Scare Quotes Research Articles

Bad Modernisms (review)

Reviewed by: Bad Modernisms Eric Hayot Bad Modernisms. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz , eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. vii + 365. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). There are many kinds of badness in the world, and they run from genuine wickedness to indeliberate stupidity, from hypocrisy to the secret goodness of the radical misbehaver (everyone's favorite mode: Jesse James, James Dean, James Joyce, Storm Jameson). At various moments modernism and its avatars have been accused of each of these, and of course, modernism being a complex and capacious object (more than ever these days), each of these accusations has rung the tinny bell of truth. You could tell a story about modernism's critical fortunes that begins with the perception of a profoundly "good" badness (the disobedient laughter of dada, the formal disintegrations of the avant-garde) and ends, after the critical revisions of the 1980s that tied modernism to advertising, to empire, and to patriarchy, with a more ordinary, disappointing one. By story's end, editors Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz write in the introduction to Bad Modernisms, modernism was seen as something "not at war against but rather continuous with tradition," "bad" in ways that rather precisely reversed the previous impressions of its goodness (6). For some people, being "continuous with tradition" is "good," but of course this is one of the problems with the words "bad" and "good" in the first place, and why they appear so often in scare quotes. From a serious perspective (that is, a "good" one) the words are too fuzzy to do much work with: their syllabic simplicity feels childish. It is possible that the "bad" in the collection's title, then, implicitly criticizes the binary, moralistic habits that corset our thinking. As we shall see, the essays in the book bear that feeling out. This collection of essays comes not to praise modernism's badness, thereby giving the dialectical piñata of the political aesthetic another desultory whack (in Christopher Bush's immortal phrase), but to suggest, in a variety of contexts ranging from the hypercanonical to the obscure, that a variety of modernism's "bad" habits or positions—either ones modernism itself denigrated, or ones denigrated in modernism—are absolutely caught up in what was "good" about it. Thus we learn from Sianne Ngai's essay on Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich that a mode of critical reading that attends mostly to plot elements in the film Blonde Venus—a mode, therefore, of total aformalistic "badness" whose lesson it was modernism's task to unteach—nonetheless opens up "unnoticed dimensions of the aesthetic object that suddenly rise to the foreground." This rising allows us to see old objects with fresh eyes and to recognize there, Ngai argues, "previously unsuspected examples of [modernist] making" that might return some of the lost suppleness of modernism's preferred aesthetic forms (173). Reading "badly," that is, makes visible aesthetic complexities that might otherwise have been missed. What results is an extension of modernism's very possibilities, one that depends on our ability to read more cleverly than we have until now those neglected "other" forms of literary and artistic production (including plot!) appearing alongside or even inside the modernist classics. Ngai's project is the model of the collection more generally: each essay leaves its reader with new objects or new tools for the field. If a singular "modernism" can be said to emerge from the book, it is one that exists more in the form of an imaginative challenge and less as a list of authors or set of formal features defining the limits of a special class. It is unfinished, and it invites interpretive labor. Hence Jesse Matz's essay, which begins by noting that no modernism "has gone bad worse than Impressionism" (300). The latter's beginnings in "subversive energy, all color and light" promised a revolution in critical vision. But by the end of the twentieth century, the story goes, impressionism was a desiccated, commercialized epitome of bourgeois culture, too busy authorizing "the total triumph of superficial form" and a "culture of distraction and fakery" to bother [End Page 364] with afternoon sunlight or...

Uncloseting Drama: Gertrude Stein and the Wooster Group

In the late winter and early spring of 2005, the New York theatre troupe the Wooster Group staged, both in Brooklyn and Manhattan, a limited return engagement of their 1999 piece House/Lights, an “adaptation” of Gertrude Stein's 1938 play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. The word “adaptation” belongs firmly in scare quotes, not only because it is a methodological description that the members of the Wooster Group would themselves resist, but also because it simultaneously over- and underrepresents the terms of the group's engagement with Stein's text. If an adaptation is a modified version of a work that nevertheless retains the integrity of and an obvious resemblance to the original, then House/Lights falls short of the mark; it is, rather, an eccentric pastiche of many source materials, among which Doctor Faustus comprises only one elliptically integrated element. Yet, at the same time as House/Lights fails to meet the requirements of an adaptation – and precisely on account of the manner in which it does so – the piece also exceeds the constraints of mere modification and offers instead a rigorous and sophisticated interpretation of Stein's text. Of course, every theatrical presentation of a play is an act of interpretation, but the singular nature of the Wooster Group's approach constitutes a mode of analysis more akin to the work of literary criticism than it is to the goals of traditional dramaturgy. In short, the Wooster Group highlights the potential of performance to embody a way of reading, and House/Lights highlights, in particular, a way of reading the notoriously difficult Stein. In turn, I propose a reading of Stein alongside – and through the lens of – the Wooster Group, in order to underscore the ways in which the group's complex performance amplifies shades of meaning already at play in Stein's correspondingly complex writing.

Telephilia and Distraction: Terms of Engagement

‘Good television?’ The question mark and scare quotes in the title give the issue a double indemnity against any misapprehension that this is simply to be about ‘quality television’ (another formulation which rarely escapes scare quotes). They imply a welcome wariness and open the way for other questions which haunt critical engagement with television: What about ‘great television’? Or is ‘good’ as good as it gets? Is Fredric Jameson right that television, like video, has no monuments, no Citizen Kanes or Personas, to mark out its history and its horizons (1987)? Or is Adorno correct that television is the ‘dreamless dream’, domesticated by its size and location, which, rather than taking us where we have not been before, welds us to ‘the unavoidable’, making us ‘once again what [we] truly are, only more so’ (1998: 49, 50)? And if Jameson and Adorno are even halfway right, is it worth pursuing talk of an art of television or of television as an art? How, alternatively, do we assign value to television? Is ‘good television’ a masquerade of the middle-brow, and is that the limit of our ambition? How are we to write about television, and why are we not asking of it the questions we ask of film, literature or art? What interests me in this article is the question of critical writing. Recognising ‘the sheer size of television as a phenomenon’ which John Ellis notes in the introduction to Seeing Things (2002: 3), I want to move from the task of phenomenological description to questions of engagement. In the distinction which he makes, I want to think about what we do when we write about programmes rather than about television, and what the defining terms of our critical engagement are. More precisely, and borrowing from Ellis in a quite different context (1980: 88), when we as academics and intellectuals write about television, who do we think we are?1 These questions have a provenance which may be relevant to the discussion.

Feeling the Heat

Feeling the Heat

Ideology and the grammar of idealism: The Caterpillar controversy revisited

Methodological idealism is attractive to the ideologue because of the freedom it offers to construct a preferred story-line. This means that the realist critique of such writings tends to coincide with a critique of ideology. Amplifying an earlier analysis by the author ( Armstrong, 2004 ), this paper revisits a recent exchange along these lines within the literature of critical accounting. The occasion was Miller and O’Leary's (1994) proclamation that a ‘new economic citizenship’ had come into being with the spatial re-organization of manufacture at the now defunct Decatur plant of Caterpillar company. A first critique by Arnold (1998) demonstrated that this version of events could not be reconciled with the experiences of the workforce. A second, by Froud et al. (1998) pointed out that it was actually based on an uncritical recycling of management representations of their own actions; a more adequate understanding, both of the representations and of the actions needed to situate both in relation to the company's competitive situation. Though both critiques commented on the stylistic devices employed in Miller and O’Leary's narrative, neither of them, understandably, made any detailed analysis of their role in arguing Miller and O’Leary's most spectacular claim: that there was some kind of ‘linkage’ between the changes in the layout of Decatur's shopfloor and a new economic citizenship for the workforce. Because Miller and O’Leary's manner of ‘writing the social’ has now become a dominant force within the critical accounting project, it is important to examine the manner in which it achieves its truth-effects. On the evidence of the Caterpillar paper, at least three stylistic devices are heavily involved: • A persistent tendency to write in the passive voice fudges the issue of who thought and did what. A first consequence is that management images of the state of mind of the workforce are all-too-easily taken to be primary evidence of what these states of mind were. A second is that the narrative fails to distinguish interpretations made by the people at Decatur from the authors’ own. • The widespread use of key terms in scare quotes, creates uncertainties about whose definitions of them are at issue and what those definitions are. The result is a terminological slack which allows the authors to argue at will the linkages and connections (also undefined) on which their thesis depends. • A preference for writing about control systems in terms of the personal characteristics which they assume results in a narrative in which hypothetical beings (e.g. ‘the governable person’) are repeatedly invoked and gradually take on a quasi-corporeal existence in the process. Modes of ‘governmentality’ then appear to produce their intended effects simply in virtue of their existence. Taken together, the effect of these rhetorical devices is to allow the empirical world to speak in evidence, but only as scripted by the authors. In this manner, the warrant of empirical research is attached to a preferred vision of the social. The result is ideology.

Enrico Jones and the empirical science of psychoanalysis

Adolph Grunbaum (1984, 1993) challenged that psychoanalysis as it stands can be, but is not yet, a science at all. While he was at it, he took apart the arguments of narrativist and hermeneutic apologists, twisting the knife as he ran. He argued in excruciating philosophic detail that claims of psychoanalytic truth cannot be made by merely listening at couchside—they must be substantiated extra–clinically. Many analytic clinicians ignored this charge. It disappeared or was forgotten amidst the wave of postmodern opinions, especially those that gave heavy weight to the subjective aspect in psychotherapy process or critical analysis.1 But the newer emphasis—that clinical craft is a co–created enterprise—also seemed to release some of us from systematic or rigorous testing of ideas, having doomed “objectivity” to be forever encased in scare quotes. That sea change featured a respectable collective of commentators, and its effect on the hegemony of classical psychoanalysis has been profound. A sampling includes: the consideration of distorting influences on patient and therapist narrative accounts (Spence, 1982); the assertion of the ineradicably subjective nature of the analyst’s interventions and the consequent impeachment of analytic authority (Renik, 1993); the explication of re–narrated selfunderstanding, with or without illusion, as effecting clinical benefit (Schafer, 1992); and finally, the imposition of dialectical polarities or relativism on clinical understanding (Gergen, 1994; Hoffman, 1998; Ogden, 1994), and, among the academics, the lignum vitae relativists Rorty (1979) and Fish (1989). One

‘Subliminable’ Messages, Scare Quotes, and the Use Hypothesis

According to the Use Hypothesis, examples such as (1) life is ‘the farce which everybody has to perform’ convey (among other things) a message to the effect that life is the farce which everybody has to perform, that is, information-content obtained from the customary contributions provided by the expressions within quotes. Apparently problematic from the point of view of the Use Hypothesis are cases such as (2) these are ‘subliminable’ ads because ‘subliminable’ seemingly fails to contribute anything to the content in question. My essay defends the Use Hypothesis by suggesting how it can profitably be applied to cases such as (2).

Varieties of Quotation Revisited

This paper develops the view presented in our 1997 paper “Varieties of Quotation”. In the first part of the paper we show how phenomena such as scare quotes, echoing and mimicry can be treated as what we call Speech-Act Heuristics. We then defend a semantic account of mixed quotation. Along the way we discuss the role of indexicals in mixed quotation and the non-cancelability of reference to words in mixed quotation. We also respond to some objections raised by Recanati, Saka, Stainton and Reimer.

Scare Quotes and Their Relation to Other Semantic Issues

The main aim of this paper is that of providing a unified analysis for some interesting uses of quotation marks, including so-called scare quotes. The phenomena exemplified by the cases I discuss have remained relatively unexplored, notwithstanding a growing interest in the behavior of quotation marks. They are, however, of no lesser interest than other, more widely studied effectsachieved with the help of quotationmarks. In particular, as I argue in whatfollows, scare quotes and other similar instances bear interesting relations with someimportant themes in the study of natural languages, such as questions regarding alleged devicesof conventional implicature, cases of so-called metalinguistic negation, and, moregenerally, problems pertaining to the distinction between semantic and pragmatic fieldsof inquiry.

Disconnections, Connections, and Questions: Reflections on Jacques Rancière's "Ten Theses on Politics"

Disconnections, Connections, and Questions: Reflections on Jacques Rancière’s “Ten Theses on Politics” Kirstie M. McClure (bio) Last year, when this symposium was first imagined, little seemed further away than the prospect of war. Little today, might seem further from the singularity of the past month than talk of the Greek demos, or of a political sensibility gathered through a critical engagement with its ancient philosophical detractors. To say this is to note what I take as a double dilemma besetting the arrival on these shores of Professor Rancière’s “10 Theses on Politics” — the first English translation of which is soon to be available on line in the electronic journal Theory and Event. In the first place, there is the dilemma encountered by all translations that are not, as Walter Benjamin had it, merely a matter of conveying information. Political languages, I take it, are not simply a collection of concepts stated and defined in analytic terms. Akin to poetics in this respect, they often travel strangely from place to place because, even today, there remains something almost chthonic about them. There remains, in other words, something that ties their affective dimensions to the particularities of their living usages as a common vernacular, something that Rancière himself thematizes with the somatically inflected term “aisthesis” — that is, a feeling of justice and injustice that materializes within particular partitions of the sensible. This, I would suggest, is even more the case with regard to polemical writings, however widely dispersed their stipulated conceptual armature might be — as is the case now with such terms as democracy, equality, freedom, law, rights, civil society, and the like. This is the sort of thing that Hannah Arendt marked in her observation that, in the absence of a sensus communis — that tacit sense of what “goes without saying” in particular places — political argument tends to be captured by the demands of that other capacity common to creatures capable of language, the demands of logic. This first dilemma, then, is no small one. But these days it is perhaps exacerbated by a second — that is, by “the events of Sept. 11” and their continuing implications. As I write this near the end of September, beyond the acts of terrorism that they surely were, those events have yet to receive a settled name, though two jostle together across the airwaves and in common conversation: “acts of war” and “crimes against humanity.” Though these last two have been ordinarily understood as mutually exclusive, it now appears that the conventional disparity between them has yielded to modes of acting that synthesize their martial and juridical fields into a common practice. On October 9th the front page of Le Monde characterized this practice, in scare quotes, as “le guerre humanitaire” — “humanitarian war” — a phrase that (to my knowledge) is no less new than it is strange. Between these two dilemmas — that of translation and that of the event — this symposium is unavoidably suspended. At such a time, some might say, to speak of the Greek demos can only be an academic exercise, the murmurings of scholars and antiquarians. Tolerable in their proper place, of course. Even appropriate, as the usual hum of the academy. Academics in the U.S. are often told — and sometimes say ourselves — that the university is a place separate from “the real world.” And yet, even for those tempted to disparage it, it is a part of the normalcy to which many now wish to return. And this, I think, is where our two dilemmas begin to merge. For at this moment, the difficulty of translating polemics across national and linguistic frontiers now meets the contingencies of an American context for which both “politics” and “polemics” have long been terms of disrepute in any case. But perhaps there’s an opportunity here as well. In the remarks that follow, I’d like to skirt these dilemmas by briefly noting a few lines of connection and disconnection that appear to me significant, in this time and this place, as a reader of the “10 Theses.” I. Disconnections First, some disconnections. Here, I would begin by noting something that, on first glance, might seem an incommensurable...

On the 'Universality' of Madness: Bessie Head's "A Question of Power"

The title of this paper is provocative. It contains two words-universality and madness-which are, to say the least, problematic and contentious. I put universality in scare quotes, but madness calls in many ways for equal if not greater caution. I start by assuming that to qualify the first immediately throws a critical light on the second. This paper will try to address the hesitancy and awkwardness of both terms for a white woman writing about a black woman writer's semifictional account of a period of breakdown in Africa.

On Value and value: A Reply to Quentin Smith

In ‘Concerning the Absurdity of Life’ Quentin Smith accuses us of contradicting ourselves in our argument against Thomas Nagel. On the one hand we said that Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 is not ‘insignificant’ compared with cosmic radiation. On the other we said that the life of a man of integrity or humanity could be lived without a formal claim to Value, so that there was nothing for Nagel's external perspective to negate. But where is the contradiction? We put ‘emotional value’, used of Mozart's concerto, in scare quotes, to show that we disapproved of the phrase, and we also called the emotional value ‘so-called’ with the same intention. What we said about the life of the man of integrity, as we characterized it, was that no formal claim about Value was made for it—note the capital V. ‘Formal’ was meant to make the same point. We meant neither to assert nor to deny that Value was objectively present in the concerto. If we had asserted it, that would have meant that the concerto was no good. If we had denied it, that would have committed us to a styptic view of what it would be for it to be false that it was no good. Also not wanted was to understand how music has a value, for example in education. Smith did not see that we were gunning for just the kind of analysis he gives of integrity and humanity. Hence that capital V in our reference to ‘Value’. It was meant ironically. Is a man's integrity ‘living by his values’, as Smith says, or is ‘humanity’, as we used it, ‘respecting the value of other human beings’? Integrity is surely, as the OED says, more a certain kind of unbrokenness or wholeness, being uncorrupted, even sinless, or innocent. The OED rightly makes no mention of values. Nor does it mention them under ‘humanity’: kindness, benevolence, humaneness, ‘traits or touches of human nature or feeling; points that appeal to man’. It is not true, let alone analytically true, as Smith says, that the notions of integrity and humanity involve value.