by James Thomson and Ian McEwan, contextualised by our encounters with literary and historical study, by our reading in Cultural Studies, and by our experience of the ordinary, of what we know of houses and gardens and the meanings they embody. One consequence was the development of revised ways of reading 'literary' texts, interrogating the term 'literary', and another was a heightened awareness of how we might re-read the taken-for-granted and so validate the ordinary. British Cultural Studies thereby becomes a pursuit of comparison rather than a lesson in 'how they do things there'. The carceral structures of Cultural Studies are our Custom House, where we can discover disturbingly close relations to histories haunted by oppression and dismal prognostications of futures unlike officially sanctioned myths of progress. But The Scarlet Letter (1850), for all its mournful entrapments, is a defamiliarising reconstruction of the many forms of prison, pregnant with possibilities of transformation which can be at once 'illegitimate' and redemptive, and its foundation is the realisation that even the first letter of the alphabet is not a fixed sign, has no natural determination. The New England Primer (1689) makes entry into the structure of language a carceral experience: 'In Adam's Fall/We sinned all.' Cultural Studies have their equivalent puritan determinisms; but they also have a tradition of 'active debate and

amendment under the pressure of experience, contact and discovery'.* Hawthorne worked in the Custom House, Thoreau in the pencil factory; but they had other lives to live.

Culture is Ordinary: Or How I Moved from the Country to the City

Raymond Williams begins the Introduction to his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) with autobiography. He recalls his return to Cambridge after World War II and a meeting with a man, also recently released from the army, whom he had last seen during the first year of the war, 'when the formations of the 1930s, though under pressure, were still active':
We talked eagerly, but not about the past. We were too much preoccupied with this new and strange world around us. Then we both said, in effect simultaneously: "the fact is, they just don't speak the same language". It is a common phrase. It is often used between successive generations and even between parents and children. I had used it myself, just six years earlier, when I had come to Cambridge from a working-class family in Wales.47

Such a journey is a common experience for many British and Commonwealth academics, not least those associated with the practices of Cultural Studies. It embodies, in its individual and local varieties, the larger movements of history to which Cultural Studies responds and the means by which those responses are theorised and articulated. It shadows the journey which British culture and society have taken through the experience of industrialisation and the consequent growth of urbanised, so-called 'mass' population; and, in Cultural Studies, it is to be accounted for by the rewriting of dictionaries, the negotiation of new maps of meaning, through interrogation and definition of the sign systems in which ideology and concepts of cultural value are inscribed. Readers may turn to Keywords and other sources for more complex histories of derivation and usage, but I begin here with some almost arbitrary oversimplifications: 'School' derives from a root meaning 'leisure'; 'culture' from a word associated with tending crops and animals; and 'science' from a word meaning 'knowledge'. From the village in the Welsh borders where I was born I attended a nearby primary school where the history taught was English history and

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where I was encouraged to speak in an accent, syntax, and vocabulary which suggested Englishness and 'correctness'. Becoming middle-class betokened success, and to be middle-class appeared to necessitate an English persona. I was early used to the two voices, for, when she spoke on the telephone, I could determine the social stratum of the other speaker by the voice which my mother adopted. This was long before the spread of 'estuary' English had been widely registered, but it is worth remembering how current those 1970s episodes of Fawlty Towers still seem in Britain and abroad. The occasional flared trousers, ear-helmeting haircuts, and platform shoes are comically dated, but the nuances of accent are not. At the age of ten I moved from the country to the city, albeit the smallest city in England, for a school which was to confirm the direction set for that elite which passed the eleven-plus examination, by my earlier education. It was a school embodying architectural and cultural layers from the twelfth century to the present, where the emphasis was assuredly not on 'leisure', and where there was little 'disputation' of the kind associated with the old Greek sense of 'school'. What passed for leisure was strictly policed, rule-bound, and tended to involve vigorous competitive activity. I attended 'science' lessons which related to a very limited, specialised, technical range of knowledge, and they were policed more strenuously even than leisure activities. For example, achieving less than half-marks for the weekly assignment resulted in a caning by the black-gowned teacher at the end of Friday's lesson. This system was put under welcome strain by one Marshallfirst names were not part of our vocabulary who could not achieve half-marks in five years of science. He was a day-boy, and sending day-boys home with such visible signs of private educational inscription could not be politic. This kind of writing on the body was commonplace. Culture is, indeed, ordinary; but ordinariness can be a most weird phenomenon. Offences which seemed arcane to a ten-year-old from what I took to be far away were punished by ritualised assaults which one was exhorted to 'take like a man'. My first experience of the system came quickly as a result of wearing the wrong kind of shoes. 'Manners Makyth Man' was carved on the elaborate Jacobean mantelpiece in the junior dining-room of the eighteenth-century mansion in which I lived until old enough to pass into a medieval house, formerly the residence of bishops. Wearing into the dormitory, high up in the old servants' quarters, shoes with laces, instead of those with elasticated sides, presumably offended against a code of manners. It certainly broke 'House' rules, which supplemented the overarching 'School' rules, of which there were many (though not as many as, for example, were laid down by the British Board of Film Censors between the wars).48 Each boy in the school was issued with a copy of these rules, of which the first was a Catch-22: 'Any breach of common sense is a breach

_^gfr-hesand a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies

0f

school rules.' The example of Marshall offers one form of resistant encounter with monolithic power laying claim to the naturalised vocabulary o f c o m m o n sense. Cultural Studies offer another. Marshall may p r o v i d e an anecdote, Cultural Studies a programme, a syllabus, and a practice. perhaps this kind of e n f o r c e m e n t of n o n - n e g o t i a b l e cultural values did n o t seem so strange to the generations of well-to-do Somerset farmers who sent their sons to the school, for it was a kind of culture bearing many affinities to the rearing and treatment of animals. They leavened, those farmers' sons, the imposition of high English culture by the subcultural adoption of accents thick

and parodic as an Adge Cutler song or a Wessex dialect poem by William Barnes; this way of speaking proved hard to drop, for those in the Marshall category, in later life. And perhaps there was something reassuring, for the many parsons who sent their sons there, about an education which made Tennyson seem like our contemporary. Our antique atlases gave us maps of the world still rich in slabs of imperial red, and boys came up from the junior school, where they had lived from the age of seven, able to recite patriotic poems by Sir Henry Newbolt, who had played a leading role in the establishment of a subject called 'English' at the heart of the national syllabus. 4 9 Our school song, which was still being sung when I left in the early
sixties, began:
England, dear motherland, queen of the sea, Chief of a thousand states, home of the free . . .

Each verse ended with the exhortation of our school motto, 'Be what you are', which figured in Latin and Anglo-Saxon on our crest. It remains the strangest of texts to me, seeming sometimes tautologically devoid of meaning, sometimes poetically condensing all the complexities and contradictions of the engines driving the culture I inhabited. I am as happy to teach, in London, in a School of Literary and Media Studies, which had once been a School of English and which came close to being a School of Cultural Studies in one of those modularising reorganisations of the 1980s, as I am to teach Cultural Studies in a School of English Philology in Poland. Many of us are accustomed to passing into work through doorways bearing antique superscriptions. If the revelation of the origins of English Studies takes the (perhaps quondam) English teacher by surprise, then that teacher's shock should relate to his or her own susceptibility to the ideological fix rather than result in unmixed hostility to the traditional discipline or condescension toward Arnold, Newbolt, or Leavis. For me, as for many others in Britain and abroad, the study of 'English' constituted a redemptive, transforming cultural engagement, whatever ideological, authoritarian work was being done by the imposition of

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a canonical curriculum. It provided me with arrows and hammers, as well as tickets of admission, to use in encounters with the dominant ideology, and it gave some insight into and distance from the strange systems of family, school and beyond. New labels are necessary, but enterprises which require them, as Thoreau observed concerning the perceived need for new clothes, are worth regarding with distrustful caution. The restless generation of labels is a disorienting feature of our late phase of capitalism, which it is our business to question. Regimes which establish Year Zero whether relating to metaphorical deaths of authors, to staff research ratings, to the collapsing of literary into cultural studies, to the precession of simulacra, or to the expediently inaccurate dating of the birth of a child in a middle eastern outpost of the Roman empire are not friendly to the enterprises of Cultural Studies if they inhibit theory competition or the understanding of the strange routes by which we all moved from some form of 'country ' to some form of 'city'. Even if we construct an image of ourselves as inhabiting a chained library, we can enumerate the links and the histories of their forging, and they can be shaken to make noises like those of 'Homer' and Melville, where the world-journey and word-journey are one.

Conclusion: Cultural Studies Are a Carp

After my four clichs, in which I have tried to embed versions of other clichs, the offer of a conclusion might suggest an imminent answer to the question: 'So what should we be doing in Cultural Studies?' One of the most satisfactory conclusions rising from asking big questions is provided by Eric Idle, in drag, at the end of Monty Python's Meaning of Life (1983):
Nothing very special. Try to be nice to people. Avoid eating fat. Read a good book every now and again. Get some walking in. And try and live in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. And finally here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to offend the censors.

Fred Inglis makes an eloquent and humane case for taking seriously these 'banal and welcome profundities' as the 'consequences and precepts' of working in the field of Cultural Studies.50 (In truth, the moral directives quoted above do not quite constitute the conclusion of the Meaning of Life. After the closing credits there is one of the film's fish-related jokes, which encodes a darker message akin to that of old Fleece's sermon to the

_^gfr-hesand a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies

sharks in Chapter 64 of Moby-Dick.) If Inglis had not pre-empted me I might have let the mock-oracular words of Python serve as a fitting conclusion here, for recently I have been paying close attention to that film again after a colleague in the United States told me that he based the whole of his introductory Philosophy course on it. I think it would work for British Studies too. My stated aims at the start of the British Studies MA course on which I am now engaged have their own kind of banality, which will hopefully lead to occasional profundity and gratuitous profanation. In general (and in language associated with the pieties of Definitive Course Documents), one wants to define the field and explore the potential for what students may do with Cultural Studies; and both kinds of enquiry tend to stress multiplicity rather than fixed unitary meanings, which is likely to entail initial confusion and due pleasure at the breadth of options. In pursuit of these aims one may interrogate each of the terms in the formulation British Cultural Studies; become aware that Cultural Studies have a history, and that British Cultural Studies have a particular kind of history; raise questions about the relations between the practices of Cultural Studies and those of traditionally instituted disciplines, with a view to establishing how the former are to be differentiated from the latter even as they draw upon and reinterpret their resources (it is hard to see how this can be achieved without experience of a traditional discipline); explore the opportunities offered by the radical redefinition of cultural practice in the field, which may seek to dissolve traditional distinctions between 'high' and 'popular' or 'mass' culture; widen dramatically the definition of 'text', to include, for example, a range of cultural production in different media, or, perhaps, in the manner of structural anthropology, treating the world as text; become conversant with critical vocabularies which have fed into or emerged within the discourses of Cultural Studies, including, for example, the analytical strategies of semiotics as applied in varieties of critical theory. It is appropriate to stress the interrogative nature of Cultural Studies and to inscribe in pedagogic practice acknowledgement of their own cultural and institutional context. Though I hope that Cultural Studies will never quite lose the 'homemade' look of the educational structures which they have erected, they are now a markedly professional enterprise. One sign of this is that when I come to exemplify what kind of introductory reading may serve the aims stated above, I find that suitable materials come ready packaged. For example, John Storey's Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (1994) covers in its seven sections the kind of topics which are relevant to those aims: The Culture and Civilisation Tradition; Culturalism; Structuralism and Postmodernism; Marxism; Feminism; Postmodernism; The Politics of the Popular. I have mentioned other such anthologies and guides above, and they are useful so

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long as we guard against the passivity which packaging can induce. And I have gone far enough in the dangerous direction of suggesting a syllabus. I first encountered the suggestion that 'Communication is a carp' in David Morley's Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (1992).51 It is the title of a paper given by R. Silverstone in 1990 which draws upon a passage in Feher's and Kwitner's The Contemporary City (1987).52 The way in which this web of relationship is presented in Morley's book is, when taken together with the provenance and organisation of the book's materials as a whole, symptomatic of the discourses of Cultural Studies. The present mode of referencing, modifying past conventions mainly reliant on footnoting, reveal shifts in priorities. Morley's book, typically, reads like a long conversation, sometimes self-critical, sometimes self-justifying, scrutinising the grounds of his past and present practice, and scrupulously acknowledging with bracketed brevity, in the main body of the text, the named and dated participants in this conversation. Only the last name is cited, and the title of the book or article must be sought in the bibliography. I extend the web only to counteract what might look like the emergence of orthodoxy and containment in foregoing paragraphs, and suggest that, after reading the following passage from Feher and Kwinter, we can drop critical clichs which speculate about whether there is a 'Fish' in the text and replace them with the fancy that 'Cultural Studies are a carp':
To draw a carp, Chinese masters warn, it is not enough to know the animal's morphology, study its anatomy or understand the physiological functions of its existence. They tell us that it is also necessary to consider the reed against which the carp brushes each morning, while seeking its nourishment, the oblong stone behind which it conceals itself, or the rippling of water when it springs toward the surface. These elements should in no way be treated as the fish's environment, the milieu in which it evolves or the natural background against which it can be drawn. They belong to the carp itself. . . The carp must be apprehended as a certain power to affect and be affected by the world.53

Notes
1 Arthur Marwick, Culture in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 8. First published 1991. 2 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 87. First published 1976. 3 Marwick, Culture in Britain, p. 8. 4 Ibid, p. xiii. 5 Ibid, p. 2.

_^gfr-hesand a Conclusion: Cartographies of British Cultural Studies 6 7 g 9 10 11 12 Ibid, P- Ibid, p. 1Ibid. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 188. Ibid. Raymond Williams, 'Culture is Ordinary', in Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (eds.), Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 5. First published in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions (MacGibbon and Kee, 1958). Stuart Hall, 'The Television DiscoureEncoding and Decoding', in Gray and Mr Guigan, Studying Culture, p. 32. First published in Education and Culture, No. 25 (UNESCO, 1974). Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 100, 112. Fred Inglis, Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 84. Dick Hebdige, Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935-1962', in Bernard Waites, Tony Bennett and Graham Martin (eds.), Popular Culture: Past and Present (London: Routledge in association with the Open University Press, 1993), p. 195. Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 254. Ben Agger, Cultural Studies as Critical Theory (London: Falmer Press, 1992), p. 109. David Jarrett, 'Bruno Schulz and the Map of Poland', Chicago Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (1994), pp. 73-84. Bernard Crick, 'The English and the British', in Crick (ed.), National Identities: The Constitution of the United Kingdom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 90. Ibid. Robert Blake (ed.), The English World: History, Character and People (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), p. 25. Cited by Crick, p. 93. Hugh Kearney, 'Four Nations or One?', in Crick, p. 1. Ibid. Ibid. See Crick, p. vii. '. . . this book is not an assemblage of conference papers written before the event, as to often happens, to be sternly defended from behind prepared positions and left unchanged unless they suffered exceptionally heavy damage. We took preventive action to avoid this by not asking participants for papers, but only to speak from notes; and we equivocally dangled only the possibility of publication. So people discussed and argued in an open-minded and friendly way, and then wrote their chapters later after reflecting on what others had said.' Crick, p. vii. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Quoted from Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan (eds.), A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), p. 203. See, e.g., the above-cited works of Agger, Easthope and McGowan, Gray and McGuigan, and Turner; also John Storey, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), and Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 53-6, 77-9; Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies, pp. 113-7, 170, 171-3. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 32-43, 94-6; Turner, British Cultural Studies, pp. 119-23, 149, 216-8. Janice Radway, ' Reading the Romance' (1987), in Gray and McGuigan, Studying Culture, pp. 62-79.

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29

30 31 32

J*

33 David Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 119-30. 34 See, e.g., Turner, British Cultural Studies, p. 52. 35 See, e.g., the introduction of Kristeva and Barthes, after the event, as it were, in Chapter eight of Hebdige, Subculture. 36 Richard Dyer, Terry Lovell and Jean McCrindle, 'Soap Opera and Women' (1977), in Gray and McGuigan, Studying Culture, p. 37. 37 Inglis, Cultural Studies, p. 3. 38 Tony Dunn, The "British" in British Studies', British Studies, Issue 4 (London: The British Council, August 1994), pp. 11-2. 39 Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991). 40 Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1969). Quoted in Hebdige, Subculture, p. 12. 41 Hebdige, Subculture, p. 12. 42 Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies, p. 162. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid, p. 164. 45 Frederic Jameson, 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society' (1988), in Gray and McGuigan, Studying Culture, p. 202. 46 Raymond Williams, 'Culture Is ordinary', in Gray and McGuigan, p. 6. 47 Williams, Keywords, p. 11. 48 See, e.g., James C. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain, 1895-1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1985). 49 See, e.g., Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989). 50 Inglis, Cultural Studies, p. 229. 51 Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, p. 183. 52 For references see Morley, pp. 301, 309. 53 Quoted in R. Silverstone, 'Communication is a Carp', working paper, Centre for Research in Innovation, Culture and Technology, Brunei University (1990), and in Morley, p. 183.

Linden Peach

Internal Difference and the 'New Geography'

The range of spatial metaphors currently employed in British cultural studiesfor example, position, location, centre-margin, global-local, liminal space, third spacereflect an important paradigmatic shift which has occurred in Western social theory. Since the late nineteenth century, history has occupied a privileged position in Western thought and the development of identity has been seen as a largely historical process in which the significance of geography has been underestimated. But the intersection of history, biography and society is being increasingly seen in terms of the socio-spatial rather than the socio-temporal. The following chapter is an attempt to explore, in a fluid and preliminary fashion, the contemporary interest in conceptualising cultural and geographical diversity in Britain through postmodern theories of the social organization of space. Not so many years ago the word 'space' implied only an empty area. But this has changed. Space no longer has only a geometrical meaning; it is charged with politics and ideology. This has come about according to commentators such as Dick Hebdige because of the startling geographical consequences of contemporary socio-economic shifts.1 We can see an example of this in the way in which the closure of the coal-mines in South Wales and the North of England and the development of service industries have created a new set of economic centres, redrawing the socio-economic geography of these regions. Not surprisingly, as Michael Keith and Steve Pile point out in Place and the Politics of Identity (1993), the cutting edge in British cultural studies is now the exploration of geographical circumstances, such as urban regeneration, as expressions of abstract social relationships. British cultural studies has become increasingly concerned with an identity politics of place and a spatialized politics of identity.2

In its assertion of the significance of geography, British cultural studies has responded to seminal redefinitions of space by theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, Fredric Jameson, Anthony Giddens, David Harvey, Edward Soja and Bell Hooks. This chapter tries to locate some of the key lines of influence from European and American theory which have enabled 'new geographers' in Britain to address notions of 'internal difference', and, thereby, to readdress notions of national identity. Its arguments are illustrated with reference to recent studies of cultural difference in Britain by academics and documentary journalists and with reference to fiction written at the margins. In arguing that a defining characteristic of the 'contemporary' is the domination of social and cultural life by spatial organization,3 Keith and Pile, draw upon Fredric Jameson; an important theorist for two principal reasons. He was the first theorist to argue for:
a new kind of spatial imagination capable of confronting the past in a new way and reading its less tangible secrets ofT the template of its spatial structuresbody, cosmos, city, as all those marked the more intangible organization of cultural and libidinal economies and linguistic forms.4

Secondly, he was the first theorist to try to define the spatial characteristics of the milieu in which we are now living. According to Jameson, who identified three phases in the development of society under capitalism, we are currently in the third phase, the 'world space of multinational capital'.5 However, Jameson's influence notwithstanding, the key players for Keith and Pile are Soja, whom Jameson believes best exemplifies the kind of spatial imagination for which he argues, and Bell Hooks. In fact, Soja's interpretation of Lefebvre, and his quarrel with Harvey's interpretation of Lefebvre's work, has proved especially significant. Lefebvre is the elder statesman of the 'new geography'. Born in Hagetmau in the Pyrenees in 1901, he studied at the Sorbonne during a period of intellectual and political turmoil in the 1920s and became a major intellectual figure in the French Communist movement until the horrors of Stalinism were revealed. His seminal work, The Production of Space (1974), was the culmination of six years intensive enquiry into urbanization between 1968 and 1974, during which he produced seven books. For Soja, The Production of Space was the first work really to expose the illusion of space as neutral and passive geometry. Actually, the term 'new' in the concept of a 'new geography' draws attention to the way in which recent thinking in the subject has challenged long-held positivist notions of space as fixed and inert. In this respect, it owes a special debt to the new physics, so called because of its rejection of the Newtonian concept of absolute space, i.e. of

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space as a passive setting for objects which exist prior to their interaction. Moreover, the static binary dualities of classical physics have been discredited by post-Newtonian theorists and replaced by theories of dynamic interaction and exchange. These notions of interaction and exchange have become linchpins of the 'new geography', challenging perceptions of space as the passive receptacle of social processes. In fact, it was Lefebvre's argument that space is the site and outcome of social, political and economic struggle that fired the imagination of Marxist geographers such a s David Harvey and Bell Hooks. As Soja points out, Marxism 'stashed away the geographical imagination in some superstructural attic to gather the dust of discarded and somewhat tainted memories' while 'Geography isolated itself in a tight little island of its own'.6 However, by the end of the 1970s, a fierce debate had arisen over the role of space in materialist interpretations of history, between Marxist geographers who argued for a flexible and dialectical relationship between space and society and those who saw space as the expression of the fundamental social relations of
production.7

Lefebvre's work was initially made available to anglophonic Marxist geographers through Castell's La Question Urbaine (1972) and David Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1973). Their critiques of his ideas on urbanism, on the organization of space and on contemporary Marxist analysis foregrounded the relationship between the social and spatial structures of urbanism and the ideological content of socially created space. But for Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), they blunted the impact of Lefebvre's work through their misrepresentation of it. Harvey, following Castell's lead, conceived of Lefebvre as a 'spatial separatist'. Although acknowledging, Lefebvre's recognition of the importance of spatial relationships, he believed Lefebvre had posited the organization of space as a separate structure with its own laws of inner transformation and construction rather than as the expression of a set of relations embedded in a broader structure.8 Soja's critique of Harvey's work is based on a different interpretation of Lefebvre's arguments. He claims that Lefebvre recognised 'the dialectical character of social and spatial relationships as well as that of other structurally linked spheres like production and consumption'.9 In doing so, he rejects the alternative theories pressed upon Lefebvre by Harvey; organized space is neither a separate structure with its own, autonomous laws nor the expression of social structures emerging from the social relations of production. Instead, Soja argues that there is an interdependence between spatial diversity and difference, on the one hand, and the social relationships of production, including class relations, on the other:

72

Linden Peach . . . a space-to-class homology can be found in the regionalized division of organized space into dominant centres and subordinate peripheries, socially created and polarized spatial relations of production which are captured with greater precision in the concept of geographically uneven development. This conceptualization of the links between social and spatial differentiation does not imply that the spatial relations of production or the centre-periphery structure are separate and independent from the social relations of production, from class relations. On the contrary, the two sets of structural relations (the social and the spatial) are not only homologous, in that they arise from the same origins in the mode of production, but are also dialectically inseparable.10

It is this theory of a 'socio-spatial dialectic', developed through Soja's critique of the works of Harvey and Anthony Giddens, to whom we will return in a moment, which has had a key influence on the two British 'new geographers' mentioned above. As they maintain: 'For Jameson, space is a template, while for Soja, such a geometrical conception of space is passive, fixed, undialectical and no longer appropriate.'11 Soja's conception of space, as we can see in the extract above, introduces a number of new concepts. It attaches significance to 'dominant centres and subordinate peripheries', 'polarized spatial relations' and 'geographically uneven development'. In other words, the geography and history of capitalism intersect in complex social processes. These in turn, according to Soja, enable us to theorize geographical and cultural diversity as a constantly evolving 'sequence of spatialities'.12 Anthony Giddens' argument that space is the medium of social processes as well as the product of their outcome proved to have a decisive influence upon Soja. His work attempted to resolve the conflict between two fundamental positions, the human geographer's insistance on the causal power of human subjectivity and meaning and the Marxist geographer's stress upon structure; maintaining that human agents undertaking routine tasks produce and reproduce the structures of society, the economy, the polity and culture. In undertaking his critique of Giddens, Soja developed and clarified some of the major premises of his central theory of a 'socio-spatial dialectic'. Giddens' concept of the 'locale' as 'the use of space to provide the settings of interaction' is extended by Soja to include a further specificity of internal difference and social being, 'the nodality of social life, the social-spatial clustering or agglomeration of activities around identifiable geographical centres or nodes'.13 Soja also insists that 'territoriality' and 'regionalism' need to be added to Giddens' theory of structuration in order to express 'the allocative and authoritative power that operates in locales'.1* Within each locale Soja finds an 'intra-locale territoriality' which may or may not coincide with central and peripheral regions. Here Soja proposes a 'micro-geography of human interaction' which, as we shall see a little later, fellow postmodern geographers have used as the basis for positing a radical

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spatial politics. Soja himself suggests that this unstable intra-locale territoriality might develop into what he calls 'localities'; 'enduring locales stabilized socially and spatially through the clustered settlement of primary activity sites and the establishment of propinquitous territorial community'.15 Soja's account of what happens to intra-locale territoriality within these localities provides a model of socio-spatial dialectic which may be found in a great deal of contemporary writing about urbanization:
Like every locale, they are spatio-temporal structurations arising from the combination of human agency and the conditioning impact of pre-existing spatio-temporal conditions. They provide another created setting, a more elaborate built environment, for human interaction expanded in scale, density, social differentiation, and collective attachment to place . . . the formation of nodally clustered and cohesive locales regionally differentiated internally (within the cluster), comparatively (one urbanized locale versus another), and hierarchically (positioned within a multi-level system of urban locales). 16

Soja's emphasis upon social differentiationinternally, comparatively and hierarchically enables us to deconstruct the following account of internal difference in an inner London suburb by a documentary journalist:
A stroll through this unhappy place yields many oddities. Turkish-Cypriot cafes and greengrocers occupy much of the High Street. Large numbers of Kurds sometimes march up and down for a homeland far away, occasionally clashing with police. The Azizye Mosque is next door to the Baptist Church. Life by day at least, is conducted rhythmically enough, without excessive or frequent friction. But off the High Street are places capable of repelling a visitor: fortified flats in the Nightingale Estate where pirate radio stations broadcast messages to drug-dealers; and streets where residents think twice before emerging at night. . . . [The front line] is now a mobile thing, returning occasionally to Sandringham Road. The people there respond when addressed politely on noncontroversial matters. They will talk about housing, the price of butter, the weather. But, unlike a few uninhibited folk on Stoke Newington High Street, they have little to say about drug-dealers, policemen or front lines. 11

The locality here consists of cohesive localeslife by day proceeds rhythmically but it is differentiated internally (there are Turkish-Cypriot cafes and greengrocers on the High Street), comparatively (the residents versus the drug dealers) and hierarchically (the Police, the residents, the drug dealers). Such urban fragmentation has often been the subject of geographical discourse. But, as Gillian Rose points out, even though 'traditional' or 'hegemonic geography' acknowledges urban division along an increasing number of social axes, it still attempts, unlike postmodern geography, to 'systemize those different spaces within one conceptual framework'. 18 Geographers such as Knox support the emphasis in postmodern geography upon multinodality, fluidity, plurality, and diffusion. Yet they still insist upon an 'organic to-

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Linden Pea^

tality of socio-spatial dialectic.19 What postmodern geography enables us to see in contemporary documentary writing about urbanization is that cultural difference cannot be theorized as the projection of social power relations on to territorial spaces; such two dimensional mapping is inadequate as spaces are structured over many dimensions. The present foci of the 'new geographers', which we will explicate further in a moment, is a significant contribution to the paradigmatic shift which has occurred in thinking about national identity in Britain. Traditional studies of national identity, especially in relation to notions of Englishness, have focused upon what distinguishes and differentiates that identity from others; in other words, upon 'the public face', upon the boundary which incorporates and encloses difference. The emphasis has been upon how the differentiated spatial boundary is internalised as the unified, temporal territory of tradition that turns 'the' people into 'a' people. The cultural mobilization of environmental myths is often part of this process and no where so than in England where the two meanings of 'country', as countryside and nation, are collapsed into one another. As we all know, the essence of England is an iconography of green fields, hedgerows, country lanes, village greens, rolling hills and rural streams. It is an iconography that reflects the geography of the south of England wherein the majority of its dominant institutionsthe monarchy, Parliament, Oxbridge, Eton and Winchester, the Capital itselfare situated. This forging of political unity is the process which creates the spatio-historical narrative known as a nation. In the modern nation state, which has its origins in late eighteenth-century France, the Grand Narrative, with a homogeneous time and 'centred', causal development traceable to a single origin, becomes the fundamental requirement in the creation of a nation, more so than race, language, geography and religious affinities. It is not only this myth of homogeneous national tradition which is rejected by the 'new geography', however, but the concomitant displacement of plural space. The 'new geography' considers national identity not from the perspective of 'the public space' but as the object of internal difference and conflict. Homi Bhabha, 're-visioning' the nation state as 'internally marked by cultural difference, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations',20 has coined the term 'dissemiNation' for this alternative perspective. Whilst Bhabha acknowledges the significance of a nationalist pedagogy, the authority of which is based on a pregiven, historical origin, Keith and Pile's criticism that Bhabha's locus of difference is sometimes tied to historicity rather than spatiality is not borne out by his essay 'DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation'. The focus of Bhabha's attention is what he calls the 'performative' space, between 'the totalizing

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powers' of nationalist pedagogy and the unequal interests and identities within the population. 21 His identification of the radical nature of this ' p e r f o r m a t i v e ' space where nationalist pedagogy becomes contentious aligns jjj m w i t h Hooks rather than Keith and Pile who, at the end of their book see 'spatiality' as 'the modality through which contradictions are normalized, 22 n a t u r a l i z e d and neutralized'. Although Bhabha's theoretical framework is significantly different from Hooks, they have influences in common, notably Jameson and Foucault. Thus, like Hooks, Bhabha writes from the perspectives of the margin, the migrant and the exile; in other words, from what cannot be contained within the unisonant discourse of national culture. Eschewing the historicism which has dominated and determined discussions of nation as a cultural force, Hooks and Bhabha share concerns with the disjunctive forms of representation that signify a nation, with the radical alterity of a nation's culture which creates new forms of living and writing and with the need for a more complex articulation of cultural difference than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism. Bhabha's engagement in 'DissemiNation', with 'the symbolic language of alternative, antagonistic cultural practices' shifts the emphasis in the discussion of cultural difference away from disturbing the rationale of cultural discrimination to transforming the scenario of articulation.23 The aim of many studies which address cultural difference within Britain is to rearticulate social and cultural life from the perspective of the 'other' which resists totalization. Examples of this approach are to be found in recent work on the North-South divide within Britain. Although the North-South divide is rooted in British history, it has more relevance at certain times than at others. During the 1980s, many of the stereotypes which pertained to it for generations were updated; the North perceived the southerner as a young, upwardly mobile white-collar worker and the South saw the northerner as unemployed or a blue-collar worker. The southerner saw the northerner as outspoken but warm hearted and the northerner saw the southerner as cultured but hard hearted. Of course, the socio-spatial differences between the north and the south of Britain are not so well defined as these preconceptions and prejudices suggest. Affluence is not confined to the South and poverty and unemployment are not unique to the North. The longstanding nature of these assumptions and stereotypes determine an obvious need not simply to address the discrimination but to shift the paradigms. In The North-South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (1994), Helen Jewell inverts the way in which the North of Britain is homogenized by totalizing perspectives from the South and defined as the margin by its 'acceptance' of the more powerful, binary 'other'.24 Her work begins in the prehistoric period and ends in 1750,

establishing how the internal difference within Britain between the North and the Souththe former was different in terms of landscape, economy, social structure and speech patternswere exploited by the South. She achieves a profound redefinition of the cultural difference between the two geographical areas. In Jewell's rereading of the internal difference, the boundaries are neither so well drawn nor as mutually exclusive as in the traditional paradigms. The North is no longer homogenized, but diversified across a multi-dimensional typography. Although the North was economically disadvantaged by its isolation from central government, even in the Middle Ages, she argues, it was cultured and set a high premium on education. Its gentry were socially and culturally aware, spending part of the year in London, and new ideas and fashions were prevalent in the North as well as in the South. Such paradigmatic shifts are also to be found in recent work on the rural-urban divide in Britain. Philip Rowe at the Centre of Rural Economy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne is studying rural social and economic life not from the traditional homogenizing perspectives of the urban 'other' but as framed within a heterogeneous, shifting and unstable sequence of spatialities. In and between these locales there is a pronounced and tense socio-spatial dialectic, which should not be totalized, as traditional, hegemonic geography has tried to do. Lowe writes about these locales from the perspective of a substantial, socially-excluded minority of rural dwellers who have low incomes and no access to transport. 25 Despite the differences between them, Bhabha's and Bell Hooks' conceptualising of the margins share a concern not to tie themselves to definitions accepting of marginalization as the imposition of a more, powerful binary 'other'. Thus there are points of similarity between Bhabha's notion of rearticulating the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the marginalized 'other' and Bell Hooks' concept of 're-visioning':
As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, 'the politics of location* necessarilly calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision.26

I I j f I I I

| I J f

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A notion of marginality as defined by the more powerful 'other' characterized a great deal of documentary writing about urban Britain in the 1980s, as in Robert Chesshyre's description of a Northern 'New Town' called Skelmersdale:
Today, the town is a totem for Britain's lost expectations, more impoverished, more socially disturbed, more hopeless than even Wigan, six miles to the East and George Orwell's symbol of political and economic failure of 50 years ago. Its population is half the originally intended target; its hospital has been cancelled; there is to be no Marks and Spencer storea touchstone amenity for many residents; its grandiose road

77LindenPeaj^^^BlggiaLDiflerenceand the 'New Geography' scheme mocks the low ratio of car owners. Today the metaphorical road to Wigan Pier snakes out of Wigan across the M6 and ends in a battered row of shops in Digmoor, Skelmersdale's most squalid estate. 27

The difficulty with this kind of explication of internal difference has been identified by Hall and developed by Bhabha. Hall argues that for the f r a g m e n t e d , marginalized, racially discriminated populations of a Thatcberite underclass, unskilled, unwaged, unemployed, homeless, material interests on their own have no class belonging.28 He criticises orthodox Left wing writings about the margins for their 'unilinear and irreversible political logic, driven by some abstract entity that we call the economic or capital' whereas 'politics works actually more like the logic of language. . . . The ideological sign is always multi-accentual and Janus-faced'. Writers such as Chesshyre fail to address the multi-accentual dimensions of ideological signs, and to some extent this is also a problem with work on the North-South and rural-urban divides. The 'scenario of articulation' to which Bhabha and Hooks attach such importance is inadequately addressed. Bhabha attempts to rectify this by focusing, in the light of Hall's arguments, upon the tension between 'the spatial incommensurability' of cultural difference and 'the non-synchronicity' of signification as one is articulated, as in Chesshyre's account, in terms of the other. Bhabha suggests that a spatial movement in cultural representation occurs when cultural differences emerge from the displacements and derelictions of social marginalization. 29 It is this shift in cultural representation, which Bhabha perceives as spatial movement and as 'a time-lag', which Chesshyre fails to acknowledge. However, not recognising it results not only in misrepresentation but eschews what Bhabha believes is an important 'interrogative space' between relocation and reinscription. It is the nature of this space which Hooks extensively theorizes, albeit in somewhat different terms from Bhabha, and which is especially pertinent for artists and writers working at the margins. For Bell Hooks, marginality, whether as imagined or real, is where one can choose to locate oneself. She positions herself in a fluid, multidimensional topography and not a territorial imagined geography where centre and margin are permanently marked and mutually exclusive. It decentres the centre, refusing to accept the subject position of 'other' whilst conceiving not of a radical subject but radical subjectivities. This has proved to be an important position in feminist geography which imagines women's political space as diversified by immigration, exile, structures of community, sexuality, class, race, religion, social relations and recognises that disruptive geographies develop in different ways. As Soja and Barbara Hooper explain, Hooks' third space is 'a spatiality of inclusion [of radical subjectivities] rather than exclusion, a spatiality where radical subjectivities

78

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can multiply, connect and combine in polycentric communities of identity and resistance'.30 It is Bell Hooks' emphasis upon 'inclusion', albeit a separatist inclusion based to some extent upon what Hooks chooses to define as 'radical', which separates her concept of uneven geographical development from Soja's 'social-spatial clustering or agglomeration of activities around identifiable geographical centres or nodes'.31 In fact, for many 'new geographers' in Britain, she has provided the most significant critique of Soja's work. Two of the premises on which her work is based have proved particularly influential: the margins define an alternative spatiality, a third space of 'radical openness', and, although a different sense of space is being theorized which straddles representation and unrepresentability, this third space is still about location and locatedness.32 These premises have helped to determine, if not determined, the current foci of the 'new geography' in Britain which, as in America, is upon describing the new spaces of politics, upon locating a new politics of identity and upon locating lines of disruption. The third space which Hooks identifies, straddling representation and unrepresentability, is that from which writers in Britain from the ethnic minorities work. As Bhabha points out, minority discourse that emerges from the liminal movement of a nation's culture not only confronts and contradicts the dominant discourse but questions the very disposition of space and time from which the narrative of the nation begins. For Hooks this questioning is essential: 'If we only view the margin as sign, marking the condition of our pain and deprivation, then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being'.33 In Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage (1985) the account of 1950s London given by Leila, a recently arrived immigrant, subjects the environment to scrutiny, searching out in the politics of place the radical possibilities of restructuring. At first, Leila sees her marginality as defined by the more powerful 'other' in the kind of terms which we discussed above. She notices how the 'snaking, endless streets' both reflect and determine the social character of the place; how West Indians stand in queues for buses that consist of West Indians while only white people appear to wear suits, carry brief cases or drive large cars. But she refuses to accept her subject position, fragmenting the territoriality of white racism by describing a place that is both inside and outside the dominant culture. Her analysis brings three discourses to bear implicitly on what she sees: the myth of England as a green and pleasant land; the memory of the warmth of the Caribbean and the experience of living in inner city Britain. The positioning of the descriptive eye between nostalgia for the Caribbean and a sense of lack in the present creates an idiosyncratic focalization in which moments of description are frozen, producing haunted and haunting images: 'on the street corner a middle-aged

79LindenPeaj^^^BlggiaLDiflerence and the 'New Geography' woman gland

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painted to appear as if young modelled on a lamp-post'; ' I n E n people left bread on their doorsteps and dogs came and passed water on it. ' A s they gt off the bus the sky hung so low it covered the street 34 like a dark coffin lid.' The Final Passage is littered with references to traditional icons of Englishess: the idyllic English childhood which haunts the description of the dirty children of the inner city streets; the relentlessness of English rain; the English queue now fallen like English cricket to West Indians and the London bus. But these icons are not in the text to provide only a sense of an alienating and alienated culture, they serve to undermine the transplantation of conventional binary structures into the third space of the novel. The London bus, for example, provides a ticket to the economic configuration of identity. It appears to offer freedom of movement, but only provides access to a prescribed route/There is socio-economic status and advantage in living close to a bus stop whilst the routes themselves redraw the socio-economic map of the city. Buses are part of a transport hierarchy based upon the different statuses which culture ascribes to different makes of cars and taxis. There is powerlessness in having to rely on public transport waiting for a bus is figurative as well as literalas Leila discovers from the spray and litter of passing lorries which make her feel like the loaf on the step. The reconstitutidn of difference from its persistent binary structuring upon which the notion of third space is predicated is evidenced in fact in the work of many British writers of non-English origins. Usually it is achieved through manipulation of the field of the same/other, the simultaneous occupation of the centre and the margin. Sour Sweet (1982), which concerns the Chinese community in London, is a tightly, and in many senses conventionally, structured novel.35 But at its heart there is a postmodern rather than an hegemonic geography. As the novel alternates between its representation of the Chen family and the triad family, London and Hong Kong oscillate between being centre and margin. Both these spaces depend upon an elsewhere for their existence and both are unstable, precarious, fluctuating and contested. In the novel, there is a greater emphasis on the multiple positions involved in the mediation of identity than in The Final Passage. In the spaces constructed by difference, the distinction between the real and the imaginary and between spatial metaphors and materialized geographies once again dissolve into a 'third space' containing more than the simple continuities of the original dualities. The narrative of Sour Sweet is written from an imaginative space beyond the tensions in the text between allegiance to the traditional ways of China and collusion with contemporary England which throws the different positions and the conflict between them into relief. In fact, Mo's authoritative presence in contemporary literature is rooted in the extent to which Sour Sweet successfully revises the

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geography of the centre itself so that it is perceived in terms of localities which encompass contexts, enclosures and nodal concentrations of human in. teraction linked to multiple networks of social power. We began this paper with reference to the increasing prevalence of spatial metaphors in social theory. The geography of Mo's novel Sour Sweet demonstrates the problematic nature of many of the geographical terms we use, such as 'location', 'territory', 'displacement', 'centre', 'position'. They belong to a geography which has used them unproblematically to conceptualize a space which in turn has not been seen as posing difficulties. As we have seen, however, the spatialities in which 'new geographers' in Britain are interested are difficult and complex to theorize and virtually impossible to articulate in this traditional vocabulary. Indeed, the inadequacy and inappropriateness of the spatial vocabulary available to 'new geographers' has become one of their salient concerns, not least because for them, as for writers at the margins, space is becoming increasingly 'liminal' and 'paradoxical'. Liminal space, as occupied by the Chen family and the triads, is ambiguous and ambivalent; boundaries between private and public use, global markets and local place, are blurred. Paradoxical space, like that occupied by Leila in The Final Passage, grounds identity whilst denying it. 36 In each case, further degrees of internal difference further disrupt traditional concepts of rootedness within one specific and coherent space.

Notes
1 Dick Hebdige, 'Subjects in Space', New Formations, 11 (1990) : vii. 2 Michael Keith and Steve Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 1. 3 Ibid., p. 2. 4 Ibid., pp. 3-4. 5 Ibid. 6 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 43. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., pp. 76-7. 9 Ibid., p. 77. 10 Ibid., p. 78. 11 Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity, p. 5. 12 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 127. 13 Ibid., p. 149. 14 Ibid., p. 150. 15 Ibid., pp. 150-1.

17 Cal McCrystal, 'The Wrong Side of the Law', The Independent on Sunday, November 21 (1993) : 13. jg Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1993), p. 133. 19 p. L. Knox, 'The Restless Urban Landscape: Economic and Socio-cultural Change and the Transformation of Metropolitan Washington, DC', Annals of the Associaton of American Geographers, 81 (1991) : 181-209. 20 Homi Bhabha, 'DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation', in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 299. 21 Ibid., p. 297. See also, Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity, p. 223. 22 Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity, p. 224. 23 Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 313. 24 Helen M. Jewell, The North-South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 25 Geoff Tansey, T h e Grass Could Be Greener', The Times Higher Education Supplement, February 3 (1995) : 6. 26 Bell Hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (London: Turnaround, 1991), p. 145. 27 Robert Chesshyre, 'The Road to Skem', The Observer Review, May 31 (1987), 17. See, also, Robert Chesshyre, The Return of the Native Reporter (London: Viking, 1987). 28 Qt. Homi Bhabha, 'Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt', in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 58. 29 Ibid., pp. 58-9. Keith and Pile believe that in his concept of the 'time-lag' Bhabha ties the locus of difference to historicity. Bhabha admits that he emphasises 'cultural temporality' here but he also sees this as a 'spatial movement' and claims to identify an 'iterative, interrogative space'. See, Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity, p. 223. 30 Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper, The Spaces That Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Polities', in Keith and Pile, Place and Politics of Identity, p. 192. 31 Edward Soja, Postmo'dem Geographies, p. 149. 32 Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity, p. 5. 33 Bell Hooks, 'Talking Back', in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornell West (eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), p. 342. See also,' Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 312. 34 Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage (London: Faber, 1985), pp. 122, 160 and 198. 35 Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (London: Abacus, 1982). 36 Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography, 140-1, 149-55.

* Writin Places

^ ^ ^ j j ^ ^ w i d Mv Tribe: Some Thoughts on Community . .. duct of a society which holds certain beliefs about competitiveness, self-assertion, and so on. We seem also to have here three very clear examples of what Daniel Bell (and many, many others) would call 'the decline of moral order'.4 Perhaps this decline is only to be expected in the face of the 'postmodern condition' a condition described with admirable pithiness by Jean-Franois Lyotard as one of 'incredulity toward metanarratives'.5 Martin Thomasson Postmodern or not, the problem I want to deal with in this paper is a problem for communitarian accounts of identity when confronted with this condition. In a sense it is for me an Aristotelian problemthat of finding the mean between two extremes. To follow the first extreme is to fly in the face of postmodernist claims and to seek to establish fixed identities arising from permanent (or relatively permanent) factors of the human environment such as biologysuch would include family, race, nationality (particularly national identity based on race). The other extreme is reached by embracing the postmodern condition and might best be described as a kind of hyperfluidity of identity, wherein the formative influences on identitysuch as relationships, communities, social rolesare in a constant state of flux. It is important to examine in detail the precise natures and depths of the difficulties posed by these alternatives before moving on to suggest, tentatively, how we might set about seeking the mean. Feminist critiques of traditional communitarian accounts of identity are useful in presenting the threats posed by the first optionthat of resorting to static notions of communal influence. Marilyn Friedman refers to the familyneighbourhood-school-church' model of communitarianism, and cites as examples Sandel and Maclntyre.6 Her criticism is that such traditional communities (communities which in Sandel's terms we 'find' ourselves in, as opposed to those we later choosehave been and continue to be sources of oppression and marginalisation for women and many minority groups. Taking the example of the biological family alone, we can immediately see how its valorisation as an essential communitarian influence on identity at once pushes women back into stereotypical roles and places the single parent and/or homosexual beyond the margin. If we, therefore adopt a broader notion of communitythat of the social group as employed in Tajfel's theory,7 we may seem to be offered a more acceptable account of the formation of social identity. Basically, Tajfel's theory was that each of us constructs a social identity by reference to a range of categories (social groups) in which we deem ourselves to be included or

Me and My Tribe: Some Thoughts on Community for the Twenty-first Century

Let me begin by relating a brief series of moral issues that cropped up in discussions with students over the last year.1 In the first, a student refused to condemn the adultery of a friend on the grounds that 'no one has the right to judge anyone else'. (N.B. It is these grounds which are of relevance to this discussion, rather than the question of the adultery itself.) In the second incident, whilst discussing with a whole class the principles upon which we, as a class, might establish our own State, and in particular the conditions under which they would acknowledge political obligaton to that state, one reasonably bright and reflective student refused to accept any groundseven his own freely given signature on the founding constitutional documentas sufficient to bind him. In the third, a generally pleasant, amenable and responsible student blithely insisted, in response to a hypothetical moral dilemma, that he would, without hesitation, cause the deaths of one hundred (or more) innocent people, if the only alternative were his own (isolated) death.2 Each of these instances in their own way represents an assertion of individualism. On the one hand, we might choose to read them as confirmingwith a vengeanceMargaret Thatcher's observation that there is no such thing as society. On the other hand, since all concerned were males, we might side with Marilyn Friedman3 and acknowledge that male values typically simply are values of individuation. However, as Friedman would acknowledge, looked at another way, those values are the product of a particular type of society. On this view, and notwithstanding their apparently rampant individualism, the students concerned are quite plainly the pro-

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from which we feel we are or choose to be excluded; e.g. gender, race, class, religion, job, hobbies, etc. For Tajfel, social identity is defined as,
that part of the individual's self-concept which derives form his knowledge of his membership of a social group or (groups) together with the emotional significance attached to that membership.8

However, whilst this formulation allows for the inclusion of groups marginalised in traditional communitarian accounts, and in doing so allows for the significance of 'communities of choice' (which Friedman rightly sees as essential to an acceptable communitarian view) it is nonetheless unsatisfactory on two counts. The first of these problems is articulated by Liz Bondi. Bondi's critique is also from a feminist perspective and is framed within a more general critique of 'identity polities'. Referring specifically to a particular development in 'identity polities', Bondi observes that,
[r]eliance upon apparently pre-given categories of class, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and so on invoked a conception of identity as something to be acknowledged or uncovered rather than constructed, as something fixed rather than changing.9

The principle of unification operated by these fixed categories is always to valorize the privileged member by denigrating the excluded Other. Such an approach to the establishing of social identity leads inevitably to sexism, racism, homophobia, the world-wide oppression of children by adults, even that attitude held by humans towards non-humans dubbed by Peter Singer 'speciesism'. As a general rule, these categories are most oppressive where they are deemed to be most fixed, which is often where they are (purportedly) based on biology. It seems likely that fixed categories are inescapably restrictive, oppressive, authoritarian and may even tend towards totalitarianism (as we shall discuss later). The other extreme which I mentioned at the beginning of the paper is the active embracing of the postmodern condition, resulting in what I have called the hyperfluidity of identity. Bondi correctly recognises this as a problem for identity politics, in that here the identity-forming categories are so unstable, so open to question and revision, that it is hard to see how a politics could be grounded in identity at all:
[t]aken to its logical conclusion, the category "women", upon which feminism is based, becomes a free-floating sign apparently able to take on any meaning we give it. 13

For Bondi, this conception is too close to the liberal humanist model of identitythat of the fixed, autonomous, rights-bearing individual. Identity here is fragmented but fixed.10 The second difficulty with these fixed categories is that, in addition to the restrictions they impose, they are divisive and oppositional. It is not merely that I am a Christian and you are a Muslim, but that the identity-bestowing power of being a Christian will for the most part be parasitic on your being a Muslim, which is to be apprehended by me under the description 'not-a-Christian'. In fact, in terms of the construction of our identities, much of the relevance of these fixed categories lies in what they excludein their emphasis on and definition of the Other. These categories are effective ascribers of identity often only in so far as they can stipulate an Other (an Other who is often characterised as a threat to the unity and integrity of that category). Thus, for example, what it means to be British is primarily 'not to be foreign' (where 'foreign' is to be understood as 'non-British'). What it means to be a member of a given biological family is prescribed in terms of the amorphous (often menacing) Other which constitutes the 'Not-family'. Even where there exists some content to the categoryperhaps such as in the German concept of Heimat11 its force as a forger of identity lies more in who it excludes than in any true, shared experience of the included.12

So much for identity politics; the problems posed by embracing the postmodern condition for identity-formation on a communitarian account will be seen to be equally severe. In his epic poem 'V', Tony Harrison refers in one section to the sense of isolation his father experienced when the corner shop near to where he lived changed hands.14 No longer was it the site of a communal experience, where he stroll in, see familiar faces behind the counter, spend half an hour chatting, buy next to nothing and still be welcomed back next time. The fact that the new owners are black has, I suspect, contributed to the dearth of close critical study of this section of the poem, for fear that any analysis might be misconstrued as a condemnation of immigration or of British Asians more generally. This is a pity, for I think the section highlights two important aspects of (to indulge in a terrible clich) the human condition. Firstly, there is the temporality of human experience. We construct our identities with reference to past, present and future. 15 Our experience of the present is comprehended only via reference to the other two tenses it is as if the present can only be made sense of, be worked upon, when held stable in the grip of a vice, one of whose jaws is our memory of past events,

the other our expectations of the future. 16 This is where the second aspect comes in; that of change. Change can be exciting, it can bear the promise of better things to come. But also, change can be feared, not simply because it can mean a worsening of circumstances, but also because (on a communitarian account) change, representing shift in community, also represents a threat to identity. For a social elite, change threatens the status quo which supports their privilege. For the rest of us, change is often to be feared because it is beyond our control, externally imposed, unpredictable, liable to diminish our condition. Change viewed positively is seen as sweeping away the old order, sweeping away restrictive structures and presenting new possibilities a form of freedom. Change viewed negatively is seen as the bringer of instability, of uncertainty, as a threat to community, security, and the self. The postmodern condition seems to be predicated on change, on the constant undermining of 'old' accounts by new ones, such that both positive and negative attitudes to change are prone to being exacerbated. On the one hand, change will be seen as the thing to cleave to (if you like, the sole certainty), so that what the individual sees as valid in her life is not her experience, nor even the 'here and now', but always what is coming next. The present moment and, most especially, the past are thus excessively devalued. What we are saying in this is that in effect, two dimensions of human experience are swept aside. Viewed negatively, (what is perceived as) the accelerating rate of change promotes fear, confusion, fragmentation and isolation, with the result that, in the cause of self-defence, the individual turns inward. What I am suggesting is that Western society is currently experiencing this extreme schizophrenic (in the non-technical sense) response to social, economic and technological change. What does this imply for the formation of community and hence of social identity? In order to form communities, some level of bonding is required. In order for bonding to take place, there is the need for some degree of stabilitynot just a shared present, but the possibility of a developing a mutual history, of projecting shared future prospects. Such stability can be chosen voluntarily or imposed. Forming communities of choice involves making choicesbeing able to say 'no' to certain options. This in itself is problematic under the postmodern condition, wherein the criteria for making such decisions must be set upon ground which is constantly being undercut. This is the problem of 'life-style options', of which there are a multiplicity, and which themselves seem to generate a fear of commitment, of making the wrong decision (due to the

proliferation of options, of criteria, and the incommensurability of these criteria). One particular source of indecision here is that, given the acceleration 0 f the rate of change, there seems little ground for long-term planning, for projecting along a pathway. Selecting a life-style option can come to seem like entering a tunnelonce entered, there is no way out but at the other end. Unfortunately, by the time you get to the other end, you are not where you expected to be when you entered the tunnel and it is probable, of course, that that elusive destination was your only reason to enter in the first place. What's the point of paying a lot of money to embark on a long (and possibly unpleasant journey) only to end up somewhere you didn't want to be anyway?! Therefore there is likely to be a tendency to choose those options which do not require long-term commitments, and thus leave open the possibility of 'changing horses in mid-stream'. The problem for the communitarian account is that if we cannot locate ourselves within settled communities, we cannot get a grip on what we are, or in Bondi's spatial terms, where we are. And before we can begin to make sense of where we want to go and how to get there, we surely need to know our point of departure. From this it might seem clear that there is a need for some hierarchy of influences, some stability of environment. We might describe our current situation as akin to adolescence, whereby we want to be free, autonomous individuals, but we don't really know how to take full responsibility for ourselves. We have a need, as social creatures, to be woven into the fabric of some shared experience, but to be a part of something in this way involves opening ourselves up to it, and how can we do this when it is constantly changing? It is not possible to form a relationship with an entity (be it person or community) that is in a constant process of unpredictable mutation. This is the point at which the circle closes and becomes potentially vicious. I have presented two extremes. One in which identity-forming communal structures are imposed from outside, most usually from above. These communities tend to be 'traditional', rigid, exclusionary. The other extreme offers communities so fluid as to be no longer functional in the forming of social identity. We have a 'nice' parallel here with the conceptual structures that render the world comprehensible: rigid structures are stultifying and oppressive, denying access to whole realms of possible experience; but where conceptual frameworks are too unstable, the world becomes an amorphous, incomprehensible blob. We cope with this confusion either by 'shutting down', withdrawing into ourselves, or by looking to external 'authorities' to impose an order. This is the danger that Robert Nisbet identifies when he speaks of the 'quest for community' leading to danger:
this is the appeal . . . of the totalitarian prophetto "rescue" masses of atomized individuals from their intolerable individualism. 11

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Where we have hyperfluidity of community, and hence of identity, we see the need to set limits,18 but we do not see ourselves as having the tools to set those limits, hence there is a tendency to invite or allow others to set those limits for us. This is the 'window of opportunity' in through which excessive government eagerly rushes. What I am suggesting is that the two extremes ultimately collapse into one outcomethat of excessive state intervention in our lives. Hence, as I indicated at the beginning, the urgent need to seek the mean. But wherein lies the mean? For Marilyn Friedman, the mean lies in friendship and other 'communities of choice'. She is surely right to maintain that such communities are identity forming in ways that are freer and less oppressive than in the 'found' communities ('family-neighbourhood-school-church) valorized by traditional communitarians. She is also right to present these communities of choice (as opposed now to communities of place) as a mitigation of city life, quoting, approvingly, Claude Fischer:
Urbanism . . . fosters social involvement in the subculture(s) of choice, rather than the - subculture(s) of circumstance. 19

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My experiences may simply amount to confusion. Wherever there is coherent account of experience to be employed to position identity, it my we il be that such experience is rooted in (and thus parasitic on) traditional communities and identities and therefore neither tremendously enlightening or liberating. Lyotard himself speaks of the need to accept local consensuslocal in space and time. Whilst this may represent a reasonable and realistic destination, it does not provide a map for getting there. The call to recognise 'the heteromorphous nature of language games'22 in the interest of the attainment of justice, whilst it may represent 'best practice' in the face of the 'inevitability' of the postmodern condition, does not seem to me to recognise the danger (highlighted by Nisbet) that both states and their citizens are likely to find othermore authoritarianresponses more tempting (though for diverse reasons). What is called for, it seems to me, is a change in attitude, a change that is simple to describe, and one which, for many of us, ought not to be too difficult to effect. So far in this discussion, we have found ourselves presented with alternatives which, despite being at first sight polar opposites, have one thing in commonthey both present a picture of a society beyond our control. And yet we are not discussing here elemental physical forces. On the contrary, at base we are dealing with relationships between human beings. Relationships between human beings are shaped by how we view each other. If we view each other as potential threats, out of control, unpredictable, we shall be disinclined to form communities, and such communities as we do form will be for defensive purposes only. The quest for community, however, is not driven by defensive considerations aloneAristotle was much wiser than Hobbes on this. Defence is a very closed form of sharing; defence against a perceived common enemy. Yet we do not enter community solely, or even primarily, as protection from outsiders, or from each other. There are more ways for me to approach other human beings than with an eye to the damage they can inflict upon me. One of these ways is referred to by Levinas, Irigaray and (in a different context) by Descartesadmiration; a sense of wonder at difference. This is an important, but not a community forming attitude. Another option is a sense of joy at commonality, at the possibility of shared experience. To approach others in either of these ways requires trust and courage and perhaps even a kind of love. For a few, sorry individuals, this is not a possibility, but for most of us it is. Most of us, in most situations, neither

In all of this I can see sense. My problem however, is that when I look around, I do not see such communities of choice proliferating and thriving in the cities of the western world indeed for certain of the community types cited by Friedman (e.g. trades unions) the reverse might be said to be true. Liz Bondi seeks her midway in 'context-dependent creativity',20 wherein identities are moulded from valid subjective experience, and are to be negatiated via a kind of political pragmatism:
fictions of identity are essential, and essentialism (humanism) is deployed strategically rather than ontologically. 21

Bondi weaves into this a positional account of identity, in which (as I have previously stated) the question becomes not 'what am I ?' but 'where am I ?' which, as she notes, lends the issue a relativised, relational, outward-looking slant, as opposed to the introspective, individualised stance of the original formulation. Again, there is much here to agree with, but once again, I have reservations. For example, wherever the postmodern condition is rampant (ex hypothesi) the creation of an identity of positionality, an account of where I am, drawn from an understanding of subjective experience, may prove

intend nor wish harm to another, and yet we have come to approach strangers, acquaintances (and even in apparently increasing numbers, friends and 'loved ones') as potential threats. Our governments are inclined to encourage us in this. (The converse of Plato's point about government power being safest in the hands of those who had no ambition to govern still seems to hold good. Those who seek to govern are too often in pursuit of power through the state. It is therefore, most unlikely that they will ever be genuinely committed to reducing the state's control over the people.) Of course, I cannot hope to make a friend and collaborator of every enemy and competitor but I can at least resist all attempts to convince me that I ought to view all as threats in need of regulation. With regard to this, any move that panders to fears or enhances an image of the inadequacy of people to organize their own lives without external (i.e. governmental) interference ought to be resisted, because it mitigates against the courage that is needed to 'connect' with others, to commune. Thus, the idea that human beings are essentially discreet, egotistical units whose only hope of salvation lies with Leviathan can become a self-fulfilling prophesy for the individualist and the regulator. A significant point to bear in mind in such an atomistic political universe is that, as a political unit, the individual in isolation is all but impotent. It is not just a Sartrean assertion to say that we can choose to view others as potential friends rather than potential enemies. There are good reasons for making such a choice. I do not wish to concede too much to biological essentialism, but it does seem that we are by nature social beings to put it minimally, the process of our development as individuals relies on the contribution of others; the forms of life we have constructed reinforce that dependence (even if it is often mediated by technology). Given this, a world in which you can generally count on the beneficence of others will be a more desirable world than one in which people are generally out to gfet you. This is not just another 'opiate of the people'. It is not like believing in an afterlife irrespective of whether one existsbecause it makes you feel better. The interactive nature of human relationships means that believing in such a world is a significant step in making it so. I do not mean to suggest that human relationships and communities can be formed independently of the material conditions of society, but precisely that the material conditions of society as we now find it (i.e. postmodern condition in Lyotard's minimal sense) offer opportunities for you and I to take control of our own lives, in a way in which our ancestors never could. In the past, the tribe was a communal unit framed by tradition, in which my belonging and my status would be decided by factors almost entirely beyond my control. The tribes to which I could belong in the future can be much more flexible, both in shape and in size, and the dynamic of

their internal relationships much more open to negotiation. In other words, my yibe can truly become my tribe.23

I I I I j f I I [ I J I I | I I I I I j j J I

Notes
1 I ought to make it clear that these instances are intended as illustrations rather than conclusive evidence for any claim fundamental to my argument. It is worth comparing these examples with the experiences related by Berel Lang in 'Tolerance and Its Discontents: Teaching the Holocaust', in Lang (1991), pp. 77-8. 2 It is actually quite task to detach students from these sorts of beliefsirrespective of the weaknesses and contradictions of the positions. It appears that moral subjectivism in particular is very deeply rooted in their psyche. I suspect this is an inadvertent result of the spirit of tolerance instilled by liberal education, (as identified by Lang, above). 3 Marilyn Friedman, 'Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community', in Avineri and de-Shalit (eds.), p. 105. 4 Daniel Bell,'Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Decline of the Moral Order', in Alexander and Seidman (eds.), pp. 319-29. 5 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition', in Alexander and Seidman (eds.), p. 330. There are now several interesting and powerful critiques of the postmodernist position. Since I go no further here than to accept the very restricted definition offered by Lyotard, making no claims as to the uniqueness or longevity of the so-called postmodern era (e.g. I do not wish to speak of an 'end to history'), it does not seem necessary or appropriate to engage with these critiques at this point. 6 M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Cambridge; A. Maclntyre, After Virtue (1981), Notre Dame, Ind.; cited in Friedman, 'Feminism and Modern Friendship' p. 103 n. 7 H. Tajfel (1974). 8 Race, Identity and British Society, p. 29. 9 Liz Bondi, 'Locating Identity Polities', in Keith and Pile (eds.), p. 93. 10 Bondi cites Dona Harraway's view of how divisive and damaging such an approach proved to be, drawing attention to categories that separated women and setting these categories up as fixed aspects of a person's identity; effectively, setting division in stone. 11 Celia Applegate, 'The Question of Heimat in the Weimar Republic', New Formations, 17 (Summer 1992) : 64-74; Jeffrey M. Peck, 'Rac(e)ing the Nation: Is There a German "Home"?', New Formations, 17 (Summer 1992) : 5-84. 12 See Michael IgnatiefFs interviews, Blood and Belonging series, B.B.C. T.V. 13 Bondi, 'Locating Identity Polities', p. 94. 14 Harrison (1989), pp. 26-7. 15 Richard Wollheim has some enlightening things to say about the temporal dimension of human experience. See Wollheim (1986). 16 The metaphor, of course, does reflect the true complexity of human experience, since each tense moulds our comprehension of the others. 17 Nisbet, p. 219. 18 Bell, 'Modernism' . . . , p. 329. 19 Cited in Friedman, 'Feminism and Modern Friendship' . . . , p. 117.

j j

92
20 21 22 23

Martin Thomasson Bondi, 'Locating Identity Politics' . . . , p. -96. Ibid. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition', p. 340. Julius Moravscik offers an interesting account of the potential for forming new communities through adopting new ways of seeing one another. See Moravscik, 'Communal Ties', Presidential Address, American Philosophical Association, 1988, pp. 211-23.

Tadeusz Rachwat

References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Steven Seidman (eds.). 1990. Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates. Cambridge Univ. Press. Avineri, Schlomo and Avner de-Shalit (eds.). 1992. Communitarianism and Individualism. Oxford Univ. Press. Keith, Michael and Steve Pile (eds.). 1993. Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge. Harrison, Tony. V. 1989. Bloodaxe, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Ignatieff, Michael. 1994. 'Dreaming a Nation', from the Blood and Belonging, series, B.B.C. T.V. video. Lang, Berel. 1991. Writing and the Moral Self. London and New York: Routledge. New Formations, No. 17 (Summer, 1992), 'The Question of "Home"'. Nisbet, Robert. 1990. The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. San Francisco: ICS Press. O'Brien, Conor Cruise. 1988. Passion and Cunning: Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism and Revolution. New York: Simon and Shuster. Piercy, Marge. 1979. Woman on the Edge of Time. London: The Women's Press. Race, Identity and British Society. 1982. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Tajfel, H. 1974. 'Social Identity and Intergroup Behaviour', Social Science Information, 13 (2) : 65-93. Wollheim, Richard. 1986. The Thread of Life. Cambridge University Press.

'My Tongue Is My Paper'. On Philadelphus Inodorus and on Mapping Indian Territories in the Eighteenth Century

Willy Maley says in his essay on British Cultural Studies that 'the encounter with other cultures is the key to cultural and political identity. It is the non-English elements of the British Isles, represented as colonies or regions, that define and circumscribe Englishness and Britishness.'1 One such other culture which Britain 'encountered' in its history was, of course, the culture of American Indians, a culture which, as it seems, has never become an element of the British Isles, but which, I think, played an important role in the formation of Britishness. A look at the British colonial discourse, which I propose in what follows, illustrates certain linguistic mechanisms of conquest and political domination of a culture facing what it perceives as wilderness, facing 'the Other', and simultaneously trying to somehow domesticate it and bring back home. Though the texts I look at, official documents and a traveller's report, represent two different genres, the implicit assumptions contained in them seem to form quite a coherent ideology concerning the possibility of a relationship between British colonizers and Indians. Indian treaties and 'talks' with the British colonial authorities in the eighteenth century, as rendered into English by translators and transcribers, are seen by some commentators 'for both matter and manner . . . after two hundred years the most original and engaging documents of their century in America'.2 The translators and transcribers were usually Indian traders, military officers and, generally, literate English speaking persons who 'were in close contact with the Indians'.3 In one of such transcriptions the Governor

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My Tongue Is My Paper'. On Philadelphus Inodorus . .. concept

95

of South Carolina (James Glen) tries to investigate an attack by Indians on a house in which a white man was wounded in the arm. The event took place sometime in 1751. Since the Indians were not very informative on the previous day, he begins the 'talk' as follows:
I listened with great Attention to what you said Yesterday in Hopes that you would have made an answer to my Talk of the preceding Day which was faithfully interpreted to you and which to prevent all Mistakes was delivered to you in Writing and was again read and explained to you, but to my great Surprise, I found you had passed over in Silence or evaded the most material Parts of it. 4

of documents and European writing, was also one of the possible sources of misunderstandings. Perhaps one such misunderstanding is hinted a t in the following report of 1766 concerning the demarcation of the boundary between the Cherokee and South Carolina:
The Cherokee propose running the line from where it terminated a straight course to Colonel Chiswell's Mines, which I believe will be north, as nigh as I could make it: . . . It would be very necessary, that a surveyor should first sight the line, from Reedy River a north course, in order to know where it will terminate in Virginia, and whether or not, it will take away any of the settlements.7

The evasion of 'the most material parts' seems to be continued also during the present talk as well, because the answer the Governor receives from Tacite, a Cherokee warrior, is that it was not the Cherokee who committed the horrible wounding, but some other tribes whose love for the English was not as strong as that of his tribe. The Cherokee were simply somewhere else and have no idea what Governor Glen is talking about:
What your Excellency says is very true. I think we did not give you a full Answer last Night, but I live a great Way from the Towns where those Things happened and from where those bad Talks came. 5

The unwritten Cherokee proposal is not quite clear to the author of the report ('as nigh as I could make it'), and the suggested line must be verified by an expert. Indian mapping cannot be documented without such a verification as it m i g h t turn out equally unconventional as their writing. Though mistrusted, however, the cartographic skill of Indians was also an object of admiration on the part of some white men as an innate, natural gift to depict the landscape. Governor Glen saw that skill in Indians as almost as good as the cartographic skill of the Europeans:
I have not rested satisfied with a verbal description of the country from the Indians but have often made them trace the rivers on the floor with chalk, and also on paper, and it is surprising how near they approach to our best maps. 8

The delivery of the written version of Governor Glen's inquiry was, on top of the prevention of mistakes, a gesture toward making the 'Talk' formal, and thus subject to being regarded as a historical document. The Cherokee idea of writing, on the other hand, must have been somehow alien to Governor Glen's mind as too subversive an identification of speech with ecriture. Something of that sort might have been at stake when Skiagunta, another Cherokee warrior, said at the and of the 'Talk':
I cannot write as you and your beloved Men do. My Tongue is my Paper. When I look upon writing I am as if I were blind and in the Dark. 6

Writing being a sphere of darkness rather than that of clarity and explication, no wonder that a number of mistakes and misunderstanding must have occurred during the 'Talks'. It seems, however, that but few of such mistakes could be actually included in the documents since the latter, as documents, should serve the purpose of recording unambiguous historical facts rather than that of testifying to their imperfection. One important subject of numerous talks held in the 1760s and 1770s between Indians and the English Governors was the establishment of the boundary between the colonies and the Indian Territories. It is thus possible to suspect that the concept of the boundary, just as new to Indians as the

All that the Indians need in order to achieve the European perfection seems to be just a little help, or guidance, from the British friends who will show them how to properly develop this natural ability into a perfect kind of art. A look into William Bartram's Travels should suffice to show that it was not only the mapping skill that Indians were seen as naturally endowed with, but, more or less, most of the aspects of social and intellectual life that seemed positive to the European eyefrom political constitution, through geometry, to the art of music. Bartram sees the political system of Indians as 'simply natural . . . as that which is supposed to direct or rule the approved economy of the ant and the bee' by 'natural reason plain to every one'.9 Though as regards music they have 'scarcely any thing worth the name' of a musical instrument, and though with what they have, they mostly produce 'a hideous melancholy discord', they are still capable of producing great music. When the 'hideous' noises of their instruments are 'accompanied with their sweet voices', the result is
a pathetic harmony, keeping exact time together . . . an united universal sensation of delight and peaceful union of souls throughout the assembly. 10

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Tongue Is My Paper'. On Philadelphus Inodorus . . .

97

Very much like Crusoe's Friday, Bartram's Indians are somehow European within, and they can live morally without the necessity of any guidance or education. 'As moral men,' says Bartram, 'they certainly stand in no need of European civilization,' and adds, giving an example of Muscogulges, that they have already 'made greater advances toward the refinements of true civilization, which cannot, in the least degree, be attributed to the good examples of the white people.'11 Regardless of Indian's moral refinement, however, Bartram finds some kind of unification with the white people profitable for them, and he expresses it by means of the rhetoric reminiscent of that of Alexander Pope, who finds his garden at Twickenham wanting correction and improvement.12 Bartram's Indians simply desire such a unification, which Bartram discovers in the Introduction to his book 'I was satisfied,' he writes, 'in the discovering that they were desirous of becoming united with us, in civil and religious society'.13 One way towards the achievement of such a unification Bartram suggests is by 'sending men of ability and virtue . . . as friendly visitors into their towns' in order to learn their language, tradition and history and then to write true and just reports which might 'assist the legislature . . . to form and offer to them a judicious plan for their civilization and union with us'. 14 Regardless of Indian natural abilities, it is anyway necessary to somehow institutionalize them within the legal system of the state and to verify (in the way the boundary line suggested by the Indians was to be verified), or investigate, whether those natural predispositions actually exist. Before the unificaton, the Indian territory must thus be clearly demarcated as properly 'theirs' in order that the 'men of ability and virtue' do not mistakenly take the Europeans for Indians, for instance. One of the paradoxes invalidating Bartram's noble scheme seems to be, say, a certain shortage of men of ability and virtue coming to live in America, at least from the British perspective. Such is the impression one gets on having read a 'promotion booklet' for America published in London in 1698. Rather than to able men of virtue, it seems to be addressed to people perhaps virtuous, but such whose 'ability' can certainly be questioned. The book defines its objective as 'to persuade the Poor, The Idle, The Lazy, and the Vagabonds of these Kingdoms and Wales to hasten thither, that they may live plentifully, and happily'.15 Those who did 'hasten thither' had mostly one judicious plan in their minds, and the plan mostly concerned the possession of land. An interesting fact concerning such an idealized vision of unity with Indians as Bartram's is that one of the first steps towards it in the 1760s was, paradoxical as it may sound, the establishment of official boundary between the colonies and the southern Indian tribes. What may sound even more paradoxical is that, as I shall try to show, the boundary was not, as is generally believed, intended to grant the settlers some security from the

bloodthirsty Indians, but, rather, to stop settlers from settling within the Indian territories. What might be a little misleading in this latter suggestion is ^at, underlying the scheme of establishing the boundary, we may suspect there wa s some will or wish to protect Indians from the 'landthirsty' settlers, which there was not. Some of the documents on the subject quite explicidy refer to the boundary as to a means of protection of Indians. In January 1763 Lord Egremont, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, wrote:
His Msty [has] it much . . . at heart to conciliate the affection of the Indian nations, by every act of strict justice, and by affording them his royal protection from any encroachment on the lands they have reserved to themselves, for their hunting grounds, & for their own support & habitation; and I may inform you that a plan, for this desirable end, is actually under consideration.1

In another document (May 5, 1763) a somehow different argument is used in support of the idea of the boundary. It turns out that it is necessary
to fix upon some line for western boundary . . . beyond which our people should not at present be permitted to settle hence as their numbers increased they would emigrate to Nova Scotia or to the provinces on the southern frontier where they would be useful to their mother country instead of planting themselves in the heart of America out of reach of governments and where . . . they would be compelled to commence manufacturies to the infinite prejudice of Britain. 17

What seems to be at stake in this seemingly modest gesture of stopping the growth of the Empire is the possibility of the Empire's dispersion and of the loss of control over it by George III. The growth is thus to be stopped only 'at present', as 'nobody's' land beyond the border is too attractive an object to be simply given up. For the time being, however, by settling 'in the heart of America', the subjects of King George III would not be easily accessible to the Crown by sea, the fact which, according to De Vorsey, 'was an anathema to many English merchants and policy makers of the mid-eighteenth century'.18 Some care concerning the consolidating power of the British Empire is sometimes also expressed in contexts different from explicidy political statements. Oliver Goldsmith, for instance, mostly known for his lamenting over the depopulation of small villages which thus were becoming objects of luxurious enjoyment for the rich, also seems to have been worried about the possibility of the dissolution of the Empire due to, among other things, the increase of emigration to America, both from England and from his homeland, Ireland:
. . . an empire, by too great a foreign power may lessen its natural strength, and that dominion often becomes more feeble as it grows more extensive. The ancient Roman

1 Writ " '* Pisces

Tadeusz Rachgg) I ' empire is a strong instance of the truth of the assertion.... To be as explicit as possible I see no reason why we should aggrandize our colonies at our own expense; an acquisition of new colonies is useless, unless they are peopled; but to people those deserts that lie behind our present colonies, would require multitudes from the mother-country; and I do not find we are too populous at home. 19 I I I

j f f j o n g u e Is My Paper'. On Philadelphus Inodorus

a unification with them (both with Indians and with the territories) was equally promising. Interestingly, in the introduction to Travels, he uses the word 'inspection' not exactly with reference to Indian territories, but, more or less, to the whole of universe:

Though himself of Irish descent, Goldsmith uses 'we' in this fragment as if positing Ireland on the colonizing part rather than the colonized one. What he does not welcome as regards the British colonial expansion is the 'aggrandization' of the British colonies, by which he of course means the extension of the present ones. Very much like in the above quoted document, I he also sees populating the 'heart' of America as useless and in fact dangerous to the empire itself. He most probably did realize that the as yet unconquered I American territories were Indian territories and that some of the grounds there were quite fertile, and yet he presents those territories as uninhabited waste land, as wilderness, as an unpeopled desert without life. Like Lord Eg- [ remomnt, Goldsmith actually says that the extension of the empire is I unnatural and unhealthy for its body, thus figuratively positing the idea of J the necessity of setting a limit, a boundary or a border as a natural force that I will keep the body of the state more or less proportional and shapely. As it I turned out, regardless of the establishment of the Indian boundary and | of its numerous redrawings, the settlers moved both south and west paying I little attention to the legal status of the boundary. Though the governor of ! Virginia, for instance, proclaimed an order 'to admit of no colonization within I the specified limits' in 1763, such orders simply could not be obeyed; 'for the J country was found so fertile and pleasant, that fresh numbers every day j thronged thither'.20 William Bartram undertook his travel to the Indian territories in 1773, and he actually accompanied the demarcation of the Georgia-Indian border. He j also was a member of the demarcation party traversing the New Purchase j (Indian lands acquired by Georgia in 1773). His description of the area is very favourable, and his eye very clearly discerns some things, which, as yet, are not there:
This new ceded country promises plenty and felicity . . . The hills suit extremely well for vineyards & olives as nature points out by the abundant produce of fruitful grape vine, native mulberry trees of an excellent quality for silk. Any of this land would produce indigo & no country is more proper for the culture of almost all kinds of fruit." j | j |

This world, as a glorious apartment of the boundless palace of the sovereign Creator, is furnished with an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing, equally free to the inspection and enjoyment of all his creatures.22

A mapping of such a huge territory seems to be an infinite task, if only for the number of things to be inspected and enjoyed in it. What adds to the difficulty is also the inexpressibility of the beauty of the scenes whose expression, in addition to inspection, seems to be one of the tasks of Bartram's endeavour. A becoming term one might coin in order to describe that undertaking could be 'inspection of infinity'. Since the infinite is closer to the spheres of the Burkean sublime rather than those of the beautiful, the task of such an inspection could also be read as an attempt at 'mapping' the sublime, at diminishing, categorizing and naming things and places as yet vague and mysterious on the European map of the world, and desiring, or 'wanting', to be put in some order, perhaps comparable to the orderly space of Philadelphia emerging from its 1764 plan (Fig. 1). Though a botanist rather than a cartographer, Bartram moves through the sublime landscapes of yet unmapped territories attempting to 'pen down' all aspects of the landscape he encounters on his way by giving appropriate names to things. He, figuratively of course, maps the sublime landscapes supplementing them, somewhat notoriously, with long lists of Latin names with which he tries to endow virtually everything he sees. Having reached the top of the Occonne mountain, for instance, Bartram rests, turns about, and finds that:
I was now in a very elevated situation, from whence I enjoyed a view inexpressibly magnificent and comprehensive. The mountainous wilderness which I had lately traversed, down to the region of Augusta, appearing regularly undulated as the great ocean after the tempest; . . . My imagination thus wholly engaged in tne contemplation of this magnificent landscape, infinitely varied, and without bound, I was almost insensible or regardless of the charming objects more within my reach: a new species of Rhododendron foremost in the assembly of mountain beauties; next the flaming Azalea, Kalmia latifiola, incarnate Robinia, snowy manteled Philadelphus inodorus, perfumed Calycanthus, &c. 23

Once the land was acquired by the white men, it became a promised land of I plenty whose fertility lay dormant when the Indians lived there. The time was j ripe now to go and 'inspect' also the Indian territories to check whether

The '&c.' promises of course some eventual naming of the 'charming objects' outside Bartram's reach whose sublimity distracted his sight for a while and made him insensible to them. His sight is soon directed, however, to some more familiar objects which, though new, make the boundless variety of the landscape accessible through the classificatory, Linnean gaze. A few

Tadeusz R a c h w

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PLAN P H I L A D E L P H I E ET ENVIRONS f J I n.- luus i\m,m,nc At \u : ./ A nn/nmir V."

Fig. 1. 'Plan de Philadelphie et Environs', from Bellin's Le Petit Paris 1764

Atlas

Maritime.

'My Tongue Is My Paper'. On Philadelphia Inodorus .

101

lines below the above passage, Bartram repeats this scheme of stepping back from the sublime to the nameable as if reading Burke's Inguiry in which distance from the sublime is constitutive of its being bearable in the form of terrible pleasure replacing the pure terror of the sublime in itself. Things 'incomparable' and 'exceeding' soon give way to measurable evaluation and become meticulously assigned their proper names. The following lengthy example does not seem to require any commentary in this respect:
. . . soon after [I] gained the most elevated crest of the Occonne mountain, and began to descend the other side; the winding rough road carrying me over rocky hills and levels, shaded by incomparable forests, the soil exceedingly rich, and of an excellent quality for the production of every vegetable suited to the climate, and seeming peculiarly adapted for the cultivation of Vines (Vitis vinifera), Olives (Olea Europea), the Almond tree (Amygdalus communis), Fig (Ficus carica), and perhaps the Pomegranate (Punica granatum), as well as Peaches (Amyg. Persica), Prunus, Pyrus, of every variety. I passed again steep rocky ascents, and the rich levels, where grew many trees and plants common in Pennsylvania, New York and even Canada, as Pinus strobus, Pin. sylvestris, Pin. abies, Acer sachharinum, Acer striatum, s. Pennsylvanicum, Populus tremula, Betula nigra, Jugglans alba, &c.; . . . Now I enter a charming narrow vale, through which flows a rapid large creek, on whose banks are happily associated together the shrubs already recited, together with the following: Styphalaea, Euonimus Americana, Hammelis, Azalea, various species, Aristolochia frutescens, s. odoratissima, which rambles over the trees and shrubs on the prolific banks of these mountain brooks. 34

Bartram as it were cannot help planting some new plants, presenting the landscape as naturally demanding certain missing species in its 'suitability' for them. The list of the suitable plants as it were uproots the existing ones which, though 'happily associated together', serve mainly the purpose of indicating the 'exceeding' richness of the soil with the presupposition that the richness could be easily made use of in some more productive manner. Though seemingly an idle spectator of landscape, Bartram actually constantly intervenes in it, modifies it, and changes it. Philadelphia inodorus, for instance, seems to be as agreeable a term in the description as Philadelphia is an element agreeable with its 'Environs' in the above plan. Bartram's mapping eye redraws the landscape translating it into a familiar and ordered sphere of a book, of a natural history or an encyclopedia thus proving that what he seems to be only observing can easily be changed into a text of that observation, into writing which made Skiagunta 'blind and in the dark', and who would probably have been even deeper in the dark had he been asked what Philadelphus inodorus was. It is only at one point of his Travels that Bartram openly admits to having metamorphosed from an idle spectator into an active conqueror due to, as he claims, nature's having prevailed over reason. The context of this metamorphosis is, of course, sexual. Walking and seeing nature with a companion (a trader), Bartram enjoys

102

Tadeusz Rachwai a most enchanting view, a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields, a meandring river gliding through . . . green turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and fruitful strawberry beds; flocks of turkeys strolling about them; herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills; companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having filled their baskets reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers of Magnolia, Philadelphus, perfumed Calycanthurs, sweet Yellow Jassamine and cerulean Glycine frutescenoes.25

The above passage does not seem to break the already familiar pattern of Bartram's narrative consisting, say, in a notorious return of Philadelphus (be it inodorus or not). He registers what he observes, and 'deer prancing in the meads' are glanced at with an equal impartiality as the 'companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins' in order to then give way to Philadelphus and other species of the sort. The list of the names of plans is, surprisingly, abruptly terminated and Bartram's eye returns again to the virgins and sees them
disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool, fleeting streams; while other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.24

This observation changes Bartram's and his companion's roles of idle spectators. The 'sylvan scene of primitive innocence' is 'perhaps too enticing for hearty young men to long continue idle spectators' and 'nature prevailing over reason' they spontaneously 'wished at least to have a more active part in their delicious sports'.27 Bartram's spirit of unification with Indians comes to the fore and he begins to put it into practice among the Cherokee virgins who are probably but a fraction of the whole tribe, but who ideally represent the innate virtues of Indians and their desire to become one with the white men. At first a littie frightened by the white intruders, the virgins hide under cover of a little grove
but on perceiving themselves to be discovered by us, kept their station, peeping through the bushes, when observing our approaches, they . . . decently advanced to meet us, half unveiling their blooming faces, incarnated with the modest maiden blush, and with native innocence and cheerfulness, presented their little baskets, merrily telling us their fruit was ripe and sound. 28

With the fruit thus ready to be consumed Bartram and his friend, needless to say, readily accepted the 'basket' and 'regaled' on the fruit's delicious taste. Then they apologized for the intrusion and 'parted friendly'. This peculiar penetration of Indian territories turns out to be an idyllic exploration of pastoral pleasures into which Bartram translates the encounter

My Tongue Is My Paper'. On Philadelphus Inodorus .

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with the Indian women. As a 'virtuous and able' person innocently inspecting Indian grounds for the equally innocent purpose of unification, he is recognized as such not only by the women, but also by Indian warriors who usually react to his presence with some strange compulsion for shaking hands. Resting on the bank of a 'friendly rivulet making a circuit' at his feet
I took out of my wallet some biscuits and cheese, and a piece of neat's tongue, composing myself to ease and refreshment; when suddenly appeared within a few yards, advancing towards me from behind the point, a stout likely Indian fellow, armed with a rifle gun, and two dogs attending. Upon sight of me he stood, and seemed a little surprised, as I was very much; but instantly recollecting himself and assuming a countenance of benignity and cheerfulness, he came briskly to me and shook hands heartily, and smilingly inquired from whence I came, and whither going; but speaking only in the Cherokee tongue, our conversation was not continued to a great length.29

Bartram's innocent intentions speak by themselves in some universal language of sentiments comparable perhaps to the language of the heart in MacKenzie's Man of Feeling. Though not very lengthy, his conversations with Indians render them as friendly creatures, open to visitations of white men to which they respond with 'perfect cheerfulness and good temper'.30 In his desire to communicate with Indians, Bartram, as we shall shortly see, goes as far as positing white men as an Indian tribe of sorts, thus rendering the idea of colonial conquest more as a conquest of the Indian hearts in brotherly love and friendship. The rhetoric of the following fragment relating Bartram's encounter with Little Carpenter is quite interesting in this respect. Bartram observes here a company of Indians led by Little Carpenter whom he presents as
emperor and grand chief of the Cherokees, as they came up I turned off from the path to make way, in token of respect, which compliment was accepted, and gratefully and magnanimously returned; for his highness with a gracious and cheerful smile came up to me, and clapping his hand on his breast, offered it to me saying, I am Ata-cul-culla; and heartily shook hands with me. 31

The compulsion for shaking hands seems to have befallen even Indian emperors. Little Carpenter being an embodiment of the European courtly behaviour rewards Bartram with a handshake and a conversation thus testifying to his innate, universally European, status and proving his membership among the community of white men. Bartram told him that he, of course, recognized the great Ata-cul-culla in him and then added that
I was of the tribe of white men, of Pennsylvania, who esteem themselves brothers and friends to the red men, but particularly to the Cherokees, and that . . . we were

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Tadeusz Rachwat united in love and friendship, and that the name of Ata-cul-culla was dear to his white brothers of Pennsylvania.32

M p k i g j r o n g u e Is My Paper'. On Philadelphus Inodorus

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This reversal of roles clearly reveals Bartram's dream of a natural society and of an equally natural social order which he projects upon Indians in order to then project it back upon the white men now metamorphosed into a tribe. Somehow ironically, Indian talks also prove that it was the Indians who did not very heartily welcome the idea of unity with white people and hardly saw any natural virtues in them. Oconostota, one of the Cherokee chiefs, declared quite plainly in March 1767 that
we want to keep the Virginians at as great distance as possible, as they are generally bad men and love to steal horses and hunt for deer.33

Once having learnt about the idea of the boundary, Indians make use of it in order to stay away from white man's desire to unite which, later on (and much earlier in the Spanish territories), actually took the form of extermination. Still in 1767 the Cherokee requested not only the establishment of the boundary, but the construction of a fort upon their territories.34 Enriched with this European concept Indians might hope that no further unification would be proposed to them once a boundary was demarcated. Perhaps it is this knowledge of the boundary, mixed with the belief in European wisdom and justice, that Chief Telletsher had in mind talking about yet another proposal for establishing a boundary:
That the red people were formerly ignorant, but God Almighty, and the King of England, had made them otherways.35

If 'we are all Indians,' as Jean Baudrillard claims,36 we are such Indians as Bartram's tribe which plants a Philadelphus inodorus wherever it is possible and then makes us see 'otherways' that it has always already been there.

Notes
1 Willy Maley, 'Exploding England', British Studies, Issue 5 (January 1995) : 1. 2 Cf. Julian P. Boyd, Indian Treatises Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1752-1762 (Philadelphia, 1938) : viii. 3 Luois De Vorsey, Jr., The Indian Boundary in the Southern Colonies, 1763-1755 (Chapel Mill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966), p. 43.

4 William L. McDowell, Jr. (ed.), Documents Relating to Indian Affairs. May 21 1750-August 7, 1754 (Columbia: South Carolina Archives Department, 1958), p. 162 5 Idem. 6 Ibid., p. 164. 7 Colonial Office Records, America and West Indies, British Public Record Office 1606-1807 Vol. 66, pp. 398-9. Quoted in De Vorsey, pp. 60-1. 8 Documents . . . , p. 536. 9 The Travels of William Bartram, Mark van Doren, ed. (New York: Dover Publications 1928), p. 388. 10 Ibid., p. 396. 11 Ibid., p. 385. 12 Cf. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 5 Vols., G. Sherburn, ed. (Oxford, 1956), Vol., IV p. 40. 13 The Travels of . . . , p. 26. 14 Idem. 15 Ernst and Joanna Lehner, How They Saw the New World (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1966), p. 156. 16 Quoted in De Vorsey, p. 28. 17 Ibid., p. 28. 18 Idem. 19 Quoted from Weekly Magazine, in L. Goldstein, Ruins and Empire. The Evolution of Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh, 1977), p. 105. 20 American Husbandry: Containing and Account of the Soil. Climate, Production and General Agriculture of the British Colonies in North America & West Indies (London, 1775), p. 281. 21 William Bartram, 'Travels in Georgia and Florida 1773-1774: A Report to Dr. John Fothergiir, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, ns. XXXIII (Nov. 1943), p. 144. Quoted in De Vorsey, p. 171. 22 The Travels of . . . , p. 15. 23 Ibid., pp. 273-4. 24 Ibid., pp. 274-5. 25 Ibid., p. 289. 26 Idem. 27 Idem. 28 Idem. 29 Ibid., p. 293. The 'vegetable production' which Bartram observed in that region just after the encounter with the Indian warrior includes some 26 Latin names of plants. 30 Idem. 31 Idem. 32 Ibid., p. 295. 33 Quoted in De Vorsey, p. 77. 34 Cf. De Vorsey, p. 118. 35 Journal of the Congress of the Four Southern Governors, and the Superintendent of That District, with the Five Nations of Indians, At Augusta, 1763 (London, 1764), p. 277. 36 Cf. Jean Baudrillard, L'change symbolique et la mort (Paris, 1976), p. 36. There will always be animal and Indian reservations to conceal that they are dead, and that we are all Indians.' For a more detailed discussion of this idea cf. Tadeusz Rachwal, 'History. Of Indians', in Tadeusz Slawek and Wojciech Kalaga (eds.), 'We are all Indians'. Violence, Intolerance, Literature (Katowice, 1990).

Susan Ford

Gender Identity and Garden Design in Victorian England1

of its existence, on the other. The writings of two promoters of Victorian middle class domestic taste, John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) and his wife Jane Wells Webb Loudon (1807-58)2 will be used to r e c o n s t r u c t the suburban scene. The suburban house and garden can be read as both a product of, and a contributor to, the cloistered domestic thinking which separated bourgeois women and children from the public world. Men and women were assigned gender roles based on what were thought to be the innate biological and spiritual differences between the sexes. The stereotypes which evolved from such beliefs are typified in this quote from Ruskin's essay, Of Queen's Gardens.
cornerstone
ear ly

The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; . . . But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle,her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. 3

Introduction |
This essay examines the ways in which design was used to reinforce and prescribe certain desired notions of masculinity and femininity in the Victorian suburban garden. Far from being merely a decorative adjunct the suburban garden can be viewed as an important arena in which the ideas surrounding the supposedly innate qualities of men and women could be inscribed. The garden was part of the new domestic landscape of the Victorian bourgeois home which can be read as the physical manifestation of an ideology of sexual difference, and as such was inextricably tied up to the construction of gender identity. The suburb, physically separated from what was perceived to be the increasingly threatening city, was promoted as a new specialised private space in which the patriarchal nuclear family could dwell, reproduce and re-create itself. For those who could afford it, the suburban villa offered a new way of living, one which would reflect the values of its largely middle class inhabitants.

Gender and the Suburban Landscape

The study of the suburban landscape has been doubly handicapped by its perceived mundaneness on the one hand, and the privacy, which was the

The place in which woman's intellect was to rule the home. 'The domestic circle' was, as one correspondent in the Mother's Magazine suggested, 'the peculiar theatre of woman's power'.4 Ideally the division of labour and responsibility within the bourgeois home was carefully designated through gender roles. Webb comments that the 'paths of men and women are quite different and though both have duties to perform of perhaps equal consequence to the happiness of the community, these duties are quite distinct'.5 A middle class woman's duties focused on the care of her husband and children and the creation of a comfortable home. Despite the appearance of many texts and images which sought to naturalise women's domesticity, a range of books and magazines appeared to advise women on household management. Perhaps the most famous of these advice books in Mrs Bee ton's Book of Household Management which was first published in monthly supplements to Samuel Beeton's The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine between 1859 and 1861. As well as the notorious recipes Beeton offers advice on running a household, including how a mistress should conduct herself, as well as the management of servants and rearing children. Many of these texts are almost exclusively concerned with imparting knowledge about the etiquette of a bourgeois existence. For instance, negotiating the social minefield which surrounded paying and receiving morning calls. In many of these books one is left to extrapolate the detailed environmental context in which such contrived social relations took place. It is here that the writings of Webb and Loudon come into their own, for they have an explicit environmental agenda, foregrounding the importance of the relationship between a well designed environment and a contented domestic life.

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The material on which this paper is based is part of a far larger project which examines in detail two texts Loudon's Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion (1836) and The Lady's Country Companion (1846), didactic texts which offer a window into the secluded home environment of ideal family life. A close reading of these texts guides the reader through both the myriad detail and broader issues concerning the suburban house and garden. Such a methodology mimics the way in which these publications were originally received. In their day these texts were subjected to close scrutiny from a readership anxious to improve their appreciation of domestic taste. The comprehensive coverage of all domestic matters, both practical and aestheticfrom laying gas pipes to furnishing a lady's boudoir offers a valuable insight into the domestic landscape of the suburb. These texts provide, what might be termed, an etiquette of interior and exterior landscape, the details of which were intended to be carefully scrutinised. Theoretical support for such an approach is provided by Erving Goffman's work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life which adopts the theatrical metaphor of a performance to study social life.6 Goffman's premise is that human behaviour is often acted-out according to cultural and personal preferences. Human interaction is dominatedespecially amongst those who are not well acquaintedby appearances. Thus, Goffman explains that
[w]hen an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him [sic] or to bring into play information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude towards them, his competence, his trust-worthiness, etc.7

However, it is not only a person's behaviour that determines the success or failure of any interaction but also the setting, the props used, and the way in which they are 'stagemanaged'; an environmental and spatial dimension is thus introduced into Goffman's approach. A more historically oriented approach to the 'presentation of self is found in Richard Sennet's sociological account of The Fall of Public Man.6 His work contextualises the Victorian bourgeoisie's increasing concern with the minutiae of appearance, as an obsession rooted in the 'notion that all appearances speak, that human meanings are immanent in all phenomena'.9 Appearances mattered, especially to those whose position in society was not guaranteed by birth, but who were anxious to socially secure a way of life funded by trade and business activities. These people, the aspiring middle classes, were the audience at which Webb and Loudon's work was explicitly aimed, they were most in need of guidance on how they could achieve the appearance which would reflect their upwardly mobile aspirations. As

EQqjHgrIdentity and Garden Design in Victorian England

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Sennett points out, there were fine distinctions between what was considered good and bad taste. In personal dress, for example, although in fashion terms the 1840s were seen as a particularly unremarkable decade, the marker between good taste and bad could be still read by those versed in the intricacies of etiquette. Subtle indicators such as the way in which a cravat was tied, the quality of a garment's cloth or the cleanliness of a neck band could be decoded by those initiated in what constituted desirable appearances. The detail of Webb and Loudon's texts, when read in this context make more sense, for they were guides to planning and decoding visual statements made in the house and garden. Within this theoretical framework Webb and Loudon's texts can thus be seen as providing information about the idealised setting and the 'props' which aided middle class behaviour. From these descriptions it is possible to extrapolate the symbiotic relationship between the suburban environment and middle class society. The texts are used to reconstruct a cultural artifact, the suburban environment, which was seen as both the ideal backdrop to a middle class existence, and which would actively foster the central tenants of suburban life: namely the separation of home from work with its attendant gender roles, and the celebration of family life.

Gardening and the Family

The garden was the key to suburban happiness: its environs promoting good health, happy family life, closeness to nature and God, and a heightened awareness of scientific knowledge. All of these benefits were to be realised literally and metaphorically from the mental, physical, spiritual and social exertions which the good management of the garden required. A garden, if well planned and carefully maintained, was an indicator of the interior order of the home. Thus, The Cornhill suggested, Though we may not always be right in the supposition that where there is a well-cultivated garden there is a well-ordered home, I doubt whether we should be often wrong in this surmise.10 The garden was seen as a surrogate indicator of the propriety of domestic organisation in an area, which in middle class households at least, was closed to public surveillance. The garden played a central role within the new landscape of the suburb. It was a space which was able to accommodate a multiplicity of social, cultural, political and economic attitudes cherished by the middle classes. The suburb locked into a series of contemporary intellectual debates and gardenthe feature which distinguished the suburb from the older urban landscapewas

HQ

Susan Ford

{tender Identity and Garden Design in Victorian England

jjj

adopted and moulded to represent the values of many groups. For example, the garden could simultaneously represent the advances in botanical science which were closely linked to the expansion of empire and trade; it could reconcile the traditional country/city dichotomy, mediating the seemingly opposed values of romanticism and industrialisation. The garden also provided a space in which divine contemplation could take place, for natural theology suggested that God's word could be found in all things natural. Finally the privacy, purity and good management of the garden could be used as metaphors in the emerging domestic ideal of home and femininity. It can therefore be seen, as Ann Bermingham has suggested, how the 'suburban house and garden became the repository of the owner's personal iconography' or perhaps more accurately a series of personal iconographies reflecting the contradictory strands of bourgeois life.11 The suburban villa and ist garden became an important vehicle of the bourgeoisie's 'presentation of self. Embedded within Loudon and Webb's blueprint for suburban happiness was an .explicit social agenda; the suburban landscape was conceived within the social structure of the nuclear family. Loudon writes:
What pleasure have not children in applying their little green watering-pans to plants in pots, or pouring water in at the roots of favourite flowers in borders? And what can be more rational than the satisfaction which the grown up amateur, or master of the house, enjoys, when he returns from the city to his garden in the summer evenings, and applies the syringe to his wall trees, with refreshing enjoyment to himself and the plants, and to the delight of his children, who may be watching his operations?12

aspirations to render 'every lady her own landscape gardener'14; but in the Gardener's Magazine written only a year earlier his definition of a lady's involvement in the garden was far more specific, 'we would [like] to see every lady have her flower-garden and conservatory, so we would wish to see every gentleman have his arboretum, or, at all events, a gardenesque plantation of trees and shrubs'.15 The final part of this paper examines the strategies which were used to perpetuate and reinforce gender roles within the flower garden, a space which is persistently gendered female within the gardening press of the time.

Gardening for Ladies

The burgeoning garden press of the period was peppered with references to the suitability of gardening as a worthwhile leisure pursuit for genteel ladies. Despite the fact that this advice is threaded-through with assumptions about appropriate gender roles Michael Waters has noted that 'surprisingly little attention has been given specifically to the part played by the association of women and gardens in the construction of female stereotypes, and in the legitimizing of women's domestic and decorative functions'.16 The flower garden was uniquely positioned to combine physical, moral, and intellectual benefits, in addition it was a home-based pursuit. It was a secluded environment in which the lady of the house could perform physical activity whilst not threatening her decorum or moral position. Decorum, however, did influence the kind of gardening undertaken by ladies. The production of culinary products was regarded as an infringement of the male role of provider. Even in poorer households, it was assumed that the man of the house would be responsible for the production of foodstuffs. The following quotation from a gardening magazine of 1848 in an article about the division of tasks in a cottage garden illustrates this point very clearly.
[TJhere are the husband's apple and pear trees twined by his wife's sweet clematis; his cabbage beds fringed with her pinks and pansies; the tool house is wreathed with roses; his rougher labour adorned by her gayer fancy, all speaking loudly of the happy union of their hearts and tastes.11

Loudon's suburban ideal is firmly rooted in the notion of the patriarchal bourgeois family, the father working in the city returns to the sanctuary of his home, wife and children.13 This scenario is well rehearsed in the literature of the period as for example in the Ruskin previously quoted. The rational male journeys daily into the public sphere to support his family but is dependent on the solace and emotional support to be found in the domestic domain. The Loudonesque suburban ideal aimed to reinforce gender distinctions; there is an implicit recognition of the ways in which appropriate design could naturalise and ease patriarchal social relations. The planning and maintenance of the suburban garden was an activity in which ideally all of the family were to participate; this personal involvement ensured that optimum benefits were to be reaped from the possession of a garden. Although Loudon recommended gardening as an activity in which the whole family could partake, within his writings there were numerous comments which qualified this idea, particularly concerning the suitability of certain gardening activities for the family's female members. For example, in the introduction to the Suburban Gardener Loudon suggested that he had

However, if gardening was to be successfully promoted as a pastime for ladies there were two areas which needed careful negotiation by its proponents: firstly, its obvious physicality was at odds with the ideal of passive femininity; and secondly, whilst a good botanic education was viewed as essential

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to any gardener, the use of lewd sexual metaphors in theoretical schema was particularly problematic for lady gardeners. Loudon and Webb both extolled the virtues of gardening for ladies and offered strategies for dealing with the aforementioned problems. Loudon advised ladies to 'devote a portion of every day . . . to some of the lighter operations of gardening, for health's sake, and for giving a zest to indoor enjoyments'. Activities which did not require stooping were advised for hot weather, such as cutting out weeds with a fork. The daintiness of the specially designed garden implements were emphasised in order to reassure readers that some concession to female delicacy had been made; thus the fork's handle need not be thicker than a fishing rod, and its prongs not thicker than a carving fork. Tying and pruning small trees and shrubs and deadheading were also considered as appropriate activities for sunny days as long a broad-brimmed hat was worn. Watering with the aid of a garden engine should only be undertaken in the cool of evening. The operation of such a machine would not be 'too severe for a healthy young woman, and which would greatly add to the strength of her arms and the tranquillity of her nights' and would enable her to throw water from thirty to forty feet in every direction.18 The physical activity of gardening was seen as a preventative measure against the problems of ennui, a condition which genteel women were seen as particularly susceptible to. The physical act of gardening was to be complemented by the intellectual rigours of botany. From the eighteenth century onwards botanizing had flourished as a fashionable as well as scientific pastime. It thrived in many different forms: in scientific societies; in the great collections of royalty and the aristocracy; in plant hunting expeditions; in the classificatory schema developed by Ray and Linnaeus; and in the popularity of flower painting particularly for ladies of the aristocracy.19 The possession of the many botanical texts which reproduced such images became a status symbol, subtly linking a display of wealth with a worthy, yet fashionable, interest in science. There were, however, problems with the theoretical content of these botanical works and particularly the vivid sexual imagery used in the popular Linnaean classification. This was based upon the sexual morphology of different species, and Linnaeus and his followers encouraged the use of anthropomorphic analogies. So, for example, Linnaeus described the fertilisation of a flower in the following manner: 'when the bed has been made ready, then it is the time for the bridegroom to embrace his beloved bride and surrender himself to her'. 20 The consequences of some plants having more than one male part and only one female depicted the flowers' female part as having a voracious sexual appetite. Such graphic sexual analogies were not appropriate for a science that was increasingly being recommended as being suitable for ladies. Garden writers were well aware of the Linnaean system's

QqjHgr Identity and Garden Design in Victorian England

J13

I potentially corrupting sexual matter; Loudon was even willing to exploit its s a l a c i o u s content. I n a list of instructions about the duties o f a botanic garden's curator Loudon advised that the curator should be prepared to tailor any educative material according to the audience. So a curator was
to induce a taste for botany and the vegetable kingdom, by pointing out striking peculiarities of plants to superficial observers in order to attract their attention; trying to point out things which assimilate with the taste or foible of the person addressed; recollecting that sexual matters and matters bordering on the marvellous, are most generally attractive to volatile or vacant minds. 21

The inference here seems to be that any methods were justified in order to attract people, particularly the working classes to whom the quotation was problably referring, to the study of botany. An altogether different strategy was adopted to make botany a fit subject for ladies and children to study: the Linnaean system was abandoned in favour of the non-sexual natural systems of Jussieu and De Candolle; whilst texts written specifically for ladies and children minimised the use of scientific terminology. John Lindley, an eminent botanist and Professor of Botany at University College London, published the first scientific botany book aimed specifically at ladies in 1834.22 Lindley's introduction reassured his readers that his book would divest science 'of the many real and imaginary difficulties that frighten students'.23 This work contrasted with his other works on botany in that it was written in a series of letters with an anecdotal note at the beginning of each.24 The discussion of the physiology of the buttercup family was prefaced by a sentimental and religious introductory comment: '[h]ow admirable is the skill which is manifested in the construction of this litde flower, and how striking a proof does it offer of the care which the Creator has provided for the humblest of his works!'25 Webb's attitude to botany was suitably ladylike. In her preface to Botany for Ladies she confides that her girlhood dislike of botany was due to her finding the Linnaean system so repulsive.26 Her marriage to Loudon prompted her to try and remedy her ignorance of botany. This time she successfully learnt it through the natural systems such as those suggested by Jussieu and De Candolle. The study of flowers, once desexualized, was an activity which was perceived as particularly well suited to ladies. Plants could be studied without a woman venturing outside her domestic world. Botany was also fulfilling a new form of worthy conspicuous consumption for the middle classes, an activity which could be justified in the pursuit of science as well as in more sentimental terms:
Flowers are the teacher of gentle thoughts, promoters of kindly emotion. One cannot look too closely at a flower without loving it . . . The utility of flowers is their ex-

8 Writing Placcs . . .

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cellence and great beauty; for by having a delightfulness in their very form and colour, they lead us to thoughts of generosity and moral beauty detached form and superior to all selfishness."

The perceived qualities, values and meanings of flowers became almost synonymous with the most cherished attitudes to womanhood. Flowers and women represented beauty, frailty, fertility, both need careful nurturing within a confined and controlled environment if they were to be brought to full bloom. Every aspect of womanhood could be described using a floral metaphor, for example, blooming, wilting, delicacy and shyness. Ladies' capabilities as garden designers were also encouraged. Texts were targeted specifically at this genteel market, for example Webb's The Ladies' Magazine of Gardening published in 1842. In this and other similar publications the language alludes to the femininity of certain aspects of gardening. For example, Webb describes planting a flower garden in the design of a Turkey carpet, which emphasises the notion of the garden as domestic (i.e. female) space. The flower beds were to be interspersed with carefully manicured turfitself often referred to as a carpetsuch language clearly identifies this space as an extension of the house. Garden writers of the period were in agreement that the flower garden should be as close to the house as possible.28 The flower garden's preferred location was next to the living rooms at the back of the house, preferably outside the drawing room. This room was of considerable importance to women for it was the room in which she presented her domestic front to the outside world, by receiving visitors, and in which she spent the greatest part of her day. The ideal flower garden's enclosed design gave the impression that it was a continuation of the interior space of the suburban villa. This illusion was further enhanced by the introduction of glass doors, french windows, as the fashionable way of entering the garden.29 The flower garden did not provide a prospect, which might have taxed female aesthetic sensibilities, but rather a pleasing arrangement of forms and colour displayed on the canvas of the lawn. The detail of the flower beds could be visually appropriated from the windows of the house, whilst the scent of the flowers was also able to drift into the windows. It was particularly important for the flower garden's boundary to be effectively marked because of the intimate nature of the activities which took place there; playing with children or gardening were not activities intended for public consumption. If possible the flower garden was to be enclosed, preferably with the house on one side and vegetation on the others. Whilst the question of how to demarcate the boundary in a town garden was not an issue, in larger suburban residences a clearly visible boundary needed to

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be established. The injudicious use of a ha ha (a sunken ditch taking the place of a fence) could lead to an unexpected and distressing incident. The scene is set:
Just imagine a couple of ladies to be rambling in a lovely garden, and suddenly, as they emerge from "an alley of limes" or a flowery lawn, they see half-a-dozen oxen staring at them in the face, from what appears to be one of the lawns in the garden. They would scream and fly and when assured there was a "ha! ha!" or, in other words, a ditch between the paddock and the garden they would still refuse to be comforted and would not make another tour of the grounds unless each had her lover's arm to support and protect her.30

This passage charts graphically the consequences of women wandering in a garden where not enough attention had been paid to women's sensibilities. The thoughtless juxtaposition of the oxen's (not docile cows) field with a part of the garden in which ladies thought they were safe to walk, totally undermines female confidence as they unexpectedly come across brutish nature in the flesh. The flower garden was a private place explicitly designed to shield ladies from the outside world and uncontrolled nature. Boundaries in the garden were intrinsically linked to the boundaries of prescribed gender roles. This paper has touched upon some of the ways in which the discourse surrounding the garden reinforced gender roles. The garden was an arena in which the complex debates surrounding gender identity could be negotiated. In this context the suburban garden should be understood as something more than a piece of aesthetic marginalia, separated from the broader concerns of gender politics. Instead, it may more productively be viewed as a fresh canvas an unencumbered spaceonto which the bourgeoisie could inscribe a new set of values concerning gender identity.

Notes
1 I wish to thank Andy Mousley for reading a version of this paper for me at the conference and also for his insightful comments on this piece. 2 To avoid confusion between the two writers I will refer to Mrs Loudon using her maiden name, Webb. 3 John Ruskin, 'Of Queen's Gardens', in Sesame and Lilies (London: George Allen, 1901), p. 107. 4 J. A., 'Women in the Domestic Circle', The Mother's Magazine (1845), p. 54. 5 Jane Loudon, The Ladies Companion at Home and Abroad, Vof. 1 (1849), p. 8. 6 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). 8

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20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

Ibid, p. 13. R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Faber, 1986). Ibid, p. 167. A contributor to The Cornhill (1872) quoted in M. Waters, The Garden in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1988), p. 229. A. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 166. J. C. Loudon, The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion (London: Longmans, 1836) p. 3. I am talking about a period before the introduction of The Married Woman's Property Act of 1860 when all a married couple's possessions legally belonged to the husband. Loudon, Suburban Gardener, p. 7. J. C. Loudon. 'View of the Progress of Gardening', Gardener's Magazine New Series I : 609-38. Michael Waters, The Garden in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1988), p. 241. Quoted in 'Cottage and Suburban Gardens', Gillian Darley, in The Garden: a Celebration of one Thousand Years of British Gardening, ed. John Harris (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1979), pp. 155-6. J. C. Loudon, 'Gardening Operations for Ladies', Gardener's Magazine (1830) : 312-4. For further discussions of the popularity of botany see: David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (London: Penguin, 1976); John Fisher, The Origins of Garden Plants (London: Constable, 1982); L. H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (London: Academic Press, 1979); Lyn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History 1820-1870 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980). Quoted in Barber, Natural History, p. 73. J. C. Loudon, Encyclopedia of Gardening (London: Longmans, 1835), p. 1239. John Lindley, Ladies' Botany or a Familiar Introduction to the Study of the Natural System of Botany (London: James Ridgway and Sons, 1834). Ibid, p. V. To contrast the writing styles of his works designed for women with his other more mainstream work see John Lindley's, Introduction to Botany (London: Longman, 1839) which was written in a clipped scientific prose was littered with scientific terms. Ibid., p. 8. Mrs Loudon, Botany for Ladies (London: John Murray, 1842). J. C. Loudon quoting from the Amulet for 183? J. C. Loudon, Encyclopedia of Gardening (London: Longmans, 1835) p?. L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 374. S. Hibberd, Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste (London: Century, 1987), pp. 359-60 (First published 1857).

Donald Wesling

The Matter of Scotland

The matter of Scotland, its location, history, and lore, is the matter with Scotland. An up-to-date understanding of the matter of Scotland is also, I will argue, a means to showing why Scotland matters to itself, to the United Kingdom of which it is still resistantly yet (for many Scots) gratefully a member, to Europe, and to the rest of us in the world system. 'Micro-nation', says Robert Crawford of St. Andrews in his 1990 poem 'Scotland': 'So small you cannot be forgotten'.1 Another new writer, A. L. Kennedy of Glasgow in her 'Meditation Upon Penguins', adopts the modest ground-shuffling fish-eater as national bird: 'Name me the penguin which has ever burned down a listed building by carelessly smoking in bed?' She ends her affectionate, neo-classical mockery with a lyrical flight: 'Lift up your cries that the penguin; the obscure, the fishy, the mocked; the shorter than average penguin might become the phoenix of all lands. And let us begin the Path here. Let fly the Penguin Rampant! Let fly all!'2 An earlier writer, Edwin Muir of Orkney, in 'Scotland 1941', rhymes nation with damnation. It seems that when Scots speak of their stateless nation, whatever they assert they undercut. We now move in an era when Scotland's dependency, inferiorism, colonial status, and reliance on tartan plaid to cover self-loathing, and despite all this its 'authentic nationhood transcending mere ethnicity' (Colin Kidd, 1994) are at last open to historical critique from within and without. This era of bravado and self-scrutiny began in the 70s with the exploitation of oil off the coast of Aberdeen and the Shetland Islands, which brought to Scotland jobs, money, pride, and legitimate worries about where the rest of the oil profits were going. Then (by causal linkage?) occurred the 1979 vote on whether there should be devolution of political power to a Scotland hoping to achieve

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greater sovereignty, especially over economic issues. The plan for a Scottish assembly failed, partly perhaps because it was set up to fail and partly because Scotland is riven by internal tensions, not only Scottish National Party (SNP) vs. Labour vs. Tory, but Highlands vs. Lowlands, industrial belt vs. the north, Glasgow vs. Edinburgh, English vs. Scottish vs. Gaelic. Next, in the 90s, the Tory government felt able to try social engineering, experimentally, on a weakened Scottish populacethe Poll Tax and privatization of water resources (both failed). This evident, punishing loss of the ability to shift the economic and political base has resulted in a flurry of historical critiques, publishing initiatives, a shift of intellectual centrality from patrician Edinburgh to working-class Glasgow, and a literary renaissance whose works often tell the story of a stateless nation. WORK AS IF YOU LIVED IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION: Can we explain the local contexts that have led the most comprehensive Scottish writer of the era, Alasdair Gray of Glasgow, to begin each of his novels with this legend, indeed to have pressed it in silver into the covers of Poor Things (1992)? I propose to explain the genesis of Gray's Utopian nation-discourse by the lists, names, dates and opinions of my own, non-Scot's circumstantial discourse. My perspective, I should say, is of necessity international, and I deplore the lies and murders that are this day being committed in the name of the nation in Ireland, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, and most likely my own country, too; also I condemn the era, now well advanced, when the nation state was effectively the tool of empires east and west, and allowed the undervaluing and killing of human labor and the natural world. However, even in the emergent era of trans-national corporations, the nation remains the home-land of ideology, everyday experience, literature, values; in these matters I am with Julia Kristeva, who in Nations Without Nationalism (1993) wrote: The time has perhaps come for pursuing a critique of the national tradition without selling off its assets.'3 After a survey (I) of recent polemic histories of Scotland, I present an account (II) of how literary works, mostly from of the post-oil-boom era, select and frame certain conflicts in Scottish history; and a reading (HI) of Alasdair Gray's novels, especially 1982 Janine, as national allegories.

by disasters which overwhelm the nation, break its continuity and a fragmented culture.' Craig says many felt this was spectacularly so after the Scottish people voted for (but did not achieve) limited autonomy in 1979 but 'Instead, the 1980s proved to be one of the most productive and creative decades in Scotland this centuryas though the energy that had failed to be harnessed by the politicians flowed into other channels'.4 To me it seems the scholarship and the creative work share in the same energy, and are different versions of the same political-national discourse.5 Anyone reading through recent history and literature will find a highly selective harvesting, for thought, of the matter of Scotland. Writers looking for imaginative or polemical energy seize on some turning-point events and omit others. Scottish schoolchildren learn these dates:
produce 81: 400: 843: 1296: 1314: 1320: Romans invade Scotland Last Romans gone Kenneth McAlpin crowned first King of Picts and Scots England conquers Scotland Battle of Bannockburn: Scots beat English Declaration of Arbroath: Scots barons declare themselves free to choose their own kings James IV dies as Scots army beatten at Flodden Union of Crowns: Scotland and England under one head of state Union of Parliaments: Under one government Battle of Culloden: Jacobites defeated

I 1 I I I j j j j j I | S

1513: 1603: 1707: 1746: 1780 to 1880: Highland Clearancestenant farmers removed from the land by aristocrats: heavy emigration to Canada 1918: All Scotsmen and most Scotswomen get the vote 1945: New Labour goverment improves health and education in Scottish cities; beginning of destruction of tenements 1969: Commercial quantities of oil first discovered in North Sea 1979: Scottish people vote in favor of limited autonomy, but their majority is not large enough 1991: Tory Government attempts to impose poll-tax first on Scotland.

I Many of the historical studies I describe here are from Edinburgh University Press, from the Polygon series edited by Cairns Craig whose page-long Series Preface in all these studies begins: 'Scotland's history is often presented as

Admirable scholarly work in history and literary history is of course being done on the whole continuum, but my interest is in the bias and drastic selectivity that makes for energy. Ideologically, imaginatively, though there is some interest in 1320 (Gray) and in the English-Scottish feudal wars (Goldstein), the historians and writers have found their matter in 1746 and the myth of the failed Stewarts (Nairn, Hechter, Pittock), in the Clearances and their devastation of the ordinary Scottish people (Chapman, Gunn, Smith, Craig, McGrath), in 1945 and the rise of a group of writers whose lives and literacy depend on the postwar welfare state which opened the Scottish university to a new class (Morgan, Gray, Leonard); and in the results of the

oil-boom (McGrath) and the 1979 vote (Harvie). The Border-incursion Scots-English wars of the feudal period, and the constitutive national knitting of 1707, have been so entirely assumed that they are not, apparently, lures to rewriting history. What energizes writers is the memory of early independence, of later victimage and dependence, and the chance to fight beyond myths of the past; the conviction that if power must be wielded, myths made, at least these will be shaped out of local materials. For commentators inside Scotland, this is a situation where literary history may stand for the matter of Scotland generally: while the stock of Hugh MacDiarmid the separatist-nationalist (not the Communist) is higher then ever before, Sir Walter Scott's nostalgic doomed-cause treatment of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and Scott's pragmatic defense of the Union of Parliaments in the Waverly novels, are usually matters of regret. For those of us looking on from outside, Tom Nairn's 1974 New Left Review essay, 'Scotland and Europe', was the first notice that there was motion in the multi-national state of the United Kingdom. The occasion was the 1973 SNP by-election victory in the Govan Constituency, and the heating-up of debate about entry into the European community: might the internationalization of capital lead 'rather to a fragmentation of the state as historically constituted then to a supra-national State'? Nairn asks why nationalism is 'conspicuous only by its absence in Scotland', and speculates that this small nation had its economic and cultural take-off before 1800 and the start of the new age of nationalism, thus missed its moment. Partly this production of Scotland as the 'negative image' (81) of general European nationalist feeling was the result of a 'development gap' (72) between the undeveloped Highlands and the rest of Scotland; and partly the result of an migr intelligentsia, who went from the hinterlands to the capital London, and who thus were absent in the nation-building moment. Nairn's Marxist periodization of Scottish culture, as a revealing anomaly in relation to Europe, has since been challenged, and yet is taken by David McCrone (1992) as the 'most comprehensive' and the one which has 'marked out the agenda for the debate subsequently'.7 Nairn's international framing of the matter of Scotland was followed immediately by another. In 1975, American sociologist Michael Hechter published Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1666.8 Hechter's argument adapts the account of internal colonialism, developed by Isaac Wallerstein and others for Latin America and US race relations, to the internal nations of multi-national Britain. Hechter raises issues of regional inequality: Did the English force themselves on Scotland to develop it industrially and by trade, or were they invited? Are the Anglo-Saxons basically different from the Celts, in power, in ethnicity? Is Scots nationalism an abreaction of a peripheral ethnic group?

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Must we see a split between undeveloped Highlands and industrial-agricultural Lowlands, dividing Scotland into a Scottish-north and an England-tending border country? Such framings of the matter, even after Hechter's re-thinking in an article of 1982, waffle on whether Scotland is under- or over-developed.9 At least, though, they draw attention to the necessary context of the world system within which the United Kingdom does business as a multi-national
state.

Two works of the late-70s/early 80s focus on the paradoxical place of the highlands in Scottish and British history. In his profoundly skeptical study of The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (1978), Malcolm Chapman shows how Highland place, dress, and language have been subject to ' "symbolic appropriation" at the hands of the majority and dominant culture'. 10 Chapman's principled refusal to try to give 'some idea of what Gaelic or Hebridean society is really like' (227), his analysis of the psychology of inferiority, is the unexpected surprise of this set of readings. This splendid book is the single most pertinent study for one who would understand the matter of Scotland. Chapman sets one myth, 'the image of the Gaelic world as the ever-departing spiritual substance of Scottish life' (12), against its counter-myth: 'Highland culture as barbarous and worthless. . . . this apparent self-denigration was externally orientated' (15); 'Gaeldom . . . has become, in its own eyes and in the eyes of Britain, a particular kind of half-world' (16). The death-throes of the Gaedhealtachd have been long drawn out since the 'Forty-five: 'Celtic Ireland, Wales and Brittany do not in any clear sense have their Culloden. They do not have an apocalypse in which the threshold of the modern world was crossed' (23). Accordingly Chapman finds the eighteenth-century a historical watershed, and devotes attention to the epic Ossian, faked by James Macpherson in the 1760s to supply England's and Scotland's need of a primitive North; it was through 'the inauthenticity of Ossian, that the Scottish Gael found his way into the European imagination' (23). The majority society needed to naturalize and feminize Gaelic culture 'as a symbolic element in defining itself (27); so 'Gaelic culture has now to face the great paradox that to revive itself it must become more selfconscious, and that its self-consciousness will be based in part on an authenticity which derives from an alien discourse rather than fidelity to itself (213). This paradox of specifically Gaelic culture and language is, it seems to me, the paradox of Scottish culture at the next step up within the United Kingdom. What Chapman reads as a tragic dilemma of thought and culture, Hugh Trevor-Roper reads as a laughable 'retrospective invention' since the kilt and the clan-plaids were brought in as commercial schemes by predatory Englishmen, and Macpherson and later Scotticizing writers were only after profit. As to the haberdashery men, 'the wealth which they generated went to the manufacturers of the differentiated clan tartans now

worn, with tribal enthusiasm, by Scots and supposed Scots from Texas to Tokyo'. 11 Trevor-Roper's information is useful, though it comes from someone who is no friend of Scotland. Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, pursue lessons learned from Franz Fanon's Africa for their Polygon study of The Eclipse of Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intellectuals (1989).12 They find that even Tom Nairn is dominated by 'metropolitan' thought, in his argument that Scotland ceased to produce significant thinkers after the Enlightenment. They fault historians of early Scotland for showing it as backward, and historians of rural Scotland for showing it controlled by English capital, and Nairn for his Oxbridge view of Scottish culture, 'sometimes closer to the ravings of a Trevor-Roper than . . . literature of a nationalist bent' (58). Their prescription for the defects of inferiorist history is Scottish ethical philosophy, in the works of Alasdair Mclntyre, and especially John Anderson, R. D. Laing and George Davie, who, they argue, 'has laid the groundwork of a decolonised understanding of Scotland' in his educational study, The Democratic Intellect (1961; reprinted 1986). Two years after the publication of the Eclipse book, Murray Pittock came back to the question of inferiority in his 1991 study of the Stuart myth and the Scottish identity, The Invention of Scotland.13 He has the heartbroken, resigned tone of Chapman, and like Chapman he returns to the 'Forty-five here to use the Stuart monarchy, the failure of Charles Edward and then the memory of that failure, as one means of explaining Scottish identity. Pittock analyzes Stuart ballads of the pre-1745 period, the writings of Burns (anti-Union) and Scott (pro-Union), Victorian popular and monarchial affection for a selective Scottish past, and also MacDiarmid and even the folk group The Corries as recent examples that high-art and popular culture still remain interested in Jacobitism: 'Charles Edward remains the iconic messianic figure (or devilish fraud and tempter, or doomed irrelevance . . .) he has always been' (161). For Pittock too, Culloden is the end of an era; it also inaugurates another: 'Culloden and the Clearances go together because the latter even clarified and intensified the effects of the former' (106). Valuable here is the central perception that unites Pittock with the more polemical attitudes of Beveridge and Turnbull, the definition of a still-current Jacobite vision of Scottish history as a struggle for liberty; this is something both Marxist and conservative SNP partisans can agree upon. (The Jacobite journey to defeat is also part of the story, darker in the telling but Pittock tells it.) Tom Gallagher has edited a Polygon collection that is the opposite of inferiorist history, Nationalism in the Nineties (1991), with seven studies that rarely go back beyond 1979 in their treatment of the present and future prospects of the Scottish National Party. 14 Another Polygon collection, with ten chapters on such topics as Red Clyde, Women's history, the historical

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creation of the Highlands, is The Manufacture of Scottish History (1992), edited by Ian Donnachie and Christopher Whatley.15 To the extent that this volume is critical, it finds that until recently Scottish history was written by upper-class persons, often Englishmen such as the admirable T. C. Smout or Scottish history was given selectively as kilts and swords for popular consumption in the novels of Nigel Tranter or the recent Highlander films; explicit feminist and Marxist writing gives correction. Also nationalist and in addition socialist is Christopher Harvie, who teaches in Germany and comments, part-way between opinion-journalism and scholarship, on Scotland and survival in a new Europe. In his Polygon book, Cultural Weapons (1992),16 Harvie attempts 'a reprise of the "matter of Scotland" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' (10), something he feels will coincide with the renewed relevance of the idea of Scotland in Europe. For Harvie, 'civil society is back on the agenda' (19), and this means a return to the pioneering eighteenth-century sociology of that notable Scot, Adam Ferguson; and to figures in between like Carlyle, who would promote 'the concept of a small, knowable polis existing within loose structures of international agreement' (20). Scotland actually had this ideal and partial practice of civic virtue in the early nineteenth century, says Harvie, and could have it again, indeed could be one instance of that same ideal of 'progress secured by conscious discussion now emerging in East Europe' (20). To my knowledge, no one in East Europe has spoken of this affinity, but that Scots speak of it shows how eagerly they wish for connexions beyond the United Kingdom to places like Slovenia and Ukraine. To my knowledge, no one in Scotland has spoken of the inconvenient, but equally likely, affinity with Bosnia and Chechnya. What unites these historical works and the literary ones to be discussed below, as products of the same discursive energy, is the paradoxical claim that Scotland can be exemplary in its very anomalousness. Alasdair Gray, in his polemic on Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992), covers the same historical ground as these other studies but with more humor, coming out for a new Scottish parliament because 'an independent country run by a government not much richer than the People has more hope [for the future] than one governed by a big rich neighbour'.17 What makes Scotland exemplary is that a government poor in money 'need not stop a small independent country having a rich culture . . . ' (21). In Devolving English Literature (1992), dedicated 'To Scotland', Robert Crawford uses political devolution as an image of the dispersion of English studies as an academic discipline, and of the de-centering of United Kingdom literature to many places including Scotland, and to many languages including Gaelic and Scots.18 In search of a 'post-British identity' (302), Crawford emphasizes 'the way in which the "provincial" energies so important to Scottish writing, and

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the anthropological viewpoint developed by Scottish Writers, fed into American writing and into the essentially "provincial" movement we know as Modernism' (9). Just as Gray argues for the breakup of the United Kingdom, or at least diminution by 5.1 million Scots, Crawford in his smaller sphere reads signs of the unravelling of English Literature as a university discipline, with Scottish literature as the 'last strand to emerge from the . . . devolving of the subject' (305).19 More recently in his book Identifying Poets (1993) and in his essay 'Bakhtin and Scotlands' in the inaugural issue (1994) of the journal he helps to edit, Crawford has referred to Mikhail Bakhtin as a figure who will help us escape from an essentialist Scotland, because 'Bakhtin sees identity not as fixed, closed, and unchanging, but as formed and reformed through dialogue'.20 Earlier this century, Hugh MacDiarmid had written a Hymn to Lenin; contemporary Scottish internationalism, in Crawford's recourse to Bakhtin, Edwin Morgan's to Mayakovsky, Alasdair Gray's to Jacques Duras, no longer seeks cult of personality or stiffening of political will. David McCrone looks at cultural and literary evidences in his study of the sociology of a stateless nation, Understanding Scotland (1992). He makes clear that sociology, even in Scotland, had avoided the Scottish case until recendybut now, when sociology no longer accepts that 'society' is 'coterminous with the British state', Scotland's very lack of articulation between civil society, state, and nation has a distincdy post-modern feel, and 'Scotland seems poised to provide the specifically British example of those fissiparous tendencies which signal the radical remaking of political orders everywhere'.21 McCrone describes and places Nairn, Beveridge and Turnbull, and other works I have also covered here, concluding that Scotland has (against expectation) become more not less distinctive in the late twentieth century (198), and 'may be entering a post-nationalist age. The vehicle on that journey, ironically, seems to be nationalism' (196). Perhaps the nature of sovereignty itself has changed in the late twentieth century; perhaps peripheral nationalism is the mirror image of nationalism of the centre (220); if so, as in the past, compromise and negotiation are still necessary to Scotland's survival and identity, and there is little danger of extinction (220). An aggressive civil society can still, in the short term, wrench a great deal from the state. McCrone's last sentence, moved to hope by recent tidal shifts in history, is a question about popular sovereignty: 'Czechoslovakia in 1989; Scotland tomorrow?' (221). His analogue, like Harvie's, above, is from Eastern Europe. The most recent items are 1993 histories, Colin Kidd's Subverting Scotland's Past and R. James Goldstein's The Matter of Scotland.22 Both deal with how late Medieval and Early Modern Scotland are represented in narrative: Kidd with early Scottish history as told by whig historians between 1689

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afl d 1830, and Goldstein with the early storytelling poets Barbour and Blind Hary. Kidd, a professional historian, 'attempts to redirect the study of Scottish national identity away from an anachronistic post-romantic emphasis on language and the arts' (7). Goldstein, a literary scholar steeped in theory of history, is a New Historicist analyst of discursive practices, and so studies history-writing as a mode of ideology. Kidd studies elite history-writing by historians who foisted an idea of progress on Scotland that has been hard to shake for the last 150 years. Goldstein studies literary works in the 'history from below' method, 'with an eye to the class interests not of the rulers, but of the ruled' (10). Like McCrone, they too sidestep, without anger or judgment, a partisan, neo-nationalist response to the historical record. Different as these books are in thensubject matter and intent, both show how difficult it is to find a believable focus for nationalism. Barbour and Blind Hary could mythologize the nation, earlier, but still, the tension between rulers and ruled is veiled as it is presented. The Whig historians of Kidd's study committed themselves to theories of progress that led them to devalue the pre-1707 past on which they needed to build a nation, so that by mid-19th century 'Scottish patriotic historiography had burnt itself out' (280). Hence the need to rewrite history now is the more pressing in Scotland. Of these two historians of history-writing, it is Goldstein who reframes nation-writing in the wider, world system context on his final page. Goldstein, having earned his parting comment by 284 pages of close argumentation, alludes to the resurgence of militant nationalisms and asserts that 'the gravest crises of our time . . . are global, not national, in their reach; their solution depends on our abandoning the road to Flodden' (284), where Scotland in 1513 marched bravely to its national destruction. Could a Scot be so contrariant as this American scholar, in condemning nationalism as suicide? Scotland survived Flodden and Culloden, after all; maimed in fact, and in its idea of itself, but not so maimed as to lose the possibility of calling out, even after a thousand years of Scottish history, the un-English, indeed American-in-spirit, command to WORK AS IF YOU LIVED IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION. That is an injunction of pioneer, even revolutionary earliness. The condition of possibility of its saying is Alasdair Gray's and his generation's decision to own their own history for the first time. Hence the angry spate of revisionist history-writing I have described above, whose major premise is that history and tradition are invented, manufactured. If you can recover, or anyway revalue the Scottish past by rewriting it, you are able to see history as malleable, renewable. Accordingly, you can invent the Scottish future not in a wishy-washy way merely by imagining itbut by bringing another mind to everyday active work in the world.

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n
Literature is active work in the world. Arguably literature shares the same discourse with recent historiography because revaluation of Scottish history had begun in the literary sphere, showing historians a certain route. Hugh MacDiarmid in poems and essays was very likely the single most constitutive figure, speaking as a committed, Anglophobe historian of Scotland from the twenties to the seventies. The histories above, notably by Chapman, Pittock, McCrone, and Goldstein, rely on literary evidences from Blind Hary to recent films and folksongs. I have discussed the historians according to the chronology of publication, but to emphasize literature's grounding in time I now take up Scottish writers along their treatment of events in the sequence of Scottish history. 'There is no beginning', begins the first of Edwin Morgan's Sonnets from Scotland (1984), a sequence of fifty that takes the nation from its start as sheer geology ('We saw Lewis/laid down . . . laughed as Staffa cooled' [437]), to an ominous, possibly post-nuclear-bomb future of space-travel ('Despite our countdown, we were loath to go' [457]).23 Morgan takes twelve sonnets to get up to Stirling Castle in 1507, and three more to get to Poe in the nineteenth century, and takes the rest of the series for recent history, or for backward memory from the present as in the sonnet about finding an old one-pound coin showing 'the head/of a red deer' and the legend Respublica Scotorum: evidence from a time when Scotland ruled itself, a time when (negative affirmation) 'nothing seemed ill-starred'. (455) In Morgan's hand, the sonnet sequence, a quintessentially English form famous for interiority, proves to be a useful album for set pieces on Scottish history. Morgan devotes a sonnet to the Ring of Brodgar (438). Even more than Morgan, thirties and forties novelists seem preoccupied by the ancient cultures that built Scotland's stone circles. These holy places radiate force into the present day of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Scots Quair (1932-1934) and Neil M. Gunn's Silver Darlings (1941) and Silver Bough (1948); main characters of these novels renew themselves at such lonely sites, rather in the same way that Kenn, in Gunn's Highland River (1937) goes back to the riverine, geological source of his life at novel's end. For these novelists, unlike Edwin Morgan, there is a beginning. For Grassic Gibbon, there is even a language of origins the speech of 'a sagaman arrived in the house of the English with the salvage of his own ruined house of words', he says in his note to A Scots Quair. In the Prelude to the novel he shows the dragon-dwelling Mearns by means of successful archaism, in diction and syntax: 'So Cospatric got him the Pict folk to build a strong castle there in the lithe of the hills, with the Grampians bleak and dark behind it, and he had the [Dragon's]

pen drained and he married a Pict lady and got on her bairns and he lived there till he died.'24 Grassic Gibbon uses the Dragon and the Stone Circle as historical scene behind his brutal twentieth century story, a permanent resource but not often called forth; by contrast the early time of violence and magic is the only time in George Mackay Brown's Magnus (1973), a historical re-imagining of the medieval Orkney Earl who became a saint and martyr. Another Orkney man, Mackay Brown's teacher Edwin Muir, wrote thirties essays and forties poems on agrarian, pre-Calvinist Orkney as showing the essential human condition, often overleaping Scotland as a national theme. In the few poems where he takes up Scotland explicidy, as in 'Scotland 1941', he makes a myth of the time of Bruce and criticizes John Knox and the calvinist reformation, and also 'Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation'. Muir argued with MacDiarmid about Scots dialect poetry, and about nation-writing; writing with the innocence of archaic Orkney as his standard, he is a Scottish poet without a Scottish language or national theme.25 Ian Crichton Smith has a complete sonnet on John Knox, imagining Knox's native-born populist theology as history's answer to the frenchified catholicism of Mary Queen of Scots: The shearing naked absolute blade has torn/through false French roses to her foreign cry.'26 Longest and most effective of these reproaches to Calvinism is the magnificent story 'Logopandocy' by Alasdair Gray, written in seventeenth century pastiche as the (imaginary lost) diary of Thomas Urquhart, the distinguished libertine translator of Rabelais. The story is one of the earliest examples of Gray's typographical innovation with changes of letter-sizes, split or stepped pages, marginal glosses, and so on; and of his ventriloquism of historical styles: 'I will not enlist opposite the flaming sparks of their country's fame those coclimatory wasps of the Covenanting crue whose swarms eclipse it. I will discourse but generally, or by ensemple, of those viper colonels who do not stick to gnaw the womb of the Mother who bears them, and of those liger-headed Mammoniferous ministers, those pristinary lobcock hypocritick Presbyters {press-biters rather) who abuse learning in the name of God. . . ,' 2 7 Urquhart invents a 'multiverbal logopandocy', a new language, while in prisonthat is the Utopian vaunt, growing out of the satirical tangle of the story's early pages that defend Scotland against all outside (England) and inside (Knox) who would suppress her national spirit. I find only one recent text on the 'Forty-five, Crichton Smith's poem 'Culloden and After', with its lines about bards in exile, 'Gaelic loss', long sad decline from monarchial claims to meaningless language in the superstructure:

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And nothing to be heard but songs indeed while wandering Charles would on his olives feed and from his Minch of sherries mumble laws. 28

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One of Crichton Smith's most brilliant performances is a sequence poem in tercets, Deer on the High Hills (1962), with an abstract, Wallace-Stevensian reference to the Highland Gaelic huntsman and poet of the eighteenth century, Duncan Ban Mclntyre. His central work on this earlier period is, however, a novel about an old woman, Mrs. Scott with her emblematic name, evicted by the Clearances: Consider the Lilies (1968) stays exclusively with her consciousness, including her dreams, and shows history through the one instance. From within this recent period, another account of the Clearances, a travel narrative, is David Craig's moving journey On the Crofters' Trail (1990).29 Neil M. Gunn's powerful novel, The Silver Darlings (1941), focuses on the way sheep-farming people from inland were forced to the North Sea coast by the Clearances, and turned into fishermen. The most bitterly comprehensive attack on the Clearances, and the only one that (perhaps illegitimately? it makes for compelling theatre) connects that moment of English state power to our own moment of the oil-boom ripoff by Texas oilmen, is John McGrath's play The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1974; 1981). To leap ahead a century: Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (1992), the story of a Glasgow Public Health Officer, Archibald McCandless M. D. is set in the late Victorian period. Here Gray ventriloquizes a Victorian doctor, all earnestness, and at the end produces the revisionary narrative of Archie's wife Bella, severly critical of Archie. Rather like Mrs. Scott in Crichton Smith, or like Chris Guthrie in Grassic Gibbon's Scots Quair, called by the narrator Chris Caledonia at one point, Bella is Bella Caledonia, Scotland herself; but here the convention of woman-as-nation is severely, perhaps terminally mocked because Bella is the recipient or victim of a brain-transplant. This is a literal impossibility, of course, but the narrative needs it: first, to display Gray's brio in inventing how someone in a woman's body has a child's brain and must, through many mishaps linguistic and sexual, bring the two into harmony; second, to represent a Scotland divided against herself, literally. The partial resolution is Bella's and the novel's commitment to free love, good medicine, and feminism. Insistently historical, Gray has written his own dust-jacket blurb for a high-class hardback of this novel: 'Since 1979 the British government has worked to restore Britain to its Victorian state, so Alasdair Gray has at last shrugged off his post-modernist label and written an up-to-date nineteenth-century novel'.30 The only things in the historical novel that in part escape the bite of satire are the topography of Glasgow and the idea of Scotland. This history-within-literature series ends in Glasgow, because this is so evidently where Scottish literature has its center in the last quarter of the

century. Glasgow writing is hyperconscious of Glasgow street life of a previous generation in working-class novels like Archie Hind's The Dear Green Place (1966), William Mcllvaney's Docherty (1975), and Alan Spence's Its Colours They Are Fine (1977). Such novels protect themselves, by backdating, from the spirit of change found in certain other literary productions of this period, for example Edwin Morgan's ten Glasgow Sonnets (1973) and Jeff Torrington's novel, Swing Hammer Swing! (1992). Morgan and Torrington, in crushing detail, show the razing of tenements and the building of tower blocks from the fifties to the seventies, something that occurred in Glasgow on a far more extensive scale than in any other British city. At the same time as the removal of whole sections of the citydestroying unsafe buildings and sending up safe if ugly replacementsthere was an intelligent effort by Labour councils to preserve what was excellent of old, Victorian, stone-built Glasgow. This extent of change in itself gave Glaswegians the sense of movement, of possibility in their city. The generation of Morgan, now in his 70s, and of Gray, now in his late 50s, was the first that had free comprehensive health care, excellent schooling open to all classes, and the chance to move out of the tenements. The welfare state after 1945 helped them to survive, thrive, learn, and then (as Glasgow poet Tom Leonard told me) 'tell our fathers' stories', because in Glasgow the earlier generations found it hard enough just to survive. There was another reason for energy and excitement in the writing: the tradition of Red Clyde, with socialist intellectuals in control of the cultural means of production in the theatres, the People's Palace museum of Glasgow life, the publishers; also Labour members were, at that earlier time, in control of Glasgow City Council. So a new generation emerged, and virtually a new class, coming up through Glasgow University and the Charles Rennie Mackintosh School of Art. They experienced the clash of classes and of types of speech in their education, and were to display this in their writing. Morgan, Gray, and Leonard are all able to switch from Glasgow dialect to standard in their writing, and can use and ironize scientific and official jargons. I think it likely that the clash of speech-types in their work, and in Liz Lochhead, Carl Macdougall, Frank Kuppner, Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy, James Kelman, is the literary transposition of the clash of discourses they encountered growing up in postwar Glasgow.

m
In 1981, Alasdair Gray, born 1934, published his first novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books. This is a phantasmagoria of Glasgow that with some daring welds together a reality-plot about the life of narrator Duncan Thaw,
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a mural-painter; and an unreality-plot about Thaw's after-death-life ^ Unthank, a place with echoes of Scotland but also a dystopia of scientific-bureaucratic control gone haywire.31 Thaw's celebration of life in a mural that he paints in a decomissioned church reminds us of Gully Jimson, Joyce Cary's character modelled in turn on William Blake (Gray acknowledges all his plagiarisms, in an Index beginning page 485). Against that positive image of the human form divine, the novel sets the nightmare of Unthank, with its Swiftian disgust at an antiseptic world of thought-control but also at the gross bodythere is abundant detail on dragonhide, a growth that starts on Thaw's elbow and starts to cover his body; one woman's hand has a mouth in it. Reality against reality-breakdown, Glasgow against Unthank, Blake against Swift, Thaw against himself: these are unresolved oppositions between which the novel lurches over its 560 pages. If we might prefer the pages on ordinary Glasgow life, on Thaw's loveless family and the way his art emerges out of grubby circumstance, also admirable is the ambition to combine incompatibles, the energy of the novel's negativity. Lanark was complete in 1976, and Gray fought over five years to maintain its integrity as a double-story as he confronted publishers who wanted to split the realistic from the fantastic sections. In 4 Books, this novel was also consciously an epic, with a huge cast of characters and a cover-illustration by Gray that shows, looming over a Glasgow-like city near the water, a huge kinglike figure holding a force-sword in one hand and a persuasion-sword in the other, and his body is made up of many tiny bodies of faceless people. Still, I consider the novel the product of an essentially satirical imagination, and on balance Gray is more like Swift than like an epic-writer or a Blake. Satire and Utopia are intimately related forms of thought, because a Utopia is a satire upon the corrupt present, and a satire is a rhetoric designed to correct error on the way to THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION. Explicidy dated, Gray's next novel, 1982 Janine (1984), is a satire upon its loathsome narrator Jock McLeish who, like Chris Caledonia and Bella Caledonia, becomes in his own voice a metaphor for Scodand. In this case, Jock is all that is selfdefeating in Scotland in 1982, at the nadir of the reaction against the failed vote for an independent parliament. We are entirely in Jock's mind from start to finish, locked in for a dark night of the soul. The action of the novel is one long night, ending in Jock's only actual spoken words of acceptance as morning comes and the hotel-lady knocks, 'All right'. But into the consciousness of this night comes a whole individual psychology and, because Jock is/is not Scotland, a whole historically-dated culture, too. Jock is opaque, and profoundly lacks self-knowledge as the novel opens in a provincial hotel room at nightfall; but as he drinks and thinks, he warms to his theme of self-hatred and national self-hatred, most incisively with this: 'The truth is that we are a nation of arselickers, though we disguise it with surfaces: a surface of generous, openhanded man-

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liness, a surface of dour practical integrity, a surface of futile, maudlin defiance like when we break goalposts and windows after football matches on foreign s0il and commit suicide on Hogmanay by leaping from fountains in Trafalgar'.32 This from an alcoholic expert on industrial security, whose 341 page monologue invents many fantasy-pornography dialogues and remembers many personal-experience dialogues, in the process breaking through surface after Scottish surface. Jock's mind is repellent, but especially to himself: hence the alcohol, hence the escapist pornography which has its place mostly at the start of the novel in the passages on sexy Janine bursting out of her clothes and getting mauled by male and female predators. As Jock comes to understand his role as woman-hater, arse-licker, substitute-seeker, love-avoider, control-freak, and so on, he must face his worst self, must take a bottle of pills, and try to commit suicide. Gray has his most stunning typographical moment here, in Jock's descent to the rock bottom of personal and national self-loathing, in a section of ten pages called The Ministry of Voices that forces the equation between pornography and Scotland. Citation from poets of Scotland, scatological language, political utterance including the slogan on the early days of a better nation, nonsense sounds, type running in all directions including right-left and upside-down, type of different sizes, are the visual representations of breakdown. Horrors are dredged up, and the result is a half-page that repeats Scots word Boak (or Vomit) a hundred times; the pills are coughed up, the suicide has failed. After this Jock can call to consciousness the failures in his relations with women that led to his inner cinema of pornography. And he can talk to God, dating his remarks Scotland 1982, admitting that 'I no longer think Scotland worse than elsewhere. . . .' (311). Jock's cutting references to Scotland, for instance on Scottish prudery, on how 'Scotland is wired for war' with American nuclear subs in its lochs, on how Scotsmen are quietly destroying their intelligence, occur throughout, nicely spaced.33 The pornographic scenarios are grouped for the most part in the opening 125 pages, and the speeches directly to God occur in the final 50 pages after Jock has been through The Ministry of Voices. Someone named AG, a joker who is one guise of the novelist, comes in after the novel is over to say that he disagrees with Jock on many issues, and to admit (with a good deal of other 'critic fuel') that The matter of Scotland refracted through alcoholic reverie is from MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man' (342). The novel has had to display a pornographic intelligence to condemn it, and through horrible Jock has had to show the nation at its worst to redeem it. With no delicate holding back of all things disreputable and inconvenient, this satire brings into the open an ugly idea of Scotland as the victim of wrong turns in 1707,1745,1979: a nation controlled from outside, angry at its subjection, turning its anger inward. The political pornography is the worst. Scots become control freaks because they are controlled.

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So there is a spirit of didacticism in the land. Recent historical studies on Scottish topics are, for the most part, satires on earlier histories. Recent literary works from Scotland are satires on Scotland. Most spectacularly in the work of Gray, the working-class Swift 0f Glasgow, but also in a remarkable number of Scottish works of fiction, we see a monologic habit as a national trait. I am thinking of characteristic books like Janice Galloway's mental-crackup narrative, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing (1989), Frank Kuppner's cheery self-scrutiny in the uneventful long story-poems of Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting! (1989), Jeff Torrington's compendium of reading-notes and jokes and enthusiasms Swing Hammer Swing! (1992), and all James Kelman's longer fictions including the 1994 Booker Prize winner, How Late It Was, How Late (1994) where the blind dialect speaker comments minute by minute on his trips around Glasgow. In the Kelman novel, pronouns in each grammatical person, singular and plural (except third person plural), all refer to the one speaking subject, ex-con Sammy, and reported quotations are not enclosed in quotation marks, so the novel is a long dissonant aria, opening 'Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye . . .' , 34 Post-1979 Scottish writing tends to be monologic because it is caught between asserting the independence of Scotland, and wondering in a punishing way if there is enough nation left after three centuries of Union to justify independence. Scotland's current discourse, more than before, manifests the contradictions of a stateless nation. It is playfully, imaginatively dialogic, but only in the chinks of a monologic regime it has been designed for its own psychic and national survival.

Notes
1 Robert Crawford, A Scottish 'Assembly (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), p. 42. This essay is for Dtvid Craig, who wrote below my name in a gift copy of his book, 'Friend of Scotland', before I knew I was, but what he said I was I became. 2 A. L. Kennedy, 'A Meditation Upon Penguins', Pig Squealing: New Writing in Scotland, 10, ed. Janice Galloway and Hamish White (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1993), pp. 81-2. 3 Julia Kristeva, 'What of Tomorrow's Nation?', in Nations Without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 46. 4 Quoted here from Colin Nicholson, Poem, Purpose and Place: Shaping Identity in Contemporary Scottish Verse (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), p. vii. 5 In this estimate, I include some works that appeared slightly before 1979, and also two scholarly books by Americans, Michael Hechter and R. James Goldstein. Alasdair Gray is the only writer I discuss in all sections: in I, his historical-political tract; in II, treatment of Scottish history in story and novel; in III, works set in present and future.

6 Tom Nairn, 'Scotland and Europe', New Left Review, 8 (1974) : 58, here quoting Nicos Poulantzas. Nairn developed these ideas at greater length in The Break-Up of Britain (London: Verso, 1977). 7 David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 185. g Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1666 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). 9 Michael Hechter, 'Internal Colonialism Revisited', Cencrastus (Edinburgh, 1982). 10 Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 28. 11 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland', in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 41. 12 Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, The Eclipse of Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intellectuals (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989). 13 Murray Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 14 Tom Gallagher (ed.), Nationalism in the Nineties (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). 15 Ian Donnachie and Christopher Whatley (eds.), The Manufacture of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). 16 Christopher Harvie, Cultural Weapons: Scotland and Survival in a New Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). 17 Alasdair Gray, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1992), p. 63. 18 Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 19 This book received rough treatment from Donald Davie in a 1992 review: Davie called it a nationalist study emerging within our era, when all writers in English are already provincials of some sort. Crawford replied in a letter to say that Davie had neglected the historical argument. 'I have as little time for Anglophobia as I do for Anglocentric prejudice'; the book 'champions impurity and pluralism'; readers 'may consider how smoothly the wish to articulate cultural difference may be dismissed by the powerful as "having a chip on the shoulder"' . Davie's review is in London Review of Books, 9 (July 1992): 10; Crawford's letter of reply is in the same publication (August 6, 1992) : 4. 20 Quoted from Robert Crawford, 'Bakhtin and Scotlands', in Scot lands, 1,1 (Edinburgh, 1994): 57. The plural in the journal title is purposeful, as is shown by the Introduction to this first issue: 'a new image of Scotland, a pluralistic, syncretic Scotland, an interational Scotland'. See also Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). Crawford in these studies proposes Bakhtin's ideas of heteroglossia as a description of the Scottish cultural and linguistic scene; in my final paragraph below, I propose monologism as a description of current Scottish narrative preferences. These days, why is it prohibitive to apply the missing Bakhtinian term dialogism to nation-discourse in Scotland? 21 David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3, 5. 22 Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-C.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); R. James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). See also Colin Kidd's splendid essay, 'The Canon of Patriotic Landmarks in Scottish History', Scotlands 1, 1 (1994).

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23 Edwin Morgan, 'Sonnets From Scotland', in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990) 24 Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), pp. 4, 6. 25 See Edwin Muir's 'Scotland 1941', in The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, ed. Tom Scott (Haimondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 428. There is a useful chapter on 'Edwin Muir and Scotland', in Margery McCulloch, Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist (Edinburgh; Edinburgh University Press, 1993). 26 Ian Crichton Smith, 'John Knox', Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), p. 2 1 27 Alasdair Gray, 'Logopandocy', in Unlikely Stories, Mostly (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 145. 28 Ian Crichton Smith, 'Culloden and After', Collected Poems, p. 30. 29 David Craig, On the Crofters' Trail: In Search of the Clearance Highlanders (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990). 30 Alasdair Gray, dust jacket blurb, Poor Things (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1992). 31 Alasdair Gray's Lanark (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1981) is reprinted in a more readily available Paladin Books edition in 1987. The most satisfying interpretation of the book is based on archival sources: Bruce Graham Charlton's M. A. Thesis, The Literature of Alasdair Gray, University of Durham School of English 1988. Charlton also shows how the second novel, 1982 Janine, was constructed on an entirely different plan, one explicitly defined against Lanark. 32 Alasdair Gray, 1982 Janine (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 65. 33 Major references to the matter of Scotland in the novel occur on pages 35, 41 ('I was Scotland'), 53, 61, 65, 83, 98, 108, 128-9, 129, 134, 136, 147, 176, 230, 280-1, 310-1. 34 James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1994), p. 1.

Tadeusz Stawek

Aphrodite and USS Enterprise Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Garden, the Suburban

It is in changing that things find repose.

Heraclitus

I
Having presented his Analytic of the Sublime and its landscape of 'threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky. . . ., volcanoes with all their destructive power, . . . [and] the boundless ocean heaved up',1 Kant turns towards a more regulated panorama of the countryside which in its absence of 'volcanoes', 'hurricanes' and 'threatening rocks' resembled more closely the land round his native Knigsberg. In the 22 paragraph of his Critique of Judgment, he prepares the ground for the 'Analytic of the Beautiful', which is to follow, by referring to a garden which, in a characteristically Kantian twist, has nothing to do with either Knigsberg or with what he saw in his lifetime. The reference is exotic but, as if to demonstrate that Kantvia his early university courses on geography which linked the scene students were familiar with with the unusual examples taken from uncommon travel descriptionscould rank among early promulgators of cultural studies, at the same time begins in the European scenery. Talking about the 'free play of our presentational powers', Kant detects in it a 'divorce from any constraint of

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a rule' and exemplifies it with 'the English taste in gardens' which allows to exercise the freedom of imagination 'to the verge of the grotesque'. In a gesture which is directed against the stiff rules of classisistic gardening of Pre Rapin and Le Ntre, Kant shows that 'stiff regularity' is contrary to the principles of taste. But this is only the first of the two movements of his thought. The second takes us to Sumatra and William Marsden's reflection that 'the free beauties of nature there surround the beholder everywhere, so that there is little left in them to attract him'. 3 Thus, Marsden's experience of a well regulated pepper garden with its clearly designed parallel paths encountered unexpectedly in a jungle gives him right to conclude that 'we like wild and apparently relentless beauty only as a change, when we have been satiated with the regular beauty'. Kant debates Marsden on the basis of the changeability of human response; whereas the learned English ethnologist and philologist believes in the solidly defined and stable human nature (which on principle dislikes disorderliness of the jungle), Kant favours the view that what matters is a certain hiatus within the structure of human attention (or understanding). The way to approach human response is not via a rigid set of tenets but through the recognition of the necessary distance between man and world. As long as there is a gap between understanding and reality, i.e. as long as we have not become unreservedly integrated with the world, we can exercise our attention, avoid boredom and epistemological fatigue of the known. For Kant, taste is not a matter of disciplined and strictly codified rules but, rather, of the animation of human attention which is energized by the estrangement from the world which surrounds it. Like a fashionable eighteenth-century gentleman Kant believes that boredom is a negative response (modernists will verify this view), but profoundly unlike them, he claims that to avoid boredom one should not simply plunge in the spectacle of the social festival but trace one's own way which would elude the traps of convention on behalf of the variety of experience. Thus, the philosopher says (one should note th reference to experiment which shows Kant's loyalty to the principles of the knowledge of Enlightenment): 'And yet he [Marsden] only need to make an experiment of spending one day with his pepper garden to realize that, once regularity has prompted the understanding to put itself into attunement with order which it requires everywhere, the object ceases to entertain him and instead inflicts on his imagination an irksome constraint. . . . ' 4 Kant uses the example of the garden for a whole series of philosophical purposes. First, he wishes to point at the limitations of 'regularity'; second, he focuses on a basic need for alienation or estrangement (a critique of 'attunement', Stimmung) which, aesthetically, allows us to contest the dominating 'order'; third, one could say that a step has been made towards a critique (characteristically, a critique performed on a relatively safe ground of aesthetics) of the aristocratic society with its strict code of social con-

duct founded upon the 'regularity' and transparency of signs used in the social intercourse.
Let us note marginally, in a different script placed in another type of column and margin so as to divert the attention of the reader and, according to Kant's principle, avoid boredom that the philosopher can be here supplemented by another author with no lesser a claim towards the same professional title. La Bruyere in his Characters devotes much space to baring social conventions for what they seem, on aesthetic grounds, repulsive to Kant: unquestioned and unreflective dominance of 'regularity' which rigorously preserves a linkage between the signifier (social behaviour) and signified (social evaluation) and thus perpetuates the same ordering of the public sphere. Out of abundant examples we shall cite only two. In his Town' section la Bruyere writes: 'If a city lady hears the rattling of a carriage stopping at her door, she is anxious to be acquainted with any person who is in it . . . ; from her window she has caught a glance of a set of fine horses, a good many liveries, is dazzled by the numerous rows of finely gilt studs . . . How well will he be received! She'll never take her eyes off him. Nothing is lost upon her, and she has already given him credit for the double braces and springs of his carriage . . ., and she esteems him the more and loves him the better for them.' In the 'Fashion' chapter the 'regularity' expands to embrace the realm of knowledge and religion to juxtapose, socially, the learned and the simple: 'Arts and sciences have been greatly improved during this century . . .; even salvation has now been reduced to rule and method . . . The first devout men, even those who were taught by the apostles did not know them; those simple-minded people only had faith . . . and led righteous lives.'
La Bruyere, Characters, trans. H. van Laun (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 112, 261.

The English garden which remains on the 'verge of the grotesque' is then a horticultural style with coded philosophical and social implications; it is there that the work of intellectual critique of dominating modes of thinking and social distribution of power is conducted, somewhat misleadingly, under the heading of 'taste'.

n
In the 51 paragraph of Critique of Judgment the garden comes back, this time with the aura of delight. This pleasure, the pleasure of the garden is first of all inscribed in its very name: Kant refers to 'landscape gardening' as to Lustgartnerei the first element of which links it with the term 'pleasure', Gefuhl der Lust, and therefore tells us that the garden belongs to the domain of enjoyment. Second, the pleasure which, let us add, is that of the eye and therefore belongs to the same order as painting is also a social pleasure of comfort and relaxation. Kant: "For a parterre with all sorts of flowers, a room

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with all sorts of ornaments (including even ladies' attire) make a kind of painting at some luxurious party . . . .' s The bliss of the garden is that of culture (with a strong emphasis on the removal of the element 'agri-' which necessarily brings about the terminology of labour and toil; La Bruyere warns us: 'In town, people are brought up in complete ignorance of rural and country affairs . . . Do not mention to a company of townsfolk such words as fallow-land, staddles, layers, or after-grass . . . for they will not think it is their mother tongue'6 in its pure state. A culture which does not consider work because it has already been done and whose charm resides in the fact that it does not want to learn how and by whom; it merely wants to look. The garden obscures labour; not only the labour of those who maintain the parterres but also of those who enjoy them because the very enjoyment seems to be founded upon their categorical reluctance to undertake any efforts which could contribute to the extension of their knowledge. The garden is a triumph of the observing eye which is dedicated entirely to the pleasure of watching without any inclination towards learning (Kant's classification which groups painting and Lustgartnerei on the strength of the argument that they 'are not intended to teach us, e.g. history or natural science' is significant). The garden comes when culture has been formed, constructed, and now there is nothing else to do but to look because any action would dislodge and disturb the state of pleasure which belongs to the regimen of the eye and not that of the (working) hand. The garden: the pure enjoyment of a completed culture where the next action could only be that of the apocalyptic destruction. The garden is the mind on the verge of revolution against which it is defending itself by means of pleasure of the eye and 'some luxurious party'. The revolution cannot take place exclusively in the sphere of the eye to which the 'luxurious party' belongs; the procedures of revolt must, sooner or later, involve the appeal to the hand which is the only agent in whose power it is to interrupt the 'party'. Thus, Kant's ordering of landscape gardening to the same class with painting locates it characteristically in the space of ornament which not only is offered to the eye but which is explicitly walled in so that it would be inaccessible to the realm of hand. '. . . like painting, this beautiful arrangement of corporeal things is given only to the eye, because the sense of touch cannot provide a presentation of intuition of such a form'. 7

HI
The wall or fence is a major problem of the garden. In Kant it is present not only in the concept of 'parterre', a boxed arrangement of flower beds, and

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the demarcation of the eye and the hand but, on a larger scale, also in the very idea of the division of arts. In the practice of gardening the wall or hedge, or ha-ha fence were to fulfill several important functions. On the one hand, they had to reflect ownership relations marking boundaries between individual estates; on the other hand, they also were to mark the area which on the ethical level, circumscribed my operations signifying 'my' place, 'my' rung on the social ladder beyond which I was not supposed to go. The first function stems from the economic expansionism the movement of which wants to be unrestricted; the other originates from the ethical reflection which is a critique of the economic growth. Virginia Kenny puts it in the following way: 'Just as the walled garden is a means of circumscribing an area which can then be brought under control, so the estate is a definable area of a definable character which bestows on its owner or tenant a fixed place in the scheme of things.'8 The garden thus appeals both to my sense of property and to my moral ethos. In the former role it asserts the world as the proper aim of man's restless and unfocused attention; in the latter, it confirms man's limitations sending him/her back to the study of his/her humanity (Pope's 'proper study of mankind is man'). The two aspects meet in the philosophy of man's placedness (or displacedness) and allow us to notice yet another facet of Kant's emphasis on the luxuriousness of the ocular scene of Lustgartnerei: by accentuating the eye undisturbed by touch, the philosopher opened a possibility of interpreting the garden as a place where a reinterpretation of man's labour goes on. This re-interpretation wants to demonstrate that the pleasure of the eye performs an ethical work of restraining the overinflated ambitions of man's which would like to gain control and thus appropriate more and more territory. If the eye can quietly contemplate the view, the hand is restless in its busyness. A philosopheme of, at least, Pascalian origin: 'What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our happy condition . . . but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture. That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment; that is why the pleasures of solitude are so incomprehensible.'0 We s6e how uncertain Kant himself is about such an interpretation of Lustgartnerei; on the one hand, he seems to invite by the contemplative pleasures of the eye; on the other hand, he discourages it the overtly social aura of his commentthe ocular delight is that of 'some luxurious party', i.e. of some social gathering where the work of the hand is supplanted by the exercise of polite discourse. Kant's 'party' almost repeats Pascal's comment in which, criticizing vain curiosity, he puts forward the indelible central mark of language: even the pleasure of the eye is not disinterested because it is pursued only in the service of the social discourse of novelty and gossip: 'we would never travel by sea if it meant never talking about.it, and for the sheer pleasure

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of seeing things we could never hope to describe to others'.10 The garden does belong to the sphere of the eye where we are not taught, where we do not labour, but it also marks the realm of sociability with all its conventions and routines. Where the hand is excluded, the mouth interferes with the delight of the eye which is always shown as suspect and only hypothetically innocent. Shaftesbury sees it clearly in his meditation in The Moralists. The ideal of the pure eye, of something which is given to the eye only, is there replaced by the work which knows its limits, the labour which avoids the extremities of luxury (not luxury as such) and which, while aiming at bringing back the particle 'agri-' to the world culture, warns seriously against the industrial exploration of land. 'Unhappy restless men, who first disdained these peaceful labours, gentle rural tasks . . . Hence all those fatal evils of your race, enormous luxury . . . ranges through seas and land . . . not satisfied to turn and manure for their use the wholesome and beneficial mould of this their earth, they dig yet deeper, and seeking out imaginary wealth, they search its very entrails.'11 The garden poses thus a philosophical question of primary importance: is it possible to think man as confined to a certain realm, or is man's condition helplessly eradicated and doomed to the 'ranges of sea and land'; and if the former, then is it possible to demarcate the areas of pure pleasure unspoiled by labour, to keep power (in any sense of this word) away from the domain of the human. If the wall is a crucial element of the garden then how effective it is, and how strong its structure against the pressure of the reality of brutal force. The eye versus the hand. Through the mediation of the mouth through which the societal finds always its way back to all the solitary and idyllic enclosures. It is not a coincidence that at this note Kant ends his remarks on Lustgartnerei. 'But how can we include visual art under gesture of speech? What justifies this is the fact that through these figures the artist's spirit gives corporeal expression to what and how he has thought, and makes the thing itself speak, as it were, by mime.'12 The most intimate and individual pleasure of the eye where the hand has no access is already penetrated by the play of social and political powers which finds its way to the enclosure of the garden first of all through the bypass of the social discourse of leisurely conviviality ('some luxurious party') and, more importantly, through a semiotic structure of human imagination which never allows object to retain the status of being simply 'out there' but which always ascribes to them a speech, a discourse and thus undercuts the very possibility of the pure pleasure of the eye. The mimical speech of things: as Kant claims in the same passage, 'This is a very common play of our fancy, whereby to lifeless things is attributed a spirit that corresponds to their form and speaks through them.' The garden is nothing else but such an attribution of 'a spirit' which, implicated in the philosophical debate on man's regioning in the world

(critique of 'restlessness' which itself is deeply embroiled in the strategies of economic and social unsettled agitation involved in the game of success), constantly relives the temptation of forming an enclave where the powers of the hand and the mouth could not enter.

IV
Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden at Stonypath (Strathclyde, Scotland) wants to elude the temptation of the eye which brings about the trap of withdrawal by a series of manouvers. First, one has to consider theory behind the horticultural practice. From a collection of notes bearing the Shenstonian title 'Unconnected Sentences on Gardening' we learn (1) that the garden belongs to the domain of the preSocratic philosophy with its stress on becoming and processual character of reality ('A garden is not an object but a process',13 (2) that the garden constitutes a political statement which subverts its previous ideology of respite and 'some luxurious party' ('Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks', IHF, 38), and (3) that the garden needs to be reinscribed in the realm of the sacred thus undermining the secularized and institutionalized establishment of the power structure ('Ecology is Nature-Philosophy secularized', IHF, 38). Second, historically speaking, the Stonypath garden results not from the tradition of consumption (the garden as a perpetuation of the predetermined social order which blurs the traces of labour and opens the realm of leisurely pleasure of nature-consummerism) but from the legacy of contestation which does not want to accept the dialectics of historical development but to bypass it by the grace of the lightning force of transgression. Michel Foucault puts it in the following way: 'Contestation does not imply a generalized negation, but an affirmation that affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity . . . to contest is to proceed until one reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being.'14 Finlay's horticultural experiment wants not only to claim again the sacred, but it also adds to it two important domains: that of political transgression as 'revolution' ('Garden centers must become the Jacobin Clubs of the new Revolution', IHF, 38) and that of the transgression occurring within the modal structure of man ('Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees', IHF, 38). A third kind of manouver takes us into the domain of aesthetics. Without doing justice to this complicated aspect of Finlay's work, we can only say here that throughout his long career as a concrete poet (the career which started

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some time in 1962 with the formation of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse periodical promoting visual and acoustic poetry) Finlay has been steadily moving towards embracing the principles of classicism and turning his works into a witty commentary on the use of power and violence. As we shall see, both elements will feature prominently in the formation and cultural reception of his Stonypath garden.

V The perspective on classicism is established by a garden note which reads: 'As public sex was embarassing to the Victorians, public classicism is to us' (IHF, 38). Classicism is shown as (1) relegated, like sex, by the modern society to the domain of privacy where the public eye cannot penetrate, and (2) opened, also like sex, to the possibility of malfunctioning, disease or perversion (as we shall see, the reason for this exclusion of classicism is partly that classicistic art knows, incorporates and displays as its vital element violence and strife, the features modern society feels uncomfortable with). The common denominator and the point where both aspects meet is the concept of 'embarassement' which can encompass both areas: the public and private, the healthy and the sick. Embarassement is a public sign of a prospective, developing illness, of health on the verge of collapsing into as dark space of malady (I am embarassed when I feel I have done something wrong or improper but which can, as yet, fall neither under the penal jurisdiction of medicine or justice), and thus it manifests to the society my private problems which however still remain private while seriously warning the public sphere to the efect that it should be ready to intervene should the situation worsen. To use Foucault terminology again, embarassement is a point where one can still ask the 'old' question 'what is the matter with you?', but where the possibility of a 'new' modern questioning along the line of 'where it hurts' already dawns on the horizon.15 What one finds in Finlay's preoccupation with the classical is the fact that this mode of thinking allows for a public manifestion and social handling of the phenomena which ought to (like sex) remain hidden but which nevertheless surreptitiously shape each individual life. In fine, classicism finds intellectual and aesthetic modes of dealing with violence and brute power in a manner which makes their analysis public and also publicly problematizes violence and power by asking provoking questions concerning their status. In the diagnostic, theoretical part of his work Finlay resembles Foucault, but his practice of classicism separates him from the French

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philosopher. The effects of war are not removed from the civil society in a state of peace, and it is a function of social power structure to reinstate the imbalance and lack of parity characteristic of a battle. The role of political power . . . is perpetually to reinscribe this relation through a form of unspoken warfare; to re-inscribe it in social institutions, in economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and every one of us.' 16 But whereas Foucault would turn towards the radical examples of contemporary art with its randomness (Raymond Roussel) and inarticulacy (Artaud), Finlay makes two interesting gestures. First, he openly decides to continue a classicist discourse in arts; second, he consciously chooses to play with the important classical age convention of the garden implicating it in a power play which Kant, in his protoromantic effort, was trying to redeem it from. Finlay's garden in Stonypath, appropriately renamed in 1978 as 'Little Sparta' as a result of a 'Five Year Hellenisation Plan' (a name already in itself indicative of Finlay's method consisting in a conscious allusion to a political mechanism [in this case of communist strictly regulated economy] and turning it against itself not so much by parody but by the subversion of the simplistically future oriented politics of progressivism ['Hellenisation' as an equivalent of, for instance, 'electrification'] through the reversal of the temporal agenda: a movement towards the future, a version of 'progress', which owes its force to a turn towards the past), is an attempt at sacralization of space and a problem that will interest us more in this essay at presentation of the presocratic philosophy of becoming in the signs of destruction and power.

VI
The garden is undeniably classical: the Temple of Apollo, Grotto of Aeneas and Dido, columns and inscriptions scattered in the copses and bushes. One is reminded of the Stourhead and Stowe gardens, but then again we have to return to the question of the eye posed by Kant. What distinguishes Finlay from Lord Cobham is his emphasis on the ocular as a domain of work rather than Kantian distanced contemplation of 'some luxurious party' (which phrase also describes the optical relaxation; not only are the people shown at leisure, but their eyes do not inspect, are not surprised by new views but, instead, look from the position of a formally reserved detachment). George Bichkam in his (1750) description of Stowe notes, 'I find it a very great Relief to my Eye, to take it from those grand Objects, and cast it for a few Minutes upon such a rural scene. . . . n 7 A dense design of Stonypath does not allow

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for prospect views, or appreciation of 'parterres' from a gallery or balcony; one has to constantly face new challenges which both confirm the classicist image of the garden and suggest ways of its redefinition. In most general terms one could address the redefinining strategies as the metamorphoses of the pastoral. But the pastoral is not a simple category. David Halperin finds that the pastoral is constituted by the special localization of a scene which does not refer merely to spatial dimension (a 'garden scene') but, rather, to a localization understood as finding a place in which man is properly located, i.e. where there is no disharmony between man, his space, his actions, and his public relationships, and where reality acquires its meaningfulness. Hence, shepherds (a necessary element of the pastoral) represent not only their profession (Halperin: 'caring animals under their charge') but also extend it harmoniously (without a division into leisure and work) unto 'singing or playing musical instruments, and making love'. In this way the world of the pastoral differentiates itself from reality and establishes itself in opposition to it (Halperin: 'The most traditional contrast is between the little world of natural simplicity and the great world of civilization, power, state craft, ordered society, established codes of behavior, and artifice in general.'18 To redefine the pastoral must then implicate Finlay's undertaking in the task of rethinking the general philosophical positioning of man in his/her social sphere. A part of this responsibility is approached by way of what Harry Berger jr. calls a 'strong pastoral' or 'metapastoral',19 a strategy which wants to reduce the pastoral to a mere convention and, by showing its shallow conventionality, construct its renewed version, e.g. by employing contemporary images and iconography to point out the obsolete character of the pastoral model (a typically modernist procedure a good literary example of which can be provided by a reference to T. S. Eliot's iconographic collages in The Waste Land). In other words, by posing a radical discrepancy between the sophisticated world of civilization and the 'simple' world of the garden, the pastoral achieves a certain harmonious model of the world with clearly marked boundaries and values, whereas the metapastoral tries to show this paradigm as pure and manipulative nostalgia. Claude Gellee, better known as Lorrain, is the final and ultimate case of the modern embodiment of such a nostalgic yearning: 'Claude's art is still fraught with myth. In the depth of modern man's unconscious, his paintings evoke the atmosphere of a lost paradise, a nostalgia for a golden age, now gone forever, when man, at peace with himself and his fellows, contemplated his own image before the beauties of eternal nature.'20 Thus, in brief , a reconstitution of a Hellenic garden (constructing a temple of Apollo or dedicating a cave to Dido) in the Scotland of 1970s and 80s must necessarily be a gesture of the metapastoral character.

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But Finlay's appropriation of the classical takes place on a more profound level which we can describe as 'grammatological'. The artist is not interested in promoting a certain vision of the classical as a totality but in the provocation of a fragment which, being a signature of the classical, writes itself upon and thus endorses a totally different reality. One of the most striking strategies taken up by Finlay is the severing of a link between the work and its signature and then using the very same signature, a mark of one's proper name, to sign a landscape which, by this very operation, is doubly changed into a work of art. First, because it is accompanied by a signature, what is more by the signature of the artist; second, because through this very procedure it becomes estranged from the rest of reality, it stands out from its background, the way a picture is separate from a gallery wall. In a series of works entitled Nature Over Again After Poussin (1980) this purpose of a grammatological redeflniton of the pastoral announces itself not only through the reference to art history (more specifically, the pastoral within art history, as marked by the name of Poussin) but, more significantly, through the recontextualization of the autograph. Signatures of Corot, Salvator Rosa, Guercino, Poussin, and Claude Lorrain have been 'cut out' of the canvas which was their proper medium, carved in stone, and placed in various places in the garden. The harmonious world which Halperin detected at the heart of the pastoral is now undermined in many ways: the signature of the artist which was the main guarantor of the order is now destabilized through decontextualization and, attached to a different sequence of spaces, now officiates another 'world' external to the previous harmonious division of the simple garden and sophisticated civilization; the artist also significantly repositions himselfhe no longer remains a part of his work which secures its continuity with the world (the signature warrants the fact that the work is somehow an 'extension' of its author) but now either presents himself as a work of art (if we assume that the carved stone with the author's signature is an independent aesthetic object) or now authorizes a different fragment of reality which is doubly discontinuousfirst, because we know that the signature does not originally belong to the space it signs, and, second, because the autograph does not seem to 'sign' anything, there is a rift between the signature and the world which has not been called forth by the artist. The latter argument brings us back to the sacred since Finlay's stone autographs placed in the landscape can be looked upon either as 'signing' reality in a God-like manner (almost melting classicism with the Romantic conviction that nature is a system of God's traces, 'signatures', left upon the world) or just the oppositeas the exercise of the blasphemous gesture of usurpation through which God is expropriated from the ownership and authorship of the world which rples are now allotted to the human hand.
10 Writing Places

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Thus, Finlay's small (in case of 'Corot') or monumental (in case of 'Claude') sculptural autograph pieces also problematize the notion 0f property always ultimately resolved and guaranteed by the signature. The intitials carved out of their original location demonstrate the fact that they themselves (and not only the world they sign and authenticate) can aspire to the status of a 'work', can acquire a value which is comparable to the piece they previously humbly accompanied in the lower corner. But, simultaneously, that they become 'works' publicly available as such (and merely as companion pieces, not as chaperons of 'true' aesthetic objects) already testifies to a certain confusion: whereas in their original location they function on the line demarcating the private (as a proper name they are linguistically the most intimate speech act possible in which I reassert my identity for myself) from the public (when the painting is exhibited it becomes available not merely as 'a' painting but as a painting 'by' . . . which introduces the artist in the system of the social exchange of values), now they belong totally to the domain of the public separated from their original placement, fundamentally displaced (but also, ironically enough, most appropriately placed, as one can hardly think of a better placing of a 'Corot' or 'Poussin' than in a landscape which they so passionately and repeatedly reworked in their oeuvres) they are on dis-play (let us remember that Finlay's project is therapeutic: he tries to liberate us from the 19th-century bourgeois corset of 'Victorianism' through a public display of the privacy of the proper name, the privacy which as profound as that of 'sex' which the bourgeois society so dramatically tries to camouflage), open to a free play of cognitive faculties which Kant was describing as a true element of the beautiful. The confusion is enhanced by the ambiguity of the discourse identity: the autographs are words, or verbal signs, whichbecoming a 'work of art'must provoke questions as to whether they belong to the sphere of painting or, perhaps, literature or poetry. Nowhere can we find a more perfect illustration of the ut pictura poesis dilemma blending two kinds of aesthetic activities in a central classicistic gesture (let us remember that Salvator Rosa was himself a poet of considerable stature): 'Doubtless the traditional affinities between the arts, which Horace's ut pictura poesis has come to enshrine, functioned to keep visual pastoral in touch with literary formulations. . . . ' 2 1 But Finlay's analysis of the classical shows a more profound processthat of the emerging of the 'literary formulation' from within the picture itself, independent of the anecdote and the mythical story 'told' in visual representations. The story, the poesis of the signature. In this manner the seriousness of the name metamorphoses into a frivolous frolic (of sheep, or of herdsmen who 'play or sing, and make love') which compromises both the idea of authorship and the pomposity of the proper name which is now liberated from its entanglements in a 'work' (a classi-

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cistic turn towards the 'simplicity' of nature away from the polish of the elegant world whose main force is that of the exchange of fashionable names', a swerve towards rustic 'vigor' and 'health': The term "free play", which Kant introduced into aesthetics more resolutely than any of h i s predecessors and to which he assigned a central role . . . Every form of play sharpens the feeling of health, enhances all activity, and freshens the 22 o r g a n i z a t i o n of the mind.'

VII
Finlay's work with the classical incorporates violence amidst the scene of 'playing, singing, and love-making'. Return the forgotten herdsmen who, let us recall, are the heart of the pastoral. The shepherd is a double figure of care. On the literal level, he is the one who tends the cattle, i.e. exercises care which is considerably 'pure', relatively unmarred by sheer ordinariness of labour strikingly present in the work of a farmer. The practice of care belongs then to a world suspended between that of exertion and relaxation and, considering the associations with music and love, of Eros and Apollo. It is this placing between the reality of benevolence and control which transports the herdsman unto the metaphorical level where he stands for the authority which not only gathers and keeps the flock together but is able to do it on the strength of the full knowledge about the objects of care which, in turn, do not try to break away from the imposed pattern of solicitude. The herdsman (pastor), as a king and priest, represents both lay and religious powers which, ideally speaking, would like to determine a world of peaceful relations while realizing that such a task is founded upon a nonviolent acceptance of control which, if it respects the rules of the game, tries to be as little violent as possible although ultimately it cannot avoid the violence of inspecting and getting to know its subjects' lives. 'Christian pastorship implies . . . a peculiar type of individualized knowledge between the shepherd and each of his sheep. The shepherd is not just aware of the state of his flock as a whole but is aware of what occurs in the soul of each of its members.'23 r A public display of carved signatures placed, like sheep (in another garden designed by Finlay in Stockwood Park, this procedure is quite explicit: big stone block scattered on a lawn are, in Stephen Bann's words, 'substitution of blocks of stone for the Claudion sheep', the replacement even more striking that the largest block bears on inscription 'Flock' 24 ), in the natural scenery of meadows is a demonstration of the knowledge of the herdsman who, as a good pastor, knows his sheep by name and thus,

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One cannot pass over in silence this ship, its kind which combines the elements and gets one through the air towards the meaning which is destructive and mortal, which understands meaning as explosion. An interesting exercise in naming: 1917 'the first ship to be designed and built as aircraft carrier' was lowered into water as Hermes, the god of theft and meaning, one who mediates between the mortals and divinities. 'Hermes' already introduces the amorous connection of love and strife from which the modern aircraft carrier emerges as a floating nest of mortal birds (Stafford: 'a selfsufficient nest of death and destruction'). Homer talks about 'the beguiling words of love-making, which trick the mind even of the wise' upon which Norman O. Brown comments: 'A lover might invoke Aphrodite "weaver of tricks" or Hermes the trickster. In fact, Hermes and Aphrodite were frequently associated in ritual, and even combined in the figure of Hermaphroditus.' Is the aircraft carrier not precisely a 'hermaphroditus', a dangerous mixture of the land and air, water and fire? And the name of the vessel used by Finlay is not neutral either: USS Enterprise speaks not only of courage and adventurism, but of the conquest and entrepre-

Tadeusz SjawA

Fig. 1. Aircraft carrier Bird-Table, 1972, d o n e

through this knowledge, also controls their souls. A tranquil scene of rustic repose is now subverted by a public presentation of the name which no longer attached to its original place (a work of art it was authenticating) reveals its secrets normally kept in the shadow of a corner of the canvass or invisibly preserved on the reverse side of the painting. But violence finds a more straightforward rendition in the Little Sparta where the erotic connotations of the garden as an interplay of music and love-making (perhaps delicately present in Kant's 'some luxurious party' and openly manifest in Fragonard, Watteau and Boucher), which put the garden in the domain of Aphrodite, take a dramatic s h i f t : V e n u s / A p h r o d i t e metamorphoses in an aircraft carrier. A presocratic insight into the nature of reality: the replacement of Aphrodite evokes the loss of unity in the erotic and philosophical sense (Empedocles' 15th fragment: ' . . . u n i f y i n g power of Aphrodite' 25 ), but concurrentiy the force of destruction or strife represented by the war machine brings about, as we shall see shortly, a reunification of elements. A metamorphosis of the erotic into the violent, as, according to Empedocles, 'These two forces, strife and love, existed in the past and will exist in the future; nor will boundless time ever be empty of the pair.' 26

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149 The metamorphic element is suggested by the titles Finlay has given to his two works: one is called 'Aircraft carrier Fountain', the other 'Aircraft carrier Bird-Table' (both works come from 1972). The decision of placing miniaturized battle ships in the garden is not only ironic in the sense of reducing a potentially fatal machine of war to the the size of a diminutive object with overtly i n n o c u o u s d e s i g n a t i o n (particularly striking in the bird feeder version). The irony doubles unto itself: a 'pacification' of a war-machine is only a first step of the process, 'polemization' (a term deriving from the Greek polemos) of a peace (pastoral) scene is the other. When a bronze cast of an aircraft carrier is placed as a fountain in a pond not only do we see it as a turning strife-into-peace process but also we cannot close our eyes to the emergence of this heavy object from the brightness of water as to a play on the famous Boticelli painting (representing the birth of Venus) and as to a subversion of the inner peace of the water element which 'has produced' the dark and heavy monster of polemos. Yet another moment of the erotics of the garden: the woman/goddess (Aphrodite) is shown as a war apparatus, the machine which goes beyond the clear-cut binarity of unity/division. As a war device it marks dehiscence and potential disintegration; as an equipment which unites air (planes), water (ship), earth (a landing deck as earth substitute), and fire (nuclear

Fig. 2. Aircraft carrier Fountain, 1972, bronze

neurialism ('free enterprise') which proceedes necessarily by way of strife. The ship and its name which became symbolic for the American Navy. When the efforts to save the first Enterprise failed, its death was represented as a ritualistic dismemberment, disintegration of the mystical union and ressurrection at the same time. Strife (of death, of mortal combat) and resurrection (of and in love which prepares for future strife): 'Early in 1959, in a dreary shipyard on the Hackensack River at Kearney, New Jersey, the torches and pneumatic hammers bit into her and scientifically took her apart . . . The steel and aluminium and Douglas fir that had been married to men, to a crew, and out of that union had given birth to 1 hipreverted under the torches and hammers to ordinary matter . . . And yet the spirit did not die . . . Early in 1961, the dock [at Newport l^Jews, Virginia] was flooded and Enterprise, the first nuclear carrier in history, the biggest ship in the world, first felt the touch of the sea. The story of the Big E. had begun again.' An explicit matrimony Of Love and Strife, of Empedocles's PhSlia and Neikos, the marriage of man and materials to effect deitruction; to write about an aircraft carrier (or to reproduce it graphically) is to think 'of an almost mystical blending of men and metal into one of the most efficient fighting machines in the history of war'. Hate and War results from Love and Sympathy. A classic Greek solution: 'Under her [Aphrodite's] influence things disjoined become

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united, and in this way she brings about an order based entirely on Love. But when this unity has been reached, it always becomes split into miltiplicity by the destructive power of Hate. This process is not perceptible to the senses but only to the eye of the mind.'

Tadeusz StawefcM

Fig. 3. Heroic Emblems

Neither should one remain indifferent to the size of the ship. The second Enterprise was after all 'the biggest ship in the world', intimidating those on land by its character of a floating towiy 'The overall length . . . measures 1101 f e e t . . . her extreme width at the flight deck is 252 feet . . . Her crew comprises 400 officers and 4200 enlisted men. The distance from her keel to the mast top equals that of a 25-story building and the ship is powered by 8 nuclear reactors which require refueling only every three years. She can. handle 100 aircraft launching them at a. rate of 4 per minute from 4 catapults.' D. Maclntyre, tilings of Neptune. The Story of Naval Aviation (New Norton, 1963), p. 28; E. Stafford, The-Big E. The Story of the USS Enterprise' (New York: -Random, 1962), p. 472, 45; Admiral A. Radford, Tbf Preface to E. Stafford. The Big, E . . . p . VI; J N. O. Brown, Hermes the Thief (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1947), p. 14; W. Jaeger, The theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon. Press, 1947), p. 138; G. Pawlowski, Flat-Tops and Fledgelings. A History of American Aircrtft Carriers (New York: Barnes 1971), p. 388.

engine of the vessel) it spells harmony and consolidation of pans but this correlation is to be revealed exclusively due to the intervention of the differentiating force of strife:'. . . from a metaphysical perspective it is strife who [sic] reveals nature as it isfor only under total strife are the four elements displayed as what they really are, separate entities'.27 Finlay develops this idea in more details in his 1977 'Heroic Emblem' representing again an aircraft carrier this time surrounded by the inscription reading: 'The Divided Meadows of Aphrodite' (marginally let us note that the same series of emblems shows also another aircraft carrier USS Enterprise with the inscription 'A Celebration of Earth, Air, Fire, Water'). With its reference to the feminine sexuality (the 'division' of female genitals) bringing the notions of the erotic union and the maternal solicitude, the very image at the same time speaks about 'division' which is not that of an inconspicuous minor gap but of the sublimity of the most powerful war machine available ('The sexual reproduction dealt with as a part of the world of strife is in accord with Hippolytus' description of marriage as a "work of strife"'. 28 Thus the garden does not isolate the imagery of force creating a background for 'some luxurious party' opening this demarcated world of stasis to their eyes, but incorporates and focuses on the

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151 violent procedures to reveal the polemos centrally present in the pre-Socratic philosophy. As Finlay himself maintains: 'A garden is not an object but a process' (IHF, p. 38). This process involves not only the scene of rustic retirement and Arcadian repose open to the erotic but the saturation of the latter with the violent and polemological.

Fig. 4. Heroic Emblems

VIII
What has happened between Kant and Finlay is a transition from 'some luxurious party' which dominated a well regulated territory by means of their glance to a neoclassical space where the domination of the glance is severely restricted first by the absence of prospects and orderly pattern of Kant's 'parterres', and second by the places where the energy of representations either liberates the enclaves of privacy and property ('signature' works) or introduces the anxiety of strife and combat (polemos). The latter element questions the structure of appropriation by force (war) which breaks the continuity of socially accepted and time established ownership (what Edmund Burke referred to in his Reflections on French Revolution as to the 'policy of inheritance'29). In other words, Finlay's horti-aesthetics has also its own political economy; its main tenet is, paradoxically, that of recognizing the right of and to property not by reconfirming it but, rather, through posing the necessity of struggling and strifing towards a property. The property which normally is a residual idea of form and stability (in short, the property which IS), in Finlay's political economy is presented as potentially formless and subject to the process of becoming. Such a philosophical investigation of the right to own is particularly interesting because in the development of European history the garden became, in late decades of the 19th and throughout the 20th century, more and more associated with the suburban which was the epitome of the middle class property focus. Writing in 1898 Ebenezer Howard, the undeservedly neglected social and architectural thinker, diagnosed a crisis of the city caused not by its intrinsic features (just the opposite: 'The town is the symbol of society of

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mutual help and friendly cooperation . . . ' 3 0 but a discontinuity between the urban and the rural ('The country is the symbol of God's love . . . 31 ) which he postulated to end by the construction of the Garden Cities. The rhetoric of Howard's treatise is particularly interesting because it suggests, in a significant gesture of a return to the pastoral (centered round play, music, and love-making), a matrimonial discourse not only of marriage but also of fertility: Town and country must be married [Howard's emphasis], and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life. . . . ' 3 2 Designing the Garden City, in which the garden was to soften the effects of the civilization, was however tantamount to perpetuating not only the idea of horticulture but also of the efficient and Utopian political economy of capitalism in which 'higher wages are compatible with reduced rents and rates . . . abundant opportunities for employment and bright prospects of advancement. . . . ' 3 3 The garden is the Utopian force of the capitalism urban power leading to the actualization of the pleasure principle formed on the model of the (neo) classical pastoralism (in the Garden City 'life may become an abiding joy and delight' 34 ). But even though Howard was far from the socialist sympathies he was aware of the fact that the garden must be implicated in the restructuring of at least some of ownership rights. If the garden is to be the pastoral force of capitalism, it must be constructed first on the philosophical principle of the metaphysical value of earth (rather than merely 'land', a transition from 'earth' to 'land' constitutes a crucial moment in the formation of capitalism), and secondafter a reclaiming of space from strictly private ownership. Whereas the city is there to remain the domain of private property, the garden (in a manner similar to the eighteenth-century binarism of the anxiety of external reality and the tranquility of the garden were 'some [optical] luxurious party' takes place) forms a different domain. Having asked himself a question whether the city is to allow new buildings on the land adjecent to it, Howard answers: 'Surely not. This disastrous result would indeed take place if the land around the town were, as is the land of our present cities, owned by private individuals anxious to make a profit of it.' 35 The garden is the territory where ownership must be reformulated and the possibilities for its redrawing reconnoitered. Howard continues: 'But the land around Garden City is, fortunately, not in the hands of private individuals: it is in the hands of the people: and is so to be administered, not in the supposed interest of the few, but in the real interests of the whole community.' The land surrounding the city is then exempt from the play of the market value and inscribed in the structure of 'true' interests: the garden performs economically and politically significant role of a space which compromises the capitalist interests as 'supposed' and itself constitutes an opening of the 'real' interests. A candid subversion of Kant's 'luxurious party' replaced now by a mixture of the tradition of ftes champtres and

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workers' political feasts in the outskirts of the city which, before the media explosion, were the most popular way of mixing entertainment and political propaganda leading eventually to the replacement of the original working class culture by its version organized on the model of petits-bourgeois ('Ainsi une culture ouvrire minoritaire . . . s'oppose une culture des ouvrirs qui n'est qu'une version populaire de la culture des petits-bourgeois: un melange d'amour du travail, de dcors sages, de vie calme, d'obissance sociale et civile, de musique et de danses traditionnelles, de gymnastique revancharde et de sports roturiers, de ftes officielles et d'alcool' 36 ). The garden of Little Sparta with That neither the question of property rights its representations of strife aims at or violence in the sphere of social relations saving the space outside the city not were alien to Finlay is evident in the tempesas a specimen of greenery and tuous history of the Little Sparta deeply embroiled in conflict with the Scottish Arts unspoiled beauty but as a territory Council and the local government of Straredeemed from the stereotypes of thclyde which, first, refused to concede tax the bourgeois society; this challenge rate reflief to the property (on account of comes both from the direction of the garden not being sponsored by the Scotaesthetics (representations of war as tish Arts Councii), and then, when Finlay in a clever move transformed the gallery into an element of garden) but also ecoa Garden Temple, also rejected a plea for nomy (problematization, although tax exemption normally granted to religious definitely not abolishment, of probuilding. This has led to a long series of perty claims). At the same time, howboth successful and abortive attemps on beever, the garden also rescues the half of the authorities to raid the property and claim the works of art collected there, land from becoming a suburb, a banthe story which is in details narrated by lieu, a place where the logic of deYves Abrioux in his definitive book on Finpendence and containment matches lay. Here suffice it to say, that the most the ethics of avoidance. The former spectacular moment of the strife, of the polemos, came on February 3, 1983, when has left its trace in the etymology a group of Finlay's fans organized in a group ('banlieuterritoire qui entoure une sporting a revolutionary name of 'Saint grande ville et qui en dpendFoJuste Vigilantes' defended the Little Sparta ed: tendue de pays soumise la against the police in front of journalists and juridiction d'une ville ou d'un seigcameramen. The event is commemorated by a bronze and brick Monument to the First neur. . . . , 3 7 ). The latter constitutes Battle of Little Sparta erected just outside the very kernel of the contemporary the garden. suburb with its dislike of confrontation and the denial of the ethics of commitment and nearness on behalf of the distance based on indifferent tolerance: ' . . . suburbanites tend to tolerate or do nothing at all about behaviour they find disturbing, abandon matters in contention, simply avoid those who annoy them . . . It is even possible to speak of the suburb as a culture of avoidance'.38 Finlay's aircraft carriers (as well as other military icons, like his metal Oerlikon gun exhibited

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in Battersea Park in London under the name of Lyre with the accompanying slate 'presocratic', Heraclitus inscription reading 'Applied to a lyre, harmonie might refer to the structure of the unstrung lyre, or to that of the strung lyre whether tuned or not, or to that of the lyre tuned in a particular mode' ( IHF , p. 186) placed in the garden reintroduce the element of strife into the artificially domesticated territory thus performing a role of an important ethical provocation: by their appeal of combat and struggle implicated in the problems of philosophy they ask questions about the nature of strife and violence (its implied and inferred inexorable character in the formation of human society and being in general), and, at the same time, they puncture the aura of tranquility and complacent isolation characteristic of the suburbanized life of the Western middle class thus forcing (which predicate is to be taken as literally as possible) its representatives into stance taking and self-definition. If it is true that 'The suburbs lack social cohesion but they are free of strife',39 then Finlay's work attempts at the reconstruction of the public sphere precisely through the aesthetic and philosophical reintroduction of violence and strife.
As a final gesture of closing one may consider how profoundly the life of modern city is based on the mapping of its geography into "good" (safe, respectable) and "bad" (dangerous, substandard) quarters. This distribution of spaces largely coincides with the downfall of city centers (which almost every where are marred with violence) and the rise of suburbia as the oasis of quiet. Nevertheless the development of local neighbourhoods has led to such a Tarification of social links which necessitated the emergence of a counterneed of commitment and connecting. However, the ethics of avoidance is so much the essence of the suburb that this counterneed has surfaced in a "negative" way, not as a postulate of involvement towards something but as an exclusionary gesture aimed against something. This "something" in case of the American suburbs assumed the shape of the dangerous Other and the violence which it brings along as its unyielding attribute. The negative sign of the counterneed of involvement without, however, resigning from the ethics of avoidance and isolation is embodied in signs placed on lamppost which read "Crime watch: we report all the suspicious looking persons and activities to our local sherrif". A manifestation of, simultaneously, isolationist policy of the beneficiaries of a specific well defined code (only on the basis of internally definable hierarchy of values, closed to any outsider, can "a suspicious person" or "suspicious activity" be determined) and of the need of solidarity which can only be phony as it has recourse not to the person living next door but to a representative of administration and law-inforcement. All the distress and sadness of the American suburbia looks at us from these signs which try to reinforce the safety and security of avoidance and indifference vis--vis a recognition of the significance of strife and violence: to face violence, to witness the polemos, without being actually exposed to it; strife as a social tease, necessary but immediately neutralized by the specialized social services (police).

Aphrodite and USS Enterprise . . .

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Notes
I. Kant, Critique of Judqment, trans. W. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 120. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid. Ibid., p. 193. La Bruyere, Characters, trans. H. van Laun (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 113. Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 192. V. Kenny, The Country-House Ethos in English Literature 16881750. Themes of Personal Retreat and National Expansion (New York: Harvester Press, 1984), p. 40. 9 Pascal, Pensees, trans. A. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Book, 1966), p. 68. 10 Ibid., p. 50. I I A . Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners Opinions, Times, Etc. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), Vol. 2., pp. 115-6. 12 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 193. 13 In Y. Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay. A Visual Primer (Edinburgh: Reaction Books, 1985), p. 38. Further referred to as IHF plus the appropriate page number. 14 M. Foucault, 'Preface to Transgression', in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Interviews and Essays, ed. D. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 32. 15 See M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. xviii. 16 M. Foucault, PowerIKnowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 90. 17 G. Bickham, The Beauties of Stowe (Los Angeles: William Clark Memorial Library, 1977), p. 8. 18 D. Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 70-1. 19 H. Berger jr., Second World and Green World Studies in Renaissance Fiction Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 1-39. 20 S. Cotte, Claude Lorrain, trans. H. Sebba (New York: George Braziller, 1971), p. 89. 21 The Pastoral Landscape, ed. J. D. Hunt (Washington: National Gallery, 1992), p. 15. 22 A. Gulyga, Immanuel Kant. His Life and Thought, trans. M. Despalatovic (Boston: Birkhausen 1987), p. 168. 23 L. McNay, Foucault. A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 120. 24 S. Bann, 'A Luton Arcadia: I. H. Finlay's Contribution to the English Neo-classical Tradition', Journal of Garden History, No. 13:1/2 (January-June 1993) : 110. 25 Ph. Wheelright, The Presocratics (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), p. 128. 26 Ibid., p. 131. 27 B. Inwood, The Poem of Empedocles. A Text and Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 46. 28 Ibid., p. 45. 29 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 119. 30 E. Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London: Faber & Faber, 1945), p. 48. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

33 34 35 36

Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 140. P. de Peretti, 'Le fte comme enjeu politique, in N. Gerome, D. Tartakovsky, C. Willard (eds.), La Banlieu en fte. De la marginalit urbaine l'identit culturelle (Saint Denis: Presses Universitaire de Vincennes, 1988), p. 208. 37 J. Guichardet, 'Promenades littraires vers la banlieu fin-de-sicle', in La Banlieu en fte p. 21. 38 M. P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 10-1. 39 Ibid., p. 134.

Ian Bell

A People in Question. Perceived Contradictions in the Political Language of Ulster Unionism

I see a culture of twigs and bird-shit waving a gaudy flag it loves and curses.1
Tom Paulin, Desertmartin

In the poem, Desertmartin, Tom Paulin makes a candid and rather scathing assessment of the people and culture of his native Northern Ireland. He describes the village of Desertmartin as'the dead centre of a faith', where he sees-
. . . a plain Presbyterian grace sour, then harden, as a free strenuous spirit changes to a servile defiance that whines and shrieks . . .J

Clearly Paulin's perception of Northern Ireland is not in any way similar to the one with which we are usually presented in our newspapers and on our television screens. There is no sign of any heroic 'armed struggle' for independence from imperialist Britain, and equally little sign of any intrinsically 'British' culture refusing to be coerced by political violence. Because it offers this almost unique perspective Tom Paulin's work is invaluable as a starting point for any examination of Northern Ireland in the context of British Cultural Studies. More particularly, his work is interesting because it deals in detail with the pro-British community in the province generally referred to as the 'Protestant' or 'Unionist' people. This community includes the majority of people in the Province, but it is a community largely unknown to the outside world.

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Even the people of mainland Britain are frequently puzzled by the behaviour of these 'Irish' who peremptorily assert their cultural distinctness from the rest of Ireland, and their allegiance to the British crown, but who have consistently harangued and criticised every Westminster government for the last twenty-five years. It is difficult to rationalise how they can, with their Union flag-waving, voiciferous and intransigent brand of British patriotism in one sense appear more British than the British on the mainland, yet still refuse to trust and acquiesce to British Government policy. Paulin identifies this contradiction in Desertmartin when he describes this people
Waving a gaudy flag it loves and curses.

The cumulative effect of their ambivalent attitude towards each Westminster administration, their manifest antagonism towards Irish Nationalism, and, more particularly, the terms in which these views are expressed must be regarded as extremely negative since Unionists continually claim to be misunderstood. This article will attempt to examine the political language of the pro-British people of Northern Ireland, using the history and literature of the Province to provide a deeper insight, at a time when this language is of great moment. Recent developments in Northern Ireland have brought an end to organised political and sectarian violence, and have necessitated a re-assessment of its constitutional role within the United Kingdom. In this political climate, the traditional rhetoric of Unionist (pro-British) politicians can seem either dangerously belligerent and extreme, or incredibly unimaginative and intransigent. For example, as recently as Friday March 10, 1995, The News Letter, one of the most widely read newspapers in the Province, carried this story about Unionist indignation at the lack of Union flags being waved during a visit by the Queen to open a bridge in Belfast
The Queen was in Northern Ireland less than half an hour when there was a row over the Union Flag. The flag was conspicuous by its absence and, while scores of furious callers vented their anger to the News Letter, DUP leader Ian Paisley accused Government ministers of deliberately censoring flag-waving. . . . Unionists were also outraged that the National Anthem was not played when Her Majesty arrived in Belfast.

Irish Nationalist counterparts, and confuse or exasperate observers from abroad. In the past various attempts to satisfy both the largely Catholic Nationalist/Republican community, and the largely Protestant pro-British community by instituting forms of power-sharing within Northern Ireland have collapsed in storms of sectarian bickering and recrimination, or been frozen out of existence by the non-participation of one or other of the main political parties. Put simply, the aspirations and political objectives of the two communities are mutually exclusive, and the language each community has habitually used to express these aspirations has been practically unintelligible to members of the other community. On the one hand, the large Irish Nationalist/Republican minority thinks in an all-Ireland context and perceives its politics in terms of a political dialogue or revolutionary struggle with what they perceive as a foreign British presence in Ireland. On the other hand, the Unionists have been able to dismiss any debate about the constitutional status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom on the basis that they represent a pro-British majority in the Province. On the face of it, the Unionists would appear to have a distinct political advantage because of their democratic mandate. Yet while the Irish Nationalist/Republican political parties have succeeded in mobilizing support within and without Britain and Ireland, most notably in the U.S.A., Unionist politicians have rarely had any comparable success and have often actually antagonised the International Community. The failure of Unionists to articulate their aspirations in such a way as to attract support is evident to anyone who cares to look in any detail at the history of the recent 'troubles' in Northern Ireland. For example, the 1969 Civil Rights Movement was, quite rightly, rhetorically exploited by Nationalist/Republican politicians and gave them a voice which they had previously been denied, an opportunity to command the attention of the world through the international media. In the full glare of this attention, the Rev. Ian Paisley, who is a key Unionist figure, only succeeded in isolating his electorate by making remarks which would undoubtedly be unpalatable to international audiences
I am anti-Roman Catholic, but, God being my judge, I love the poor dupes who are ground down under that system.3

At a time when most observers feel that extreme sensitivity is needed to preserve an unexpected and fragile ceasefire and political dialogue which has only just begun after decades of recrimination and violence, such publicly extreme behaviour is unlikely to endear Unionist politicians to anyone but their own electorate. In spite of this they continue to use forms of discourse which, by their nature, exclude the political aspirations of their

The Rev. Paisley is currently the leader of one of the two main Unionist parties and represents Northern Ireland in the European Parliament. His recent exploits include interrupting the Pope's speech to the European Parliament in order to denounce him as the Antichrist. At the height of the hunger strikes of 1980 the eyes of the world were focused on Northern Ire-

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land as Republican terrorists held prisoner in the H-blocks of the Maze prison refused food in order to establish themselves as political Prisoners of War. During this crisis Unionist politicians in general simply echoed Margaret Thatcher's line that 'Crime is crime. It is not political.'4 Whether alarmingly extreme or unsatisfactorily prosaic both forms Qf Unionist discourse have only succeeded in alienating them from an international community already more disposed to interpreting Northern Irish politics in the didactic British/Irish terms promulgated by Irish Nationalist and Republican politicians. It is therefore no suprise that, in the unlikely event that people outside the British Isles are aware of the political aspirations of a culturally distinct people in Northern Ireland, they are unlikely to be sympathetic to them. The question which begs to be asked in all of this is why Unionists have not rejected the forms of discourse which have been so detrimental to their interests? The roots of both species of Unionist rhetoric, prosaic and bombastic, and the reasons for their continuing use are to be found in the history of the Province and in its recent socio-political structure. Various factors have made Unionists at best suspicious of, and at worst hostile to any form of change. Paulin addresses this characteristic in the poem In the Lost Province as he recalls his time in Belfast
And the sky is a dry purple, and men Are talking politics in a backroom. Is it too early or too late to change?5

In recent times they have tended to discuss the endemic violence of Ulster either in terms of 'law and order', using the sober language of criminality to describe it, or in the seventeenth-century terms of a struggle with the RomanCatholic Irish, using biblical bombast to revile Irish Nationalist opposition. Broadly speaking we might say that these forms of discourse are characteristic of two distinctly different kinds of Unionist politics. The predominant and more moderate kind is that of James Molyneaux's Official Unionist Party (OUP) and in general might be said to represent the views of the Protestant middle-classes. The Rev. Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) forms the minority Unionist camp and depends largely on working-class Protestant support. This minority is, however, very substantial and considerably more voiciferous and less moderate than the other. Both parties depend on a Protestant electorate and both are extremely suspicious of constitutional change, but there the similarities end. The Official Unionists profess a sober but sincere and dependable loyalty to the British crown which represents a strain of Unionist feeling originating in a middle-class Protestant financial prudence of the nineteenth century.

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jhe industrialisation of the North of Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth century meant that the interests of the middle-classes lay firmly jo maintaining the Union for the purposes of trade. In addition, the Protestant morals and patriotic values which abounded at the height of British Imperial power appealed to the prospering middle-class who effectively controlled the party. These middle-classes identified strongly enough with mainland Britain to call themselves British and cease to identify politically with the rest of Ireland. Louis MacNeice, himself a product of this section of Unionist society, attempts to define its motivation and aspirations in Autumn Journal
Such was my country, and I thought I was well Out of it, educated and domiciled in England . . . . . . Why do we like being Irish? Partly because It gives us a hold on the sentimental English As members of a world that never was, Baptised with Fairy water; And partly because Ireland is small enough To be still thought of with a family feeling; And because the waves are rough That split her from a more commercial culture; And because one feels that here at least one can Do local work which is not the world's mercy . . . 6

The Protestant middle-classes, affluent as a result of historical privileges and protected by this affluence from the grinding poverty which afflicted the rest of the population, were in a position to ally and assimilate their own heritage with a wider British identity. Their loyalty and sense of Britishness was confirmed and intensified by very heavy losses in support of the Britsh cause during the First World War. This sense of being an integral part of the United Kingdom while still having a certain autonomous economic security is still to be found, even though, as MacNiece pointed out a good many years a g o
. . . It is self-deception of course; There is no immunity in this island either; A cart that is drawn by somebody else's horse, And carrying goods to somebody else's market.7

Their attitude to the Catholic Nationalist/Republican minority in Northern Ireland has been one of reluctant, condescending tolerance which resulted in at best exploitation, at worst repression during years of Unionist rule from the Stormont 'Protestant parliament for a Protestant people' in Belfast. MacNiece evokes an image of the results of this attitude in Garrickfergus
" Writing P j c n

162
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries, To the hooting of lost sirens and the clanging of trams: Thence to smoky Carrick in County Antrim . . . . . . The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and the halt.8

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After the partition of Ireland this Unionist Party had a monopoly of power in the North which was only broken by the predominantly Catholic Civil Rights Movement of 1969 which catalysed the recent Troubles'. The formation of the breakaway Democratic Unionists, who thought the Official Unionist line on the Movement threatened the Union by being too accomodating, was another result of Official Unionist mismanagement. By promising to be, 'on the right of constituional issues and on the left of social issues'.9 Paisley mobilized working-class support for his new DUP. The Protestant working classes had been only marginally better off under Stormont administrations than their Catholic counterparts. The atmosphere of the years of Stormont rule is evoked by MacNeice, again in Autumn Journal
And the North, where I was a boy, Is still the North, veneered with the grime of Glasgow, Thousands of men whom nobody will employ Standing at the corners, coughing . . . . . . A city [Belfast] built upon mud; A culture built upon profit; Free speech nipped in the bud, The minority always guilty . . . 1 0

Essentially, they maintain interest and support by loudly championing this economically deprived, inward-looking and insecure section of the population whenever they feel threatened by change, and by stirring up traditional prejudices and fears when there is no obvious threat. The DUP takes a populist line on social policy and is more overtly anti-Catholic in order to enlist the support of the Protestant working-class. Also, in contrast to the rather sober and austere sense of duty and loyalty propounded by the OUP, a more revolutionary patriotic line. The perpetual cry of Paisely's Democratic Unionists is, memorably 'Ulster is British', but there can be no doubt that for their electorate the most potent term here is 'Ulster' and not 'British'. The Union with Britain appeals to them principally because it provides them with the opportunity to maintain their cultural and above all religious distinctness from the rest of Ireland. The Official Unionists are perhaps more bound up in the economic concerns which permit this and identify more confidently with mainland Britain. Tom Paulin addresses the atavistic, quasi-religious nature of this brand of Unionist politics in Desertmartin
Masculine Islam, the rule of the Just, Egyptian sand dunes and geometry, A theology of rifle-butts and executions12

Restrained to the point of banality, their politics and mode of expression is indicative of a highly developed sense of belonging which provides reassurance despite suspicions about constitutional ambiguities voiced by the British and Irish governments. Their prime tactic in most political battles can be roughly summarized with the paradox 'active inertia'. Confident of their pro-British majority they have been able to deny or delay any concessions to their Nationalist/Republican opposition and prevent the build up of any momentum for change. The Rev. Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists represent a strain of insular feeling whose roots reach much deeper into the history and culture of the Protestant people of Ulster. In his poem Ecclesiastes, Derek Mahon identifies the archetype of this kind of politician
God, you could do it, God help you, stand on a corner stiff with rhetoric, promising nothing under the sun.11

Referring perhaps specifically to the Rev. Ian Paisley, known colloquially as 'Big Ian' or 'The Big Man', or perhaps more generally to the archetypal preacher/politician common in contemporary Northern Irish society and in its political history, Tom Paulin sees in Desertmartin the 'plain/Presbyterian grace' of his ancestors 'sour' as
. . . it shouts For the Big Man to lead his wee people To a clean white prison, their scorched tomorrow.13

Their attitude to the Roman Catholic minority is one of unambiguous j mistrust at best, at worst blind bigotry. Their attitude to the British political and military presence in the Province is bound up with their perception of | how well this presence serves their sectarian interests. There is a hint of this ambivalence and unpredictability in Desertmartin when the speaker gives us his impression of a patrolling Scottish soldier
A Jock squaddy glances down the street And grins, happy and expendable, like a brass cartridge. He is a useful thing, Almost at home, and yet not quite, not quite. 14

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The attitude towards the British authorities by this kind of Unionism might best be explained by a few lines from the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid
England, frae whom a' blessings flow What could we dae withoot ye? Then dinna threep it doon oor throats As gin we e'er could doot ye!15

These ironic lines from the poem The Parrot Cry, taken out of context, encapsulate to some extent the ambivalence of the attitude towards England adopted by many Northern Irish Protestants. There is an instinctive antipathy and mistrust here which rankles with their political situation. That this sentiment might be expressed by a Scottish poet is no coincidence since the roots of the Protestant people of Ulster and the roots their political preferences he principally in Scotland. One of the initial problems with even beginning to discuss the Protestant people of Northern Ireland (often called Ulster) is the abundance of misnomers applied to them which tend to confuse or even abrogate their identity. They variously refer to themselves and are referred to as 'British', 'Protestants', 'Unionists', 'Planters', even 'Irish' (much to the chagrin of most Ulster Protestants). Yet none of these labels are sufficient to describe the people in question, and some of them are actively misleading. Within Ireland, 'Irish' does not simply denote 'of and pertaining to Ireland' as one might expect, but is bound up with the kind of Catholic Irish identity created by the drive for National independence in the Southits political connotations make it inapplicable to the Protestants in the North. 'British' can be confused with English and is rather an affirmation of political allegiance then identity. 'Protestant' or 'Unionist' provide only narrow definitions in terms of religion or politics, and 'Planter' (or 'Settler') is a counterproductive term since it can only define the people as being 'not Irish'. Perhaps the most useful, but least popular name which might be applied to the Protestants of Northern Ireland is 'Scots-Irish' since it implies both cultural similarities to and distinctness from both of those countries. The ancestors of the Scots-Irish came to Ulster, largely from Scotland, as a result of the policies of James Stuart who was both James VI of Scotland and James I of England. When James became the nominal ruler of Britain and Ireland he had two major problems on his hands. Firstly, the native Irish of Ulster still successfully defied English authority, and secondly, the political situation in his native Scotland was potentially volatile because of the radical nature of the Scottish Reformation, and the traditionally unruly Borders region was not fully under his control. His proposed solution

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involved offering land in Ulster to the politically undesireable Calvinists and poor Borderers who would undertake to dispossess the Ulster rebels in return for the comparatively rich agricultural land there. The Protestant fundamentalists would bring to Ulster a stern work ethic, a sterner faith, and the rhethoric of the Scottish Reformationall of which still permeate the political language of Ulster Unionism. From Paulin's poem Anastasia McLaughlin we can glean an idea of the austere intensity of the work ethic and the terrifying biblical bravado of the Calvinist rhethoric. Her father remembers
. . . a righteous preacher in a wooden pulpit Who frowned upon a sinful brotherhood and shouted The words of deserts and rainy places where the Just Are stretched to do the work a hard God sent them for. His anger will seek us out till we shall hear The accent of the destroyer. The sly champing Of moths busy with the linen in our chests.18

James also legislated against the warlike families who had, until then, controlled the Borders. These families were largely responsible for the bands of 'rievers' or 'moss-troopers' who frequently pillaged the North of England, and, in lean times there, had few qualms about raiding Scotland. While traditionally allied to the Scottish throne they were notoriously unpredictable. James addressed this problem by outlawing them, making it practically a hanging offence to simply be called Armstrong, Scott, Bell or Elliot, for example. James also ensured that a substantial amount of English settlers also received land in order to prevent the establishment of a purely Scottish and potentially hostile colony. By emphasizing the English impetus of the enterprise James protected his own interests since his power base now lay in London. However, the bulk of the manpower and zeal came from Scotland. A common invocation from pulpits in the Borders at this time was
Get thee to Ulster. Serve God. Be sober.

The result was the perfect army of settlers: Protestant fundamentalists dedicated to making Ulster their new Zion; land-hungry Border fanners; and experienced brigands from the Borders trying to escape English law who were well-qualified to combat the native Irish. The 'Plantation of Ulster' occurred in the seventeenth century, so while this colonizing people might not be considered as part of the indigenous population of Ireland, nevertheless they have now been there long enough to have become culturally distinct from

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the people of Scotland, and also to warrant some kind of Irish identity. An originally Scottish antipathy towards England and the temperament, rhetoric and anti-Rome prejudice of the Scottish Reformation have persisted as very strong characteristics of the Scots-Irish. Even the rhetorically restrained Ulster Unionists owe a good deal of their political philosophy to their heritageCalvinism and Capitalism have always been comfortable partners. One might even argue that these have been the factors which have shaped the history of this people. Addressing the House of Commons on the 10th November, 1981, the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, asserted that 'Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom as much as my constituency is.' In light of this, Prime Minister John Major's recent assertion that 'Britain no longer has any selfish interests in Northern Ireland', would appear to constitute a sea change in British government policy towards Northern Ireland. Ostensibly, both statements are simply an affirmation of the democratic principle upon which Northern Ireland's constitutional position within the United Kingdom supposedly depends. In an international context, successive British governments have derived their justification for involvement in Ulster from a perceived support for the union by 'the majority of the community'. However the nature of this 'community', divided as it is by profound political differences, presents peculiar problems for any Westminster administration seeking to apply democratic principles to the internal government of the province. John Major's statement has accentuated the instinctive insecurity of Unionists about their constitutional position within the United Kingdom by emphasising that Northern Ireland is a dispensible adjunct to the country rather than a fundamental and integral part of it. Tom Paulin summarised Unionist fears when he posited that the British Government's aim in the present peace process is to relieve the financial burden which Northern Ireland represents to the British economy by making the loyalist (pro-British) population scapegoats for effecting an eventual British withdrawal. Since there remains a substantial pro-British majority in Northern Ireland and in the past they have always maintained that it will remain a part of the United Kingdom as long as this majority exists, any 'unjustified' withdrawal would be politically damaging. However, the political convictions of Unionists would force them to resist any attempt to resolve the current peace-process in an all-Ireland context. Their dependably fiery or unpalatable rhetoric and potential for violent insurrection would justify the British in an international context by making them appear the voice of reason and peace. This would in turn allow them to wash their hands of the 'unreasonable' or 'intransigent' Unionists and allow matters in Ireland to take their, most probably bloody, course without British involvement.

This would, for Unionists, mean that after decades of bitter fighting and thousands of deaths, Republican terrorists would achieve their express aim of destroying the political order in Ulster to achieve a United Ireland in the resulting civil war. They would have achieved this effect by constituting an intolerable burden on the British economy by breaking windows in London, not by terrorising Unionists in Belfast. This is not only unacceptable to Unionists because of the deeply felt political convictions discussed above, but would be catastrophic for their economic interests as Northern Ireland is heavily dependent on British subsidies. In the 1970s most theories seeking to explain the 'Irish problem' imputed the blame wholly on the English who were accused of an internal colonialism which exploited the Celtic peripheries of the British Isles for the benefit of the London economic core militant Irish nationalism being an understandable reaction to this. However, Tom Nairn, an unorthodox Marxist theorist, has proposed a different theory 17 based on the economic over-development of the Ulster periphery in relation to the Dublin economic core of Ireland, which to a certain extent accounts for Unionist hostility towards Dublin. Irish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists feel that their economic interests are threatened by London and Dublin respectively. In theory, London draws wealth away from the peripheral Province, or at least will not allow it to reach the same stage of economic development as itself, and the comparatively under-developed Dublin could, in a United Ireland, retard the economic progress of the Belfast periphery. In examining the present Unionist fears we can see that the position of the Scots-Irish has not changed in any fundamental way since their arrival in Ulster over four hundred years ago. Today they are still prey to the same economic insecurity, and prone to the same political ambivalence and religious fundamentalism which were the driving forces for their ancestors' original migration. The political language of the Ulster Unionists is necessarily different from that of most of contemporary Europe, because it must express an altogether different world which is still vulnerable to problems other countries left behind centuries ago. Louis MacNeice remarks on the difference between his schooling in England and his home in Ulster in the final stanza of the autobiographical poem Carrickfergus
I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents Contracted into a puppet world of sons Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines And the soldiers with their guns. 18

If the political language of Ulster Unionists seems intransigent or simply unacceptable to a modern audience, it is perhaps because this audience is

ignorant of, or chooses to ignore, the historical forces which have shaped the political landscape in which the Unionist people of Ulster must live.

Notes
Robert Jensen
1 Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Fallon and Mahon (London, 1990), p. 331 2 Ibid. 3 Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles 1968-1993, ed. Bew and Gillespie, Gill and MacMillan (Dublin, 1993). 4 Ibid., p. 146. 5 Penguin Contemporary Irish Poetry, p. 328. 6 The Faber Book Irish Verse, ed. Montague, Faber and Faber (London, 1974), p. 304. 7 Ibid. 8 The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, ed. Kinsella (Oxford and N. Y.: UOP, 1989), p. 345. 9 N.. I. A Chronology of the Troubles, p. 40. 10 Faber Book of Irish Verse, p. 304. 11 Ibid., p. 364. 12 Penguin Contemporary Irish Poetry, p. 331. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse, ed. MacQueen & Scott (London: OUP, 1966), p. 499. 16 Penguin Contemporary Irish Poetry, p. 329. 17 See Political Issues in Britain Today (Chapter 10, 'Northern Ireland'), ed. Jones Manchester (University Press, 1994). 18 New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, p. 346.

Against Photography Reading Barthes on the Photograph1

Roland Barthes, whose work on a semiotics of advertisement, music, visual imagery of mass culture has been seminal for the development of cultural studies, remarked in an interview around the time of the publication of Fragments d'un discours amoureux that 'there are few great texts of intellectual quality on photography', especially when compared to the literature on film. He cited Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art' essay, Susan Sontag's On Photography, and a forthcoming Michel Tournier. 'The photograph', he concluded, 'is a victim of its superpower, since photography has the reputation of literally transcribing reality or a slice of reality, no one ever thinks about its I real power, its true implications'.2 He declared his intention to write a book it would be his last exploring his 'superpower', La Chambre claire.3 It is an extraordinary work, at once a mediation on photography, on memory, and on death, in short a work of great literature as well as criticism. In Camera Lucida Barthes abandoned the 'scientific', logical exposition of his earlier semiological writing for a Nietzschean aphoristic style. It took its place beside Fragments of a lover's discourse and Roland Barthes to constitute what Susan Sontag described as 'one of the most intelligent, subtle, and gallant p; of autobiographical projects'.4 The trio's linkage as autobiography depends far less on their construction of a life narrative than on the increasingly personal voice of Barthes's late writing, wherein grounds the problems of writing and reading in personal experience.5 Camera Lucida turns, in fact, on two autobiographical moments, the first occasioned by the discovery, 'one day, quite some time ago', of a photograph of Napoleon Ill's brother; the second, the 'Winter Garden' photograph encountered 'one November

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evening, shortly after my mother's death'. From these two incidents, 0 r Proustian shocks, what Barthes called punctum, he produces his reflections on photography. In parallel fashion, the two halves of the book adopt the rhetorical posture of working through what was 'shocked' out of Barthes by each photograph, forcibly recalling Proust's mmoire volontaire, and enacting the process by which the pain of each image is transformed into writing What might be called Barthes's 'theory' of the photograph is therefore presented retrospectively, as if we were participants in the process of his reasoning, in the first half doing the work of memory, in the second half, the work of mourning. In the first he asks why certain photographs arouse his interest; in the second, he inquires into the grief occasioned by a face. In a book that takes up the problem of reference in photography, Barthes makes himself the only possible measure on which his analyses can be anchored. Camera Lucida is consequently instrumental^ self-referential, even though the autobiographical element is contained exclusively by the figure of the author as the producer not the subject of the text.6 Neither style nor autobiography sufficiently account for Camera Lucida's early, often hostile or uncomprehending reception. As Barthes himself suggested, Camera Lucida may be seen as a point of departure for a new 'science' of photography. This 'science' for those who opposed the work stood against the semiological, sociological, and even Lacanian psychoanalytic traditions his earlier work was seen as supporting. Thus one critic denounced Barthes for his ' "science" of what cannot be shared in the reading of a photograph', which he went on to call 'the most unpromising area of study imaginable for any useful and responsible theory of photography'. 7 Of course, since 1981, the book has received serious, ever-widening attention across a number of critical disciplines.8 Still, when confronted today with the resonant power of Camera Lucida, we must ask: what are we doing when we take Barthes seriously? What are we now to make of a science that cannot be shared? Rereading Camera Lucida today, Barthes's 'theory' clearly threatens the photography community as much as it did when first published fifteen years ago. At the same time, the book now appears to be far less a radical departure from Barthes's earlier views-on photography. Looking back, a semiotic and sociological essay like 'Rhetoric of the Image' (1964) not only demonstrated through advertising photography how photographs encode their social significations, it marks the beginning of Barthes's inquiry into the more fundamental his critics would call it an essentialistphenomenology of the photograph. 9 Perhaps the radical conclusions Barthes reaches in Camera Lucida would appear less surprising if they are read as direct descendants of those earlier, powerful critiques of the medium offered by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. That is, Camera Lucida belongs to a tradition of

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photographic criticism which has largely written against photography, or at least against photography conceived of as art. Beginning as early as the 1961 essay The Photographic Message', Barthes became fascinated with the photograph's possibility of offering 'a message without a code' (PM, 5).10 To make this point in 'Rhetoric of the Image', Barthes opposed photography to the coded nature of drawing with its regulated transformations and its divisions between what signifies and what does not (since a drawing cannot reproduce everything) and argued that both to make and to read a drawing require apprenticeship. Drawing therefore originates in a relationship between two cultures (artist, art traditions, and art institutions on one side and the audience for art which brings its education, horizons of understanding, etc. to its experience of art on the other). Photography arises from a relation between a nature, the mechanical/chemical tracewhat Barthes called the analogon of the photograph , and a culture. A photograph does not transform, but registers, even though connoted meaning arises immediately in the act of registration. Barthes ascribed the real which surfaces in the analogon of the photograph to the chance operations of the photographic process; it is the realm of the unintended that exists side by side with the intended, what Stanley Cavell called in relation to film the image's 'automatism'.11 This appearance of the real differs from the 'naive' view of photography, which attributes to the photographic image the property of transparencythat is, that the world appears as it is in a photographand from the 'social' view of the photograph, where the real might be described as the constructed product of the Operator and the general social, aesthetic, and environmental circumstances in which the image was taken. Barthes's analogon of the real arises from the incidental character of the vast majority of photographs, the sheer visual array, the complexity of data, normally beyond the reach of a determining author or audience. As Barthes suggested, it is becoming increasingly difficult to appreciate the iconic power of the photograph. It is best grasped where we seek to set limits upon it. For example, in pornography almost anything can be put into print; but society has far sharper boundaries on what it wants to allow to be seen. Conversely, while photographs have become the standard proof that something once happened, that something once was there, captured in the camera's lens, they are notoriously unreliable forms of evidence (and getting worse).12 Above all, photographs are capable of generating a host of unintended (by the Operator, at least) perceptions. Indeed, for a photograph to achieve its evidentiary status, to be 'true' to some point of view, it must first be disciplined by language; the image may be controlled by as little as a caption or by as much as an academic treatise. Thus photographs offer our gaze at once both their (what Barthes calls Adamic) state of silence, awaiting language, and

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their intrinsic iconic power, which unsettles, even defies language. F 0 r a century and a half we have tried to come to terms with the photograph's intractable reality, or its illusion of reality, which for my purposes is much the same thing. Barthes did not deny the role of the photographer in selecting, framing, and developing the image. But he insisted on the additive character of this process in order to account for the psychological, or rather, the phenomenological effect of our experience of a photograph. (Barthes followed the tradition of phenomenological thought by defining reality only by our attention to it.) What is discovered in, or named through, a photograph is a perception, not a thing. Therefore:
Only the opposition of the cultural code and the natural non-code can account, it would appear, for the specific character of the photograph and permit us to measure the anthropological revolution which it represents in human history, for the type of consciousness it implies is indeed unprecedented; the photograph institutes, in fact, not a consciousness of the thing's being-there (which any copy might provoke), but a consciousness of the thing's having-been-there. Hence, we are concerned with a new category of space-time: immediately spatial and anteriorly temporal; in the photograph an illogical conjunction occurs between the here and the then. ( RI, 33)

a photograph taken of Barthes's mother as a child, the 'Winter Garden' photograph.14 He never shows us this image:
It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the "ordinary" it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term- at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound. (CL. 73)

Barthes called this conjunction the 'real unreality' of the photograph where 'this has been' triumphs over 'this is me'. 13 He saw here an experiential shift, a change in consciousness that fundamentally reconstituted the nature of human experience. This 'illogical conjunction' became the centerpiece of Camera Lucida and is at the root of his fascination for what he called the photograph's punctum, at the expense of its studium. The studium was the arena of Barthes's earlier political/semiotic inquiries. The studium consists of those features of the photograph which bear on its surfaces: its politics, its aesthetics, the motives and grammar of the photographer, in short, the social. The punctum represented the capacity of certain photographs to give shock or pain to the individual beholder. These 'pricks' or 'wounds' are occasioned for Barthes by some detail, some fragment of a photograph, which arises precisely from its property of providing a 'message without a code', the property of a photograph at the level of its mechanical, chemical trace. In the first half of Camera Lucida, Barthes discovers that the performances of a photographs's studium are not responsible for photography's fascinations. The book turns instead toward an 'ontological' and private investigation of how photographs matter, or rather, now they mattered to Barthes. The first sections of Camera Lucida 1 are an extended disclaimer about his ability and/or interest in speaking about photography. He would write only on individual photographs. As we learn in the second half of the book, Camera Lucida is in fact a meditation on

The studium is open to semiological analysis; it is the 'visible object of a science'. The layers of cultural assumptions or mythologies that inform every photograph are to be read just as one might read the more obvious evidence of what the photograph records. Yet, as Barthes warned, one of the salient features of photography is its superficiality, that is, its inevitable surfaceness. This is what Barthes meant by invoking a camera lucida (light chamber) as a metaphor for photography against what he regarded as the paradigm for the Operators of photography, the camera obscur a.15 The photographer sees the photograph as 'vision framed by the keyhole of the camera obscura' (CL, 10). A camera obscura stands for the photograph as a product of human agency; it also invokes the image of a dark room, with its associations of mystery and depth given light by the Photographer. The experience of the spectator (Barthes), by contrast, is that of the camera lucida, a light chamber: we know the photograph 'as descended essentially, so to speak, from the chemical revelation of the object (from which I receive, by deferred action, the rays)' (CL, 10). Barthes concluded that it was not 'the painters who invented Photography (by bequeathing it their framing, their Albertian perspective, and the optic of the camera obscura)', but the chemists. As a medium without depth, the distance between a superficial reading of a photograph and a semiological 'thick description' of its underlying ideological structures is determined by the reader more than by what is to be read. The studium quickly loses its interest for Barthes because it does not understand its own superficiality. Barthes had already expressed impatience in 1971 with the cultural demythologizers who followed in his wake.16 Looking back on his first writings on myth, Barthes concluded that today it was no longer enough to practice dmythification, for it 'has itself become discourse, stock of phrases, catechistic' (166). Anyone, properly schooled, may read a text, an image, a social mannerism, for its class identity, for its embodiment of power. The problem now was 'not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to fissure the very representation of meaning, is not to change or purify the symbols but to challenge the symbolic itself (166-67).

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In Camera Lucida photography came to offer just such a challenge, which Barthes located precisely in the resonant power of photography's superficiality. He cited Maurice Blanchot:
the essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy, and yet more inaccessible and mysterious than the thought of the innernost being; without signification, yet summoning up the depth of any possible meaning; unrevealed yet manifest, having that absence-as-presence which constitutes the lure and the fascination of the Sirens.
( C t , 106)

The pain Barthes expresses over the 'Winter Garden' photograph embodies photography's fascinations. Autobiography supplants history as the locus of Barthes's thought. His punctum insists on the phenomenological primacy of the real measured through individual, lived experience rather than through predetermined constructs of the photographic operator; it therefore insists on the primacy of the reader rather than what is to be read. The photograph's reality in the presence of his lost mother is subject only to his own experience. * * * The temporal distortion of the photograph led Barthes to separate its testimony from all other forms of reproductive media. In 'Rhetoric of the Image', Barthes insisted on the ontological difference between photography and cinema: 'the cinema is not an animated photograph; in it the having-been-there vanishes, giving way to a being-there of the thing; this would explain how there can be a history of the cinema, without a real break with the previous arts of fiction, whereas photography somehow escapes history' (RI, 34). Cinema, and by extension, television, participates in the narrative illusion of the novel, that is, the past tense of narration discovered in both literature and history. By comparison, the photograph is without temporality, since what it captures is here now, or rather, it names 'That-has-been' (CL, 77).17 'Henceforth the past is as certain as what we touch. It is the advent of the Photograph which divides the history of the world' (CL, 87-88) Pre-photographic societies irresistibly privilege the account of an event over the event itself, that is, they can only conceive of history as myth. Private memory and experience are articulated through communal narratives, the stories that people individually and collectively tell about the past, the traditions and rituals by which it is encoded and explained. In the 1930s, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs categorized this process under the concept of collective memory, that is, the 'social framework of memory'. 18 The certitude of the photographed 'there' stands in definitive opposition to

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collective memory. But it is also opposed to the historian's enterprise to discover the past wie es eigentlich gewesen, as it really was. Photography does what Leopold von Ranke could only dream about. Yet the past that magically in the photograph is by structure merely a fragment, an Edenic moment, ever subject to a return to the myths of history as soon as the photograph becomes disciplined by language, sorted, positioned, and used as evidence. Barthes believed the conditions of historical narration are opposed to the experience of the photographic image.
The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph) . . . Here are some Polish soldiers resting in a field (Kertsz, 1915); nothing extraordinary, except this, which no realist painting would give me, that they were there-, what I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya, such as art lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real. What the Photograph feeds my mind on (though my mind is never satiated by it), by a brief action whose shock cannot drift into reverie (this is perhaps the definition of satori), is the simple mystery of concomitance.
(CL, 82-84)

Barthes's 'simple mystery' is the actual identity of something that once was there with its photographic record, and the even more remarkable knowledge that what was there is here now on a piece of paper. Rather than constituting an aide mmoire, Barthes proposed that photography defeats memory, since it replaces whatever might be in the mind with the certitude of what is on the paper. 'Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory (whose grammatical expression would be the perfect tense, whereas the tense of the Photograph is the aorist), but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory' (CL, 91). The aorist tensea tense without temporal definitionof modern photographic culture is manifest in the unbounded public repertoire of images as well as in the private domain of the photo album, the video recording, and so on. All work to supplant the communal recollection that in past time shaped private into public memory.19 What we remember of our own lives is continually filtered through our photographed or videoed records of thema flattening of experience that may be more exact to appearances, but is also more alien, more mediated than what one holds unaided in the mind. Barthes recounts occasions where photographs substituted for his own memories. (Only when the image precedes his own life does he consider its function outside this blockage.) Barthes waited until Camera Lucida to declare this opposition between the here and the then, the inevitable recognition before a photograph that whatever confronts us as living and present belongs to an irretrievable past. They offer the illusion of restoring to desire what in fact can never be regained. And for this reason alone, photographs must always be about death.

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His encounter with death, figured in the 'Winter Garden' photograph, led Barthes to declare photography dangerous, and therefore to discover in the history of photography a steady resistance to its own nature. He argued that in order to reconcile the dangers of photography with society the Operator attempts to endow the photograph with
functions, which are, for the Photographer, so many alibis. These functions are: to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause to signify, to provoke desire. And I, the Spectator, I recognize them with more or less pleasure: I invest them with my studium (which is never my delight or my pain).
(CL, 28)

In the closing pages of Camera Lucida Barthes proposed the thesis that society, in order to repress the madness, has sought to discipline photography by making it into an art, 'for no art is mad' (CL, 117). By implication, then, photography can become an art only at the expense of repressing what it does, its 'essence'. If this is true, then the history of exhibition photography, besides strictly technical innovations, has been no more than a history of the succession of attempts to deny photography's physical properties through varied techniques of physical and chemical manipulations of the photograph and/or its subjects. The more 'real' the photograph is, the less it is the art some of its makers would aspire it to be. The more artful or constructed a photograph becomes the less it is concerned with the real and that which most compels the photograph's spectator. This resistance to photography is peculiarly twinned in genres at which photography has always excelled: pornography and the grotesque. To take Barthes's argument even further, the history of photography cannot be anything more than the history of technical innovations and the temporal history of the real recorded by the photograph, so that from the earliest photograph to the latest, nothing hasin substancechanged. If, as Barthes believed, photography is without style at that point in which it is a message without a code, then photographic 'style' can never be anything more than a surface code, without depth, without substance. Society's other alternative in the face of the madness of photography is 'to generalize, to gregarize, banalize it until it is no longer confronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself, assert its special character, its scandal, its madness' (CL, 117). Here Barthes had in mind the modern image world, something akin to Jean Baudrillard's 'society of the simulacrum', in which 'there are no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it'. 20 Barthes put it this way:

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the so-called advanced societies . . . today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs; they are therefore more liberal, less fanatical, but also more "false" (less "authentic")something we translate, in ordinary consciousness, by the avowal of an impression of nauseated boredom, as if the universalized image were producing a world that is without difference (indifferent), form which can rise, here and there, only the cry of anarchisms, marginalisms, and individualisms: let us abolish the images, let us save immediate Desire (desire without mediation).
( C i , 118-19)"

Barthes's opposition between images and beliefs, the disappearance of the authentic, and the reaction of nauseated boredom (or in Baudelaire's term, spleen), are, of course, familiar figures in Benjamin's work on photography and aura. The justly famous 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility', posed as its central question not whether photography is art, but 'whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art'. 22 Benjamin argued that photography, by virtue of its mass reproduction and its multiple sites of reception, inherentiy resists the aestheticism, the rarity, and the historical patina of conventional art media or what he called the auratic character of art. Aura, for Benjamin, was the attachment of metaphysical, transcendental values to what would be defined as an incommensurable, unique work of art. Photography, by contrast, was potentially anti-elitist since it is accessible to all, usable by all. Benjamin's exposition, however flawed in retrospect, helped to erect photography on the rubble of painting and sculpture.23 Benjamin was right to see the history of photography as a history of occupation. Its terrain of conquest has been the traditional functions of painting to remember, to commemorate, to encode and mythicize the past. Photography stole the function of memory from the art of painting. In the largest sense, photography conquered memory, substituting the individual certainty of the photographic image for the mistake-prone, socially-conditioned operations of human memory. It was a revolution comparable to the invention of the printed book, which progressively diminished the oral traditions of language. Photography (and the indexical media later derived from it) arguably offered an historically unprecedented intersection of the spheres of public and private life. Whereas painting, sculpture, or even prints traditionally belonged to the public sector (and now more especially as they are reconstituted in the museum), photography, by the multiplicity of its sites and uses, operates as powerfully in either realm. Moreover, professional and amateur photographers alike have widened the domain of the photographed to embrace every social and private occasion. Particularly since the invention of snapshot photography, we have become subject to unknowing surveillance. What we deem
12 Writing Place. . . .

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private in the flow of events can be suddenly wrested by the photographer out of our experience and into theirs.24 Whether or not photography is indeed responsible for the collapse of the private into the public sphere (or even whether notions of public and private are simply hollow categories), at the very least photography has repeatedly been taken in the literature on photography as a powerful symbol for just such disappearances. Benjamin, in his writings on photography and on the work of Baudelaire, took photography as a fundamental metaphor for life under the conditions of modernity. For Benjamin (and perhaps for Baudelaire) photography signified the 'fallenness' of modern life, the loss of tradition, of aura, of everything which allows the permeation of the past into the present moment. This aesthetics of loss hinged upon the argument that human memory has fundamentally changed in the modern world, an alteration that some, like Barthes, would attribute directly to photography.25 Benjamin was also explicit in his desire to link the 'derealization' of memory to photography, if not causally, then as a symptom. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940), Benjamin called up the image of photographic instantaneity to describe modern historical consciousness.26 To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up [ aufblitzt ] at a moment of danger' (255). His own moment of danger was palpable the Hitler-Stalin pact and the subsequent Nazi occupation of Western Europe. And his image of sudden exposure, expressed in the verb aufblitzenwhich evokes both the lightning flash and the flare of the photographer's primitive flashBenjamin used to convey simultaneously the arrested moment and our inability to grasp the past in totality. 'The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up [aufblitzt] at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably' (255). Benjamin posited the photographic instant as a positive occasion for the act of remembrance, the willed engagement of the present with the past. His desire to restore to the world the wholeness of aura ultimately led him to conceive remembrance (and history) in theological terms.27
What science has "established" can be modified by remembrance. Remembrance can make the open-ended (happiness) into something concluded and the concluded (suffering) into something open-ended. This is theology; however, in remembrance we have an experience which forbids us from conceiving of history fundamentally atheologically, despite the fact that we are hardly able to describe it in theological concepts which are immediately theological.28

Benjamin hoped that the experience of conflict, especially the great dangers of the world in which he found himself, would serve as a motivating agent for historical consciousness, that it would lead to an historical reawakening which could, in effect, repair the past. Barthes on the other hand did not believe the photographic record, at least offered any such transcendence.29 Rather, photography coincides with is perhaps partially or much responsible for, the irrevocable destruction of the experience of cultural continuity, what we usually call tradition, that binds past and present together.
History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time, and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything today prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.
(CL. 93-94)

In his apocalyptic view, we live in the endless here and now of the photographed world: an illusory world that confirms immortality, even as it assures us that this has been is also, inevitably, no more. We have come to consume images rather than beliefs constructed in and through remembrance. Against Benjamin's theology of the recuperation (understood both in the sense of restitution and of healing) of the past, Barthes discovered the mortality, the finality of the photograph. Camera Lucida is a book of mourning. Personal loss, the loss of history, and the failure of memory are all revealed in the mad knowledge of the photograph. Is then Barthes's 'science' a science of death? By an accident of history Camera Lucida now reads very much like a last book, a book with no conclusions, no exits, but death.

Notes
1 The following essay is excerpted from a work in progress, Life and Death and the Chemical Trace. Photography after Barthes. My thanks to Tadeusz Slawek for making it possible. 2 R. Barthes, 'On Photography, Interview with Angelo Schwarz', (late 1977), reprinted in The Grain of the Voice, trans. L. Coverdale (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985), p. 354. 3 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard (New York: Noonday, 1981), hereafter cited as CL. 4 S. Sontag 'Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes', in A Barthes Reader, ed. S. Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), p. xxxviii.

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5 Sontag also noted the prevalent thematics of desire and death that rule these books. 6 The autobiographical project of Camera Lucida rests in the observation that 'Classical phenomenology . . . had never, so far as I could remember, spoken of desire or 0 f mourning . . . I wanted to explore [photography] not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, henoe I notice, I observe, and I think' (CL, 21). 7 Steve Baker, 'Against Camera Lucida', Creative Camera, 219 (March 1983): 864-5. Barthes' 'science' as he tells us in the opening pages of Camera Lucida is grounded on the heuristic principle of Nietzsche's celebration of the 'ego's ancient sovereignty' (CL, 8). Barthes looked forward to a radical individualization of scientific investigation, in which a new science might be invented for each object under consideration. On the other hand, Victor Burgin, in some of the best writing on Barthes's work, argues that Camera Lucida offers no theory 0 f photography on the grounds that Barthes cannot reconcile at the level of theory two philosophical traditions, semiology and phenomenology. See V. Burgin, 'Re-reading Camera Lucida', in The End of Art Theory (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Internationa], 1986), pp. 71-92. 8 Exemplary of the new literature are Ann Banfield 'L'Imparfait de l'Objectif: the Imperfect of the Object Glass', Camera Obscura, 24 (September 1990): 64-87 and Gary Shapiro, To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die', in Signs in Culture. Roland Barthes Today, eds. Steven Ungar and Betty R. McGraw (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), pp. 3-31. 9 Barthes invokes ontology on the first page of Camera Lucida, when he speaks of his 'ontological' desire to learn 'at all costs what Photography was "in itself'" (CL, 3). Undoubtedly aware of the pitfalls, the apparent oxymoron, of an essentialist phenomenology, Barthes was careful to put ontological in quotation marks. That is, Barthes's desire toward photography might be ontological, but while what he discovers about photographs may be true to his desire, he does not claim for his discoveries any a priori truths. 10 The Photographic Message', hereafter cited as PM and 'Rhetoric of the Image', cited as RI, are reprinted in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1985). The French originals are most easily attained in L'obvie et l'obtus. Essais critiques III (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1982). 11 S. Cavell, The World Viewed. Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 12 Barthes knew that the aspects or 'essences' he admired in the photograph were historically bounded. Will our assurance in the 'reality' of the photograph disappear when more and more images are constructed rather than registered? See William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge: MJ.T. Press, 1992). 13 Barthes's irralit relle appears to play on a phrase of Benjamin's ['A Short History of Photography', in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. A. Trachtenberg and trans. P. Patton (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980), pp. 199-216] where he speaks of the eigentliche Realitt of the photograph, but means its social dimensions, not its mythicizing illusionism. The inversio-, whether Barthes was aware of doing so or not, contrasts a perceptual, subjective consciousness of the photograph to Benjamin's extrapersonal, historically determined understanding of photography. For the German text see Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), pp. 65-94. 14 Barthes's 'Winter Garden' photograph uncannily echoes a similar selection by Benjamin as a fulcrum for his essay 'A Short History of Photography'. Benjamin writes of a 'winter garden' photograph, of Franz Kafka as a boy of six, which he describes as a picture of 'immeasurable sadness' which stands as a pendant to 'the early photographs in which people did not yet look out into a world as isolated and godforsaken as the boy here. There was an aura around them, a medium that gives their glance the depth and certainty which permeates

it' (207). By implication the photo of Kafka is without aura, it is an image of abandonment and superficiality, that is, the photograph is in a state of fallenness, which is also so much a theme of Barthes's. 15 Barthes was not particularly concerned with the technical device of the camera lucidaalthough there are important passages that refer to it. On the device see John H. Hammond and Jill Austin, The Camera Lucida in Art and Science (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1987). The device decisively differs from a camera obscura in that the Operator simultaneously looks at the world with one eye and the surface, the sheet of paper, on which the image is to be transcribed with the other eye. 16 R. Barthes, 'Change the Object Itself. Mythology Today', in Image-Music-Text, 165-9. 17 For a discussion of the opposition between film and photography in Barthes's work see Steven Ungar, 'Persistence of the Image: Barthes, Photography, and the Resistance to Film', in Signs in Culture, 139-56.1 cannot agree with Ungar's conclusion, however, that Barthes effectively repudiated in Camera Lucida the idea that photography offers messages without a discontinuities where this book will insist on the intrinsic connections between the early and late Barthes on photography. 18 See M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. L. A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Peter Burke, 'History as Social Memory', in Memory, History Culture and the Mind, ed. T. Butler (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 97-114. 19 For an alternative, positive reading of this process see Patricia Holland, 'Introduction: History, Memory and the Family Album', in Family Snaps, eds. J. Spence and P. Holland (London: Virago Press, 1991), 1-14. 20 J. Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotexte(e), 1983), p. 54. See also Andreas Huyssen, 'In the Shadow of McLuhan: Jean Baudrillard's Theory of Simulation', Assemblage 10 (December 1989) : 7-18. 21 The apocalyptic media world of these last pages from Camera Lucida can be traced back to 'Rhetoric of the Image', where Barthes described the political implications of the 'denoted image', the condition of the photograph as being absent of meaning, yet, as Barthes wrote, 'charged with all meanings'. This is precisely that which gives the photograph a kind of 'Adamic state'. 'Utopianly rid of its connotations, the image would become radically objective, i.e., ultimately innocent' (RI, 31). This, however, is also the site of photography's mythic speech. The 'reality effect' of the photograph offers the illusion that what is there is real and therefore what is real in the photograph is also somehow natural. Barthes concluded that the more technology develops the circulation of information (and notably of images), the more means it provides of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning' (RI, 34-35). 22 W. Benjamin, 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit', is reprinted in translation by H. Zohn in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 217-51, esp. 227. 23 Particularly useful discussions of the Benjamin essay are Miriam Hansen, 'Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology" ', New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987) : 179-224; Joel Snyder, 'Benjamin on Reproducibility and Aura: A Reading of "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" ', in Benjamin. Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. G. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 158-74; Susan Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered', October 62 (Fall 1992) : 3-41; and for a much-needed historical reappraisal, Jacquelynn Baas, 'Reconsidering Walter Benjamin. "The Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Retrospect', in The Documented Image. Visions in Art History, eds. G. P. Weisberg and L. S. Dixon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), pp. 337-47.

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24 For a wonderful reading of the violence of photography see Bill Jay, The Photographer as Aggressor', in Observations. Essays on Documentary Photography, ed. D. Featherstone (Carmel: The Friends of Photography, 1984), pp.7-24. 25 On the 'memory crisis', see Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993). 26 W. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations, pp. 253-64. 27 The opposite may also be true, that Benjamin's growing theological interests fed his longing for aura. 28 Letter (never sent) from Benjamin to Max Horkheimer, cited in translation by Richard Wolin, 'Experience and Materialism in Benjamin's Passagenwerk', in Benjamin. Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, pp. 210-24, esp. 225. Wolin's essay insists on the theological element in Benjamin's later writings against the attempt to subsume them in a Marxist historical materialism. 29 Elissa Marder, 'Flat Death: Snapshots of History', Diacritics 22 : 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1992): 128-44, offers a compelling comparison between Benjamin's optimism and the ultimate pessimism of Barthes.

Adrian Page

Creativity as Cultural Studies: The Transition from Media Studies to Media Practices

It is, of curse, curious that British Cultural Studies, which was born of a desire to legitimate the study of popular culture, has itself become something of an esoteric discipline. The playwright John McGrath once referred disparagingly to 'the high priests of semiotics', and denounced the intellectuals who applauded the people yet distanced themselves from them in their work (McGrath, 1984 : 79). The classic schism in Media Studies developed with the debate about the journal Screen and the capacity of semiotics to produce anything more than a formal analysis guided by complex theory. Some theorists broke with the journal at this stage. As, for example, Simon During has written, the semiotics of the 1970s remained 'an analysis of "codings and recodings", not of uses, practices or feelings' (During, 1993 : 5). Structural analysis inspired by Althusserian politics had emphasised the social codes and conventions within which any interpretation of cultural artefacts had to operate. In addition to restricting the range of possible meanings, Althusser also denied the individual any potential for fruitful resistance to an oppressively dominant ideology. Political obedience was produced by an unstoppable social machine which controlled the popular mentality. The more determinist approaches to culture, which insisted on the complete control exercised by existing social structures were opposed by the intervention of culturalist approaches. These emphasised the way in which 'forms of life' gave meaning to cultural items. The narrow interpretations of traditional semiotics were opposed by the view that people could, through the way they lived, create new meanings for cultural objects. The theory of polysemy raised the possibility that cultural objects be re-interpreted in

different social contexts. A good example of this was Paul Willis's book, Learning to Labour (1977) which emphasised the power of the working-class to re-interpret their lives against the grain of the dominant ideology. Rather than restricting their readings to existent conventions, the working-class read culture in the context of their own lives. The result is a flourishing counter-culture, where dominant values may be stood on their head and vigorously opposed. Angela Carter also created a controversy in the 1970s by suggesting that pornography was not a matter of the content of an image, but a question of the cultural effect of presenting society with an image at a certain moment in history. Some women's organisations such as The Campaign against Pornography and Censorship have, for example, given operational definitions of pornography which specify exactly what kinds of images should be considered as falling into this category. Angela Carter argued that a 'moral poraographer' might be possible if a form of pornography could be found which did not reinforce the status quo in which women were degraded by explicit representations of sexuality (Carter, 1979 : 35). The contentious argument is one of the manifestations of culturalism which suggests that the meaning of an image is found in its effects on our culture and our culture also determines how the image is perceived. In short, if women are generally abused in society, then pornographic representations of them will perpetuate that abuse. If, on the other hand, relations betweeen the sexes were more equable, then some pornographic representations might not have this effect. 'Forms of life' both determine and are determined by the image. Media Studies, therefore, began at a time when the Screen tradition was flourishing. It was initially a study of the media as a phenomenon, as a strand of social life which could be isolated and examined passively. With the increasing popularity of culturalism, the study of the media turned away from formal textuality, and began to consider the use rather than the meaning of signs, yet culture remained something that a student could stand back from and study at a distance. The next stage in the development of Media Studies as a form of Cultural Studies, is the acknowledgement of the ordinary citizen as both consumer and producer of popular culture. If conceptualising culture is producing it, then it is not something which academics alone do. The advent of the video recorder in particular led to the establishment of numerous courses which empowered students to create as well as consume and study culture. In 1977 Pierre Bourdieu published his Outline of a Theory of Practice. In 1988 the Council for National Awards published a pamphlet which summarised a conference on the future of Media Studies in Britain held the previous year. One of the main conclusions was that the subject needed to engender 'critical practice' in its students: 'the suggestion was made that it might be useful to reconceptualise media courses as more oriented towards problem recognition and problem solving than at present' (CNAA, 1988).

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Video Production, for example, one of the most popular modules in any Cultural Studies Faculty, needed to encourage students to reflect on the nature of the work they were doing. The call for a new generation of Media students led to the establishment of degrees in Media Practices rather than Media Studies. Admittedly not all Media courses have made this transition, but the trend towards practical media courses is very clear. Cultural Studies has come to embrace the field of creative electronic arts as well as the sociology of the media. The Journal Cultural Studies invites contributions from any form of cultural production including writing and art work. The transition has been from a purely text-based inquiry, in which Media Studies could isolate its object of study in advance and subject it to rigorous analysis. Hence the debate between Screen and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The transition is from the analysis of the meaning of cultural artefacts in context, to the function of culture in society. The change in the conception of Cultural Studies is that the explanation of cultural phenomena began with the way people lived, a culturalist explanation, rather than the political economy of society alone or the politics of the signifier. The former assumes a superior position from which an analytic judgement can be passed, whereas the latter approach incorporates the view that the media are activities, or practices rather than curiosities to be studied. Media activities are things that social groups do. In analysing the media, therefore, we are also analysing the function of the phenomenon under consideration as a practice. The study is effectively an anthropology of the media. The work of Marshall McLuhan anticipates to an extent the anthropology of Clifford Geertz. In McLuhan's writing the media re-formulate experience in a manner which enables us to make sense of the world. Much of what Marshall McLuhan says about the media in, for example, Understanding Media is parallel with Geertz's anthropology. When McLuhan argues that games are 'the extensions of Man', the reason is that games are a way of representing the world in which we live. The social function of the media, in which McLuhan includes games, is to make our world comprehensible, to mediate in the sense of making it understandable. McLuhan says that games are 'a kind of talking to itself on the part of society as a whole' (McLuhan, 1964 : 259). This is directly parallel to Geertz's analysis of Balinese Cock-fighting. The practice enacts the ideology of Balinese society and enables the participating men to experience the thrills and despair of real life: 'It (the cockfight) is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves' (Geertz, 1973 : 448). The function of a game may, however, differ from one society to another, or from one social group to another. For McLuhan the game is a way of extending the consciousness of individuals and groups, whereas for Geertz, it is not clear that the Balinese learn anything from

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cock-fighting. What is clear in both cases, however, is that the function of the media in both cases is determined by the role of these activities in people's lives. The word 'practice' is usefully ambiguous. It emphasises the distinction with purely theoretical approaches, but it also underlines the notion that certain forms of life are irreducible: they have to be studied, not analysed. As Wittgenstein says, '"obeying a rule" is a practice' (Wittgenstein, 1951 section 202 : 81). Although it may seem that we deduce the application of a rule, Wittgenstein argues that rules are, in fact, simply ways of living or behaving. To conform to a rule is to learn by experience how to behave accordingly. It is a matter of experience, not logic. This, of course has implications for pedagogy: if it is a question of teaching a media 'rule', then it may not be possible to do so in theory, but only by reflecting on practice. The further shade of meaning of the word practice to mean 'repeated trials' is again important here. The purpose of media education is to enable the student to repeat the process of abstracting theory from lived examples. This must involve a process of cultural studies in that the phenomena must be understood as a social practice. Creativity means knowing how to add to the range of existing cultural practices, hence study of examples, explanation and then adaption to new circumstances. As Marx puts it, 'we do not explain practice from the idea, but explain the formation of ideas from material practice' (Marx, 1977:58). Marx argued that theory does not precede practice. Empirical observation of practice enables us to abstract theory. Once the provisional extrapolation has occurred, however, we do, in fact, begin with theory, as it stands. Practice precedes theory at the birth of a discipline, but later the theories gleaned are the starting-point for a dialectical interplay of theory and practice. Theory is initially an abstraction from practice, and practice may be guided by the prior abstractions. The dynamics of theory production are changed by creativity. An example: how can we teach a cultural practice? If we take the example of the interview, it may perform the function of the pillory in Medieval society. Although not entirely inescapable, the interview on screen may perform the social function of allowing the population to express their anger towards someone who is revealed in front of millions of viewers. The ancient practice of imprisoning social offenders and allowing people to hurl rotting vegetables at them is parallel to the screen interview. It is a question of calling the prominent social figure to account. This can only be taught by experiencing the practice at first hand becoming acquainted with the phenomenon and learning from experience. The theory abstracted is always at a more general level than the concrete practice. Theory always explains the functions of specific types of practice, not actual examples. The electronic artist, is therefore, by definition, also a student of Cultural Studies. In order to make a statement, the artist must be aware of the

current stage of the dialogue in society, and how her or his own remark will be received as a contribution to it. Just as the anthropologist's true test of understanding a society is to live amongst them and live as a member of that people, so the true test of understanding of media practices is to participate in them. Artistic practice is also a form of understanding but perhaps in this case it is more a question of knowing how rather than knowing that. The lesbian photographer, Delia Grace has become a celebrated parodist. Her example illustrates the form of Cultural Studies which is implied by the term 'Media practices'. Delia Grace is famous for her parody of Canova's classical statue T h e Three Graces'. Canova's famous statue, which is jealously guarded as a prime example of English culture, shows three Neoclassical beauties clasped in a tender embrace, and personifying pleasure, chastity, and beauty. The statue is in unblemished white stone. In a deliberate reference to the classical statue, Grace photographs three naked, shaven-headed women in the same pose, wearing only large boots. Here there is general recognition that the image reminds us of the ideological power of the original. The 'Graces' are classically beautiful women, all of whom conform to the same Greek type. By contrasting these male creations with three living women, the statement made by the photograph is an immediate comment on the genre used by Canova. These three women immediately compel the viewer to realise that they are not representative of all women, any more than Canova's figures are. The assumption hidden in the original work, which was recently the subject of a massive financial bid to purchase it for America, are made explicit by parody. As The Guardian reported when they published this photograph, Delia Grace has stated that 'My ambition is to visually deconstruct our notions of Woman' (The Guardian, October 13, 1992). Implicit in the photograph is a recognition of the centuries of representation of women which have gone before this moment. Grace has an ambition to both interrelate centuries of cultural history and to make an impact on contemporary society. If advertising could be said to work by fitting a signifier to a signified, both cooperating with an intervening in the semiotic process, then a media practice such as Grace's works by detaching a signified from a signifier. The photograph both comments on and does something to change the situation it refers to. It attempts to change the popular notion of woman. To understand this aspect of photographic practice, we need to consider its antecedent history, the text, and its contemporary reception. As new photographs are added to the sum total, so the nature of the practice under consideration changes. Practices are not stable, but progressively changing objects of study. For this reason, the study of media practices must adopt a methodology which acknowledges the constantly-shifting territory to which it belongs. In the theory of ideology proposed by V. N. Volosinov, the

meaning of language is 'determined entirely by its context' and, 'In fact there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of usage' (Volosinov 1973 : 79). If the creative artist is concerned to generate a new ideological meaning, then she must incorporate in her thinking the previous contexts in which the sign has had meaning and identify some new contexts yet to be explored. Volosinov's concept of ideology as a constandy evolving dialogue means that no theory can encompass ideology whole at any one moment. As Wittgenstein wrote, in a famous maxim, 'To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life' (Eagleton, 1983:60). Similarly, to imagine a new artistic practice in the media is also to envisage a new form of life in which, for example, women can enjoy representations of their sexuality. A further example of Delia Grace's photographic work is her series of photographs which depict nuns. As Richard Allen points out in his comment on Manet's Dejeuner sur I'Herbe the male gaze is often not recognised. In Manet's painting Allen argues that the male gaze is characterised, as the viewer takes up a voyeuristic position in which the two naked women become objects of privileged male attention. In her sequence of photographs depicting nuns, Delia Grace features on image which is again a deliberate parody of Manet's painting. A naked lesbian woman is shown adopting the same sideways-on posture as the Manet women, yet in her case, she is flanked by two nuns. One nun gazes at the viewer, whilst the other gazes at the naked woman. The women are all holding glasses of wine. The naked woman appears to be exposed to the gaze of one of the nuns. Here again there is a conscious parody of the male art-object which has hitherto defined woman. In order to achieve this degree of artistry, the photographer has had to demonstrate an implicit understanding of the history of the male gaze. The photograph is accompanied by two words, however: 'Blasphemy' at the top, and 'Communion' at the bottom. This is an additional gesture in the direction of deconstruction, but in this case, it is aimed at the concept of a nun. The binary opposition between communion and blasphemy is deconstructed by the realisation that in such a case the opposition does not exist. Here communion, the meeting of these women in common purpose, is blasphemous, and blasphemy is a form of communion. The dictionary defines communion as 'sharing or holding in common'. There is also a suggestion that the two nuns might 'share' the naked woman. The purpose of the photograph is to throw our conceptual system into chaos and to thereby re-order our cultural values. In order to imagine this new 'language' of photography, we have also to imagine a new 'form of life' in which religiosity and lesbianism are entirely compatible. At the exhibition of this series of photographs another which featured the same trio was accompanied by the words 'Profanity' and 'Reverence'. In this image the naked woman has her back to the camera and the nuns are gazing at her body while she appears to be laughing. The

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supposedly immoral act of lesbian attention, is an act of reverence as they gaze with sexual fascination on the naked woman. The binary opposition is understood, but the reverence for a human body displayed here is depicted on a serene, religious countenance. The act of worshipping the human body is seen to be a quasi-religious act despite its moral connotations. Religious devotion is not incompatible with lesbian eroticism. In a society which recognised the nature of lesbian sexuality, such a representation would be thought natural. The dissolution of the binary opposition is reinforced by the quotations accompanying the entire series. Delia Grace adds to the exhibition a series of remarks about the actual lives of nuns. An example will suffice here: 'Our superiors described particular friendships as exclusive intimacy with another sister, drawing us away from total dedication to God and the community. Ideally we were expected to love all of our sisters equally . . . As a safeguard we were advised to recreate in groups of three or more . . . Although our superiors did not state that particular friendships might become lesbian love affairs, the official caveats were cloaked with an aura of forbidden, dangerous and vague evil that we feared them as serious violations of the religious rule and probable grounds for dismissal' (Rosemary Keefe Curb formerly Sister Mary Geralda, quoted in Tessa Boffin ed. p. 77). Delia Grace's work is a somewhat easier strategy to evaluate as a Media Practice than that of Madonna, who has caused considerable controversy in her media appearances. The debate has focussed on whether she has established herself as a woman who is able to reclaim the female image and remain in control of the images of herself that she has promoted. The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities and Cultural Theory (1993) edited by Cathy Switchenberg is one example of work in Cultural Studies which seeks to defend her strategies as those of a postmodern feminist. Other academic work deriving from Britain such as the collection edited by Fran Lloyd (Lloyd ed., 1993) has accused her of neglecting some of the political and social consequences of her stance(s). Madonna's sexually provocative screen appearances are sleazy to some and highly progressive to others. Media critics have agonised over whether she is subverting the dominant images of woman or simply pandering to them. It is arguable, for example, that she has created what Foucault calls a 'reverse discourse' by taking the example of a sexually active woman and celebrating her sexual preferences rather than apologising for them. In Madonna's videos the sexual position she adopts with male and female dancers and even animals, would clearly be degrading if they were adopted by an unknown woman. The star persona of Madonna, however, may lead us to conclude that she is, in fact celebrating her right to indulge in whatever sexual practice she chooses and taunting the moralistic public who would wish to impose their own values on women in general.

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In television interviews, Madonna has been asked why she has not had children now that she is in her 30s. Madonna's responses have indicated some surprise at the way in which her public persona has been confused with her private self. The interview seems to demand that she acknowledges a price to be paid for the moral attitude of sexual licence which she has apparently promoted. The interview is a form of public arraignment, in which she is made to justify her outrageous stance as a form of life she has chosen. What is interesting to Media Practices is not merely the content of the videos which promote Madonna, but also the reason why she should be subjected to this public pillorying by male interviewers. Any student of Cultural Studies who is examining this phenomenon would take into account the social consequences of making a radical statement such as Madonna's. As Angela Carter points out in The Sadeian Woman, 'A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster' (Carter, 1979 : 27). Ironically, a woman who proclaims her freedom to indulge in sexuality in whatsoever manner she chooses, will be hailed by many who would applaud the aim as a supporter of reactionary forces because her stance may be misread. Martin Amis writing in the Observer noted that Madonna might have a point (The Observer, October 11, 1992). The example of Madonna, therefore, indicates how Media Practices are complex webs of inter-related issues in culture and society, and need to be cognisant of many features. The text itself is always of crucial importance. In many of Madonna's videos she disengages herself from a writhing mass of sensual bodies to make full eye contact with the viewer by looking directly at the camera. The act of acknowledging the viewer automatically means that she is conscious of her audience and is deliberately posing for their benefit. By adopting this pose she appears to signify that she is in control of the image which she creates. The state of freedom paradoxically includes the freedom to choose enslavement. If Madonna wants to play submissive as well as dominant roles in her performances, she may well be illustrating what Freud called 'polymorphous perversity' the uninhibited, many-faceted sexuality of the child who acknowledges no moral restraints on pleasure. Margery Metzstein argues that ' Sex is the perfect metaphor for this process because everyone is being fucked including those who think they are doing the fucking' (Lloyd ed., 1993). Her reading of the stance adopted by Madonna is a negative one which sees it as an ironic reflection of her involvement in an exploitative business from which there is no escape. John Fiske, on the other hand, argues that Madonna succeeds in wresting control of her image from others (Fiske, 1992). One curious feature of the debate, however, is that the name 'Madonna' is taken to refer to the same person. The star herself has hinted in interviews that the persona she projects need not reflect herself, yet she is continually identified with the stage presence she uses. This is another Media Practice which is base on what we might call the transparency of the star. In the case

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of stars, they are thought of as representing the qualities they portray because they possess them. To become iconic is to represent 'polymorphous perversity' whenever you appear, even out of character. The example of Madonna, therefore illustrates the way that the media react to attempts such as Delia Grace's to radicalise practice and transform the meaning of the works they create. Any media text produced using the newly-available technology, will eventually encounter the problem of its own reception, and it is in anticipating this that Cultural Studies is essential. In the study of the media, we no longer study just the texts found but what people do with and to them. The most beneficial effect of the transition to Media Practices is that those who choose to study in this way may become genuinely empowered to make changes in the culture they inhabit.

References
Bonner, Frances et al., eds. 1992. Imagining Women: Cultural Representations and Gender. Oxford: Polity. Boffin, Tessa and Jean Fraser. 1991. Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs. London: Pandora. Carter, Angela. 1979. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago. CNAA Publications Media Education and Broadcasting: Into the 1990's, July 1988. During, Simon, ed. 1993. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Fiske, J. 1989: Understanding Popular Culture. Boston Mass.: Unwin Hyman. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books. Lloyd, Fran ed. 1993. Deconstructing Madonna. London: Batsford. Marx, Karl. 1977. The German Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wish art. McGrath, John. 1984. A Good Night Out. London: Methuen. McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media. London: RKP. Switchenberg, Cathy, ed. 1992. The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics Subcultural Identities and Cultural Theory. New York: Westview Press. Volosinov, V. N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP. Wittgenstein, L. 1951. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mary Kehilly and Anoop Nayak

The Geometry of Man: New Angles on the Male Body?

Introduction
There is a growing visibility of men's bodies within mediain film, adverts and pop videos. Take That!, The Chippendales, the Hollywood Bratpack and East 17 all represent versions of the male body as 'new' objects of desire. Images of men in advertising have drastically altered, where we see men's bodies fetishised and on display. This shift in emphasis has been documented as the commodification of men's products which 'stimulate (men) to look at themselves and other men as objects of consumer desire' (Mort, 1989 : 194). The notion of 'new man', representing a softening round the edges of traditional forms of masculinity can be interpreted as a crisis in masculinity, where patriarchal relations have negative effects for men and women (T olson, 1982; Hearn, 1987; Chapman, 1989). Although the images of men in ads may have changed, we suggest a continuity remains as to the ways men are represented. On the surface the altered images may seem remarkable but underlying this are more familiar structures of representation (Dyer, 1989). Through an analysis of particular ads we aim to focus on the way men's bodies are framed through advertising images and the implications for masculine identities and viewing practices. We argue that the modes of representation used to frame men's bodies remain gender and racially specific. These relations structure the way we interpret the visual image and have implications for the ways in which men's bodies are framed and presented to us through advertising.

Recent ads indicate that the male torso has been marketed as a new erotic zone, providing for a further space of consumption (see Figs. 1 and 2). This can be seen as part of a wider social trend where men's bodies are now fractured and commodified in similar ways to the historical representation of women's bodies. This fragmentation has lead to a fetishisation of torsos in particular. We argue that the torso is becoming a focal point for the expression of masculinity and is often presented as well oiled, wet with moisture or exposed through a draped silk shirt. I this way the torso has become a signifier for male sexuality and is a site upon which fantasies and desires can be projected. The torso is usually presented as trimmed, tanned, athletic and muscular. The pose suggests strength through definition, an active posture far removed from the docility of page three women. (Dyer, 1989). So how do men's bodies achieve this heightened masculinity? If we look at these images of men, much of the power they appear to inhabit is interwoven into the visual space they occupy. Stances, poses and the way the body is framed are significant techniques used in advertising to masculinise the male form. It is worth noting the ways in which men's bodies are already framed in ads. Assertive male stances are, then, naturalised within advertising, where the pose comes to signify essential masculine characteristics. The problem with this is that these stances are anything but natural. The moves are carefully planned to appear masculine, where shape is considered and angles are precise. There is, then, a geometric frame that operates within advertising, used to structure the male body. This structuring of the male body creates a very particular masculine identity. Unsurprisingly, torsos, like men, are portrayed as solid, clearly defined, hard and angular. Most importantly, men's bodies are then presented in opposition to women's bodies. Although women's bodies can also be geometrically framed, this is often done to emphasise curves, contours, roundness and softness. In this sense masculinity is framed against femininity as Easthope acknowledges:
The hardness and tension of the body strives to present it as wholly masculine, to exclude all curves hollows and be only straight lines and flat planes . . . but above all not be desirable to other men because it is so definitely not soft and feminine.
(Easthope 1990 : 54)

The sexual tensions that Easthope identifies and the ways geometric frames are employed to conjure up particular male identities within advertising will be focused on in the next sections.
13 Writing Places . . .

Fig. 2. Calvin Klein

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Holding Tight: White Masculinities in Advertising

In an advertisement for ice cream, the male torso dominates the image - it is placed at the centre, framing the product (see Fig. 3). The caption reads 'Hold Tight', a phrase which captures the dynamics surrounding the male torso. The reference to holding tight can be read in two ways: the woman is holding tight to the man, but the man is holding tight to himself. Here, the torso is visibly tense, the arms and shoulders angular, biceps bulging. There is a geometric frame to the male body where there is a squaring of the form from shoulder blades to elbow joints. Clearly, holding tight is not just physical, it is geometric. The male body is compressed into a box-like shape, signifying a very particular masculinity that is both physical and psychological. The boxed structure of the man is mirrored in the typography. To be male in this context is then to have a hard exterior. A transition takes place where the man's body, made of blood, bones and sinew are transformed into a form of box-like armour. In this ad the male posture is impervious, seeking to hold out against femininity and pleasure. Where the man's posture is closed and tight, the women's is open and flexible. The man's posture and expression suggest a closing off which is in direct contrast to his unbuttoned jeans. This highlights the ambiguity around control and desire, mind and body. There is a struggle to defend this unity, where the man shuts his eyes, turns his face and tries to close his mouth. If we look closely the tensions in the man's body are reflected in his face. The struggle can then be seen as painful and pleasurable, where the man's look could be a grimace or a smile. As Dyer (1989) has pointed out, straining is appropriated as a male quality where the act of struggle is seen as a good thing in itself. The camera then freezes the moment of struggle where the man is shown suppressing his desires. Male denial is physically represented through the man's tightly folded arms. It is through these acts of resistance and denial that male identities are forged. If the man's posture is closed and tense, the women's is open, embracing and relaxed. She intersects the closed unity of male geometry within the ad where her hands and legs disrupt the fixity of the image. This is an interesting struggle when we consider the ways men hold tightly onto their masculinity, rejecting femininity and thereby foregoing certain acts of pleasure. Here, the man is attempting to deny himself the pleasure of the product and the woman as well as holding onto his own masculinity. There is then an anxiety that stems from the fear of losing control, being 'opened up' and made vulnerable to emotions. This emotional fear of intimacy is complexly bound up with desire. However, intimacy is threatening to closed unified masculine identities which are constructed as independent, self sufficient and in control of all emotions (Seidler, 1985).

PRIDE & JOY

Fig. 3. Geometric framing: Pride and joy

Mary Kehilly and Anoop NayaV

The geometric frames used in advertising, then, play an important role in the social construction of masculinity. -They create a version of masculinity that is naturalised through the act of representation. This macho choreography situates the male form and accentuates straight lines and angles, constructing masculine identities against femininity. The use of geometric frames is significant when we recognise that geometry is about measurements, hard lines, angles and precision of form. In contemporary advertising, these geometric frames slice up the male body and use light and shade to reproduce angular in the search for perfection.

Pirelli Power and Control: Black Masculinities

So far we have seen how the geometric framing of men in advertising provides for an enhanced masculinity. It does this by connecting up images of the body and relating this to conventional notions of masculinity. Here, the geometric frame adds an extra dimension of 'maleness' to the image. In this sense the power of the male model is actually affirmed, something that rarely occurs for women. The geometric frames used in ads are, then, not static and are not applied in the same ways to the same people. This has implications for our viewing practices and the way we interpret ads. If we look at images of Black men in advertising there is often a focus on the body and geometric representation. However, these ads are rarely empowering to Black men, where the geometric frames used are active in their confinement. In this section we aim to draw out these differences within advertising where a racial geometry exists framing the Black body. The advert for Pirelli tyres focuses on the body of Carl Lewis, the famous United States athlete (see Fig. 4). Only by reading the small print at the bottom can we make sense of the product that is being sold. Here, the posture of the Black male body is used to emphasise a variety of angles. In the 'Hold tight' image we saw how accentuating angles made the man appear solid and powerful. The geometric frame used in the Pirelli ad creates a different effect. The Black body is in a crouching position and appears savage, animalistic and ready to pounce. The athlete's back is arched, the head hung low and the fingers protrude like claws. He is scantily dressed making his limbs appear long and sinuous. The body is angled so the rear end rises above the head. The emphasis is on the natural body and away from a controlling mind. The issue of power and control needs exploring further. At one level the geometric framing of Lewis does instil a sense of power but in a particular way. The power can be seen as a raw, naked energy, an

Anoop Nayak

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unrestrained, uncivilised force. This is in direct contrast to the ways geometry operates to represent white masculinities. In the 'Hold tight' image masculinity was framed in such a way that control was central to the ad. The white man's identity was already a steadying force against the instability of women and desire. The power Carl Lewis has is 'wild' and appears to require 'taming'. In the literal sense the shoes Lewis wears are a controlling aspect stopping him exploding from the starting block. Symbolically, stilettos suggest a paradox of sexual dominance and sexual subservience. In this sense Lewis the runner is also a chained animal, surrounded by a cage which locks him into our voyeuristic gaze. The surrounding fencing acts to emphasise his entrapment while at the same time provides a horizontal backdrop for further defining his angled pose. Lewis is then portrayed as a caged animal, dangerous but contained by external forces. The caption above his frame informs us 'Power is Nothing without Control'. The physical power of Lewis is then volatile and needs controlling, where the threat is also sexual. The construction of Black masculinity as rampant and sexually unlicensed is given voice within the ad. The raising of Carl Lewis's posterior is suggestive of this bestial sexuality. Here geometry is used to imply a primitive, base sexuality. The implication is that Lewis cannot control his sexual urges and must have these confined and controlled for him. There is then a clear split between the dualism of mind and body. If the former signifies control, discipline and white masculinity, the latter signifies the realm of the physical, sexual and Black masculinity. The geometric structuring of Lewis's frame informs us he is all body and so carries with him these connotations. Lewis is wearing only red stilettos, a skimpy black tunic and a gold earring. These few items of clothing are sufficient to suggest sexual availability. The red shoes and writing contrasting with Blackness draw links with prostitution. The Black body is presented as economically available but also 'deviant'. The clothing worn opens up the Black body as a site for further sexual consumption. The use of cross-dressing enhances the homoerotic'appeal of the Black form. The image also works alongside rumours of Lewis's sexuality and draws on representations of the camp celebrity Ru Paul. The geometric pose Lewis offers the viewer allows for these multiple levels of desire. He is bent over, dressed like a woman and made to occupy a receptive position of vulnerability. Our gaze focuses on the area around his buttocks, the red shoes and his face. The fact that his pose is made passive and inviting through this frame is significant. The way Lewis meets our gaze also has a close association with pornographic viewing codes. What is central in this analysis is the recognition that the Black body is on the surface powerful, yet controlled in such a way that it is created as passive and available. The feminising of the body, then, limits the amount of power given to the image. Any masculine

power that may be achieved through geometric framing is .immediately circumvented where Carl Lewis becomes a spectacle of ridicule and desire. His availability can then provide for a whole spectrum of sexual fantasies and pleasure. In these fantasies the Black body can only have the illusion of power, a power projected onto it by the white imagination. Strength, speed and Black sexuality are enslaved within the image and served up for our erotic fascinations. The fetishising process leaves us with the certain messagepower is nothing without control.

Conclusion: Limitations of the Essentialist Framework

Men's bodies are now being sexualised in ways that up until recently had only applied to women. However, this co-representation does not suggest equality of treatment as images of women's bodies are more prevalent within advertising and framed in particular ways. Moreover, we have argued, the ways in which men are sexualised in ads differs from the ways women are portrayed. We feel that charting the shifts in masculinity in terms of the transition from 'old' to 'new' man emphasises change and difference. This overlooks many of the continuities in the ways men are represented. A central, unchanging feature is the reliance upon an essentialist framework. Here, aspects of masculinity are constantly naturalised in an effort to define a core masculine identity. This identity is presented as biological, yet the changing definitions of what it is to be male would suggest the social construction of masculinity to be more significant. Despite a softening around the edges, male identities remain predominantly confident, in control and at ease. Images of men in advertising offer little space for self doubt and vulnerability. The essentialist framework, then, structures the field of representation, limiting the extent to which new masculinities can be constructed. One of the ways in which the essence of man is maintained within ads is through the representation of the body. Men's bodies are geometrically framed, graphically emphasising a sense of masculinity. This has the effect of constructing male identities as hard, rigid and powerful. These poses are calculated, choreographed and shot several times to create a perceived masculine essence. It is the way masculinity is staged and the processes by which these performances have become naturalised that needs examination. The geometric representation of men in ads becomes a way of signifying latent and overt masculine qualities. Even so, the geometric frame is flexible and can be adjusted differently for the representation of gender and 'race'. We have

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suggested that for white men the use of geometric framing can be seen to enhance and empower their status. When applied to Black men, however, the framing can be more ambiguous. As in the ad featuring Carl Lewis, it is the man's blackness, and the aspects ascribed to this colour, that come to the surface. The geometric frame can, then, fetishise an imagined Black masculinity, representing it through racist repertoires. On the one hand this masculinity is powerful, athletic and strong. On the other, it is dangerous, sexually deviant and irrational. The ways in which the Black body is framed is, then, constraining and potentially disempowering. The process of objectification eroticises blackness, casting it into the realm of the exotic. Rather than acquiring added status, the Black body is demeaned, represented through a prism of negative imagery. Geometric framing operates to maintain 'essences' within advertising. It helps to purvey the illusion of natural identities by creating or exaggerating certain characteristics. This selective process is beneficial to white masculinities which are socially constructed as intelligent, independent and in control. The fictional essences of white masculinity are then seen as ideals or norms that we can aspire to. The problem of framing women and Black people is made all too explicit, where the values we attach to these images is not the same. This tells us that the terrain of representation is not, or never can be, a neutral one. Barthes has indicated the importance of this translation where image are, literally, represented (Barthes, 1977). The bodies of Black men are then positioned differently from those of white males. This has implications for the social construction of masculinities. It is these power relations within advertising, and their relationship to identity construction, that we draw attention to. We locate the essentialist framework used to continually define masculinity, and identify the geometric framing of men's bodies. It is difficult to imagine more challenging masculine identities emerging from within this framework, where masculinity is constructed as active, hard and uncompromising. It is these structural dynamics of power that this paper has tried to recognise in the portrayal of men in contemporary advertising.

References
Barthes, R. 1977. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana. Chapman, R. 1988. The Great Pretender: Variations on the New Man Theme', in R. Chapman and J. Rutherford, eds. Male Order. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Coward, R. 1984. Female Desire. London: Paladin. Dyer, R. 1989. 'Dont't Look New', in A. McRobbie, ed. Zool Suits and Second Hand Dresses. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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Dyer, R. 1985. 'Male Sexuality in the Media', in A. Metcalf and M. Humphries, eds. The Sexuality of Men. London: Pluto Press. Easthope, A. 1986. What a Man's Gotta Do. London: Grafton. Gilman, S. 1992. 'Black Bodies, White Bodies', in J. Donald and A. Rattansi, eds. Race. Culture and Difference. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Goldman, R. 1992. Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge. Gupta, S. 1992. 'Desire and Black Men', Ten 8, Critical Decade, Vol. 2, No. 3. Hearn, J. 1987. The Gender of Oppression. London: Wheatsheaf. Hearn, J. and Morgan, D., ed. 1990. Men, Masculinities and Social Theory. London: Unwin Hyman. Hooks, B. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. London: Turnaround. Mercer, K. and Julien, I. 1988. 'Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity', in R. Chapman and J. Rutherford, eds. Male Order. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Metcalf, A and Humphries, M. eds. 1985. The Sexuality of Men. London: Pluto Press. Morgan, D. 1992. Discovering Men. London: Routledge. Mort, F. 1988. 'Boy's Own? Masculinity, Style and Popular Culture', in R. Chapman and J. Rutherford. Male Order. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Nayak, A. 1995 (forthcoming). Frozen Bodies: Power and Pleasure in Haagen Dais Advertising. Neale, S. 1980. 'Genre and Sexuality', in Genre. British Film Institute. Nixon, S. 1992. 'Have You Got the Took? Masculinities and Shopping Spectale', in R. Shields, ed. Lifestyle Shopping. London: Routledge. Segal, L. 1990. Slow Motion, Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. London: Virago. Seidler, V. 1985. 'Fear and Intimacy', in A. Metcalf and M. Humphries, eds. The Sexuality of Men. London: Pluto Press. Tolson, A. 1982. The Limits of Masculinity. London: Tavistock. Williamson, J. 1978. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Boyars.

George Hyde

Approaching The Waste Land

Let me begin with two quotations, utterly different in character, but both belonging to the class of 'kinds of things you can say about literature':
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford . . . in 1914 he met Pound . . . in 1915 he married . . . in 1917 he began to work for Lloyd's Bank . . . in 1922 he founded a new quarterly, The Criterion: in the first issue appeared, with much eclat, The Waste Land.

That is from Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature. The second of my quotations runs as follows:
Every verse series isolates and intensifies its own boundaries. More weakly isolated, but nevertheless isolated, are the internal divisions of the seriesthe boundaries of periods, etc.

This is Yuri Tynyanov, in The Problem of Verse Language. These two kinds of propositions, that is, the biographical kind and the stylistic kind, seem on the face of it to have nothing in common: but this lecture sets out to show that there is a connection, even if it is not immediately obvious. The connection lies along the boundaries of the text. The point that the Russian Formalist wants to make is not as abstract as it seems. Poetry works within and against the syntactic boundaries of language, playing off speech rhythms and prose rhythms against the artistic or aesthetic functions of rhythm which metre and verse form insist upon, even when the verse is free like Eliot's (paradoxically, free verse makes form more palpable: perhaps because, as Pounds said, 'no verse is free for the man who wants to

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do a good job'). As form is rendered palpable, tangible, dynamic, so its components are laid bare. The most extreme case of this is parody, which is the sincerest form of literary flattery; a little less extreme is the dialogic text, and the kind in which intertextual components are activated; but after all there is a sense in which all texts are intertextual, since it is hard to imagine an unprecedented text. Certainly The Waste Land is so determinedly, or overdeterminedly, intertextual, that it seems sometimes to have been written in about seven languages at once, in seven different eras, seven different cultures, by seven different poetic personae (I chose the number seven, like Lewis Carroll and William Empson, because it is magic). Conspicuous among the unburied dead who haunt its opening lines is Shakespeare, and especially his neurotic offspring Hamlet, a haunted play which haunts the whole of Eliot's text. One could illustrate what Tynyanov means by reference to the opening soliloquy of the Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.

Boundaries remniscent of the inner dynamic of Hamlet's To be or not to be, that is the question/Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing, end them are shaped by Eliot's hanging participles that seem to have nowhere to resolve to, and create a tension or ambivalence between past and future, caught in an uncertain present. Each line might be read as self-sufficient; yet each tips over into a continuous meditation in which the periodicity of the voice is related to verse periods like those measured by rhyme and metre. Shakespeare is mainly pentameter, Eliot mainly tetrameter, yet the rhythmic effects are similar, because the boundaries of the verse unit are laid bare in each case. This is an instance of what William Empson called 'ambiguity': it is reinforced in both cases by mixed metaphors, and Eliot had done it already in Prufrock. 8 million dead, 25 million injured, many of these with dead souls, or what was euphemistically called 'shell shock'. Burying the dead was quite a problem; they are always likely, as that other casualty of American Puritanism, Edgar Alan Poe, knew only too well, to feel kind of uncomfortable down there and batter at our gates, trying to make another entrance into the world of the living. On the other hand, we have everything to learn from them, do we not?: so there must be some way of negotiating a proper sort of boundary between

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those of us who have so far survived and those ancestors who went before. Our secularised Protestant culture is very poor in ritual observations of death and its boundaries: the idea of 'tradition', which looks like a way of talking about the past, is, as Eliot well knew, inherently boring, and he tried to liven it up by telling us that we are the ones who keep remaking it. From the buried dead new life springs. William Empson has a nice phrase germane to this topic in the introduction to his classic Seven Types of Ambiguity, perhaps the only book of literary criticism worth buying: 'the language is full of dead metaphors as the soil is full of corpses'. How Tynyanov would have loved that! The negotiation of the boundaries between past and present is not primarily historical: it is the business of ritual and myth; and, dare we say it, of religion; and of psychiatry. The poet joins the ranks of the myth-makers and prophets when, in A Game of Chess, he perches on the boundary between two mutually exclusive idiolects or dialects, each illuminating the other, each swinging helplessly back and forth between love and hate as Mummy and Daddy re-enact all those original traumas for the millionth time; and the poet aligns parodies of Shakespeare and Pope with a sort of Goon Show pub chatter and something like Evelyn Waugh. Verse with a quite new sort of life sings of marital mental cruelty, sado-masochism, and rape. Nowadays you can get all this on television; for Eliot's first readers it was new, shocking, and horribly true. The Waste Land is sometimes said to be a depressing poem. It is not; thought it is certainly a poem about depression, in the clinical sense of the word. I believe this is what Eliot meant when he said in later life that it was 'just a bit of rhythmical grumbling'. A beautiful term Freud, or his English translators, invented for 'depression' was 'involutional melancholia'. Freud also compared the condition to being in love; because other people couldn't see what all the fuss was about, while the lovers could see little beyond the boundaries of their relationship. Depression is closely linked to self-love, or narcissism; Eliot's self-esteem, or ego-defence system, having broken down (the Bank, Viv, the Hyacinth Girl back home, moving house), he regresses happily back into a state of primary self-love in which memory merges with desire. It is precisely this closed magic circle, designed to exclude pain, which, if you walk into any psychiatric clinic in the world, you will find patients tracing out in the air, in their thoughts, in their language, or (like the London crowd) 'walking round in a ring'. It is precisely the closed circle of acutely depressed patients that psychotherapy has to address itself to: and it is extremely difficult to negotiate the boundaries involved when the patient has systematically effaced them all. What Freud, or his translator, called 'the return of the repressed', is actually the encircling movement of the mind's immune system trying to shut out the possibility of any more pain; and in treatment the energy this contains has to be made to work for the patient's recovery, instead of against it.

The patient, our Thomas, meanwhile, pressed hard against the mother's breast like Blake's Infant Sorrow, produces a series of counter-factual propositions as a kind of smoke-screen, and generates the whole range of Aaron Beck's symptomatic cognitive errors, such as maximisation and minimisation, depressive overgeneralisation, exaggerated reference (Hamlet meets someone who has invaded Norway and knows this is a sign to him, Hamlet, to be decisive and kill his uncle). Maximisation is the wilful exaggeration of a life event which the patient is required to respond to and cannot (depressives lose all power of choice); minimisation is the patient's conviction/assertion that because he is utterly worthless and insignificant it does not matter what his preferences are. Reference, as I have indicated, is what makes schizophrenics in the more colourful manifestations of the disorder believe that they are being run from outer space: the splitting of the ego manifests itself through what Ronny Laing called the impotence/omnipotence duality: I am the universe; everyone is talking, about me; someone is trying to make me do something I do not understand: I am nobody: and so on. It would be no exaggeration to say that this symptomatology is comprehensively evident in The Waste Land. While he was writing the poem, Eliot was engineering more or less in parallel with it a theory of impersonality, which culminated in the classic phrase 'The greater the artist, the more complete in him the separation between the man who suffers and the mind which creates'. Lawrence said rather cruelly that it was just bunk. It was certainly untrue in Eliot's own case: but then he may well have felt (especially as events turned out subsequently) that the King and the Queen in the chess game were only too obviously a blow-by-blow account of his marriage. It is only because they are this, of course, that reader can relate them so immediately to their own sexual experiences; but one sees only too clearly how vulnerable Eliot was at that moment. This is also why his theory of the 'objective correlative' is worked out so laboriously in relation to Shakespeare's Hamlet, leading to the preposterous assertion that Shakespeare's play is a failure: having some urgent personal matter to distance, by failing so to distance it, he had, said Eliot, composed an unsatisfactory work of art. The split ego of the King (Hamlet senior/Claudius) vis--vis the Queen/Mother and Prince/Son is so intimate (and so close to Freud's immortal tale) that the over-mothered Thomas, named Stearns after his mother's family, dreading the primal act of betrayal, sex, which he must for ever embody in a frame made weak by congenital hernia, thinks only of retribution, the symbolic or real castration that was the punishment for the transgression of the incest taboo. It is all horribly familar. Hamlet had already preoccupied the younger Eliot, who loved the French poet Jules Laforgue for his ironic reformulations of key scenes from Shakespeare's play; but now there is more, in the form of the
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impulse to be a real hero, and to take seriously the role of setting right the out-of-joint time. Regressing, therefore, through the golden realms of romance to the origins of love and hate, 'love' tattooed on one breast, 'hate' on the other, the hermaphrodite Tiresias, aka Eliot, encounters Mummy and Daddy, Antony and Cleoptra, Elizabeth and Leicester, Gertrude and Clauius, Tom and Viv, Tristan and Isolde, you name it, and all the other great lovers of myth and history, greeting them with classic ambivalence in the magic Land of Id. Degraded by their association with the pub crowd and the city workers, the great and the good become much more fascinating then they were when they were 'real', because more approachable more 'human', damned like us. Caught between (to borrow a phrase from the Polish author Tadeusz Kantor) 'the scrap heap and infinity' they at last (like Kantor's domestic menagerie) become 'themselves'. All this is done appropriately enough through a romance narrative, putting the reader in mind of Freud's outrageous use of the term 'the family romance'. It is heavily indebted to Jessie Weston and other followers of Fraser, and it is about restoring the Waste Land to fruitfulness, which is also part of Oedipus' brief. This romance structure gave Eliot the cue for what he called 'the mythic method', to distinguish it from conventional narrative sequencing: incidents, images, literary topoi, form thematic clusters organised by a montage process around a romance event in defiance of what Eliot came to call the 'dissociated' sensibility, that scientific, linear, analytical habit of mind which he attributed to the historical moment of fall when the King's head was cut off (thus dramatising his own castration fears in historic guise) and the world of feeling and intuition lost contact, for the space of two hundred years, with the world of the intellect and the achievements of scientific reason. The great effort of the modern poet, who must, if necessary, 'dislocate language into meaning' (Eliot's own phrase), was to restore by this process a lost, almost impossible, language in which it was possible to feel thought 'as immediately as the odour of a rose'; a language in which to think was to experience. It should perhaps be said that in the period immediately preceding breakdown, and before any identifiable cognitive errors have appeared, the subject is commonly elated; this mania, sometimes quite slight, may contribute to the exhaustion which is commonly a factor in psychotic depression, perhaps accompanied by drug or alcohol abuse (in Eliot's case, the latter). In this timeless prelapsarian order of things, we go back to the oral stage, and as we might have expected, and as Eliot is bold enough to tell us, all women are one woman (of course: they are all Mummy, with 'hate' tatooed on one breast and 'love' on the other). Their main role, as in the famous Freud narrative known as the 'Fort/Da game', is to pick up and restore to little Thomas the toys (i.e. bits of Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell et al. he has so cleverly thrown out of his pram).

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However, The Waste Land may be the most marvellous compendium of symptoms: but does this explain why we (even if we could take seriously Eagleton's contention that high culture is a kind of conspiracy by the establishment) continue to read this difficult poem with fascination and keep on trying to work out what Eliot was getting at, to find, in the phrase used of Hamlet, the 'method in the madness'? Nervous breakdowns are common enough, but even when they are creative experiences for those going through them, they do not all result in classic texts that keep reappearing on the reading lists of long-suffering students of literature. Is it possible to return to the poem in terms of some sort of distinctively literary values; and to link these up, perhaps, with something that Eliot might seem to be saying about the journey through the dark night of the soul, the experience of breakdown, out into some new hope? It is the literature that concerns us: to do as many commentators do, and take the Christian level of the text as the final level may be conforting; but it will not satisfy the sceptic who wants a poetic solution to literary problems, or the cultural historian interested in unravelling Eliot's mythic restoration of order in a metaphorical universe. The 'roots' that Eliot unearths in the end are inevitably linguistic roots: like Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover, he tries to imagine an unfallen language in which no shadow comes between idea and act. Paradoxically, however, and as we have already seen, 'identity' is definable only by reference to 'relationship', in literature as in life. Tynyanov, in his 1924 classic Problems of Verse Language, makes the fairly obvious but nevertheless crucial point about verse language that it is always in process. Because verse rings the changes on the contexts, collocations, syntactic shifts, and syntactico-rhythmic 'differences' that words, and their component morphemes and phonemes, go through, the word in verse 'means' by virtue of the ways in which it alternately masks and discloses its semantic 'sameness' or self-identity. The split self is still a self; a broken mind is a mind; displacement and condensation presuppose a narrative, grand or not. The split signifiers of The Waste Land, far from shoring up a traditional culture, or even reinforcing what Eliot called (in the essay entitled Tradition and the Individual Talent) the 'mind of Europe', an 'ideal order', range back and forth over a fragmented culture from which the idea of what Walter Benjamin calls 'aura' a definitive sense of valuehas disappeared for ever. This kind of 'devastation', like the great emptying-out which people experience in breakdown, and the consequent sense of a babble of voices engulfing one, actually liberate whole sequences of new collocations: the strangeness of the result is why contemporary critics thought Eliot was mad. Certainly, when we get to the 'roots' in the poem which the narrative voice, or soliloquiser, in the first section, had asked so plangently for evidence of, they turn out to be Sanskrit. Since this is the archetypal Indo-European

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language, the one from which so many others have evolved, descended, or 'fallen' (depending on where you're standing), some readers of the poem suppose, inevitably, that an unbroken continuity has been restored with what Heidegger called the 'ground of being', and therefore with a continuum of meaning. This is a consoling thought, but the text does not bear it out. For one thing, the Sanskrit roots are decontextualised to such a degree that it is altogether mysterious to the reader what they might have meant as they were 'originally' used: the famous footnotes might have been designed to be unhelpful on such points: and we only know that they represent, to the poet or his double the voice of the thunder; it takes a considerable leap of faith to identify this voice with the voice of the Judaeo-Christian God. Moreover, by being recognisable (Da is yes in Russian and Rumanian, and clearly behind the Latin word for 'to give'), the Sanskrit words strike up resonances in contexts very remote from the scriptural source (the child's second word must surely be Dada). And it is characteristic of Eliot that the essay in comparative religion and comparative philology that brings the poem almost to its close is abandoned at the last minute as the 'voices' assert themselves once more. Eliot's fragments, therefore, are closer to the distractable world of Walter Benjamin's aesthetics than they are to Heidegger's authoritative 'ground of being'. 'Distraction' is an important notion in the later Eliot: in Four Quartets, the problems posed by a world in which we are 'distracted from distraction by distraction' are countered, if not resolved, by the power of music to wholly absorb and engross the mind. The problem for the conservative in Eliot and his conservative readers is that it is precisely the vulgarisation, the mass or 'mechanical' production and reproduction of images, that makes them so suggestive, so full of promise, so promiscuously available to poetry in all the ambiguity of their identity and relationship. If the present leaves its imprint on the past, as Eliot rightly argued, the present age of ubiquitous reproducible images will insert itself into the productive process that generates the text: because there is no longer any 'text-that-was-in-the-beginning'. Already Matthew Arnold, in an essay entitled The Study of Poetry published in 1865, had offered a model of reading based not upon complete texts but upon the significant representative fragment, and used a compendium of fragments, rather like a Victorian keepsake album, to demonstrate his method. These he called 'touchstones' because being in every way exemplary of the highest literary and spiritual values, they might be used comparatively as indicators of the worth of other, as yet unassimilated, texts. Behind Arnold's 'touchstones' there was indeed an 'ideal order', which he called 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'. There was as yet, however, no institution, beyond some rather shadowy academy, that could contain and preserve the values they represented.

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For Eliot it was just the opposite. His 'touchstones' (like Hamlet, he calls for 'his tablets' so that he may note down even commonplaces, in the spirit of the age) are consciously distorted by the processes which generate them as Arnold's were unconsciously (Arnold seemed unaware of the fact that the theme of the doomed culture-hero, or 'beautiful loser', ran through them all). Like Benjamin's 'illuminations', Eliot's fragments represent the after-life or half-life of an image, when what Benjamin calls its 'aura', that which seemed to bear witness to its authenticity or uniqueness, is already decaying. In dislocating language into meaning, Eliot holds on to another set of precepts than Arnold's: it was his loss of faith in secular value-systems that fuelled his Christianity, etc. But despite elements of prayer, prophecy, mass, gospel etc. passim in Eliot's great poem, it is a mistake to identify it too closely with scripture. The range of displacements is the creative principle: there is no point in looking for one beyond them. The god Hermes (of Mercury), the perennial messenger, has brought this news from some subliminal realm, and it is meant to be consoling, in the long run. The undissociated sensibility never was, except in myths of the fall; and even there, it is nothing more than the precondition of fallenness. The Dickens epigram the poem once had, 'he do the police in different voices', makes this very point. The centre of authority (ego and super-ego) having split under pressure beyond all hope of restoration, Hermes slowly and invisibly moves among the rats of Dead Men's Alley, transforming, realigning, juxtaposing, redefining, making connections between things that seemed utterly unconnected: and '0,0,0,0 that Shakespearian rag' generates metaphor after metaphor as if nothing was real but music and verse, rhythm and metaphors. This does not mean that history does not matter: the past, as Eliot said himself, is that which we know. The strange German line 'Bin gar kein Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt Deutsch', means little to the average English reader. But when I taught the poem in Poland a few years ago, this was, for my students, the most compelling of all its liminal propositions. They could hear so clearly the voice of the border guard asking, in German, for proof of identity; and the stateless person, made homeless by the war, answering nervously that she came from Lithuania, and that this made her a real German, and not a Russian. Lithuania, which became part of the Soviet Union, was once incorporated into the greater Poland, and Poland's greatest poet was born there; however, it was also regarded by the Prussians as part of their sphere of influence. 'Lithuanian' is, of course, a nationality; but at that moment it was safer to say one was German. That is what you call 'an identity crisis'. This voice marks a crucial boundary, working like the other voices towards the gradual disclosure not of a plot but at least of a progression. Whatever the distinction of Eliot's essays from this period, they sound dogmatic because

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they do not do different voices. So maybe I arrive by indirection at a very traditional conclusion: it is the poetry that tells the truth; or, as Lawrence said, 'never trust the arist, trust the tale'. Eliot's 'Fort-Da' game with literary history (the poem ends, as we've seen, with a ceremonial da) is not a conservative bid for power; it is a way of following the advice that Stein gives Marlow on Lord Jim's behalf: 'in the destructive element immerse'.

Nol Gray

Edges

The question of what is an edge is a relatively unproblematical one when we are only meaning to determine, say, the particular limits of this or that inanimate object. However, when we are speaking about something as significant and volatile as culture, subjectivity, identity or any other matter with deep epistemological and ontological debts and profound influence on the extent, character and condition of lived-experience, then, the innocuous edge becomes a matter of some import. Both at the level of its corporeality and its ethereality. Indeed, whatever can be said to in fact constitute a cultural edge is always going to be itself a volatile and contested matter. Not least of all, because, as the very term edge has at a vernacular level a strong material and finalized sense about it, it therefore seems slightly inappropriate when used in conjunction with the term culture. Equally, the term culture does not of itself exclude the material. Quite obviously, culture has a material face; although the entire question of a culture's edge would be redundant if all there was to culture was an exclusive materiality. And speaking of material borders, we don't need to be reminded that to mark such a physical edge has enormous political ramifications, as does not to mark it. So, with these difficulties in mind, I will only try to give a certain edge to the question of our culture's edge. For instance: if we adopt on this occasion the long tradition of positing intellection and perception as actually divisive and uniquely separate ways of engaging reality (along with their respective positions in an equally traditional architectonic structure), in what way then within this tradition may we think or see the edge of something as mercurial as culture? Think or come to see the edge of something that in a sense we presuppose by the very question we ask concerning its edge along with speaking about it already as 'something?'

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A word that clearly suggests a certain fmitude, a certain measure that in a sense precedes whatever measure we are yet to conclude will constitute or stand as the edge of that very 'something'.1 Even if we chose to put aside the above presuppositions and their leaning toward the spectre of an infinite regress, we should however make no mistake as to the formidable task that such a question of a culture's edge raises. For, to ask this question is to already be driven to acknowledge that we are deeply embedded in and ever inseparable from the very thing that we are seeking to determine the edge of. Hence there is no outside position here that would make sense of speaking about the edge of culture in the way for instance that we speak about the edge of this or that object. Although equally, it is also not entirely correct to speak in this latter sense (concerning inanimate objects) of some outside position, for, objects are equally culturated. But nevertheless, we of speak in this latter way as though we are in some uncontestable fashion outside of this or that object, so, let us also on this occasion keep this in mind if for no other reason than to seek to glimpse a certain difference here in relation to the effort to give and edge to something as seemingly simple as a tactile inanimate object in contrast to speaking about giving an edge to culture, (which has within its sense, as I alluded to at the beginning, both a tactile, a mercurial and a certain transcenderit reality). Hence: this small set of qualifiers, concerns or edges may be summed-up by saying that it is already always a cultural question itself to ask what is the edge of culture. That is, it is a question that only makes sense to a Being already immersed and profoundly enfolded in and profoundly contaminated through and through by culture. It is a question that already has a cultural edge to it, so to speak. To argue otherwise, that is, to adopt the idea of being able to be outside of one's own culture yet still somehow able to ask this question, would be firstly to be making the claim that what can coherently only be a radically unknowable question in all its fullness to 'the one outside' is nonetheless somehow also 'knowable' in a way that stills leaves intact the demand that the knower in this instance is in fact 'outside'. Hence, to meet this coherency demand, whatever could be 'knowable' to any outsider would thus emerge as just the edge of their own so-called 'outsideness'. It certainly wouldn't be otherwise unless our so-called transcultural Being could in some fashion be both inside and outside of that which it is radically other to in order to initially pose itself as transcultural. Moreover, and as there is already a little tradition being launch here of adding difficulties to the sense of this question, let us also note that we in our turn are only correct when we speak of culture as that which we understand as the processes or whatever that we ourselves are embedded in. Processes that we can only, if at all, barely glimpse due to their enormous complexity. It is therefore not strictly correct to speak of the edge of this or that 'other' culture

for in so speaking we are, if anything at all, only ever really defining the edge of our own culture. And this latter difficulty is as well an old debate which goes under the terms translation qua transformation, and commensurability versus incommensurability. Which, in relation to the latter term, as is well known, is a geometric term denoting a type of (inegative or yet to be found) measure or discreteness. Except that here it is important to remember that incommensurability also contains implicitly the sense that the other culture that is incommensurable to ourselves may be made commensurable if only the absent measure can be found that will reconstitute difference to some index or gradient of the same. However, should we ever find this absent measure it will always be the measure of our culture in that measure itself is also culturated through and through. For, even though we may feel that we can observe 'other cultures' measuring and hence 'to measure' is universal, however, this commensurating concept would only function coherently if we were able to separate event from meaning. For, whilst we can conceivably subsume any observable 'other' cultural event under the mantle of our idea that measuring is a universal, it is something else again to suppose that the event is understood as an act of measuring by who ever in the other culture is involved in orchestrating the event (or for that matter even understands it to be an event in the way we understand such a thing). Hence to know the event and its meaning as they are knowable to the orchestrator in another culture is in fact a non-possibility. It is in fact ever unknowable to us in any sense of its original ontic validity (if in fact it has one), for, we can never shed the fact that all events we perceive (regardless of what we take to be their initial generative origin or source) are even-always tied inexorably to our own meaning system and its production. They are inexorably mediated through, contaminated by our own meaning system. Indeed, culture contaminates ceaselessly. In short, everything we perceive (regardless of and in spite of its so-called other cultural source) will ever always be mediated, including what we may choose to regard as transmediate. For, even to perceive it as as event that we immediately understand as an act indicating the universality of measuring is to already give it meaning. Regardless of how immediate the perception of the event may seem. To imagine otherwise is to be seduced by our own valuing system into believing, on one hand, that immediacy is outside of mediation. And on the other hand, into forgetting that perception is already always valued laden. Indeed, to even speak of an event as transcultural, transmediate or immediate is to already be enmeshed in, at the same time as attempting to displace, some theory of mediation generated from within our own culture. Alternatively, for the universality of a universal to be truly demonstrated, then such a demonstration would have to take place outside of all and meaning systems. In a word, it would have to transcend language in the fullest

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Derridian sense of that term. It is difficult to imagine how that might be accomplished without ultimately a fall into some form of representation? It is therefore not a trivial thing to say that the universal is itself ever for us inside meaning not outside. For the universal is not a thing that language merely refers to, (i.e., some non-mediate referent,) but rather is a type of surface trace if you like, of an essentializing and ideation process enfolded in our meaning production. Or in a reverse fashion: universals are perhaps essential to us in order to think a certain unchangeability that we might feel characterizes our existence as it endlessly drifts and darts in a sea of ceaseless change. But that essentiality in its essentialness is something entirely different to being transmediate in respect to different cultures. In fine, cultural transmediation only gains its sense if mediation qua meaning can be suspended. Leading one to ask: in what way can we think outside of meaning; in what way would we represent to ourselves the cultural transmediate without a fall into some form of representation intricately enfolded in our peculiar culture? It is in this sense that I mean to say culture contaminates ceaselessly. Hence, given this inescapable difficultly of an inseparable immersion in and contamination by culture, what then are we in this culture asking when we ask what is the edge of culture? Well, one of the things we are doing by even speaking of an edge, and this is obvious from what I have said so far, is that we are obliged to implicitly or explicitly mobilize rigorously or casually some measuring system, some geometry, with which to define firstly what will count as an edge and then to set about plotting in some manner this self-same edge. Bearing in mind that geometry is as much a generator of meaning, as it is a tool with which to discover meaning, what edges then does geometry generate? The first edge generated is, we might say, a negative edge. In order to understand this strange all but contradiction in terms, we need to remind ourselves of the tradition that I hinted at at the beginning that goes from Plato to Kant and in a slightly altered form is still very much a legacy today in contemporary geometry. Namely, the idea that the highest level of the sensible, the image, is the imagination. Which in turn logically leaves the upper reaches of intellection image free. In Plato's case, this blind intellection is brought about by the fact that his Nous or upper reaches of reality, his realm of idealities, is an undifferentiated and unchanging whole. A partless realm that partakes of no division as Proclus in a later commentary tells us.2 What all this means for our concerns is that traditional geometry announces its presence in the imagination and not in Plato's upper reaches of intellection.. Hence, if we are to coherently speak of culture as having an edge then we cannot, in remaining faithful to Plato's schema, expect to locate this edge in Platonic pure thought. For, his pure thought partakes of no image, partakes of no division, of no geometry. However, as we can in fact think the idea of culture as having an edge, then is so thinking we must

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either admit that it is an idea that exhausts the image making capacity of the imagination, thereby installing culture in the Platonic schema as an ideality which has the result of also installing culture as unchanging. Or, we can accept that culture's edge is only to be thought at the level of the imagination. The first move leaves culture with a negative edge, that is, an edge that is just beyond the imaging capacity of the imagination. Which is to say that culture's edge is bounded by what is not only a blind Platonic intellection but also now a blind imagination, (and we can certainly recognize the similarity of this outcome with Kant's idea of the sublime which also exhausts the image making capacity of the imagination thus granting a privilege to intellection qua reason over the sensible). Of course, we should not dismiss too quickly this move towards ideality. For without doubt, there is a strong need to retain some sense of a transcendent aspect to culture at the level of the experiential if for no other reason than to avoid a fall into radical empiricism. The second move leaves us with the problem of trying to picture in our imaginations an image of the edge of culture. Which is to say, in geometric terms, we would be faced with giving a shape to culture. And it is precisely here, when we realize that we are speaking of trying to imagine a difinite shape to culture that we seem to reach the end of the capacity of traditional geometry to come to our aid. For clearly, none of the plethora of austere shapes available to traditional geometry appear adequate to describe what we have perhaps already decided is at the very least, a mercurial, ever-changing condition. I have used the term condition decidedly, for if there is a way out of our dilemma then it is assuredly to adopt the idea that culture, if it is any one thing at all, is more likely to be a process rather than some static object that is reducible to any of the austere forms of traditional geometry. In other words, (and mindful of Husserl's telling observations of modern science's inability to completely mathematize the plenum3), culture precisely because it comprises qualitative elements is therefore not something that can issue-up an ideal shape the way that the quantitative procedures of modern geometry has done in relation to say, the multitude of disparate forms perceivable in nature.4 Culture in all its fullness, which is to say in geometric terms its irregularity or dynamicness, simply escapes the overt static regularity of past geometry even though the geometry of austerity or axiomatica was borne in the very heart, perhaps at the very emergence of this self-same culture. Although I have just said that culture in all its fullness escapes the regularity of past geometry, I do not therefore mean to imply that this geometry is simply and solely a geometry of ever repeatable procedures finding their expression in austere regular forms which are thought to point towards static idealities. Rather, as I have said elsewhere, traditional geometry has deeply hidden within its structure a horizon of immeasurability that can be brought into appearance by noting the displacements that geometry is

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obliged to enact in order to privilege its idealities qua austere forms.5 Indeed it is precisely by recalling these displacements that we can witness how traditional geometry, amongst other things, is a prime generator in thinking the character of culture qua the experiential as in fact irregular of dynamic (in contrast to the regularity of idealities). However, I will not rehearse again that idea here. Instead, let us turn to certain features of contemporary geometry. Specifically, fractal geometry as conceived by the geometer, Benoit Mandelbrot. Fractal geometry has announced itself as the geometry of irregularity, of processes, of nature, of the dynamical. In short, as the geometry of what we 'see and feel'.6 That being the case, then, this is the geometry we would assume might overcome the limits of traditional geometry. Or more correctly, given the embryonic state of this recent geometry, at least lead eventually to a way thatmight allow us to think in an explicit sense the edge of culture in a manner that would capture the mercurial, ever changing and qualitative character of culture. Apart from the novel mathematical procedures of its operation which need not concern us here, fractal geometry makes the innovative claim that it is the geometry of what see and feel because it is able within its own lights to generate images of nature that it says are recognizable as such by any observer.7 However, this reliance upon recognition as proof-positive places before us a new difficulty. Recall our starting position is that we do not know what image or edge of culture looks like. So how would we, when and if the time ever comes for fractal geometry to say that it has generated an image of the processes that drive culture, how would we recognize that such an image was in fact a mirror image of culture at the level of its processes? Of course, there is nothing new about this dilemma; for this epistemological problem of knowledge based on recognition goes all the way back to Plato's slave in the Meno: i.e., knowledge based on recognition as prove-positive presupposes what it is attempting to demonstrate, and not least of all, also raises the question as to how novel knowledge becomes possible; how does culture change in other words? The theory of knowledge based on the foundation of recognition has nothing to say about this problem. Another feature of fractal geometry that also seems at first promising is its claim that successive scales exhibit the same degree of complexity. What this means in simple terms is that, any part of a fractal exhibits basically the same degree of complexity as the whole fractal. Mandelbrot calls it, self-similarity. This feature I think fits in nicely with the idea that I hinted at very obliquely: namely, any cultural element, aspect or whatever is contaminated at some level or another by the forces of the whole culture. Clearly, any fractal image of culture would therefore need to be able to capture in every level of its pictorial being this type of complexity and contamination or face the charge that it had within its structure a will towards reduction. That is, a will to reduction

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predicated on granting in some hierarchical order a privilege to one fractal scale over another. Which would simply and ultimately lead towards a certain similarity with the privileging structure of traditional geometry. Alternatively, the worlds within worlds, or complex layer within complex layer, character of fractal images by and large by-passes the problem of traditional geometric shapes. Which is to say that, the latter in being thought as emptied of content logically emerge as inadequate to image the content laden character of culture. However, as promising as self-similarity may at first appear, if transported over to our concerns, then, this idea that the part is largely indistinguishable from the whole (at least at the level of similar degrees of complexity) would lead by metaphoric inference to the idea that each identity within culture is self-similar. Which whilst true in some senses also faces the danger that it may lead to a neo-humanism that grants a sovereign subjectivity over and above culture. Over and against the self-same culture that it is supposedly also self-similar to and to which it owes its existence and peculiarities. Which is to say that, to simply collapse identity and culture under the rubric of as self-similar complexity is to ultimately reduce culture to identity. Hence, what this schema of scaled identity qua self-similar complexity would erase is the differences within. We might care to think of this erasure as a type of imploding imperialism.8 And certainly we are familiar with this problem as it makes its appearance in say cognitive science theories or neural network theories. Familiar, in that in these theories the differences within differences become reducible to a calibration grounded in the presupposition that the generative process of mental activity is somehow capable of a mathematical separation from its product. Once again, the spectre of cultural embedment cannot be easily got over by this presupposition. The last edge that I will ascribe to the question of culture's edge relates to the process of iteration. Firstly, the iterative function or feed-back procedures of the math used to generate fractal images is not unlike the idea that culture in its constant changeability ever falls back into itself by its need to ever reproduce itself. Mathematical iteration in its turn, constantly alters the initial conditions for the generation of a fractal image, and thus all but guarantees a ceaseless generation of ever changing fractal images. Hence this mathematical process has therefore a certain value analogically in gaining some understanding of cultural iterative processes. Cultural processes which produce the very idea and possibility of identity; produce the possibility of the very idea of culture; and, as culture also ever falls back into itself it must logically also ever reconstitute and regenerate what in fact it is ever falling back into as well as what it produces. What mathematical iteration in its turn more or less does is materially visualize or give a concrete image to a certain type of computational procedure. However, mathematical iteration is not only a procedure for the generation of images which image mathematical generative procedures but

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also generates particular ways that these images are desired to be thought or engaged. Put another way, what mathematical iteration or fractal geometry frames or images, what it brings to the surface or gives an edge to in a pictorial register, is nothing more or less than an effort to ground the lasting truth to the world in the materiality of that world; specifically, in the so-called look of the world at the level of its experiential engagement. This is the epistemological and ontological sense of Mandelbrot's idea that fractal geometry is the geometry of 'what we see and feel'. However, this reduction of the world to its look is, at one and the same time, an overlooking of cultural specificity, (it is in this sense that I have been using the term transcultural). What is displaced in this schema is that the world, like iterative mathematics, is inside of culture in the sense that I spoke of earlier. And hence, when this displacement is called back into service, then, what can be observed is that radical empiricism qua fractal geometry has enfolded within it a debt to (and ongoing presence of) a whole range of our culture's idealities that it constantly seeks to disavow in order to privilege what it wishes to present as the transcultural or 'natural' look of the world qua fractal images. In other words, what is masked in this contemporary effort at disavowal is that culture qua the world qua fractal imagery is ever more than just its materiality as it is ever also that materiality. Hence, mathematical iteration in advancing the transcultural truth of the world is at one and the same time a disavowal of the very specificity of the culture that gave rise to it. Which is to say in a round about way that, what will be advanced or come to count as the transcultural is ever borne inside of our culture and can not, therefore, be assumed to be a feature of other cultures. It is precisely at this point that mathematical iteration exhaust itself as a way to adequately image culture. In that, fractal geometry cannot give an image to that which it must necessarily displace in order to privilege the turbulent, the dynamic; i.e., its displacement of the ancient and not so ancient idealities that stand, amongst other things, as a way to think the ongoingness of the unchangeability of the world as thought in our culture. Which is to say in conclusion: true, fractal geometry is a convenient way to think or see variance but it reaches its limit when faced with the invariance of the variant. It is here that it must perhaps, (and unwittingly), fall back upon that which it has sought to displace, namely the austere forms of traditional geometry. A trite but not entirely insignificant example is that, computer generated images of change, electronically depicted images of mathematical iteration, are by definition profited to us inside the static rectilineal shape of the computer screen. They are held fast there; they are ever contained in this electronic frame. Which is without doubt, in terms of this frame or screen's shape surely an ancient geometric form that calls back traditional geometry and all the limits that attend that ancient and not so ancient system. Which

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to say again in an entirely different way that mathematical iteration cannot depict all the conditions for its own possibility. It cannot control all its own terrain. It must, as it were, ever fall back into a deeper more primal iterative process. Namely, the iterative processes of our culture that initially gave birth to the very idea of idealities that find their trace in the shape of the screen wherein fractals make their appearance. Leading us to accept, in this fall into that which fractal geometry sought to displace, that it is only the culture itself in all the fullness of itself that can speak the entire truth of itself. A truth that at every moment of being spoken and heard also erases itself at that self-same moment that it ever rises again and again in order to ever erase itself again and again . . . culture constantly erases itself as it ever arises from within itself. Hence, it seems to me that it is only ever and always culture in the plethora of its enfolded manifestations that will give the edge to things and perhaps in this desire to edge, measure or displace, also and always give an ever static and ever changing edge to itself. In fine, and to expand something I remarked upon earlier, culture contaminates ceaselessly and completely. Our question, therefore, ought not to be it seems to me, what is the edge of our culture. If by such a question we expect to therefore somehow step over this edge into something else and know that elsewhere as it knows itself. Rather, we need, it further seems to me, to accept that every 'without' arises ever from within and hence, concentrate our question on the processes that mask the contaminations at play in this arising. And, concentrate on how each and every 'without' is able to posit itself as somehow uniquely separated-out from that wherein it arises. The question therefore shifts itself from one of edges, to one of edging. More precisely, it shifts to the processes of differentiation. Shifts to the play or slap or tolerance between this and that.

Notes
1 And here we must be on guard to the problem of an infinite regress similar to the one that interested Kant concerning the measure of measure, but which, for him, reached something of a resolution: firstly in his a priori geometry which announces his first critique, and later, in his idea of the sublime, and his aesthetic estimate grounding measure, in his third critique. 2 As there is no division, there is logically no place for geometry here, hence geometry is not an Idea in the Nous sense. Rather, in its function as exemplar, it is located firstly at the level of the imagination; and secondly at the level of the empirical. The role of the empirical in Proclus' schema, apart from being the material field of geometry's applications, is to trigger the Nous into projecting down onto the screen of the geometrical imagination a more or less pure image of itself. In one instance, say, the image of the geometric point which is a more or less pure image of the indivisible ideality of the perfect point that resides in the Nous. More or less pure, for as Proclus also tells us, the point inhabiting the geometric imagination is in fact divisible, but even in this divisibility it is still more pure than those points that are visible to perception.

3 David Carr, trans., Edmund Husserl: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Press, 1970), pp. 21-100. 4 I say modern geometry here, because the shapes of traditional geometry, at least from Proclus' perspective, were not an abstraction from matter. 5 Forthcoming essay in Carl Mitcham (ed.), Research in Philosophy and Technology (Pennsylvania State University). 6 Benoit Mandelbrot. The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: WH Freeman, 1983), p. l. 7 This appeal to recognition marks a considerable shift in the validation procedures that have long characterized geometry. Namely, the emphasis is no longer primarily on prediction, but rather, is as much now based on retrodiction; certainly, this is how I understand Mandelbrot when he says that 'seeing is believing' (ibid: 21). In other words, a generated nature or fractal image is deemed successful primarily by a referral to a past or present actual nature that the observer is presumed to be more or less familiar with. Indeed, if a fractal image in being compared with so-called actual nature results in the observation that the two are alike, then the procedure for producing the fractal image be considered proven. It is precisely here that recognition emerges as an important ground with regard to proof. For as likeness (i.e., computer replicated or generated .nature) presupposes an already existing image of nature it follows that: that which is recognizable becomes that which is true: becomes recognized as that which is naturally true; or once again as Mandelbrot says, can be 'seen' or 'felt' to be true (ibid: 1-3). 8 As an aside, a small, but not entirely insignificant coherency problem is that scales or scaling is itself a traditional geometric process and it is therefore not clear how fractal geometry would be able to honour this debt at the same time as claiming that it is a radical break from traditional geometry.

Zpis miejsc, mapy slow: nad brytyjskimi tdiami kulturowymi

Streszczenie W czasopimie Newsweek z 7 listopada 1994 r. Harold Bloom stwierdza, i studia literackie zostaly przej?te przez dosy z a s k a k u j e ilo chlamu zwanego tdiami kulturowymi".1 Takie apokaliptyczne wizje nie niczym niezwyklym w sprach akademickich w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Opieraj si? one na dwch zasadniczych przeslankach. Jedn% z nich jest wiara w niepodwaalnoc podziah na kultur? wysok^" i nisk^". Bloom widzi miejsce studiw literackich w kulturze wysokiej, w kulturze takich uniwersyteckich programw, w ktorch nie ma miejsca dla docdeka nad zjawiskami kultury masowej, na przyklad. Drug^ przeslank? stanowi przekonanie o upadku wspieraj^cego dotychczas rozwj sztuki i nauki systmu wartoci Zchodu. Walcz? na tylach" powiada Bloom i wiem, e wojna ju si? skoczyla, i e przegralimy Z punktu widzenia niniejszego tomu owa nostalgiczna retoryka bitewnego pola nie wydaje si? zbyt adekwatna. Tom ten nie wyklucza, lecz take nie anektuje, tradycyjnych dziedzin docieka akademickich i jak s^dzimy nie ogiasza koca adnych wartoci. Zarys jego problematyki wyznacza kwestia granicy (pogranicza, ograniczenia, koca), pojawiaj^ca si? w wi?kszoci zamieszczonych artykulw, cho bez zamiaru dokonania podboju lub te pokonania kogo czy czego. Zastanawiamy si? nad kwesti% granicy take ze wzgl?dw etycznych, odrzucaj^c filozofi? kultury Blooma, zgodnie z ktr^ uyteczno literatry nie polega na uczeniu si? rozmowy z kim innym, lecz rozmowy z samm sob$". Miast naucza takiej narcystycznej nieo pogadanki ze sob^, tom ten proponuje spojrzenie na innego" wlanie, na kwesti? obcoci w tym, co piszemy i czytamy, w szeroko poj?tej dziedzinie kultury. Z punktu widzenia nuk humanistycznych eorie kultury oferowane na uniwersyteckich kursach w Wielkiej Brytanii stanowi^ pewn^ modyfikacj? tradycyjnych dyscyplin akademickich. Interdyscyplinarne kursy wprowadzone do systmu szkolnictwa w latach siedemdziesi^tych okazaly si? znacznie mniej apokaliptyczne ni w scenariuszu Blooma, choc teoretyczne wojny" wokl nich wci^ trwaj^. Jednm z powodw podj?cia decyzji o opublikowaniu niniejszego tomu w Polsce jest oferowana w nim moliwo modyfikacji sztywnych struktur dziedzin tradycyjnych przez otwarcie na interdyscyplinarne studia kulturowe. Adresujemy go, oglnie rzecz bior$c, do trzech kategrii czytelniczych. Po pierwsze, do czytelnika zaangaowanego ju w przemylenia i studia kulturowe, nie tylko w kontekcie brytyjskim. Po drugie, do tch czytelnikw w Polsce i Europie Wschodniej, ktrzy poszukuj^ kulturowych przedefiniowa". Po trzecie, do tch czytelnikw, ktrzy okopali si? po ktrej ze stron Bloomowskiego pola walki. Metafora mapy pojawia si? w kilku artykulach niniejszego tomu, ktry sam rwnie stanowi prb? topograficznego opisu terytorium studiw i praktyk kulturowych. Oferujemy tu pewien kontr kultury, a nie cile wytyczon% grame?. Kultura jak zauwaa Herder jest notorycznie wieloznaczna i zmienna: Nie nie jest bardziej niedookrelone ni to slowo, nie nie jest bardziej zwodnicze ni stosowanie go do wszystkich narodw i wszystkich czasw."2 Zaniechanie esenejonalizmu i uniwersalizmu stanowi istotne cz? studiw kulturowych. Z tego te wzgl?du zadawane tu ptania o granic? umoliwiaj^ ponowne odezytanie tekstu" kultury w jej zmiennoci i fragmentarycznoci, zauwaenie w niej take realnoci codziennoci. Zdaniem Noela Graya granica" stanowi kluczowy problm w mysleniu o kulturze. Kultura, lokalizowana b^d to w Platoskiej idealnosci poza sfer^ wyobrani, b^d te w sferze samej wyobrani, nigdy nie wytwarza wyranej linii demarkacyjnej, lecz jawi si? jako ci^gfy ruch granic i ogranicze. Zdaniem Lindena Peacha, z kolei, projekt postmodernistyczny jest odwrceniem hierarchii modernistycznej (ktorej w swym artykule broni, po cz?ci, George Hyde), proponuj^c
15 Writing Plece*

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Streszczeni*

przestrzen mikrogeografii ludzkiego dzialania". Podobnie jak u Henri Lefebvre'a, przestrze spdeczna to terytorium spotkania" ze wszystkim, co oferuje natura i spoleczestwo.3 Jak demontruje to Dvid Jarrett i Francis B. Curtis, spotkanie takie moe take nastypi na tak specyficznych terytoriach jak opracowywanie programw brytyjskich studiw kulturowych dla polskich uczelni czy te w przemianowywaniu instytucji edukacyjnych w Wielkiej Brytanii. Tadeusz Rachwal omawia t? samy problematyk? w kontekcie dyskursu kolonialnego, widzyc w j?zykowym porzydkowaniu wiata istotne cech? kulturowej ekspansji Eurpy. Odrzucona przez Blooma kultura popularna to domna zainteresowania Johna Storeya, ktry dokonuje przeglydu rznych wobec niej stanowisk od Matthew Arnolda po postmodernizm. Mary Kehilly i Anoop Nayak podejmujy kwesti? reklamy w kulturze masowej, koncentrujme na sposobach przedstawiania w niej m?skiego ciala, a Adrin Page skpia swy uwag? na kulturowych kontekstach fotografiki Delli Grace i sposobach manipulowania mdiami przez Madonu?. Kultura masowa stanowi take przedmiot zainteresowania Rberta Jensena, ktry analizuje napi^cia pomifdzy tym co publiczne i prywatne, opierajc si? na estetyce straty" Rolanda Barthesa. Poj?cie straty" powraca take w artykule Donalda Weslinga, w ktrym dowiadczenie kultury szkockiej widziane jest jako nanoszenie na map?" przez innych. Tadeusz Slawek, take w kontekcie szkockim, omawia oywion$" przez lana Hamiltona Finlaya tradycj? pastoralny oraz jej polityczne implikacje. Ian Bell, z kolei, skpia si? na strategiach retorycznych rzydu brytyjskiego w kwestii Irlandii Polnonej. Ju sama rnorodno podejmowanej w tomie problematyki stanowi niejako przecdwwag? wojennej retoryki Blooma, redukujcej dzialalno akademicky do dziala w dwch monolitycznych i monologicznych obozach. Ufamy, e studia kulturowe, choc by moe konfliktowe i polemiczne, niekoniecznie musz$ okopywa si?" wzdlu akademickiej lnii Maginota.

Dvid Jarrett, Tadeusz Rachwal and Tadeusz Slawek

Przypisy
1 We Have Lost the War", an interview with Harold Bloom, Newsweek, November 7 (1994), t. 60. 2 Cytat za: R. Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1976), s. 89. 3 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, przekl. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: BlackweU, 1991), s. 101.

L'inscription de places, cartes de mots: des tudes de culture britanniques

Rsum Dans le magazine Newsweek du 7 Novembre 1994, Harold Bloom constate que les tudes littraires ont t interceptes par une grande quantit d'ordures appeles tudes culturelles".1 Ces visions apocalyptiques ne sont gure une chose extraordinaire dans les polmiques acadmiques aux Etats-Unis. Elles sont fondes sur deux facteurs de base. Le premier est la foi concernant la culture haute et basse". Bloom voit la place des tudes littraires dans la culture haute, dans la culture de certains programmes universitaires ou il n'y a pas de place par exemple pour des analyses de culture de masses. L'autre facteur constitue la conviction concernant la chute du systme de valeur de l'Occident, soutenant traditionnellement le dveloppement de sciences et d'arts Je me bats en arrire-garde dit Bloom et je sais que la guerre est dj finie et que nous l'avons perdue". Du point de vue de ce volume cette rhtorique nostalgique de champ de bataille ne parat pas trop adquate. Le volume en question ne l'exclut pas mais n'englobe pas non plus les domaines traditionnels de considrations acadmiques et comme nous le pensons ne dclare pas la fin de certaines valeurs. Le contenu de ces problmes est trac par la question de frontire (bornes, limites, fin) qui apparat dans la plupart d'articles insrs, mais sans l'intention de faire la conqute ou de vaincre quelqu'un ou quelque chose. Nous rflchissons sur la question de frontires, aussi pour des questions thiques, en rejettant la philosophie de la culture de Bloom, conformment laquelle l'utilit de la littrature ne consiste pas apprendre la conversation avec quelqu'un d'autre mais la conversation avec soi-mme". Au lieu d'enseigner ce discours un peu narcissique avec soi-mme, ce volume propose une vue sur ,4'autrui" justement, sur la notion de l'alination, dans tout ce que nous crivons et lisons, dans le domaine de la culture, dans le sens large du mot. Du point de vue de sciences classiques, les thories de culture prsentes durant les cours universitaires en Grande Bretagne constituent une certaine modification de disciplines traditionnelles acadmiques. Les cours interdisciplinaires introduits dans le systme scolaire dans les annes soixante-dix se sont avrs moins apocalyptiques que dans le scnario de Bloom, mme si les guerres de thories" les concernant, durent encore. Une des raisons majeures de la dcision de publication de ce volume en Pologne est la possibilit de modifications de structures rigides de domaines traditionnels par une ouverture sur les tudes interdisciplinaires de la culture. Nous le destinons, d'une faon gnrale, aux trois catgories de lecteurs. Premirement, il est destin aux lecteurs, qui plongent dans les tudes de culture, non seulement dans un contexte britannique; deuximement il est destin aux lecteurs polonais ainsi qu'aux ceux de l'Europe Centrale, qui recherchent des modifications de dfinitions" de culture; troisimement, ces lecteurs qui sont dans un de camps de bataille de Bloom. La mtaphore de la carte apparat dans plusieurs articles de ce volume, qui constitue galement une tentative de description topographique du champ d'tudes et pratiques de culture. Nous y prsentons une certaine forme de la culture et non ses frontires exactes. La culture comme constate Herder possde bien frquemment plusieurs significations et change: Rien n'est plus indtermin que ce mot, rien n'est plus trompeur que son application par rapport toutes les nations et toutes les poques."2 L'abandon de l'essentialisme et de l'universalisme constitue une grande partie d'tudes de culture. C'est pour cette raison les questions concernant la frontire, qui y sont poses, rendent possible une nouvelle lecture de texte" de culture dans sont aspect volutif et partiel, ainsi que la mise en vidence de sa ralit du quotidien. l

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D'aprs Nol Gray, la frontire" constitue un problme crucial de la pense sur la culture. La culture, situe soit dans un idalisme platonien, en dehors de l'imagination, soit dans l'imagination elle-mme, ne dtermine jamais une ligne de dmarcation trs claire, mais plutt apparat comme un mouvement continu de frontires et de limites. Selon Linden Peach, le projet post-moderniste est le renversement d'une hirarchie moderniste (dfendue dans l'article de George Hyde), en proposant l'espace de micro-gographie de comportement humain". Comme chez Henri Lefevbre, l'espace social est un territoire de rencontre" avec tout ce qui est offert par la nature et la socit.3 Comme le dmontrent David Jarrett et Francis B. Curtis, une telle rencontre peut galement avoir lieu sur des territoires spcifiques, du genre laboration de programmes d'tudes de culture britanniques pour les universits polonais ou bien modification d'institutions ducatives en Grande Bretagne. Tadeusz Rachwal prsente les mmes problmes dans un contexte de discours colonial, en mettant en vidence le rle important de l'expansion culturelle europenne dans un ordre linguistique du monde. La culture populaire rejete par Bloom, c'est un domaine auquel s'intresse John Storey, qui fait une analyse de diffrents points de vue, commencer par Matthew Arnold, jusqu'au post-modernisme. Mary Kehilly et Anoop Nayak soulvent la question de la publicit dans la culture de masse, en concentrant leur attention sur les moyens de prsentation du corps masculin, Adrian Page analyse le contexte culturel de la photographie de Dlia Grce et la faon de manipuler les mdias de masse par Madonna. La culture de masse constitue galement un champ d'analyse pour Robert Jensen, qui analyse les tensions entre ce qui est public et priv, en basant sur l'esthtique de perte" de Roland Barthes. La notion de la perte" revient galement dans l'article de Donald Wesling, dans lequel l'exprience de la culture cossaise est perue comme le marquage sur une carte" par les autres. Tadeusz Slawek, galement dans un contexte cossais, analyse la tradition pastorale et ses implications politiques, ravive" par Ian Hamilton Finlay. Ian Bell, son tour, se concentre sur des stratgies rhtoriques du gouvernement britannique dans la question de l'Irlande du Nord. La varit de problmes abords dans ce volume constitue en quelque sorte le contre-poids de la rhtorique de guerre de Bloom, qui rduit l'activit acadmique aux dmarches de deux camps monolitiques et monologiques. Nous avons confiance que les tudes sur la culture, qui entament peut-tre les conflits et polmiques, ne doivent pas forcment faire des tranches autour d'une ligne Maginot acadmique.

David Jarrett, Tadeusz Rachwal and Tadeusz Slawek Notes

1 We Have Lost the War", interview avec Harold Bloom, Newsweek, November 7 (1994), p. 60. 2 Q t . de R. Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1976), p. 89. 3 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trad. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Bladcwell, 1991), p. 101.

Writing Places and Mapping Words Readings in British Cultural Studies Ed. by David Jarrett, Tadeusz Rachwal and Tadeusz Slawek ERRATA Line Page from above from below 13 15 16 21 5 5 the and plans rule the beatten and and For Read

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