Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS

18 Performativity III: Retroactivism

18 Performativity III: Retroactivism ฀ In chapter 16, we looked at some examples of how, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, modernity and rationalization performatively shaped space and time and bodies and wood and labor,and how some of these articulations inform the more abstract or conceptual habit of binarizing and hierarchizing difference. Cultural theorist Fred Jameson coined the term ideologeme to name fundamental conceptual units such as the hierarchized binary (76, 87); these units resemble what get called tropes or topoi in rhetoric (that is, figures of speech or common metaphors); the more monolithic epistemological versions are Foucault’s episteme or Kuhn’s paradigm. Like all these related concepts, an ideologeme cannot really be a fundamental unit in the sense of something preexisting and relatively simple that is used to build more complex structures. It can’t be because it’s already the overdetermined product of (and participant in) a ubiquitous, resonant, very material, and multidimensional logic (as in the examples developed in chapter 16). There is a danger in considering an ideologeme as a more or less freestanding conceptual device: it grants too much agency to it, even in such simple but powerful ways as habitually making it the subject of sentences. Considering language more as a subject is a good way to restore some of the agency that referentialism tries to steal from it, but only if language is not mistaken for an independent thing-in-itself. If you want to emphasize the relational status of an ideologeme (the way it operates somewhere between wordness and thingness, and only by participating in a heterogeneous constellation of both), something more like Bruno Latour’s terms quasi-object and actant might do the trick or, to emphasize its virtual livingthinglikeness and contagious, viral, and parasitical quality, Richard Dawkins’s term meme 16-22.109-182_Livi.indd฀฀฀124 9/27/05฀฀฀3:29:06฀PM (which makes cultural units out to be like self-replicating genes, the common example being a฀catchy฀tune), or, to reject the reductionist organicism, something like Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract฀machines. This chapter returns to look at the complex circuitry of the ideologeme called romanticism, which is part of what orchestrates resonances among the ways that various kinds of difference are understood, part of what gives them their ring of truth. In particular, the ideologeme deploys the idea of a premodern past and a modern present to organize gender, sexual, and cultural /ethnic difference. The term romanticism has been used to name the particular period of history or literary history in question (namely, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), but since literary and historical periodizations (the mandate to cut up the historical pie into neat slices) are themselves concepts shaped by the romanticism supposed to be under investigation,we are driven to consider romanticism also as an ongoing ideological formation or complex that cuts up time. Most broadly, romanticism is a very modern kind of antimodernity , one that can function as accommodationist or as oppositional. Literary historians Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy have defined romanticism more specifically as “opposition to capitalism in the name of precapitalist values” (26; also see Livingston 12–14), but in any case romanticism seems to name a modern narrativization of time that ongoingly,often nostalgically but always retroactively, identifies a precapitalism or premodernity—or, even more fundamentally, a precultural nature. The important point is that the making of such a difference is not something that happened once and for all at some particular point in the past but is continually reproduced and renegotiated in the process. In other words, it is performative, so nothing written on the topic can be simply descriptive. The romantic ideologeme works not only to schematize historical eras but also to schematize gender, for example, by representing femininity as a kind of “hypercivilization,” either to valorize (as in Victorian cultural feminism) or to devalue (that is, by representing women as superficial or artificial creatures ). On the other (and equally ambivalent) hand, the same trope can just as well represent femininity as a less mediated relation to nature and therefore more innocent or pure or sexy—or in any case as a kind of superseded stage of masculine development. This latter turn of the trope has often structured Western caricatures of other peoples as variously “primitive,” though Western Orientalism in particular has also painted the East as “hypercivilized” as well (and, again, alternately to value or devalue). The...