Author: skjeldaa

I enjoyed political satire of Art Spiegelman’s work (the first 10 plates), which was easy to perceive offhandedly – and became even richer through its intertextual play with media images, poems and old comics. Hence the term comix. By starting the work with an “Etymolocial Vaudeville” that installed the falling shoe as an image of threat, and showed how the people on the lower floors of the house waited in vain for it to fall to the floor, I felt Spiegeman from the very onset was undermining/ critiquing the American government’s narrative of fear. This narrative pervades the work both as a theme and through its constant use of orange and red – the colors of alert. Spiegelman presents the 2004 presidential election with an image of a sky full of shoes – cowboy-boots for the Texan candidate whose campaign played on people’s fear of new terrorist attacks. Other images work similarly. In plate two, Spiegelman has become the ancient mariner of Coleridge’s poem, doomed forever to tell his story to anyone who will listen. However, in the original poem, the mariner is not an innocent victim. Lacking respect for life, he shot the albatross, thereby setting in motion a series of misfortunes against himself and his crew. The variation offered in this strip is that the albatross is the American eagle, merging with the unfortunate mariner Spiegelman through a rope around the neck. The two are linked through their actions and their fate.

In the same plate, Spiegelman and his wife suddenly turn into Hans and Fritz with burning towers on their heads, connecting the events of this plate with those of the comic strip “The Glorious Fourth of July”. In the latter, the expected threat (caused by ‘other kids’) to the grandfather and his reading of the Declaration of Independence is discovered and neutralized. Hans and Fritz, ‘the insiders’ armed with sticks of dynamite resembling the burning towers (this image is also used in plate 10), make use of the spectators’ focus on the perceived threat to blow them up. The real threat to the American nation does, in other words, come from within. The same message is communicated in another version in plate 7’s Upside Down World story, which read in juxtaposition with its predecessor (Plate III), criticizes the war-eager president of making use of simple moralistic tales to ‘turn the world on its head’ and justify the war on Iraq.

The first time I read the book, I was puzzled by the mouse heads. Did they have any significance except resembling gas masks and displaying a sense of being small and insignificant in the face of big and threatening events? And why was mouse-Spiegelman carrying a small, red tower in plate 8? The interpretation of this image would have been impossible (to me) without Spiegelman’s description of his favorite comic strip, Krazy Kat, in which the malevolent mouse, Ignatz, regularly tosses a brick at the strip’s cat, and is in turn chased down and put to (a brick) jail by a bulldog in love with the cat. In Spiegelman’s comix, the Americans (in plate 10 several) are the mice, and after 9/11 what they toss against their adversary (Iraq) is the Twin Towers terrorist attack. (To put it very cynically, it could also be argued that there is a certain regularity in this attack, – if not in its means, then in its target.) This reading contrasts Spiegelman’s interpretation of the strip from 1936 (presented in “The Comic Supplement”), in which the mouse is the snake in the garden we must all learn to live with, and therefore probably not a representative of the American. But as the whole text plays with imagery, I don’t think one interpretation necessarily undermines the other.

Comparing “The Comic Supplement” with the extra material provided with Donnie Darko and Fight Club, I find the former superior because of its ability to enrich rather than restrict my reading of Spiegelman’s text. The inclusion of this explanatory historical survey, together with the old comic strips themselves, underline what seems to be one of Spiegelman’s points; that even – and perhaps especially – in times of tragedy and in the face of apocalyptic fear, we need a comic supplement. Irony cannot be dead.

Although Giroux has a good point when he asserts that we should not overlook the pedagogical aspect of films like Fight Club, and the way its violence might potentially further numb our already malfunctioning (according to him) human sensibility, I too think his critique was a bit ‘over the top’. While I feel many of his interpretations of the film were justifiable, I want to defend the novel against some of his most harsh accusations. Could it not be that the point of its violence is to display how the capitalist system makes young men like Jack so completely numb that he feels nothing even when ‘destroying something beautiful’? In Fight Club the novel, it seems that the ‘two Tylers’ ultimate and impossible dream is to restore what is natural and beautiful, yet now tragically and for all purposes out of reach. Part of their frustration is the legacy their generation is left to deal with. A comparison between the scene in which Tyler, the human ‘trash’, turns his being fired into a blackmail and tells this boss “I am […] your responsibility” and the sense of unwanted responsibility in the following quote is telling: “For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up an trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone…And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born” (115). There is a strong sense of bitterness and a good deal of despair, therefore, in the want to destroy “everything beautiful I’d never have” – like an untouched Amazon rainforest or a clean ocean (115). In a sense, it does not matter what you do to the beautiful things of this world, for they are already gone,- and recycling is “like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed” (116).

Similarly, through the mention of whales sacrificed to make ladies perfume and through the brutal story of the origin of soap, the texts installs the notion that the production of consumer commodities is based on the sacrifice of living things. Hence in a typically anti-postmodern move, it turns the focuses back on the production process which, as Jameson pointed out, remains hidden in the capitalist culture of consumption. The making of soap and explosives are done boy-scout style, and without covering up the sacrifice involved. The production of soap demands not merely extracts from the human body, but also herbs fertilized by blood and bone. But this is small-scale production’s sacrifice. Jack’s job, on the other hand, is sacrifice systematized. Thus while society’s official ideology is one of security – of the importance of having health insurance and building a good ‘nest’ (which, as Giroux points out, is up to each individual) – its capitalist forces are systems of brutality. Caught between the two, you get stagnation and numbness. Or you get one personality for each irreconcilable part of the divide. Although the novel offers no real solution to this state numbness – only a demonstration of what the solution is clearly not – it can be argued that not all artistic expressions need to come with its own politics and suggestions for a way out of the crux. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was also dark and marred by disillusionment, without this being a mark of poor artistry! 

I think that as a critique of the destructiveness of neo-liberalist society, the fact that Fight Club portrays the desperation and disillusionment of white men who, as Giroux (and Julie!) points out, should have nothing to complain about, is significant. For whereas Jack can have no material complaints about the system, there is still something fundamentally wrong and dehumanizing about it that causes him to suffer. Something that cannot be explained as the result of poverty, racism, or other kinds of direct oppression, but must be the symptom of a more indirect and elusive kind.   

Is Donnie Darko a brilliant movie about deep philosophical questions of time and creation, or is it just another “God-is-dead-it-is-up-to-one-man-to-save-the-world” movie? Personally I reacted much like Josh; thought it was a cool, quirky film, more valuable because of its satirical treatment of contemporary society than because of the ‘philosophy’ of its time travel element.

Donnie Darko is interesting because the main character, the schizophrenic, seems to be the most sane and well-reflected of all the characters. If he does indeed have superpowers (like he indicates to Gretchen), these are the powers to resist the massive manipulation that works to reduce the world into a two-dimensional affair. Contrary to the teachings of Cunningham and his (fanatic!) followers, Donnie realizes that everything cannot be reduced into a continuum of love and fear. The human spectrum of emotion is complex, and fear and love only constitute one vector in multi-dimensional space. Consequently, this schizophrenic teenager exposes the guru Cunningham as a fraud. Cunningham plays on people’s fears and oversimplifies them in order to sell his (no doubt expensive) package of cheap solutions. He represents the danger implicit in the tendency of reducing profound questions into naiveties that can only lead us astray. The film provides several examples of the deception or destructiveness of this kind of denial. Cunningham himself is, of course, the greatest deception of all. Whereas he claims to possess the means to rid all people of their inner fears and lead them onto the path of love, he is himself a man possessed by a subversive kind of love and a nagging fear of having it exposed. Kitty Farmer’s refusal to believe the truth about Cunningham when it is finally exposed (by Donnie) is also a naïve denial. Contrarily, the people who do possess a wider perspective on things are restrained from communicating their knowledge. Due to the religious policy of the school, Dr. Monnitoff is not allowed to talk to Donnie about the deep philosophical questions that are to the latter a matter of life and death. Similarly is Karen Pomeroy’s concern with the increasing difficulties involved in the attempt to communicate with a generation in the process of receding into a state of apathy caused by the overexposure to ‘prescribed nonsense,’ interpreted by the principal as her own personal failure as a teacher. The principal finally fires her on the basis of her ‘unsound methods’. In this manner the people with real knowledge are silenced, while Kitty Farmer’s voice is heard as it rises to loud and shrill to warn society about the dangers of the active mind; of the subversive literature of Graham Greene, a character from Bonanza. On the bases of these characters and events, I read Donnie Darko as a critique of a mindless and fear-based society: a society based on censorship.      

I think Donnie is the only character that has a well-reflected view on fear. Whereas he acknowledges the fact that he possesses many fears, I do not think he is necessarily lying when he tells his psychologist that he finds the question of ultimate loneliness absurd, and that he has stopped thinking about it. Donnie seems to recognize that there exist different kinds of fear: rational as well as irrational. Being afraid when someone tells you that the world is going to end in 28 days, is, however absurd the situation, a natural reaction. If we accept the main framework of the film – namely that by being led by a Manipulated Dead rabbit, Donnie is able to save the world from destruction – then this fear is also highly rational.

Given the deceptive simplicity (and outright censorship) of the society Donnie Darko presents, the fact that the main character is a schizophrenic is significant. Possessing a mind of multiple personalities, Donnie – even when medicated – cannot be forced into seeing the world from one perspective only. His open mind and willingness to deal with questions otherwise avoided is indeed what saves the world. Although his condition is at times destructive, all his acts of destruction are ultimately creative. The flooding of the school leads to a new relationship; the fire to Cunningham’s house to the realization of a deeper and darker truth about the guru of simplification. Similarly, the murder of Frank indirectly becomes the salvation of the world. The events of the story in this manner underpin Donnie’s interpretation of destruction as creation. A world without the potential of creation is a stagnant and in many ways a worthless world: – hence his critique of the Smurfs. Within this line of thought, my question becomes: what if Donnie hadn’t saved the world? Could not its destruction in turn have led to ultimate creation?

Finally, I cannot help regretting the way the director has added the textual version of ‘The Philosophy of Time Travel’ to help guide the viewer through the interpretation of this complicated and somewhat confusing movie. Does not this addition somehow reduce the reading of the movie into exactly the kind of prescribed understanding it criticizes?

White Noise is a novel that hovers around ‘the system’ of capitalism and consumption. When I read it I constantly felt ‘logged into’ what Jameson termed the new technological or hysterical sublime. Jack, a reflexive intellectual with a high position in the College on the Hill, intermittently recognizes the presence of this ‘system’. However, in the nature of a true sublime, the ‘system’ is omnipresent and can never be pinned down or thoroughly comprehended. It is just there, as an overpowering ungraspable fact tapping into every aspect of postmodern life, to inspire fear and awe in those who catch a glimpse of it.

Jack’s fear of death, like his accelerated progression towards it, is a result of the power of this immense and indefinite capitalist system. Death, of course, is the closest we can come towards imagining a sublime: the fear of the great unknown, the ultimate void of non-existence. The text itself points out the great power of consumerism and, I would argue, connects it to death. Even in the quiet small town society of Blacksmith, the supermarket is the heart of existence. It represents “some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.” (36). As long as the supermarket is shining and bright, other signs of deterioration in the community can be overlooked. Shopping is a source of happiness. Money transactions equal life. As Jack goes on an unusual shopping spree, he reports how he “began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me” (84). Like making and having money, his ability to spend confirms his place within and blessing from the system (46). Likewise, Winnie Richards asserts that she is proud to be an American because America is the most sensory stimulating country in the world. It is the capitalism’s promised land: the ‘city on the hill’.

This positive image of consumption/ accumulation is countered later in the text (in “The Airborne Toxic Event”), when the byproducts of industrialization become acutely life-threatening. The effects of consumerism as a life-style does make the sky at sunset more beautiful, but the viewers’ awe of this beauty is accompanied by the fear that it is somehow caused by the accumulation of toxins and other pollutants in the air. The text creates a general feeling that the new technological developments – despite the beauty Jack finds in their incomprehensible levels of intricacy – represent an invisible force of death seeping into the human genome to thwart future generations. But perhaps just as disturbing is the discovery that immediate and familiar things constitute health hazards. To careful people like Denise, daily life becomes a constant negotiation between forever new and contradicting waves of information about the hazards of foodstuffs and medicines; the do’s and don’ts for a longer life. For every product, there seems to be a threat. And the products of capitalism are omnipresent. Several places in the text family scenes are interrupted by breaks in the text in the form of advertisements for new products like optical megabyte hard discs (112), or credit cards with rainbow holograms (122). As the text nears its conclusion, these breaks present darker ‘products’ of consumer society, such as “Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction” (303). At this point accumulation has come to signify death. This is evident in the room of Jack’s German teacher, Howard Dunlop. The objects that pile up in his room in stacks tall enough to keep all sunlight out reminded me of the piles of belongings that accumulated in German concentration camps during WWII. There is also the suggestion (made by Murray) that Howard finds death erotic. Jack on the other hand, who desperately tries to avoid death, empties his house of excessive possessions. Yet he cannot escape the fact that the career he has built up is based on death. The unprecedented magnitude of death Hitler instigated is what occasioned his founding of the department of Hitler studies at the College on the Hill. In this connection it seems possible to read the ‘city on the hill’ as a counterpart to the College on the Hill, and American society as comprising both the supreme bliss and the ultimate threat of consumption.     

Hmmm. As I read these hypertexts, I was actually most struck not by their structure, but by their content. In “The Mode of Information and Postmodernity” Poster claims that “[l]anguage no longer represents a reality, no longer is a neutral tool to enhance the subject’s instrumental rationality: language becomes or better reconfigures reality” (60). The disappearance of reality is also what Baudrillard deals with in “Simulacra and Simulations”. But the ‘disappearance of the real’ is not necessarily connected to the disappearance of life, although in Hegirascope and Pax I got the sense that this was the case. The subject matter of these works (at least the ‘paths’ I found myself on) seemed to be communication (naturally), quirky relationships (love?), life and death, and the ultimate loss of reality. With Hegirascope I constantly felt like I was reading an updated re-writing of Beckett’s Endgame. There are poems(?) about the bomb, about a de-personalized ‘subject’ waking up in a place where he searches in vain for other people, about death and bones and Viking funerals. Others overtly position themselves within the postmodernist discussion of signs and reality, like the ones that talk about simulacra and those that mention Walt Disney and his frozen state of non-death. My question thus becomes: Why the pessimism? As the introduction to Pax points out, these hypertexts possess an inherently playful structure. This makes the hypertext become alive as you read it, which makes moving through it a fun and pleasurable experience. The feeling of pleasure, unfortunately, is destroyed by the darkness of its subject matter, which to me resembles a more modernist sense of alienation and paranoia. It does not matter that Hegirascope asserts that the electronic network (was it the internet? I don’t remember) will survive any cataclysm; that it in this sense is larger than life itself. To me, this only makes the whole project seem more depressing. Why do these texts have such a negative attitude towards the technology that ‘gives them life’? Why does their subject matter connect this technology with death by the bomb? (And aren’t these modernist themes?) There have to be (there are) more optimistic ways of linking the new possibilities of technology to the human experience. The fragmentation of the subject in the hands of technology leads to infinite possibilities, at least some of which should be joyful.

I really enjoyed Kwame’s article, and was deeply shocked by the attitudes of the curators; the so-called experts on African art. No wonder African artists feel the need to distance themselves from their ancestors! Even though this distancing is an act of resistance to the realism and nationalism that followed in the wake of liberation from the colonial power, I would have resisted with all my might against an  art establishment that that, despite its alleged postmodernism continue to place such old-fashioned and, and Kwame points out, modernist demands on African art and culture. For whereas postmodernism claims that African art cannot be legitimated merely on the basis of  culture- and history-transcending standard, modernism asserts that “primitive art was to be judged by putatively universal aesthetic criteria” (347). It is incredible that an (almost) contemporary curator, safely and ‘objectively’ placed in the Center of the art world, actually allows herself to patronize an African artist by indirectly claiming that he – unlike her Western self – is ignorant of the diversity of African art and hence does not know how to appreciate it. It does indeed seem just if it is true that the good curator became a victim of her own superiority: if the commodification of African art works that encourages the continued construction of African Otherness and gives room for the introduction of works of ‘falsified otherness’, led her to include such works in her postMODERNIST exhibition of exotic objects of interior décor.      

False constructions and otherness are also major themes in Dream Jungle. We are never sure if Zamora Lopez de Legazpi is, like his namesake Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, a true explorer, or a man who has set the whole thing up, ‘just because he could’. Zamora could have ‘refurbished’ reality a little, or himself have been fooled by Duan. It is also possible that the President (who has in every other way prostituted his county), has gone behind Zamora’s back to use PIMPF for his own dubious purposes. Just like Sebastian Clairborne, the President might have inserted himself into the script of the Jungle Emperor and changed it. In Clairborne’s case, the script is Tony Pierce’s. Ironically, Pierce is making a movie about the Vietnam War in an area in which there is an actual armed conflict going on. Yet despite his work on a movie that attempts to portray the complexities, dehumanization and suffering of the Americans’ great war, Pierce has absolutely no thought for the ‘natives’ or the conflict going on around them. To him, the country is merely a backdrop; one that frequently causes them inconveniences; such as having to stop shooting of the film because the helicopters are needed in actual shootings, or having to deal with the nuisance of real dead bodies instead of the expected props. For this reason, Pierce seems to me the worse ‘colonialist’ of the two Jungle Gods.

Because it depicts the Vietnam War, because of its setting, its drugged and disillusioned cast, and because it is being documented by Janet, Pierce’s film alludes very clearly to Apocalypse Now. So much so, that I wonder if it is not a comment upon this film, and the notion it plays upon (taken, of course from the great modernist work Heart of Darkness) that the Philippines with its dark and dreamy jungle, just like Africa and its cultural expressions, is still to us that ultimate Other. And we want to keep it that way. The great response to Zamoa’s discovery of the ‘lost tribe’ underscores people’s need for this Other – to which we are both drawn and repelled – just like films like “Napalm Sunset” promise to perpetuate its image.        

Although it is not obvious due to the way his discussion on the traditional art work’s loss of ‘aura’ is represented, I find Benjamin’s essay to be very positive towards the new mechanically reproduced art forms. The fact that their emergence everywhere – i.e. the new focus on exhibition – has changed the way art is perceived, is of outmost importance to him. When read in connection with the introduction and epilogue, it becomes evident that Benjamin actually regards the ‘loss of aura’ and the ‘absorbtion of art by the masses’ to be what protects art from being used as an aesthetizied tool to promote party politics – like Fascism. I also liked the way he perceived the avant garde art of Dadaism as a forerunner to film and the new mode of perception the film developed. Stating that “[o]ne of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later”, Benjamin points out how Dadaism attempted to create in their pictorial and literary art the same effects the film today provides (17). Dadaist artworks were ‘reproductions’ deliberately useless for contemplation. Emerging at a time marked by the decline of the bourgeois, this art trend promoted distraction as an alternative to what it regarded the asocial bourgeois aesthetics of contemplation (Benjamin, 18). Its foremost objective was to shock and outrage the public. Benjamin regards the Dadaist art work as “an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality” (18). In this manner Dadaism initiated the demand for the distracted mode of participation now realized in film. The development from contemplative to tactile reception spurred by this avant-garde represents to Benjamin but one among many examples of how perception changes according to changes in humanity’s entire mode of existence (5). Radically overturning the more negative notion that the products of the culture industry represent a diminution of art (strongly argued by Adorno and Horkheimer, for instance), he also suggests that new mechanically reproduced forms like film may enrich more traditional art forms with important (primarily technical) insights (Benjamin, 29).

I am a little at loss as to why this book is on the reading list in a course about postmodernism. Or even, why this book was chosen from among all those written by Tony Morrison. Clearly, as many of the blogs have pointed out, Song of Solomon is a text in which names and naming are important. Names have societal as well as personal value, and due to a communal tendency to name people according to defining characteristics, several of the characters have two names. But apart from Milkman’s unfortunate and somewhat embarrassing nickname, and even a general indignation over the fact that white people had the power to (utterly carelessly!) inscribe the very symbol of what was both a new identity and a new existence for the freed slave, the names of the characters do not seem to signify any radical (postmodern) fragmentation of identity. When thinking about the story of how his grandfather first got the solemn name that is passed down through the generations, what Milkman seems to ponder most is why his grandmother encouraged him to keep it.

In portraying black experience, the text takes an ex-centric perspective. Yet in comparison with the ex-centricity of Joann Russ’s (ultra-)feminist text, Song of Salomon reads like a male Bildungsroman. Its attacks on white society (its mention of unprovoked, random violence) seem to me more of a historical back-drop than an important force in the narrative. Similar to the way Frantz Fanon’s account of the white-male-colored-female relationship focused on criticizing the colored woman for wanting the white man, Song of Solomon seems to launch heavier attacks on the coloreds struggling to pass for white, than the position of the whites themselves. Likewise, Milkman (because he is his friend) reacts more strongly to Guitar’s involvement in the Seven Days than to the white killings of black Americans that trigger these acts of vengeance. (Of course, as the plot develops, he has every reason to…). But perhaps this is the point. Why should black narratives center on whites? Would that be subversion?

Time, which postmodernism is generally so eager to twist, thwart, and fragment, does in Song of Solomon align itself in neat chronology: we follow Malcom Dead from birth to what is either death or some kind of symbolical re-birth. Although history is an important theme, the book distinguishes itself from most postmodernist texts in that history can be recovered. The past can be understood and connected to the present and the future, and a sense of belonging and rootedness can grow. So albeit feeling a little bit like the white snobbish critic bell hooks criticized for barring black Americans access into the ‘intellectual high sphere’ of postmodernism, I remain questioning as to what in this particular text (which the author herself claims to be “very saga-like”) is postmodernist. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been working on Pyncheon the last week, but I must say I’m very curious as to how this text aligns with the others we have worked on so far.

When that is said, I must admit that as homage to the figure of the father, the description of Jake, the first Macon Dead, is one of the most beautiful I have read.

I think books like The Intuitionist please bell hooks, as it seems to incorporate much of what she finds to be lacking in postmodernist representations of black Americans. Colson Whitehead does not revert to simplification in portraying the black community of New York (is it?), but shows how, despite similar background and class belonging, black American experience is always unique and will create differences, and sometimes even antagonisms, within the group. 

Even though Lila Mae and Pompey are two of the very few black elevator inspectors who are actually allowed to work as such, there seems to be no common bond between them, only mutual animosity. Lila Mae looks down upon Pompey because of his apparent adaptation of a ‘white’ outlook on the world (and a racist sense of humor), while he sees her as a presumptuous black chick whose rise in the firm is alleviated by all the hardships he went to go through in the attempt to be accepted as a black professional. In fact, their attitude towards each other seem to the white people around them to confirm the view that one colored person means integration, whereas two colored means “you got a race war as they try to kiss up the whitey” (249).

Of course, their attitude towards one another has nothing to do with ‘kissing up the whitey’; they are merely results of attempting to display the ‘caricature of strength’ needed to get by in an antagonistic world. For whereas the world they live in – and the trade they live by – is the very emblem of social mobility, the color of their skin makes it impossible for them to ascend like white men. The comparison with the white black man, Fulton, emphasizes this. Towards the end of the novel Lila Mae admits that her hatred towards Pompey is based on her hatred towards herself: what hostilities she has ignored and what ‘white’ or Empirisist vision (i.e. judging things based on surface appearance) she has adapted in adjusting to the white world that surrounds her in her upward ascent. Lila Mae and Pompey can thus be seen as representatives of what Cornel West called the “anxiety-ridden” black middle-class, which is “insecure” yet “willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be” (in hooks, 8).

The other group West describes as those sharing the collective plight of the black Americans is the hopeless members of the “vast and growing underclass” (Hooks, 8 ). In the novel these are the dwellers of the colored parts of the city. These people whose skin color force them to live their lives trapped in what seems to Lila Mae a distasteful and atavistic “horizontal maundering about” (171) the city’s dirt, water and ‘dark murk’ beyond the dream of social ascent. They are invisible to white men, and the closer they get to the power network that runs the city, the worse their predicament. At the financial district their very bodies dissolve, and their voices are silenced to such an extent that even organizing sentences becomes an “impossible prospect” (223). The reason for Lila Mae’s slight contempt for these people is that she (like most black kids?) was taught to believe in the possibility of social ascent, and early taught the mechanics of this ascent by her father, a man himself trapped at the lower level of society.

Fulton’s first dream of ascent was of high buildings in which people were stacked on top of one another and no-one knew anything about his neighbor: where he came from or what he did. In this dream-world, successful integration depended upon not being recognized or having contact with people of the same background as yourself. It is the white man’s idea of integration: each black individual separate in a white world, – and it is very similar to modern city anonymity. Yet it is a state that cannot protect the black man from free fall. The shafts of each elevator are separate, and there is always the threatening black void beneath you. Fully integrated into this kind of community, Fulton realized he could not make his satire bite because no-one was there to share his vision. This is why he came up with his vision of the second elevation: a different approach to black ascent.

Fulton’s final dream is of a world based on interconnectedness: of shafts in which you rise from the original black nothingness and into something that transcends it and diminishes the probability of falling. In this ride, there is only ascent, no fear of free fall. You leave the world below you behind – that black coffin that diminished you and kept you grounded in the mud – and rely on new “dependable allies” (222). This mutual lift must be based on Intuitionism: it is a black thing, associated with an awareness (black, and hence stereotyped as witchcraft and voodoo by white men) that can only be partially understood even by sympathizing whites (like Chuck). This means that the ‘second ascension’ is all about communication: Intuitionism is communication: communication which what is not-you. Only when black Americans have been able to communicate in a way that unites their common experience and prevents them from falling back into separate states of black dispair (i.e. when they have formed new allies), can the subject be dissolved without becoming nothingness.

In this way, I believe, The Intuitionist asserts bell hooks’s point that issues of identity are still important to black Americans, and must be allowed in postmodernist writings in order for it to maintain its function as a discourse of difference and resistance. Insisting on dissolving the subject before individuals belonging to marginalized groups have been able to negotiate some kind of subjectivity only serves postmodernism to become exclusive instead of inclusive, and favor the voice of the (white intellectual) critic over the real (and colored) other.

I agree with Ada that language is important in this text. As Harvey mentions, the relation between power and knowledge is a central one in postmodernism. Theorists like Foucault and Lyotard attack the notions of meta-narrative and meta-language, emphasizing instead the existence of a plurality of ‘power-discourses’ and ‘language games’. The individual is at any given time in the cross-section of many different discourses or language games, many of which are connected to specific (institutional) contexts. According to Foucault, the codification of such discourses (or systems of knowledge) is often intimately connected to the exercise of social control and domination within the particular context covered by the discourse. Similarly to Lyotard’s, his work emphasizes that those in command of communication are also in command of power.

In le Guin’s novel, the relationship between Orr and Dr. Haber can certainly be thought of in terms of a power-discourse: a language-game as well as a mind-game. From the very moment they meet, Haber has the upper hand. He is the jovial doctor, and Orr his malfunctioning (schizophrenic?) ‘jellyfish’ of a patient. The doctor’s knowledge of the human brain and of technology is what constitutes his power over Orr. The unequal power relationship is manifested in the lack of communication between the two characters. For the whereas Orr looks to Dr. Haber for a reassuring and clarifying dialogue, what is offered him is a one-way communication in which the doctor holds the power of the word. Orr is silenced from the very beginning, and the more powerful Haber gets, the more difficult it is to speak up against him. Not until his position is beyond threat of any counter-argument, does the doctor enter into some sort of dialogue with Orr. But by then it is too late for Orr to engage in a verbal power struggle with his doctor. As the end of the great experiment draws near, the doctor indeed makes an attempt to completely nullify Orr’s balanced personality (or what some of his colleagues would call his holistic adjustment) by representing it as a ‘canceling out’ of his entire person. In this sense it is possible to read Orr’s increasingly eccentric dream-worlds as the mind’s creative resistance to oppression.

The more in control Dr. Haber gets, the more totalitarian and controlling he becomes. Not merely does his position in the world greatly improve through the manipulations of Orr’s dreams, his physical appearance also changes. His voice becomes deeper and more commanding, his laughter hollow, and his whole character take on ‘larger than life-size’. Along with the ever greater sacrifices of innocent lives the doctor is willing to accept in order to create a state of “THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER”(132), these characteristics indicate that his ideology is crumbling while his thirst for power grows. Haber’s ‘benevolent’ utopian state, in which there is no more war or racial conflicts, is nevertheless totalitarian, controlling and suppressing. The final dream-world before the crisis is a kind of combination between Orwell’s 1984 (most of the legislation on which this society is founded is indeed reported to be from this year) and Huxley’s Brave New World. It is definitely a capitalist society: Haber and his WPC are reported to control 90% of the world’s trade. It is also a tough-minded society in which humans are considered Utilities (the HURAD), and it is growing tougher yearly. In this sense Haber’s project of restoring the world has only led him into the Foucaultian trap of “replicating all the multiple repressions of capitalism in a new form” (Harvey, 46). In fact, the further his utopian project runs, the more the dream-worlds resemble the dystopia in which the novel begun. Why?

To me, Orr and Dr. Haber represent two different world views. Orr represents a holistic view of life, in which the individual has a feeling of interconnectedness with the world, and does not seek to change it. Dr. Haber, who has “the quality of the will to power” which “is, precisely, growth” (128), is a representative of capitalist society and ‘progress’. His urge for power and expansion takes us (the readers, as well as the dream-worlds) back to the nothingness from which it started. The reason for this, I believe, is the same as the reason why the basic geographic and environmental circumstances stay much the same throughout the novel. By having Orr claim that all the worlds of the text are dream-worlds he created just as earth was destroyed in a holocaust of nuclear war, pollution, and over-population, and by never letting the subsequent dream-worlds escape the destructive ‘heritage of the last century’, I think Le Guin is making a conservationist point. Unless we check reason (which Enlightenment freed from submission to God)/ science, the human love of power will merely merge with the capitalist urge of growth and expansion to send us forever into slightly diverging – but similar – circles of death and ecological devastation. That is why the wildly imaginative sci-fi story is balanced – or has a dialogue with – the chapter epigraphs on Taoism. They function to reminderus of the limits of human knowledge and power, and to urge us to be at peace with the rest of the world. The link to Taoism may explain the curious turtles included at the end: In the I Ching, or The Book of Changes, the secrets of the future is revealed in the cracks of the tortoise shell.