A Response to Maurice Wallace

Maurice Wallace's reading of Toni Morrison's Jazz (1992) as an exemplar of print's prosthetic (im)personation offers a provocative point of entry for contemporary efforts in literary and cultural studies to amend—if not transfigure—existing conceptions of personhood. With his genealogy of the fetishization of print within American literature in general and African-American literature in particular, Wallace proffers a historicized understanding of literacy as a mode of power enacted through the technology of print and materialized in the form of literature. Moreover, by locating this literary personation at the particular conjunction of the oral and the written exemplified by the trope of the Talking Book, Wallace elucidates the extent to which print's perceived potential and limitations may owe as much to its magical function as to its technological one: within the African-American literary tradition, the techniques of standardized print not only render literature the prosthesis by which the textual appears to faithfully replicate the aural, but imbue the literary text with the alchemic power to make people out of property, humans out of things.¹ Or to put it differently, and as Wallace demonstrates in his reading of Jazz, the fantasy we hope to see fulfilled on the page is the proximal articulation of both the voice of the absent and the voice of the object.

Part of what is so provocative about Wallace's argument is that it makes possible a reading of print fetishism that integrates the multivalenced significance of the fetish across registers, ranging from commodity capitalism, to the economies of desire, to the metaphysics of objects of power. In its most material sense, the printed book is certainly a commodity fetish. It is the forced forgetting of the technologies of ink on press and the materials of paper pulp and glue that allow the reader to imagine that the transcription of sense and affect, culture and psyche to the printed page is both immediate and unmediated. Yet as Michel de Certeau argues in the pages that Wallace references, it is not only through the production of the book as commodity, but through the overall production of knowledge within bureaucratic technocracies, that the processes of alienation entail the print fetish. A critical instrument in the historic reproduction of the material and discursive structures through which knowledge is produced, diffused, and consumed, the printed text is overdetermined by these same power-laden relations. The primacy granted literacy within the African-American literary tradition points to the historical significance of the written text as a "secret"—an index of the mysterious (or more accurately, mystified) processes by which reading produced meaning.²

At the same time, for Wallace the fetishization of print in literary studies signals a desire for literature to effectively produce both personation and persons, and indexes an originary absence: the severed sound of living speech that text cannot personify.³ According to this logic, literature's disability is its inability to exceed its role as a near-simulacrum of living speech, a failure of personation that is at once aesthetic and ontological. Print, then, emerges as a prosthetic technology intended to suture the gap between the au/oral and the written, presence and absence, human and object. Marking what Fred Moten has described as "the cut between word and sound, meaning and context" (175), the printed word seeks to elide the very conditions it signals: the impossibility of reproducing the sonic in the written, and the unrepresentability of the subject in text.

The intertwined deployment of terminology of prosthesis and disability—enabling or otherwise—remains, for many, inextricable from the mid-nineteenth-century discourses of normalcy and deviance—the super-, sub-, or ab-normal—so crucial to the ideologies of technological and governmental progress that undergirded capitalist industrialization and the consolidation of bourgeois and bureaucratic power.⁴ Yet the rhetorical and critical promise that the metaphor of prosthesis holds for those invested in the creation of a post-humanist lexicon—among whom I count myself—is a Janus-faced one. However, as Moten reminds us, what appears as a "cut or a break that is easily reconfigured...