The Mashup and the Remix: Fetishizing the Fragment

From Soviet montage to the Memorex mix tape, leftist Western thinkers have proudly declared their membership to a "sample culture." Remix theory, the latest version, keeps the candle burning bright. Like its predecessors, it attempts to found an aesthetic regime on the claim that the explicit selection of texts – sampling in music, collage in art, montage in film, citation in literature – is political and disruptive (by virtue of breaking-up and recombining old, "reified" things), but unlike its forebears remix (or mashup) theory takes its inspiration from a digitized, musical (rather than pictorial, avant-garde) provenance.

As a formal technique first and foremost, "sampling" insists on discovering an intrinsic subversive effect in the re-contextualizing of other texts. In fact, this kind of operation increasingly defines "subversion" itself -- which now means, simply, an ironic or against-the-grain "re-presentation" of something else.

But what, exactly, of sampling -- as an operation or technique -- is so disruptive (and therefore political)? (Or, for that matter, according to what criteria are disruptive effects political effects by default?) These questions appear all the more urgently in that, historically speaking, the mix (or collage or montage) has been known to surreptitiously alternate allegiance, so to speak -- between the oppressive logic of the commodity, on the one hand, and a liberating, subversive ironism, on the other ...

And yet, in spite of our culture's having found the "fragment" a tired register for understanding the commodity or the artwork, new publications like Remix Theory and Vague Terrain Journal continue to promote this philosophy (in a novel way, admittedly), while a more general Surrealist inheritance maintains steady influence in academic circles, primarily through a Frankfurt School/Benjaminian tradition. Thus, in the following commentary, I will review Eduardo Navas' "Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture," a heavily-circulated semi-theoretical text that seems to unfold at the nexus of the major academic and popular strains of (what could be called) 'montage politics'.

'Sample Recognition' in Remix Theory

According to Navas, there are three kinds of remixes: extended, selective, and reflexive. Each is anchored in the "original" work (off which it's based): the extended remix is a "longer version of the original song," the selective remix "consists of adding or subtracting material from the original song," while the reflexive remix 'maximizes and combines' both strategies. Whereas the extended or selective remix is a "reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the 'aura' of the original will be dominant in the remixed version," the reflexive remix

"allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original. In Reflexive Remixes material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact in order to be recognizable. An example of this is Mad Professor's famous dub/trip hop album No Protection, a remix of Massive Attack's Protection. In this case both albums, the original and the remixed versions, are considered works on their own, yet the remixed version is completely dependent on Massive’s original production for validation. The fact that both albums were released at the same time in 1994 further complicates Mad Professor’s allegory. It is worth noting that Mad Professor’s production is part of the tradition of Jamaica’s dub, where the term 'version' was often used to refer to 'remixes' which due to their extensive manipulation in the studio pushed for autonomy."

Navas' unorthodox appropriation of Benjaminian concepts (aura, allegory, fragment) deserves pause here. For, while Benjamin refers to the aura -- which he defines as the importance of "presence" to the traditional work of art, i.e. its actual, singular location (in a museum, for instance) -- as precisely what is lost in the arts of 'technological reproducibility' (e.g. cinema, photography, radio, etc.), Navas suggests that the aura is increasingly dominant with each remix of the original fragment. Or rather by tearing a fragment out of an original work, and sampling it, the aura increases, "always maintaining the 'essence' of the song intact." The reflexive remix, by contrast, challenges the "aura" by, in a sense, growing a second work off of the first and achieving relative autonomy 'alongside' the original.

As such, the reflexive remix -- and its more sophisticated subspecies, the megamix -- functions as the revolutionary turn in the mashup taxonomy, which ambitiously spans, as I further discuss below, all the arts, architecture, software, advertising -- in short, all of culture. The reflexive remix is thus the privileged moment where the fragment, or sample, breaks away from the tradition to which it is otherwise attached and assumes contrary, politicized meaning. "The foundation of musical mashups can be found in a special kind of Reflexive Remix known as the megamix, which is composed of intricate music and sound samples." The intricacy -- which is at least partly an effect of the quantity of samples -- produces a new text that is not simply a homage to, or affirmation of, other, prior tracks.

Now if it's the quantity and complexity of samples that overcomes the aura of origins, then one would think that the megamix -- and allegory itself -- depends on a certain loss of recognition of the samples' origins. (The megamix would thus fast approach a non-mixed, run-of-the-mill work, ripe with allusions but not explicitly composed from samples of the alluded.) Here, indeed, is where Navas' methodology breaks down. For, if subversion depends on the subject's recognition of the samples' sources, then "intricacy" will necessarily or inevitably threaten this communication. Likewise (or conversely), if the logic of the commodity requires the subject to recognize mashup homages to other commodities, then how will this recognition be distinguished from its opposite, subversion?

On this difficult matter Navas expresses a clear ambivalence over the status of "recognition." At one point, he claims that advanced reflexive remixes prevent recognition of the samples, with the exception of the title, while at another point he claims the exact opposite, namely that the megamix (which is a form of the reflexive remix) is founded on an extended, complex recognition of fragments.

• "Allegory is often deconstructed in more advanced remixes following this third form, and quickly moves to be a reflexive exercise that at times leads to a 'remix' in which the only thing that is recognizable from the original is the title."

• "The creative power of all these megamixes and mashups lies in the fact that even when they extend, select from, or reflect upon many recordings, much like the Extended, Selective and Reflexive Remixes, their authority is allegorical – their effectiveness depends on the recognition of pre-existing recordings."

• "A megamix is built upon the same principle of the medley but instead of having a single band playing the compositions, the DJ producer relies strictly on sampling brief sections of songs (often just a few bars enough for the song to be recognized) that are sequenced to create what is in essence an extended collage: an electronic medley consisting of samples from pre-existing sources. Unlike the Extended or the Selective Remixes, the megamix does not allegorize one particular song but many. Its purpose is to present a musical collage riding on a uniting groove to create a type of pastiche that allows the listener to recall a whole time period and not necessarily one single artist or composition."

How important is the moment of recognition to sampling? Further, would the "uniting groove" necessarily have to have a real-world thematic correlation -- e.g. a time period -- or could it conceivably sample, combine, produce along altogether different lines? Needless to say, I don't think it would take us very long to find that neither the audience member's recognition of the sample sources, nor the song's fealty to a pregiven theme, are required for a work to be -- intentionally or unintentionally -- a "mashup". Which leads us to the question: why take the sample -- a literal replication from a song -- as the aesthetic unit proper? Why take a fragment -- or, rather, the intentional, perhaps manual citation of another work -- as the most fundamental and effective unit of an artwork, especially when, technically speaking, in these cases the sample itself is not really even recognized by the audience member?

Let us, then, for a moment appreciate the mashup taxonomy's accidental but inevitable production of this paradox: In taking the "sample" as the basic unit of meaning, "recognition" is paramount. Without it, the sample is only a sample in principle and not in practice: on the one hand, if the work's reception is not as dependent on the sample as the artist's is, then the sample devolves into an arbitrary stricture on creativity, but on the other hand, if the ideal remix work is simply a play or string of source recognitions then it can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from certain commodity forms -- e.g. the promotional medley -- and so would slide into the lowly genre of homage, virtuosity, and clever manipulation. (The megamix would here categorically approach the dangerous, border territory of the "novelty.") Thus, to avoid this pitfall, the remix must be complex -- a task that almost becomes a matter of quantity of sources -- but not so complex as to lose audience recognition; although, again, the moment of recognition still depends on affirming rather than subverting the source, a possibility that likewise can only grow with the intricacy of sampling, an intricacy that at some point threatens to simply make use of sources for reasons that cannot be contained so easily.

The easiest way to rid ourselves of this paradox, while at the same time avoiding a tedious game of dialectics, is to simply dispose of (or at least severely limit) the concept "sample." This move is perhaps already suggested by the taxonomy itself, which finds, within the category of the megamix, an exception to the aura and a hesitant departure from the importance of recognition. To be sure, if the manipulation of a sample is extreme enough, does it really matter if it was literally extracted? Navas' vocabulary of manipulation -- extend, add, subtract -- will at some point have to become superfluous. Simple, if tedious, hypotheticals are easy to produce. For example, what if two artists, both working off the same original, produce an identical text, only the first artist begins with a copied sample, manipulating it beyond recognition, while the second artist works from ear or bar or by some other means: what purpose would be served by deeming one a "sample" and the other an "allusion"?

In fact, the closer we look at contemporary aesthetic usages of the "fragment," the more its deployment seems designed to overtake the "allusion" as a critical referent. Where the latter remains a fairly open concept for describing intertextuality -- it is as happily undefined as "trope" or "symbol" -- the latter introduces a definite "unit" as the basis of textual relations. Functionalist and literalist in impulse, the fragment or sample in this sense insists on a finitude and exactitude that can all too easily become the crudest of critical instruments. Like the so-called "indexical image" in film studies, the sample attempts to ground the text in a relative faithfulness between documents, which, in this case, amounts to an arbitrary fetishizing of digital reproduction.

The first crudity of this dogma is perhaps measured by the disappearance of questions and textual forms it necessitates. For instance: what happened to the musical "cover"? --In not referencing or critiquing other texts "directly" (so to speak), with literal "samples" (although we have already determined that the qualification "literal" is problematic), are the songs that 'merely' engage in rich allusion, genre play, or "covering" all the less intertextual? Why is copying a text suddenly the only way to reference or engage with a text? This is, perhaps, an historical rather than analytic question, so, to answer it, we will have to take a short detour through the 'totalizing character' of Navas' concept "mashup".

"Mashups are everywhere": "Sample Culture" as Zeitgeist

The first effect of a functionalist typology of "sampling" is to draw into proximity cultural practices that otherwise have little in common, or at least don't intuitively bear the relations attributed to them by the taxonomy. Nothing could justify the comparison of music sampling and software mashups, or for that matter 2.0 mashups and RSS aggregators, other than a deeper, perhaps metaphysical concept of the fragment (which even finds a place for "cut/copy & paste"). But objections like these are accommodated in advance by the taxonomy form itself, which explicitly strives to establish a proper name and apply it to all of culture, across distant and highly specialized practices.

"Tall buildings in major cities are often covered with advertisements selling products from bubble gum to cell phone services, or promoting the latest blockbuster film. The building turns into a giant billboard: advertising is mashed up with architecture. A more specific example; cigarette companies in Santiago de Chile have been pushed to include on their cigarette packs images and statements of people who have cancer due to smoking: two cultural codes that in the past were separated on purpose are mashed up as a political compromise to try to keep people from smoking, while accommodating their desires. The Hulk and Spiderman have been smashed up to become the Spider-Hulk. In this case, the hybrid character has the shape of the Hulk with Spiderman’s costume on top. It is neither but both – simultaneously. Mashups are everywhere. They have moved beyond music to other areas of culture. Such move is dependent on running signifiers relying on the spectacular repetition of media. And repetition had meddled with computer culture since the middle of the twentieth century."

A wild totalization. One would think there is a Platonic Form "Mashup", a great combinatory power governing anything that can be forced to admit of at least one discernible accoutrement. But what holds these diverse examples together, as species of the same general operation, remains largely unclear.

It is thus important to attend to the distinctions between the examples Navas offers as self-evident: for example, the cigarettes and the hybrid. One invokes an image of grafting -- e.g. two otherwise discrete forms suddenly attached to each other (the billboard and the building, the warning label and the cigarette pack) -- while the other suggests a conflation of features within the same indivisible entity (Spider-Hulk). The former speaks well to the concept of mashup that Navas has so far described; but the latter, upon closer inspection, clearly undermines the functionalist, literalist impulse behind the fragment, the sample, and the "uniting groove".

Let me explain: the megamix, which corresponds to the 'inappropriate' combination of billboard and building – "two cultural codes that in the past were separated on purpose are mashed up as a political compromise" -- does not itself correspond to the hybrid, in that the latter is more an "admixture" -- a single entity -- than a collage or montage of discrete "samples". The hybrid, in this sense, would correspond to a work of art – a song, say – that does not take as its project the manipulation of units, samples, or extractions of other works.

Or does it? Let us, for a moment, seriously entertain this idea. Does every work ultimately only sample, with or without the intention? Can one not help but be a megamixer? There is, of course, a long aesthetic history to this position -- from the Stoics to the Scholastics (who perceived a 'combinatory' mental operation at the heart of imagination) to the British Empiricists, like Hume, who claimed there was no such thing as creation proper, only a creative combining of other things (through a variety of 'syntactic' rules), to the early Modernists, who obviously took great interest in the fragment (Joyce, Benjamin, Picasso), and, finally, to Deleuze, who recovered something of this project with his concept of the "assemblage". --Hume's well-known example of the dragon perhaps best expresses this position. In his view, the fictional entity 'dragon' was not so much an 'invention' as it was an imaginative composition of different 'real' animal anatomies. Though clearly informed by a hard Epicurean epistemology that bases knowledge in "experience," Hume's argument nonetheless radically transformed or extended this notion, from the intellect to cultural forms themselves, and in this respect bears relevance to the art object that Navas seems to have in mind.

But is a hybrid a megamix? Is the distinction (if there is one) important?

What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of a critical unit, a discrete 'cultural atom' of meaning. In this vein, there are at least two problems with the concept of "sample". First, with respect to the hybrid, determining what actually qualifies as a sample quickly becomes problematic. What were once allegedly fragments are here characteristically conflated in a single feature; they are not 'attached' to each other -- the model Navas' architecture example is most available to -- any more than they are sustained as distinct within their new, singular appearance. Second, what is to prevent the discovery, within a fragment, of still further fragments? Spider-Hulk is a succinct example of this problem, for isn't the Hulk himself a hybrid of, say, Frankenstein and King Kong, morose Romantic monster and frightful oversized beast? The exactitude of the fragment quickly gives way to the ambiguity of the allusion.

In this sense, then, the concept of fragment attempts to put a stop -- an arbitrary stop -- to a potentially infinite regress (of features within features), the tracing of which would no doubt quickly require the abandoning of the unit itself, which automatically implies contour, edge, finitude, and a posterior combination (while somehow maintaining that contour through each subsequent remixing).

In this way, the fragment or sample becomes a structural instrument for discerning, but in fact drawing, all sorts of analogous relations. For Navas, the mashup indeed appears as a kind of contagious operation "moving" from one domain to another: "Mashups are everywhere. They have moved beyond music to other areas of culture." Passing over the avant-garde movements that Benjamin often had in mind, Navas takes as his origin the early 1980s, no doubt to raise the remix genre to a spiritual locus for the age, and from there conceives of a kind of 'nework cascade' across the rest of culture. He includes the "desktop" as an early infection, although "This conceptual model has been extended to web application mashups." Little wonder, then, that the management of historically disconnected phenomena becomes difficult without some serious revisions of definitions already in play.

"Mashups as a conceptual model, however, take on a different role in software. For example, the purpose of a typical Web 2.0 mashup is not to allegorize particular applications, but rather, by selectively sampling in dynamic fashion, to subvert applications to perform something they could not do otherwise by themselves. Such mashups are developed with an interest to extend the functionality of software for specific purposes. [...] What these examples show is that web application mashups function differently from music mashups. Music mashups are developed for entertainment; they are supposed to be consumed for pleasure, while web application mashups, like Pipes by Yahoo!, actually are validated if they have a practical purpose. This means that the concept and cultural role of mashups change drastically when they move from the music realm to a more open media space such as the Web. We must now examine this crucial difference. [...] As previously defined, the Reflexive Remix demands that the viewer or user question everything that is presented, but this questioning stays in the aesthetic realm. The notion of reflexivity in a mashup implies that the user must be aware as to why such mashup is being accessed. This reflexivity in action in web applications moves beyond basic sampling to find its most efficiency with constant updating . So a Reflexive Mashup does not necessarily demand critical reflection, but rather practical awareness."

If the mashup functions completely differently between music and web 2.0 applications, then why compare them at all? If the purpose of the latter isn't to allegorize the fragment, then how is it still a mashup? The use of the word "subvert" seems more than a little forced, as if Navas is struggling to maintain a revolutionary vocabulary that is already stretched thin. And yet, what we perceive as the problems, gaps, incongruities bound to bubble up from a broken method, for Navas becomes impetus to further explore -- "We must now examine this crucial difference". This kind of structural or structuring method produces problems and questions by default; it inaugurates a whole domain of thought simply by virtue of working within a technical, unitary register. Sample theory is in this sense closely affiliated with network theory, on account of its easy transformation of anything into nodes, units, loci, an operation that then invariably necessitates the question of what connects these points together other than the question itself.

The Consumer-Subject of "Sample Culture"

Having discussed the importance of "source recognition" to Navas' concept of the sample, and having discussed the totalizing character of the fragment/sample/mashup methodology, we have to wonder where the subject fits into this expansive world view. For, on the one hand, the subject seems tightly defined -- existing only to the extent that intertextual messages are recognized -- but on the other hand seems universal and mindless, insofar as nearly everything is a mashup (copy & paste, desktop, web apps, music, architecture, product packaging). But, in either case, the subject is deeply associated with a capitalist, consumerist function -- which, for Navas, becomes at certain points explicit.

"Let’s take the music mashups considered so far. Their power lies in their spectacular aura; meaning that they are not validated by a particular function that they are supposed to deliver, but rather by the desires and wants that are brought out of the consumer who loves to be reminded of two or more songs for his/her enjoyment in leisure. Music has this power because it is marketed as a form of mass escapism. According to political economist Jacques Attali, the average person consumes music in order to wind down and find delight in the few spare moments of the everyday."

In this view, the mashup is a particular kind of nostalgiac event: that is, as a marketing program -- the listener is in fact referred to as a "consumer" -- the mashup recycles previous commodities and re-circulates them to emminently happy effect. Why this simple, formal operation should prove so effective or fundamental is left unexplained, but, either way, the commodity's 'fascination with itself' is taken as not only 'in itself' disproportionately affective over the consumer -- is this what, for Navas, makes the consumer a consumer and not, say, a subject? -- but as also, and this point is expressed in the same move, programmatically satisfactory for the consumer's "desires and wants". Which is to say, when the commodity constitutes itself explicitly as a commodity, as composed of prior commodities -- this whole model depends on the subject's so-called nostalgiac "recognition" of the samples -- then the subject's desires achieve an exceptional, almost mystical fulfillment. Now, while Navas is certainly not saying that this is the only art and the only desire, it is nonetheless clear that this model is the dominant form of the age, extending itself across nearly every domain -- architecture, computers, objects.

In any event, one would think that Navas is referring exclusively to "regressive remixes," and not "reflexive remixes," for while both depend on the recognition of the samples, only the former affirms the aura. But, again, we return to the double face of the concept "reflexive." On the one hand, you will recall, it distinguishes musical from application mashups (referring to the latter), but on the other hand it appears as the third kind of remix within the Regressive category. It is thus both inside and outside the Regressive.

"The third remix is reflexive; it allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original. In Reflexive Remixes material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact in order to be recognizable. An example of this is Mad Professor’s famous dub/trip hop album No Protection, a remix of Massive Attack’s Protection. In this case both albums, the original and the remixed versions, are considered works on their own, yet the remixed version is completely dependent on Massive’s original production for validation."

What is remarkable about the reflexive remix is that it both replicates a former work and creates a new one. It is not only a sample. Which is to say, though it materially works on and off a fragment from a former work, the fragment's status as fragment is compromised, or rendered incidental by, the radically new use or interpretation to which it is lent. This kink in Navas' taxonomy likewise reveals the problematic notion of the aura at work in the piece; for, if the material fragment is just as present in the reflexive remix as in the extended remix, how could the aura be less (or, for that matter, more) dominant? Wouldn't we then have to conclude that the aura is not in fact associated with a literal, material fragment in any instance? Either way, the escape from the aura in the reflexive remix is entirely ellided by Navas' later need to associate the "recognition" of the sample with a deep, structuring commodity/consumer model. Now, rather suddenly, the "power" of the musical mashup lies -- without exception -- in the "spectacular aura" of the sample.

In theoretical terms, Navas is trying to circle back to a Frankfurt School-oriented concept of the culture industry, the commodity, "mass escapism," entertainment as distraction, perhaps to underpin or legitimize so unwieldy and ambitious a taxonomy. The subject -- or rather the consumer -- is accordingly quickly disposed of: "their elation will help them cope with whatever stress they may have had throughout the day". (Is it only a coincidence that Navas here refers to neo-liberal economist Jacques Attali?) The earlier references to allegory, with its hints of a revolutionary subjectivity, are here completely dispelled (as a parable, of sorts, warning against mixing Benjamin's aesthetics with Adorno's politics). Perhaps we would be better off returning to the "allusion," as a critical concept, and restricting our notion of politics to explicit content (instead of 'syntactic operations').

Read on ...

Death's Pose in "America's Next Top Model"

A post and discussion over at Sparkle*Matrix, entitled "'even dead women can look sexy ...'", expresses the requisite horror and indignation over the America's Next Top Model photo shoot where the contestants were tasked to simulate dead, but sexy, poses. Sparklematrix links to a slideshow matched with the judges' comments, to swiftly expel any doubts as to the extremity of the theme. Suggestions of brutal rape are indeed unambiguously the subject of at least one scene (--with murder, suicide, and otherwise ghastly indeterminate deaths dominating the spread).

There is no denying that these photos are reprehensible in theme; but what is perhaps more important to recognize, especially since such themes will not be making their exit any time soon, is their particular mode of expression. For, and this is the essential point to grasp, the photograph is not actually their proper or original form of occurrence. Which is easily overlooked since the photos -- which sparklematrix reproduces as such -- are, ostensibly, the purpose or culmination of the episode, when, in fact, they are merely the terminal result, or excuse of sorts, for an entirely different procedure -- namely, their discussion.

The discussion, or critique, of the photos is, after all, the true force and focus of the episode -- and, arguably, of the impetus behind the show itself. One does not watch the show to see real models perform, but rather to see real models criticize provincial non-models who attempt to simulate, or emulate, the judges who critique them. The show, in this sense, both affirms and closes the gap between star and stargazer (if by extracting out from a banal crowd the one who just might be able to cross the line). So, this has to be kept in mind when the photograph -- which is only one moment in a long process --is extracted from the show and cited alone, as if the show itself is a magazine.

Now, despite even the star industry's genuine attempts to manufacture itself, to systematically produce a star, the winner usually can't actually cross that line. However, in attempting to do so, the question is posed of what distinguishes the performer from the audience. Is the distinction as absolute as it would otherwise seem? Are stars really and truly exceptional, or can anyone (within obvious strictures of course) become one with the right training, will, and opportunity? No show that poses this question ever offers a solution, but it is a profound problematic, and one that is otherwise raised in television and media studies, from the outside, so to speak. In any event, one is left suspended within a meaningful host of questions. For instance, one might otherwise think -- rather naively and with too strong a sense of a 'culture industry' that willfully distracts and manipulates an easily-read public -- that stars are really not too unlike stargazers, they lack talent, have always had privilege, and, well, anyone could do what they do if they only had the chance. Or, conversely, one might think that stars are in fact utterly talented and deserving of their station when, in fact, a good percentage of everyone could make it in their world and in the end it's mostly a matter of who you know, getting the right training, and stumbling into the right opportunities. Shows like America's Next Top Model permanently fail to answer this question while at the same time exploring it, however unintentionally.

In this vein, the photos in question ought to be the critical point of arrival rather than the point of departure. As the judges' commentary can attest, the focus of the episode is the photographs' production and subsequent critique. Indeed, it would be one thing to encounter these photographs in a magazine, and another thing to view the process -- however catered and sullied by industry logic -- that produces them. The remarks at Sparkle*Matrix do not, unfortunately, distinguish between the two. Which is to say, the point is that the aesthetic object is not, in this case, the art object proper (the photograph) but rather the procedures and customs informing its creation. The judgments and criticisms that usually follow a work, or at least remain to a certain extent detached from it, are here intermingled with it, as a guiding force informing the work itself at every step of the way. Criticism, in this sense, overshadows the work, rendering it comparably incidental -- which has the effect, moreover, of casting the photographs as delicate contrivances and effects of a critical procedure. Importantly, this procedure is split between the shoot itself -- the photographer's instructions and intercut commentary -- and the judges' later discussion, which by and large authorizes the earlier one, summons it, and cites it authoritatively. Likewise, as an audience, we are meant to take delight in the critique's expression, and even suspend judgment of the work until later, in order to hear the judges themselves, who are in many ways the true work itself.

If the production, criticism, discussion of the photographs is the true work, then what role, in terms of the artwork, do the photographs play? There is no easy answer to this question, because, simply, there is no center to the work. Instead, the photos and their judgment face-off, with variable respective importance, vis a vis the other. (This format applies to so many shows: Top Chef, Project Runway, Make Me a Supermodel, American Idol, the list could go on.) The work, in all of these shows, only achieves commodity form in the final moments, with the greater bulk of the programming alotted to the contingencies of production. Which is to say, in this format the traditional work (the photograph) assumes a different function: instead of being the object of a detached, focused attention, it organizes the criticisms themselves and serves as the alibi or motivation for their deployment. In formal terms, the work gathers up different strands of the aesthetic world in question and unites them in a sustained revelation. It would indeed be facile and naive to think that the purpose or essence of the show is simply to put a group of youthful naifs through improper tribulations, to then take delight in their predictably strenuous short-comings. It is much more complicated. Guest designers, guest judges, product placements, featured photographers, sponsoring publications, and even slyly wardrobed 'off-set' contestants all meet up and cohere around the photograph which is, hence, of both little and massive importance.

In this respect, the death poses and photos in question are particularly interesting -- primarily because, well, death literally has no pose. Death is the only position without pose; it is the opposite of pose. You 'lay as you fall', as they say. (It should also be noted that, contrary to a discussant at Sparkle*Matrix, masculine sexuality does find correspond form, in the war film, which aestheticizes death and corpses in all sorts of ways, most of which cannot be divorced from sexuality, atheticism, and the body.) To pose death is therefore the culmination of contrivance. To call one who attempts to do so a marionette is insulting, yes, but also astute. There is a long aesthetic history of stringing up corpses and playing them like a marionette (and this cannot be confined to feminine subjcts); which is also why death, the corpse, can be invoked as the condition, rather than opposite, of posing -- it is, after all, the ultimate, most pliant relaxation, a formlessness and laxity open to any rearrangement. 'Holding' difficult poses may, in the right descriptive register, suggest as much. And yet ... this generally innocent history -- a phrase I use with great reservation -- must be reconciled with the specific, contemporary implications of the photos -- which are easily connected, through genres that casually mix feminine sexuality and death, to cultural perceptions of women that produce real events and, statistically speaking, contribute to general, oppressive conditions.

But what I find ameliorative or tempering or difficult in the America's Next Top Model episode in question is the way in which the poses themselves are discussed as explicitly constructed and a matter of convention. Let's not forget that comparable documents are frequently publicized without the least suggestion that the image or message is less than natural, obvious, or authored. The America's Next Top Model format, by contrast, tediously discusses the crooks of arms, the awkward poses, the failures and deviations from the ideal image that is, hence, completely denaturalized and torn away from an aura of self-evidence or naturalism. From set to photo to judgment these images are rendered toothless in a way that can not be said for reproductions or citations of the image alone.

Which is not to say that the resultant portrait is by any means good or progressively deconstructive. On the contrary, it introduces a new technique of oppression, one that accomodates criticism, makes it its own, and puts it in the service of a more expansive apparatus -- a whole industry and milieu of actors (most of which seem to 'hide' behind the photo). Accordingly, these kinds of shows call for a new form of critique that must look beyond traditional forms and works -- here, the photograph -- and see behind them a more complicated expression. Still, it remains an open and largely unanswered question to what extent these formats' self-demystifications introduce new, perhaps more sinister forms of mystification, and to what extent these self-demystifications do manage to temper or dismantle the violence they choose to depict.

Read on ...

"Kenosis" in Bloom, De Man, Gregory, Hegel

Paul De Man notes Harold Bloom’s insight that with respect to one poet’s influence on a later one,

“the encounter must take place and that it takes precedence over any other events, biographical or historical, in the poet’s experience. This means that texts originate in contact with other texts rather than in contact with the events or the agents of life (unless, of course, these agents or events are themselves treated as texts). To say that literature is based on influence is to say that it is intratextual. And intratextual relationships necessarily contain a moment that is interpretative. […] The main insight of The Anxiety of Influence is the categorical assertion that this reading be a misreading or, as Bloom calls it, a ‘misprision.’” (Paul De Man, “Review: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom,” Comparative Literature 26, no. 3 (1974), 269–275: 273)

De Man then briefly observes that Bloom’s six “revisionary ratios” (clinamen, tessera, apophrades, askesis, daemonization, kenosis), for describing the temporal/historical relations between texts, are not only paradigmatic rhetorical structures but explicitly concern substitution, metonymy, misreading, impropriety, etc. (Tessera, for instance, refers to the “potentially misleading totalization from part to whole of synecdoche” (De Man 274).) De Man’s greater point, however, is to demonstrate that Bloom’s influence model depends on a linguistic and intratextual, rather than temporal and psychological, schema.

“If the substantial emphasis is temporal, the structural stress entirely falls on substitution as a key concept. And from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are governed by linguistic rather than by natural or psychological models: one can always substitute one word for another but one cannot, by a mere act of the will, substitute night for day or bliss for gloom. However, the very ease with which the linguistic substitution, or trope, can be carried out hides the fact that it is epistemologically unreliable. It remains something of a mystery how rhetorical figures have been so minutely described and classified over the centuries with relatively little attention paid to their mischievous powers over the truth and falsehood of statements.” (De Man 274)

But lest we consider De Man’s attempts to render Bloom’s work compatible with or intelligible through a deconstructionist lens, it should first be noted that Bloom was always less subject to this gesture than receptively considerate of it. In “Emerson and Ammons: A Coda”, for instance, Bloom appears happy to include deconstruction in the list of ‘revisionary ratios’ between one text and another. So while De Man is surely right to indicate the intratextual fundament of these ratios, this point should not obscure the manner in which these ratios are performed and executed. They assume, that is, a decidedly topological, extended figure:

“When the latecomer initially swerves (clinamen) from his poetic father, he brings about a contraction or withdrawal of meaning from the father, and makes/breaks his own false creation (fresh wandering or error-about-poetry). The answering movement, antithetical to this primary, is the one I have called tessera, a completion that is also an opposition, or restorer of some of the degrees-of-difference between ancestral text and the new poem.” (Harold Bloom, “Emerson and Ammons: A Coda,” Diacritics 3, no. 4 (1973), 45–46: 46)

For Bloom, the relation between texts is a relation between poets and this relation is in effect a repetitive career-long struggle with influence and dependence, on the one hand, and originality and freedom, on the other. A Kabbalistic dialectic of fragmentation and reconstitution, fall and resurrection, is directly imposed on this oedipal anxiety. “Applying the Lurianic dialectics to my own litany of evasions, one could say that a breaking-of-the-vessels always intervenes between every primary and every antithetical movement that a latecomer’s poem makes in relation to a precursor’s text” (Bloom, “Emerson and Ammons,” 46). Further, insofar as the original shattering and final reconstitution are ‘stages’ marking a creative career – rather than, say, textual moments occurring haphazardly across a body of work, a single text, or within the same feature – the oscillations between primary and antithetical movements are governed by a much larger, programmatic arc that draws the ‘latecomer’ (much like, say, a satellite colliding with the planet that ‘gave’ it its orbit) back home to his father-predecessor.

The figuration of this relation is accomplished through the “dialectical pair of ratios, kenosis (or undoing as discontinuity) and daemonization [return, restitution]” (46). Bloom, for instance, reserves the first for describing the “wildest, finest, and freest” (46) series of Ammons’ texts – that is, with respect to their distant anchor in Emerson (“Kenosis is the particular mark of an astonishing series of poems […]” (46)). Whereas, the “answering voice in Ammons, his daemonization or Tikkun for this contraction of the self, begins in ‘Saliences’ and continues […]” (46) until the arc has traced its widest possible ambit of freedom. Bloom then predicts “an even more strenuous pattern of contraction, catastrophe, restitution, a dialectical alternation of a severer self-curtailment (askesis) and an answering return of lost voices and almost-abandoned meanings (apophrades)” (46). But while this model can certainly be seen to reflect a real relation or impetus between certain texts or authors, the explanation of why an economy of wandering and return should exclusively be ‘catastrophic’ (or for that matter for the same reason define the highest value) remains largely undeveloped. As De Man notes, “It would take only one small step, without having to change the premise, to make the same statement in a jovial rather than a saturnine mood, and to replace the anxiety by a serene, pre-Johnsonian theory of decorous imitation” (De Man 273).

Bloom, to be sure, locates at the nexus of kenosis and daemonization a mediating self-discipline (askesis) that ‘at the last moment’ curtails the betrayal and returns the son to his almost-abandoned father (apophrades). But why prize “contraction” when, before ‘return’ is imminent or inevitable, kenosis, the undoing, is so ‘wild, fine, and free’? It is at this point that the economy of disavowal and return becomes truly an ‘economy’; for, rather explicitly, the poet’s return is compelled and enforced – requiring self-discipline, producing anxiety – by an inner need to settle a debt. It is a “restitution” of ‘property’ to its proper owner, a returning of what was borrowed and almost stolen. The dialectic of kenosis and daemonization is thus at heart an ethical circle – (or rather it is ethical only because it is circular) – motored by an internal dialectic of guilt and reluctance, one that tightens, moreover, with each turn of the gyre (–with each “answering return” a “severer self-curtailment”). And though for Bloom influence can only be ‘misprision’ (that is, improper and always already without allegiance), the ‘precursor’ nonetheless shines through as the formal cause and origin of even its faintest, or most abusive, employment.

The value of kenosis is likewise in large measure dependent on the subsequent contraction (daemonization) that revokes it or makes it justifiable; a poet’s wild departures from a predecessor are only acceptable to the extent that the poet returns and renews allegiance. The career and corpus – and so the future historian looking back – thus define a posthumous structure that descends (backwards, often) on particular texts and weighs each, conspicuously, against a totality that can only seem arbitrary or unfair from too many angles. Indeed, Coleridge’s kenosis with respect to Milton receives none of the fanfare of Ammons’, if only because it was not completed afterwards with a complementary return. Bloom first observes:

“But the next revisionary ratio, the kenosis or self-emptying, seems to me almost obsessive in Coleridge’s poetry, for what is the total situation of the Ancient Mariner but a repetition-compulsion, which his poet breaks for himself only by the writing of the poem, and then breaks only momentarily. Coleridge has contemplated an Epic on the Origin of Evil, but we may ask: where would Coleridge, if pressed, have located the origin of evil in himself? His Mariner is neither depraved in will nor even disobedient, but is merely ignorant, and the spiritual machinery his crime sets in motion is so ambiguously presented as to be finally beyond analysis. […] (Harold Bloom, “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” Diacritics 2, no. 1 (1972), 36–41: 40)

Passing over the question of why “ignorance” is unworthy of thematic treatment, Bloom asks, rhetorically, “what was Coleridge the poet trying to do for himself as a poet? To which I would answer: trying to free himself from the inhibitions of Miltonic influence, by humbling his poetic self, and so humbling the Miltonic in the process. The Mariner does not empty himself out; he starts empty and acquires a Primary Imagination through his suffering. But, for Coleridge, the poem is a kenosis, and what is being humbled is the Miltonic Sublime’s account of the Origin of Evil.” (40)

II.

If one poet is complicatedly ‘indebted’ to another poet, that is one thing, but if criticism theoretically privileges that textual relation over any other, or excessively isolates that aspect of a text as the essential feature, then the critique has turned the corner from explication to aesthetic regime. However, the converse argument can just as easily be made with respect to the criticism that, in critiquing the privileging of these features, declares them applied, enforced, invented – an ‘effect’, in short, of the overextension itself. Indeed, in practicing ‘wild, free’ kenosis one is quickly rendered eligible for the counterpart error: the defining of ‘curtailment’ as supervenient. This error (or naïveté) substitutes the ‘influences’ imposed on the creative subject for a ‘raw material’ to mince and meld with freedom and without repercussion. Does not undoing and discontinuity somehow frequently manage to promise reconstitution just when we think it most free, detached, and clear in the open? Behind De Man’s hapless wonder over Bloom’s totalizing anxiety can we not discern the disingenuousness of a ‘calculation’ that is always, in its peculiar mixture of rigor and evasion, 'helplessly' right?

Indeed, De Man, in a remarkable turn, isolates Bloom’s kenosis as a figure of de-construction itself:

“Kenosis is a more complex case, because it is the only class in which a figure is used to undo systematically the substantial claim implied in the use of another figure; it is the figure of a figure, in which one de-constructs the universe produced by the other. As opposed to tessera, kenosis breaks up a totality into discontinuous fragments: it substitutes a contiguity (in temporal terms, a repetition) for an analogy or resemblance (in temporal terms, a genesis) and thus rediscovers, in its turn, the familiar metaphor–metonymy opposition, though with an epistemological twist that was lacking in Jakobson’s version.” (De Man 274–275)

This remark, for our purposes, opens onto two substantial lines of thought: Heidegger’s concept of destruktion and Jakobson’s concept of metonymy. Both, in their own way, discover and expose the concealed contingency of what otherwise appears self-evident, universal, timeless. The former deals with tradition and the obscuring of its own sources, an epistemological logic, while the latter deals more with signification, language, and the provisional accrual of ‘associations’ (opposed to the elucidation of ‘definitions’ and ‘proper’ meanings). Heidegger’s destruktion, the prototype of De Man’s de-construction, thus stresses the ‘ossification’ of knowledge, with an insistence on the difficulty of even determining its nature or relative value: that is, tradition, by virtue of being tradition, conceals its criteria (for being traditional) behind a self-evidence that resists easy interrogation:

“When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Row, 1962), 43.)

As readers and subjects we are thus confronted with only the terminal result of a long critical process; the actual (one would think, historical) production of what now appears self-evident thereby remains, in effect, forgotten for its product. Therefore, “this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved” (Heidegger 44). Now, while this perspective, which is resumed later in Being and Time under the sign of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, has of course found divisive heritage in Gadamer’s ‘hermeneutics’ (Truth and Method), on the one hand, and Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’, on the other, for our purposes it will suffice to say that the former stresses retrieval, recovery, tradition, drawing close to a ‘proper’ or centered meaning, while the latter stresses play, difference, a plurality of irreducibly dissonant positions. (It is nonetheless clear that for Heidegger destruktion involves less an anarchic dispersal of tradition than a critique of its ‘ossified’ contents; after all, there is the explicit promise that some of the concepts 'handed down' will prove to have been “genuinely drawn” from the “primordial ‘sources’”.)

Our interest in this general problematic is however for the most part confined to Bloom’s kenosis, De Man’s de-construction, and the dialectic of flight and return at stake between them. Let us turn, then, keeping Heidegger’s destruktion in mind, to the literary and epistemological history of kenosis.

Kenosis, as it were, refers specifically to a limited and relatively exceptional characterization of the relation between Jesus and God (or, rather, the formation of the relation itself). The term is almost exclusively associated with the hymn reproduced by Paul in Philippians 2:5–11, wherein God’s incarnation as Jesus is described as a loss or “self-emptying” of divine qualities:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form

of God

did not regard equality with

God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human

likeness.

And being found in human

form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the

point of death–

even on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted

him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and

under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

(Philippians 2:5–11, New Revised Standard Version)

This is also the passage to which Bloom makes explicit reference in his use of the term kenosis:

“Kenosis, which is a breaking-device similar to the defence mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition-compulsions; kenosis then is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor. I take the word from St. Paul, where it means the humbling or emptying-out of Jesus by himself, when he accepts reduction from Divine to human status. The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he ceased to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor's poem-of-ebbing, that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems.” (Bloom, “Coleridge,” 39)

But with respect to De Man's tradition, kenosis occupies a profound place in poststructuralist conceptions of identity and difference, at least to the extent that they have been formulated out of the writings of Hegel and perhaps Levinas. But first, a brief explication of the passage.

Generally speaking, debate over the passage has focused on its reference to “the preëxistent state of Christ, the emptying himself of some measure of that preëxistent glory and his subsequent exaltation to the right hand of God” (Milton S. Terry, “The Great Kenotic Text (Phil. 2:5–11.),” The Biblical World 17, no. 4 (1901), 292–296: 292–293). Contestation has accordingly arisen over the nature of this formation of one identity out of another, a difference in self that is also somehow between selves, but two selves destined to reunite, if not literally as one – in that Jesus will remain at the “right hand” – then theoretically or spiritually. And while the literature on the relation between Jesus and God is in effect endless, the kenotic passage characteristically expresses this relation as one where Jesus preexists his body and literally emerges out of God. It therefore suggests an enclosure to this difference, a difference ‘within’ as well as ‘without’, and such that the redemption is a return or circle.

Theological and textual questions concerned with this passage likewise encounter symptomatic difficulties in interpreting relations between Jesus and God, if only because relations between them must always already be ‘within’ them/him. Terry, for instance, concludes that if “God highly exalted him” then this exaltation must not only be a “consequence of his humiliation” but also a “reward or recompense” (Terry 293). But if “Nothing in the whole passage is plainer than the explicit distinction between God and Christ” (Terry 293) is not this distinction itself pursuant to the act in question? It is Christ’s/God’s self-emptying, after all, that renders the dissociation between Christ and God explicit. (Indeed, we cannot simply say ‘Christ emptied himself’ without observing the proleptic redundancy – in the sense, that is, of ‘the poison hung in the sick air’ – enforced upon the sentence. This is no small ‘communicative’ problem, but, rather, the force of the question.)

Thus, if the exaltation is indeed “the meritorious result of the self-humiliation” (Terry 293), then Christ’s resurrection, which is a return to where he started, is also the collecting of a debt. But is this to suggest that Christ humbles himself in stooping to human form in order to receive reward? This reading would, again, have to belie the fact that it was his descent that produced not only a debt but, in one and the same move, both the debtor and the creditor ‘within’ a circumscribed identity. In this view, God would, in effect, split himself into one who owes the other. Indeed, it would appear that the identity paradox posed by kenosis specifically works to render the usual sense of debt and credit, reward and consequence, cause and effect, especially immaterial (in both senses of the term).

But if the specific textual event of kenosis (Phil. 2:5–11) describes a particular abstract relation that resists explication and visual description, how might it inform readings of relations between Jesus and God elsewhere in the New Testament? For, if the difference between them is circumscribed by the affirmation of their identity in the kenotic moment, what could possibly serve to renew, apply, or affirm this circumscription in passages where Jesus is for all intents and purposes narratively alone? Can the kenotic passage form a criterion for reading the character of Jesus as a difference within God -- or, by virtue of the scene or moment in question, is this relative within/without always a matter of context? It is in this sense that difference within identity, or identity as difference from itself – especially between the limited human Jesus and the objective omniscient God (who are not simply different but in a certain sense opposite) – gives rise to a textual ‘dialectic’ – which is to say, the categorization of acts of Jesus according to whichever of his split persona appears most prevalent.

“One clear instance is Gregory’s response to the kenotic motif found in Philippians 2:7. At one point in the Theological Orations Gregory [of Nazianzus] interprets this metaphor as indicating that the Son of God assumed ‘what he was not’ [page] while at the same time continuing to be ‘what he was.’ Yet later, in a passage emphasizing the condescension of the incarnate life, he asserts that the Son put aside ‘what he was’ and assumed ‘what he was not.’ / Such Christological ambiguity on Gregory’s part forms the background for the specific example chosen, namely, his exegesis of Jon 11:33 and 43 as it occurs in the Third Theological Oration. This is the familiar story of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ Such a question undoubtedly implies ignorance on Jesus’ part. Hence Gregory’s comment: ‘He asks where Lazarus was laid for he was a man (anthrōpos gar ēn).’ Subsequently Jesus commanded, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ Such a command unmistakably suggests divine power. So Gregory’s assertion: ‘He raises Lazarus for he was God (theos gar ēn).’” (Oration 29.19; J. Barbel, ed., Gregor von Nazians: Die fünf theologischen Reden (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1963), op. cit., p. 160; cited in David F. Winslow, “Christology and Exegesis in the Cappadocians,” Church History 40, no. 4 (1971), 389–396: 390–391)

In this view, a more or less strict alternation would govern the Jesus/God difference. They are exclusive to, if continuous with, each other. The oscillation (in Jesus) between God and himself would therefore only nominally recover the identity that circumscribes both, while in effect interpreting kenotic ‘difference within identity’ as a division ‘against’ oneself more than a difference ‘as’ oneself. And while the relations described by Gregory certainly characterize given moments, they are by no means representative of, nor wholly consistent with, other kenotic moments, much less the kenotic passage itself.

I only introduce the possibility of deriving, from Phil. 2:5–11, a ‘dialectic’ characterization of Jesus in order to draw in greater contrast contemporary philosophical interest in God’s subjectivity. This turn, as it were, is for the most part due to Hegel. Indeed, where much of the scholarship on kenosis has focused on Jesus’ interiority, Hegel focused on God’s exteriority. Following Luther’s well-known translation of Paul’s kenosis as Entäußerung (‘the separation of the Self through an externalization’), Hegel likewise discerned in this double movement of externalization and reconciliation a model for subjectivity (and history, art, language, etc.). Thomas Altizer, who has written much on Hegel’s relation to kenosis, describes it in Hegelian terms as such: “The true God who can be known as being ‘in-itself’ (in sich), can only actually be so known by the negative movement of God’s being ‘for-itself’ (für sich), and that is a self-negating or self-emptying movement, a movement in which Spirit realizes itself as Subject only by abandoning itself as Substance, and that itself is the life or movement of Trieb or kenosis” (Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Hegel and the Christian God,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 1 (1991), 71–91: 75).

It is in this sense that kenosis became, for Hegel, a generic philosophic concept capable of diverse application. For the Hegelian subject, kenosis is both an incarnation of form – an outwardizing or utterance (Äusserung) – and an externalization of something otherwise interior and self-identical. One is constituted through a detour through ‘the other’. One ‘abandons’ oneself through speech, through desire, through perception, to external effects that in turn reply and contribute to the one abandoned to them, not as simple projections of an inner life, but as investments of the self in external phenomena. Derrida thus describes the relation between kenosis, Hegel, and what he agrees to be the force behind definitions of modern subjectivity.

“The process which assures a ‘mutual fashioning’ (this is a deliberate plastic expression) of the two instances of kenosis, the divine and the human, that of God and that of the ‘modern subjectivity’, would be a process inherent to the Vorstellung, that is, a representation which at the same time exteriorizes and interiorizes (Entäußerung/Erinnerung). In exteriorizing, in extra-posing its object, it alienates and empties itself, it sacrifices itself, according to a movement which already belongs to the Being of God and hence is in this way represented. The representation effectively represents it and not as a simple figurative projection.” (Jacques Derrida, “A time for farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou,” preface to The future of Hegel: plasticity, temporality, and dialectic, by Catherine Malabou, tr. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2004), vii–xlvii: xliv)

In Levinas, as well, a kenotic self-emptying opens the subject to ‘the other’, experience, God, etc. It is the touch of the Infinite that renders it specific, real, and accessible. As an evacuation of the self to 'make way' for the other, Levinas’ kenosis is an “expulsion of self outside of itself … the self emptying itself of itself” (Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 110–111, quoted in Paul Ricoeur, “Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence,’” tr. Matthew Escobar, Yale French Studies 104 (2004), 82–99: 92. Originally published as Autrement: Lecture d’Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence d’Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).) A similar reading is performed by Hélène Cixous, albeit with respect to reading: for her, kenosis is a relentless process of ‘de-selfing’ and ‘de-egoization’ to find the proper distance from which to hear the other.

III.

Thus, to return full circle, how might these appropriations of kenosis relate to De Man’s critique of Bloom?

First, a few general observations: in Bloom’s kenotic schema, the precursor (in the above examples, Emerson and Milton) functions as God externalizing himself as, respectively, Ammons and Coleridge (Jesus). But, since a “breaking-of-the-vessels” intervenes, externalization is not necessarily also internalization (daemonization). Ammons completes the circuit, while Coleridge does not.

Different strands of the poststructural tradition likewise take up different aspects of the kenotic passage. (1) The de-construction or ‘undoing’ of tradition: kenosis, at least in De Man’s usage, here refers to Bloom’s figure but not necessarily to the New Testament kenosis that implies a return. (2) Hegelian subjectivity, externalization/internalization of desire, language, perception, the constitution of the self through the other. (3) Self-emptying to clear a space for 'the other', a form of receptivity and reading, the precondition of immersion.

De Man’s remarks thus attempt to relate the first to the second. The ‘undoing’ of tradition is identified as specifically kenotic. But what, then, relates ‘undoing’ to ‘externalization/internalization’, especially when De Man seems to reject the countermovement of daemonization, return, reconstitution? Which is to ask: Can we in any way speak of a kenotic ‘undoing’ (of tradition or of a text) that does not ‘always already’ promise (or threaten) this movement with return, reconstitution?

The key perhaps lies in ‘where’ De Man and Bloom respectively identify this return. For the former, the misreading (which he relates to Bloom’s ‘misprision’) is already a return. In this view, which he elaborates on elsewhere (e.g. Paul De Man, “‘Conclusions’ Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ Messenger Lecture, Cornell University Lecture, March 4, 1983,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985), 25–46), the ‘original’ reading is just another misreading. Ammons thus redefines Emerson and does not simply return to him. Bloom would likely agree, but with the qualification that not every reading redefines another and that this is precisely what is at stake. Ammons achieved a redefinition (of Emerson), while Coleridge (of Milton) did not. Hence, the breaking of the vessels. Or, as Cixous stresses in a slightly different vein, the subjective process of gaining access to a text implies everywhere the threat of failure, breakage. Textual kenosis, if conceived as a self-emptying for something/someone else, cannot help but approach the hermeneutic.

But we have already mixed models. We are speaking of the relation between texts as if they are enclosed by a representation that circumscribes their externality (as some kind of internality), as if there is something that always ensures a bond or fealty between readings. And this, I suspect, is the treachery of the kenosis figure’s displacement from theology to philosophy. On that subject, Levinas would appear to have something entirely different to say, though I have not yet read the key essay in quesion -- Emmanuel Lévinas, “Judaism and Kenosis,” in In the Time of Nations, tr. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1994). Although I think it is safe to say that his take on kenosis, hermeneutics, and the 'breaking of the vessels' will be much less Christian in model and spirit.

Read on ...