Baker 1
Jacques Derrida's relatively recent essay "Force of Law" [FL] (Force de loi [FdL]), offers some fundamental ways of understanding the question of violence in its social context. The essay is thus an important extension of Derrida's suggestion that intersubjective violence be understood as the horizon for understanding "writing" in the expanded sense he develops in the Grammatology; that is, how all social systems--including politics, economics, education and religion--in which human subjects find themselves always already enmeshed can be described in terms of their pervasive and, indeed, constitutive violence.The question from the Grammatology that I use in Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn [DET] as one basis of my interrogation of Derrida's theory of violence is: "If it is true, as I in fact believe, that writing cannot be thought outside of the horizon of intersubjective violence, is there anything, even science, that radically escapes it?" (G 185; trans. 127). This is one of the few moments in Derrida's entire (vast) uvre where he even comes close to defining writing by relating it to a more encompassing horizon of understanding. It continues to mystify me why more has not been made of this statement in the (even vaster) literature on deconstruction. I and others have called this way of interpreting Derrida's philosophy "ethical deconstruction," since what emerges from this expanded understanding of "writing" are practices of reading and interpretation potentially useful for intervening in social systems founded on and necessarily able to perpetuate such violence.See, for example, my Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn [DET], as well as works by Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi, Drucilla Cornell, among others, that generally operate out of this line of understanding Derrida's work. Ethical deconstruction, in this sense, runs completely counter to the "received" view of Derrida's work as claiming that all we can really do is analyze written texts and therefore amounting in the final analysis to what some critics have termed "nihilist hermeneutics."See, for example, my analysis of Robert Scholes' description of Derrida's project as a "nihilist hermeneutics" (Protocols of Reading 71ff.), an analysis that refers to various statements by Derrida that directly refute this characterization (DET 12-17). Perhaps perversely, my argument takes off from this position that deconstruction has real-world effects in order to investigate the possible deconstructive insights that may be found at work in (or at least brought to bear on) such "virtual" representations of violence as those found in film, using the recent Pulp Fiction (dir. Tarantino; 1994) as the primary text for analysis.
In a time period characterized by a proliferation of (at the very least, strong claims for) "virtual" spaces, many important questions claim our attention, including the basic definition of terms, or what do we mean by the distinction between "virtual" reality and reality tout court? We also want to know why it is that film especially should foreground the element of virtuality, a profound question that has recently been interrogated along Lacanian lines by Joan Copjec and Slavoj iek.The Lacanian analysis that has come to the fore with the recent work of theorists like Copjec and iek displays particular interest in the phenomenon of film noir, from which Pulp Fiction is widely thought to derive. See especially, Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir: a Reader. As high level literary theoretical discourse has emphasized for some time now-- and I am thinking particularly of works by Albert Cook and Charles Altieri that generally take Wittgenstein as their point of philosophical reference--literary discourse, as typified by poetry, always virtualizes its situation of utterance, effectively invoking while suspending truth conditions of statement and demonstration.Poet Charles Bernstein, to give yet another example, quotes Wittgenstein as follows: "Do not forgetthat a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not used in the language game of giving information" (Bernstein 14). In the current cultural debate over violence in film, music, and other art and popular entertainment forms, it seems to me that the important question of virtuality (which truly is a question, in that it poses a continuing provocation to thinking) has regularly been collapsed with the "reality" of the self's supposed auto-definition, especially when it becomes a question of violence and the social ethos. In other words, many very smart people (not to mention Dan Quayle and Bob Dole) routinely assume that there is a direct, causal link between representations of violence in music, film and television, and the social violence that increasingly characterizes post-technological societies. It will be my position, then, that just because this connection is so routinely assumed by such a wide range of people--high and low culture figures, left and right oriented political thinkers and representatives, religious and media personalities--its very self-evidence should be investigated all the more closely.
Derrida's analysis of the complex interrelationship between violence and justice in "Force of Law" is based in part on a painstaking (and seemingly painful, at times, for him) analysis of Walter Benjamin's essay from 1921, Zur Kritik der Gewalt ("On the Critique of Violence"). One of the many paradoxes Derrida works around in the essay is the double meaning of the German term Gewalt, translated in the title of the essay as "violence," but also capable of meaning "force" in the sense of legitimate power or justified authority (as in "force of law"). This leads him to offer the following as a characterization of Benjamin's thinking on Gewalt, or violence: "There is no natural or physical violence. We can speak figuratively of violence with regard to an earthquake or even to a physical ailment. But we know that these aren't cases of a Gewalt able to give rise to a judgment, before some instrument of justice. The concept of violence belongs to the symbolic order of law, politics and morals" (FL 31)."Il n'y a pas de violence naturelle ou physique. On peut par figure parler de violence au sujet d'un tremblement de terre ou même d'une douleur physique. Mais on sait qu'il ne s'agit pas là d'une Gewalt pouvant donner lieu à un jugement, devant quelque appareil de justice. Le concept de violence appartient à l'ordre symbolique du droit, de la politique et de la morale" (FdL 80). This sense of violence, which Derrida uses in his continuing investigation of Benjamin's complex analysis of the different kinds of violence both underlying and challenging state authority, would seem to be shorthand of sorts for what he terms "intersubjective violence" in the Grammatology. A potentially perplexing dichotomy thus emerges--one that does not seem to rise to the level of Derrida's attention in the essay--between "intersubjective violence," social violence or violence in the realm of human subjects (Dasein), and what we might term "natural violence," or violence that occurs in the absence of, or despite, human subjects.This is not to say that Derrida ignores the interaction of the human and the natural. His continuing investigation into what he now refers to as carno-phallogocentrism, which expands to include "the treatment of what we call animal life" ["l'énorme question dite de l'animalité"] (FL 29, FdL 63), sees the relation of human subjects to the natural world, and especially those concepts based on meat-eating and sacrifice, as foundational social structures.
This latter, "natural violence," is the violence that Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney invokes and places at the center of his ongoing poetic project, as in this prefatory note to his book-length poem, Concordat Proviso Ascendant: "Because A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario is a ritual text each book has to be preceded by the firsthand account of someone who has been inside a tornado. This is a primal, sacred experience of nature's most extreme and random violence. However, it is a cruelty without malice derived from an impartiality at the heart of nature, and the universe, for that matter. Ultimately our cosmos functions as an inhuman, yet intimate, phenomenology to which we impute deistic attributes because we cannot conceive of anything so subtle and complex operating without consciousness as we know it." Dewdney invokes the natural violence of the tornado--which in this instance, at least, seems to require the presence of the human observer as witness--in order to claim an order of reality that surpasses human subjectivity and can be experienced by human subjects and, one further supposes, can be represented to others in poetry and presumably in other art forms, as well, without any need for an extra-human "spiritual" cause or prime mover. Derrida's move-- explicitly in his analysis of the Benjamin essay, but more generally in his work as a whole, which maintains a high level of skepticism towards concepts like "experience"--is to bracket the category of "natural violence," at least in the way Dewdney poses it.In the Grammatology, for example, Derrida says: "As for the concept of experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I am using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure" ["Quant au concept de l'expérience, il est ici fort embarrassant. Comme toutes les notions dont nous nous servons ici, il appartient à l'histoire de la métaphysique et nous ne pouvons l'utiliser que sous rature"] (G 89; trans. 60). We might understand this dichotomy along the lines of Albert Cook's analysis of deixis, or reference, in the literary text, where he suggests a Kantian antinomy between reference and the "dominance of the signifier": Derrida's assignation of violence to the social sphere and Dewdney's insistence on a non-human "natural" violence would seem to be mutually exclusive, neither can be used to refute the other, and yet they both seem true on their own terms.As Cook says, "By bringing a split in perception to bear on the very act of moving into speech in the archi-écriture of his différance, Derrida forces the hand of all other dualistic oppositions than this one and opens up the possibility of a power in the arbitrariness of linguistic utterance not at all confined to Saussure's account[]. The referent is indeed radically deferred; but it is also not deferred, and this or any line of attack that asserts the primacy of the signifier in whatever relation to the signified over the referent will at once hold and must yield before the plain deictic fact of ordinary language use. Arguments on both sides of this question are coherent and complete; the dominance of the signifier stands in a Kantian antinomy to the soundness of the deictic act" (APR 15). Or to put the question yet another way: does the deixis of ordinary language hold within the "virtual" world of the (film) text, or do these kinds of inquiry rather cause the distinction between "virtual" reality and its other to collapse?
The law is perhaps the last place one would look to find the workings of such abyssal structures as a co-implication of "virtual" and real spaces; yet this is what Derrida's analysis of the foundation of the law in "Force of Law," as it were, uncovers. I would interpret Derrida's core argument as follows (a rhetorical chiasmus appropriate to a fundamental proposition that, as such, displays an inevitable circularity): constituted authority cannot serve as a (final or ultimate) recourse for violence in society because violence arises in the same process by which authority is constituted. There is no violence that is not social in origin because law and violence arise `at the same time.'When Joan Copjec asks "what is it that legitimates the modern exercise of power?" she answers: "With no external support, it appears that it legitimates itself. Power is simultaneously that which society produces and that which produces society--we encounter here that circularity which characterizes the performative utterance. Modern power is immanent in the very relations that structure the social order" (153-4). This is why Derrida must bracket any reference to "natural" violence, though deconstruction does seem to require a suspension of deixis, as Cook suggests. If Derrida's expanded sense of "writing" (as a catachresis) implicates all human interaction characterized by differential power relations of force and domination, deconstruction arises in the space between actually existing systems and forms of human interaction and the necessarily aporetic (or "virtual") possibilities of non-violence and true participatory democracy.
Derrida's close analyses in "Force of Law" of Pascal's and Montaigne's enigmatic statements on law, justice and violence may be seen as an invocation of earlier "authorities," but I see them rather as indications that he is not inventing this line of analysis. In fact, it would seem that serious thinkers of all eras--not just Walter Benjamin, not just in the twentieth century--have been perplexed by the question of the "foundation" of law and authority. Montaigne and Pascal even have quite different reasons for training their skeptical gaze at these "founding" moments of the social order: Montaigne's thoroughgoing skepticism begins from his position as a political figure; Pascal's skepticism toward consitituted authority here and now moves him to urge a faith in a higher authority, one whose wisdom is only partially available to the ratiocinations of human intellect. The phrase Derrida uses as a subtitle to "Force of Law," the "mystical foundation of authority" is one he identifies as being an unacknowledged quote by Pascal of a passage from Montaigne's "De l'expérience."Montaigne's statement is from "De l'expérience": "Or les loix se maintiennent en credit, non parce qu'elles sont justes, mais par ce qu'elles sont loix. C'est le fondement mystique de leur authorité, elles n'en ont poinct d'autre" ["And so laws keep up their good standing, not because they are just, but because they are laws: that is the mystical foundation of their authority, they have no other"] (Essais 1049; FdL 29; FL 12; my italics). Commenting on and paraphrasing this passage, Derrida says: "Here Montaigne is clearly distinguishing laws, that is to say droit, from justice. The justice of law, justice as law is not justice. Laws are not just as laws. One obeys them not because they are just but because they have authority" (FL 12; FdL 30). Derrida earlier insists there is no such thing as a law without the possibility of its being enforced, as exemplified in an English expression he notes with special emphasis, "to enforce the law."Derrida gives close attention to Benjamin's thinking on the police as embodying the "modern" co-implication of lawful authority and violence (FL 42ff.; FdL 100ff.). One recalls Mayor Richard J. Daley's famous (mis)statement during what were later called "police riots" (by a government-appointed commission) at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago: "The police are not here to create disorder, the police are here to preserve disorder." From this perspective, the Mark Fuhrman tapes merely confirm an underlying structure inherent in modern "democratic" law enforcement.
Derrida is not, however, offering a simple assertion of moral relativism (as his many vocal critics are anxious to accuse him). Derrida takes pains to insist that he is not assenting to the moral truism of the La Fontaine fable about the wolf and the sheep: "Might makes right" (FL 13; "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure," FdL 31). Rather, Derrida is attempting to locate the aporia, or gap, that opens up when attempting to understand the different concepts of law and justice. Moreover, he attempts to situate that aporia in the contemporary real-world setting of institutions, power and authority. Here is Derrida's explanation of this move: "But if we set aside the functional mechanism of the Pascalian critique, if we dissociate it from Christian pessimism, which is not impossible, then we can find in it, as in Montaigne, the basis for a modern critical philosophy, indeed for a critique of juridical ideology, a desedimentation of the superstructures of law that both hide and reflect the economic and political interests of the dominant forces of society. This would be both possible and always useful" (FL 13; FdL 31-2).Derrida seems to want to maintain the paradoxal quality of Pascal's insight, without retaining his skeptical path to Christian belief. René Girard's La violence et le sacré, perhaps the most celebrated work on violence in "poststructuralist" theory, does indeed follow Pascal in suggesting that the Christian belief system is the only way out of the sacrificial economy, though Girard's invocation of Christianity is only made explicitly in his later works. The false modesty of the final sentence aside, this statement is about as clear a call for the practical and real-world effects of deconstruction ("a desedimentation of the superstructures of law that both hide and reflect the economic and political interests of the dominant forces of society") as Derrida is usually willing to make.
This direct link between Pascal's and Montaigne's insights into the foundations of law and justice with the practice of deconstruction continues in a series of quotations where both thinkers say, in effect, that if you trace the foundation of legal authority back to its origins, it simply disappears, or is seen to be founded on what Montaigne refers to as "fictions legitimes."Montaigne says, in "Apologie de Raimond Sebond," "notre droict mesme a, dict-on, des fictions legitimes sur lesquelles il fonde la verité de sa justice" ("even our law, it is said, has legitimate fictions on which it founds the truth of its justice," FdL 30; FL 12; my italics). This leads Derrida to claim that: "Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can't by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground" (FL 14; FdL 34). This startling statement can be seen as a restatement of the link between "writing" and violence found in the earlier Grammatology; that is to say, the institution of "writing" can only be thought within the context of intersubjective violence or what in this essay he calls simply violence. This leads to the even more startling statement:
The structure I am describing here is a structure in which law (droit) is essentially deconstructible, whether because it is founded, constructed on interpretable and transformable textual strataor because its ultimate foundation is by definition unfounded. The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress. But the paradox that I'd like to submit for discussion is the following: it is this deconstructible structure of lawthat also insures the possibility of deconstruction. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice. (FL 14-15; FdL 34-5).
In my reading, Derrida is saying that justice, outside of its actual implementation (which, as if we needed the O. J. Simpson trial to remind us, is always a complicated, contingent business), simply makes no sense. Deconstruction thus becomes a way of describing movements of thought and decision-making tied to the realities of social existence that denies any meaning to justice in the abstract. Rather, deconstruction says that all justice is "here and now," in a here and now where "pure presence" is denied, where complex forces (or violence) are always working to determine in advance anything like individual subjectivity.
To say that justice is an experience of the here and now in which "pure presence" is denied is to say, as Derrida does, that, "Justice is an experience of the impossible" (FL 16). Although usually interpreted as a form of endless regress leading inevitably to ethical paralysis, impossibility as a characteristic mode of deconstruction is not merely a negative way of viewing the possibilities for ethical decision-making. Impossibility becomes rather a means to describe the illusory (and ultimately extremely misleading) "present" in time and space, a way of calling for a recollective responsibility informing transformative acts of future-oriented interpretation.This sense of responsibility is what I find admirably unpacked and explicated by Drucilla Cornell in her recent books, The Philosophy of the Limit and Transformations. What Cornell reminds us is that decision-making always operates within a process of transformative memory, a sense of the past and the weight of previous law and authority that is not beyond questioning, but rather always deconstructible. Any decision that is "just" both is accountable to the past as interpretation and calls forth a possible future through its transformative power. This is what Derrida means when he says "deconstruction calls for an increase in responsibility" (FL 20). This stance is clearly opposed to the "received" view that deconstruction urges an attitude of ahistorical skepticism toward all meaning that is not textual, and therefore disarms "political" action (see Helmling). The aporetic structure of critical responsibility can better be understood as a revision of the standard Western view of time, corresponding to the spatializing metaphor of gaps in textual operations that is an established model for deconstructive criticism. So when we hear (or use) the slogan, "No Justice, No Peace," for example, we can see a deconstructive mode in operation, one that views justice as always necessarily aporetic, existing in a radical utopian future (unrelated to the standard notion of time) much like what Derrida describes as the horizon for enacting true democracy (cf. L'autre cap). Justice would then be the positive moment of deconstructive critique, corresponding to the violence that is "writing."
The impossibility of justice is a way of talking about the necessity for transformative interpretations in the "here and now" in which presence is denied. This leads to the three aporias of responsibility that Derrida outlines in "Force of Law" (cf. Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit 133ff.). The first is what he calls épokhè, or the suspension of the rule. That is to say, in part, a decision-making machine is not imaginable. Any system of justice requires a judge who both invokes and suspends the law as unbending rule.This crucial feature of judgment has been enacted by those federal judges who have declined to sit for drug cases, at least in part because of mandatory sentencing guidelines. Or, as Derrida says, "Each case is other, each decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely" (FL 23). This is obviously not the same as saying that the judge makes it up as she goes along, which would be a denial of the increased sense of responsibility called for in the transformative interpretation of deconstruction. It is rather a statement of aporia, a restatement of the Pascalian paradox: "It follows from this paradox that there is never a moment that we can say in the present that a decision is just,or that someone is a just man--even less, `I am just'" (FL 23). We might relate this to the Greek apothegm concerning happiness: call no man happy until his life is at an end. Seen deconstructively, this paradox is a restatement of the theme that there is no justice outside of context, no metalanguage that serves as a guarantee of rightness of judgment, no divine oversight grounding judgment in a realm of eternal and immutable truth.
Derrida's second aporia is a restatement of the first in terms of the "undecidable." Derrida denies that undecidability is an endless regress or oscillation between two equally valid constructions of meaning. Rather it is a means of accounting for the aspect of the impossible, the increase in the sense of responsibility called for by deconstructive interpretation. In terms of the judge's decision, Derrida says: "A decision that didn't go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. It might be legal; it would not be just" (FL 24). And, of course, there are many decisions made all the time, by judges and others, that viewed within the context of the legal system are perfectly coherent and rule-bound--and just as clearly unjust. But even this judgment cannot be made with certainty on the spot. Justice is what is deconstructible, not what has an inherent self-present justification. In fact, as a wide range of legal scholars now increasingly recognize, the whole legal framework founded on self-presence of the self to the self, known in one of its aspects as intentionality, is largely responsible for the crisis of legitimation in the legal field with respect to rape law, the insanity defense, and many other areas.In current rape law, as many feminist legal scholars have argued, the question is not, did the rape victim say no, but rather, did the rapist understand the victim to be saying no. The threshold for conviction is thus the state of mind of the perpetrator, not the fact of the violation. As Derrida notes (in the form of a classical aporia): "The whole subjectal axiomatic of responsibility, of conscience, of intentionality, of property that governs today's dominant juridical discourse and the category of decision right down to its appeals to medical expertise is so theoretically weak and crude that I need not emphasize it here. And the effects of these limitations are massive and concrete enough that I don't have to give examples. [The obscure dogmatism that characterizes the discourses about the responsibility of the defendant, his or her mental state, the passionate character, premeditated or not, of the crimes, the unbelievable depositions of witnesses or `experts' on this subject should suffice to attest, in truth to prove, that no critical or criterialogical rigor, no knowledge can be attained on this subject]" (FL 25; FdL 55; bracketed passage added to French edition). As in a classical aporia, Derrida does then go on to say what he says he will not, giving several instances in which the legal system is clearly hampered by the guiding model of intentionality inherited from traditional humanism, in a tone which betrays an unusual (for him) level of sarcastic invective.
Derrida's third aporia rhymes with his recent thinking on apocalypse and other themes: what he calls urgency. The urgent need for justice paradoxically "obstructs the horizon of knowledge" (FL 26). As he says: "But justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait. It is that which must not wait. To be direct, simple and brief, let us say this: a just decision is always required immediately, `right away'" (FL 26). Obviously, a whole range of present concerns can be made to resonate (and this would always be the case, productively, in any future moment) in this statement, whether it be the urgency of racial justice in Los Angeles, the face-off with apocalyptic religious extremists in Waco, or the seemingly unconscionable delays in the international response to the civil war in Bosnia. The urgency embodied in the current slogan "No Justice, No Peace" recalls an earlier generation of Americans dissatisfied with their government who chanted "Peace Now." As radical, or empowering, as these slogans may be, they also have a tendency to take on apocalyptic or messianic tones that threaten rational decision. Or as Derrida says, citing Kierkegaard: "The instant of decision is a madness, says Kierkegaard. This is particularly true of the instant of the just decision that must rend time and defy dialectics" (FL 26). But, paradoxically, this is not just a danger, but also a promise. In the language that Derrida borrows (and transforms) from the speech-act theorists, the call for justice is never simply a constative, or statement of fact, but also and always a performative.
The singularity of the act of judgment as performative utterance means that each such act is necessarily a violent one. As Derrida puts this: "But as a performative cannot be just, in the sense of justice, except by founding itself on conventions and so on other anterior performatives, buried nor not, it always maintains within itself some irruptive violence" (FL 27; FdL 57).This relates to Derrida's account of the ethics of critical discourse in Limited Inc., where he says, for example: "And if, as I believe, violence remains in fact (almost) ineradicable, its analysis and the most refined, ingenious account of its conditions will be the least violent gestures, perhaps even nonviolent, and in any case those which contribute most to transforming the legal-ethical-political rules: in the university and outside the university" (112). In Limited Inc., responding in part to the "violence" of his response to John Searle, Derrida claims that the deconstructive analysis of such violent discursive acts (performatives) are "the least violent gestures, perhaps even nonviolent" (112). But just as one can never say in the present moment that "I am just," the orientation of nonviolence is necessarily that of a promise. Promise implies a future but this is not a simple future, a future that merely extends the present. Derrida explains this as follows: "Paradoxically, it is always because of this overflowing of the performative, because of this always excessive haste of interpretation getting ahead of itself, because of this structural urgency and precipitation of justice that the latter has no horizon of expectation. But for this very reason, it may have an avenir, `to-come,' which I rigorously distinguish from the future that can always reproduce the present. Justice remains, is yet, to come, à venir, the very dimension of events yet to come" (FL 27; FdL 60). Derrida's discussion of the yet-to-come structure of decision here rhymes explicitly with his discussion of democracy in the context of the recent changes taking place in Europe. In L'autre cap (The Other Heading), he uses these same terms to describe democracy: "a democracy that must have the structure of a promise--and therefore the memory of that which carries the future here and now" ("une démocratie qui doit avoir la structure de la promesse--et donc la mémoire de ce qui porte l'avenir ici maintenant" 76; my trans.; italics in text). I see these statements as continuing the thinking in the Grammatology on intersubjective violence as the necessary horizon for understanding "writing" in the larger sense outlined there. In other words, the violent underpinnings of "writing" understood as any system of instituted meaning or authority lead inevitably to the aporias of justice that Derrida examines in "Force of Law." These aporias in turn need to be understood, not as negatively paralyzing moments of undecidability, but as urgent reminders of the necessity for judgment to bring about such positive goals as nonviolent (human) interaction and democratic governing systems.
What can this positive moment of deconstructive critique say about the interpretive act, especially when that interpretation takes on the virtual world of cinematic violence? To begin with, I would say that deconstruction allows for an aversive stance to received ideas concerning representations of violence in film, television, music, art and other forms of popular culture. The dominant view shared by a range of arbiters, including leagues of concerned parents, conservative religious leaders and many elected representatives in Washington is that cinematic, televised, and musical violence--or what I will heuristically term "virtual" violence--bears a causal relation to violent behaviors, or what (for lack of a better term) I will call real violence. That this is the dominant view is clear from the power these figures have demonstrated in eliminating most representations of violence from network primetime programming. But apparently these legislators and concerned citizens are not satisfied with their de facto censorship of network programming; as the recently debated proposals on the so-called V-chip that would allow parents to block "violent" programming demonstrate, they seek a more active role. These are, not incidentally, the same federal legislators who have recently voted, among other things, to eliminate welfare payments to mothers under age eighteen, to scale back school lunch programs, and to scale back or eliminate all twenty-four federally funded education initiatives.
Thesis 1: Such political actions are acts of real violence.
My position is that politicians in general are more comfortable confronting "virtual" violence, over which they believe they can exercise some (real or imaginary) control--or, what is far more likely, they believe they can convince their constituents that they are exercising control--than they are confronting conditions of real violence, which not only necessarily elude them, but for which they inevitably bear some measure of responsibility.Julia Kristeva, discussing the work of Marguerite Duras, states: "Politics is notthe field in which human freedom is deployed. The modern political domain is massively, totalitarianly social, leveling, killing" (Soleil noir 242; my trans.). Or, as Derrida says, commenting on Benjamin: "The parliaments live in the forgetfulness of the violence from which they are born" (FL 47; FdL 113). This is not an accident, but an essential feature of constituted authority.
The following is an excerpt from an on-line discussion group at Towson State University called "Tigertalk" initiated by me under the heading "_Pulp Fiction_ Rules" in which I respond to someone asking what I see in Pulp Fiction and how I see it relating to Natural Born Killers (dir. Stone; 1994):
I see _Pulp Fiction_ as a creation of a postmodern space based on parody and oversaturation of pop culture contexts. Within that postmodern space, Tarantino stages all sorts of interesting ethical dilemmas and then sits back and watches what happens (with us). So one of the most interesting things about Quentin is his author-position which also doubles as a viewer-position and makes his work enormously appealing. While he has us hooked, he allows us to contemplate complicated situations that most of us will never come close to experiencing in "real life" from a position in which we are not directly threatened. Should I (Travolta) sleep with the boss's wife? Well, no because there's this loyalty thing. Should I (Travolta) try to save her life when she o.d.'s? Yes. Should I (Bruce Willis) go back in the basement and save the big man who hours earlier was trying to kill me? After some hesitation, mainly over choice of weapon, yes. Should I (Samuel L. Jackson) resort to shooting this loser Pumpkin, or should I negotiate my way out, since I'm trying to reform my life anyway? A little biblical hermeneusis and the answer is: nonviolence is the way.
Contrast to _Natural Born Killers_ which I also think a crucial piece of cinematic work: (1) author-position totally self-involved, so only a creep could identify with the vision of the director; (2) vision presented on screen totally engrossing and gross; (3) characters again placed in positions of having to make decisions from their own seriously flawed pasts and socially-constructed roles. So, aside from the fact that there is no possible "grooving" with THE MAN, like there is with Quentin, there are some comparisons possible? Watcha think? [2-Mar-1995]
I realized when I was writing this that I was responding to and ripping off an e-mail from my friend Jerry McGuire (that he has kindly permitted me to quote in this context):
subj: virtual possibilities
But I just saw _Natural Born Killers_ last night and loved it--a film that _thinks_ it's fulfilling social responsibilities right and left, but is worth watching (for me) exclusively because it is infantile, egomaniacal, sociopathic, and a tour de force of adolescent technologicity. Came out of it feeling truly gooey, but had my head nailed back while it was happening, and got to think over my own pretty wild mixture of responses. Not exactly a recollection in tranquillity, but certainly a struggle of secondary revision with itself under the various eyes of the whole squad of cognitive functional systems.
Which is to say, the responsibility is _my_ problem, not the film's, which is a peepshow whose principals outfit themselves with fetishes that remind me of my--well, your--culture. So the question you raise ("feel their pain") of identification / transference / sublimation etc. is the right one to ask, but I wouldn't be hasty to over-neaten the scenario, which _was_ Aristotle's, not to forget M. H. Abrams', problem. As it is the problem (from my point of view) of any model hanging its cap and gown on the oversimplifications of identity theories far and wide. As a response theorist, I'll remain an anarchist or I won't be in your revolution. [15-Feb-1995]
So far mine is the last link in the chain, which may mean I overloaded the channel. I also realized subsequently that I had completely failed to address the political dimension of my correspondent's query ("and you say that Generation Xers have no political commitment?").
Thesis 2: All ethico-political reflection occurs in virtual space though many of the resulting acts have real consequences.
Pulp Fiction begins with two prologues and then develops a series of three interlocking stories: "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife," "The Gold Watch," and "The Bonnie Situation." In the first prologue, a couple of thieves, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, are discussing their future in crime in a diner. Tarantino's first feature film Reservoir Dogs (1991) also begins with a prologue featuring a colloquy of thieves in a diner. Natural Born Killers, for which Tarantino wrote the original story, also begins in a diner. True Romance (dir. Tony Scott, 1993), for which Tarantino wrote the screenplay, begins in a bar, but develops scenes in coffee shops, as well.Tom Conley writes: "Somehow the gargote is a great place to initiate violence: a point that Lévi-Strauss had shown in Le Cru et le cuit, but that he probably found in They Drive by Night (Walsh, 1940) or I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy, 1932)" (personal letter). The couple of Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) are not particularly significant to the plot, but they do establish a key point: thieves have inner lives. They also have codes--"honor among thieves" is a time-honored trope--and quasi-moral issues. The second prologue features the film's two protagonists, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson). This prologue begins with the now-famous discourse on the "royale with cheese" that Vince has discovered in his European experience. The "royale with cheese" (what the French call MacDonald's quarter-pounder) clues the audience in on the idea that the film will be dealing with a kind of dense internesting of cultural details (much as Tarantino's character's rap on Madonna's Like a Virgin attempts in the prologue to Reservoir Dogs). The main topic the two hitmen rehearse as they prepare to perform their hit is an anecdote concerning a half-Samoan, half-black associate of theirs, Tony Rocky Horror, who apparently was tossed out of a four-story window for performing foot massage on the boss's wife. The humor, language, and mild parody of this morality play resonate with the first full frame of the film, when Vince is asked to escort the boss's wife, Mia Wallace, and show her a good time.Marsellus Wallace thus sets up this situation in which he cannot know what will happen, except by means of his power of interdiction, becoming thereby the perfect representation of the Other (or the Big Man, or simply, The Man). According to the analysis of Slavoj iek: "The fundamental pact uniting the actors of the social game is thus that the Other must not know all" (72). The irony of the frame's ending is that the secret the couple agrees to conceal is not an erotic dalliance, but Mia's near-death experience. There is also the chance for a nice visual pun on the ambiguities of "take care of her."
Thesis 3: The space of non-dominant discourse is increasingly being controlled by the same forces that control the means of production and the corresponding political power.See, for example, Andrew Ross's compelling arguments in The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life that the ecology movement has been actively coopted by a powerful coalition of political and business interests as a means of compelling a wide range of the citizenry from the poor to the upscale to accept a worldview based on diminished expectations for their material conditions of existence, the possibilities of social justice, equity of income distribution, and so forth.
Before Vince can take Mia out he apparently needs to score some drugs. One implicit strategy of Pulp Fiction is to dispense with any rationalizing about what the dominant society would consider serious moral transgressions. If two hitmen can discuss the cultural differences displayed in hamburger nomenclature, then one of these hitmen scoring high-grade heroin and shooting up is just part of the universe of the film. The entire episode of scoring the heroin is tinged by a funny extended discourse on body piercing that also introduces supporting characters who figure in the frame's more dramatic conclusion. Mildly shocking is that Vince clearly enjoys his high. Of course, it is simply a misrepresentation to claim otherwise, so what the dominant society tries to do is to censor all reference to the actual drug experience.James Baldwin's classic short story, "Sonny's Blues," dramatizes the situation of a drug addict remembering how he might have helped to turn Sonny on to drugs: "`I never give Sonny nothing,' the boy said finally, `but a long time ago I come to school high and Sonny asked me how it felt.I told him it felt great.It did'" (90). In an arguably similar way, dominant media censor all reference to actual sexual experience and ride fairly close herd on imaginative representations, as well.
In response to external pressures on the arts exerted by conservative politicians and religious leaders, and then reinforced by the supposedly "liberal" media, David Wojnarowicz, in Close to the Knives, generates a rage that is, in my view, completely apposite:
It doesn't stop at images--in a recent review of a novel in the new york times book review, a reviewer took outrage at the novelist's descriptions of promiscuity, saying `In this age of AIDS, the writer should show more restraint' Not only do we have to contend with bonehead newscasters and conservative members of the medical profession telling us to `just say no' to sexuality itself rather than talk about safer sex possibilities, but we have the thought police spilling out from the ranks with admonitions that we shouldn't think about anything other than monogamous or safer sex. I'm beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gesture is the imagination. At least in my ungoverned imagination I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw congressman William Dannemeyer off the empire state building. These fantasies give me distance from my outrage for a few seconds. They give me momentary comfort in a hostile world. They give me strength. I have always loved my anonymity and therein lies a contradiction because I also find comfort in seeing representations of my private experiences in the public environment. They need not be representations of my experiences--they can be the experiences of and by others that merely come close to my own or else disrupt the generic representations that have come to be the norm in the various medias outside my door. I find that when I witness diverse representations of `Reality' on a gallery wall or in a book or a movie or in the spoken word or performance, that the larger the range of representations, the more I feel there is room in the environment for my existence, that not the entire environment is hostile. (20-21)
Wojnarowicz's "violent" discourse may be said to enact his subject; it may also be said to expose the social, familial and political violence to which he has been subject. Wojnarowicz, in both his art and his prose, comes as close as any artist of our time to posing the questions of the interaction between the virtual and real levels of violence in our society.For a range of Wojnarowicz's visual and performance works, as well as his writings and insightful responses to his work, including its political implications, see the exhibition catalogue, Tongues of Flame. This in turn could be seen as one reason his work was singled out for attack by Helms and others.
Vince's drug use is matched by Mia, who provokes the frame's central crisis when she mistakes Vince's stash of highgrade heroin for cocaine and o.d.'s. Mia's error is counterpointed by Vince's bathroom soliloquy on loyalty and not banging the boss's wife. What might be the central ethical dilemma this frame dramatizes is Vince's commitment to save Mia's life by rushing her to the house of his drug-dealer friend and giving her a shot of adrenalin to the heart. The first time I saw the film I remember feeling a moment of boredom in the seconds leading up to Mia's discovery of Vince's stash. In my, admittedly personal, reactions to the film, I would now claim this boredom is the most radical moment of the frame and maybe the entire film--as Baudelaire says, "l'ennui est meurtrier" (boredom is murderous).iek's analysis of the Lacanian objet petit a lends a conceptual focus to the motivating objects of the three frames: the briefcase with the mysterious golden glow in the prologue and part three, the gold watch in part two. Of the "purely formal nature of the `object small a,'" iek says, "it is an empty form filled out by everyone's fantasy" (133). The (murderous) moment of boredom in the first frame may thus be symptomatic of the lack of the objet petit a. Avital Ronell brilliantly analyzes the psychoanalytic and hermeneutic dimensions of "drugs" in her Crack Wars; following Ronell, Mia's plight here might be compared to Emma Bovary's.
Thesis 4: Cinema, music, art and literary discourse (along with "private" conversations) are among the few remaining spaces where it is possible to question or subvert dominant socio-symbolic discourses based on normative values (cf. Wojnarowicz).
"The Gold Watch" is set up by an amusing prologue in which a military figure (Christopher Walken) hands on a family heirloom watch to young Butch, a watch that will figure prominently when boxer Butch (Bruce Willis) has to retrieve it after reneging on a promise to throw a fight made to the big man, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). The fix arrangement was made at the beginning of the previous frame. The main story of this frame begins with Butch winning the fight--by killing the other fighter--and escaping in a cab. The female cab driver is interested in "how does it feel to kill another person," to which Butch responds, "I don't feel the least bit bad about it." This is a bit of complexly embedded social discourse in itself, having to do with the ethics of boxing and, by extension, sports generally. When Butch returns to his apartment to retrieve the watch he blows away Vince, something which many people I have talked to about the film find disturbing for the reason that Vince returns in the final frame, meaning that the three frames are presented out of their chronological order. In following Vince and Jules' travails in the final frame we are constantly aware that Vince is only virtually there. The psychologically upsetting structure of a film narrative told out of order is given considerable depth by Slavoj iek.iek says, for example, "It would be wrong to conclude from the `nonexistence of the big Other,' i.e., from the fact that the big Other is just a retroactive illusion masking the radical contingency of the real, that we can simply suspend this `illusion' and `see things as they really are.' The crucial point is that this `illusion' structures our (social) reality itself" (71). He argues that the "staged" quality of the social order is such that when this staging is made apparent through the devices of the cinema (one thinks here of Brecht's Entfremdungseffekt), viewers are made uncomfortable. Even more people I have talked to are disturbed by the graphic representation of "homosexual" (i.e., staged as homosexual) rape and torture. As with Tarantino's graphic language for dealing with race, he means to be shocking in order, one would hope, to solicit engagement with these very issues. But the extremity of this situation only serves to set up, I would say, Butch's ethical dilemma, which is dramatized in his choice of the appropriate weapon of revenge.
Corollary to 3 and 4: This is why "the arts" can appear threatening to the normative socio-symbolic discourse.
The film's out-of-sequence final frame, "The Bonnie Situation," follows the end of the second prologue, with Jules reciting Ezekiel 25:17 prior to blasting one of the young wastrels. An unaccounted-for fourth youth comes out with gun blazing and completely misses the two hitmen, who finish him off. This is the miracle that causes Jules to experience "a moment of clarity" in the diner (introducing both symmetry and a final, fleeting possibility of non-violence). Riding in the car, Vince accidentally blows their young informant's head to bits, the motivating crisis of the frame. Vince and Jules head to the domicile of one of Jules' friends (Quentin Tarantino), where mob problem-solver Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel) arrives and helps them dispose of the headless corpse. Jules and Vince are unwinding at the coffee shop when Pumpkin and Honey Bunny pull their heist, but Jules is a smarter gunman than Pumpkin and gets the drop on him. This leads to his extended biblical hermeneusis on the passage from Ezekiel that he always used to recite before performing one of his jobs. He gives three possible interpretations. In the first, Pumpkin is the evil man, Jules is the righteous man, and the gun is the shepherd. In the second, Pumpkin is the righteous man, Jules is the shepherd, and it is the world itself that is evil. In the third scenario, Pumpkin is the weak and Jules is the tyranny of the evil man, but, as he says, "I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd" (187). Nobody wants to hear this right now in the "real" world, in which 1.2 million Americans are presently incarcerated (see Thesis 1) and even the current president has given his support to so-called "three strikes" sentencing legislation, but criminals have inner lives, and if they have inner lives, they can reform.
Thesis 5: Cinema, music, art, and literary discourse, through the creation of virtual spaces existing outside (or alongside) of normative, socio-symbolic discourses, embody deconstructive attitudes toward specific issues such as violence, social justice and participatory democracy that are active, sustainable possibilities.Perhaps because I was working on a version of this paper the week of the Oklahoma bombing, I feel the need to insist that this paper does not "advocate" violence in any form, and in fact sees the deconstructive endeavor as a form of non-violent analysis of violence that can potentially contribute to a lessening of violence (cf. Derrida, Limited Inc. 112). Andrew Ross develops a complex analysis of the World Trade Center bombing in The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life (99-158).
Peter Baker, Towson State University
Altieri, Charles. Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
Baker, Peter. Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995.
Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues," in Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dell, 1965, 86-122.
Bernasconi, Robert. "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics," in John Sallis, ed., Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 122-139.
Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Cook, Albert. Canons and Wisdoms. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
__________. "After Olson and Celan: The Breadth and Twist of the Referent" [APR], American Poetry Review 24:4 (1995), 9-16.
Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
Copjec, Joan (ed.). Shades of Noir: a Reader. London and New York: Verso, 1993.
Cornell, Drucilla. The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge, 1992.
__________. Transformations. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Critchley, Simon. "The chiasmus: Levinas, Derrida and the ethical demand for deconstruction," Textual Practice 3:1 (1989), 91-106.
__________. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. L'autre cap. Paris: Minuit, 1991; The Other Heading, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
__________. "Force of Law: The `Mystical Foundation of Authority'" [FL], translated by Mary Quaintance, in Drucilla Cornell et al. (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge, 1992, 3-67. [Force de loi (FdL). Paris: Galilée, 1994.]
__________. De la grammatologie [G]. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
__________. Limited Inc., translated by Sam Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988 [rev. ed.].
Dewdney, Christopher. Concordat Proviso Ascendant. Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1991.
Girard, René. La violence et le sacré. Paris: Grasset, 1972.
Helmling, Steven. "Historicizing Derrida," Postmodern Culture 4:3 (1994) [e-journal; no page numbers].
Kristeva, Julia. Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancholie. Paris: Seuil [Coll. Folio Essais], 1987; Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Montaigne. "De l'expérience," Essais. (Book III, Chapter 13), Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1962, 1041-1097.
Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
Ross, Andrew. The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Scholes, Robert. Protocols of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Tarantino, Quentin. Pulp Fiction [screenplay]. New York: Miramax / Hyperion, 1994.
Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. New York: Vintage, 1991.
__________. Tongues of Flame. New York: Distributed Art Publishers / Illinois State University Galleries, 1990.
iek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.