>Tom Lehman wrote:
>
>>The market is closing up today. Does that mean the market "likes" our
>>nation's tragedy?
>
Doug Henwood writes:
>The official line is that they're relieved there was nothing new in the
>report. To me, what's new is what an imperious jerk Clinton was with
Monica
>- like a guy whose idea of foreplay is a snap of the fingers followed
by
>pointing groinwards. At least with Gennifer he was a generous giver. Is
>this what power does?
>
>Doug
This has been on my mind lately (gaw, if only it weren't). I can think of a lot of anecdotal examples to draw from, of this kind of interpellation power-dynamic. It's all that adolescent, often frustrated boy sexuality surging from the Big Star[r] I sometimes listen to, no doubt. But I hesitate to specify the dynamic by gender, though I would suggest, along with Eve Sedgwick below, that it is incribed in an economy of male desire. Note the part about the call, the snapping the fingers, and how Sedgwick reads it in *Billy Budd*. Interesting stuff.
So here's a jump in theoretical register. Bill/Monica, Claggart/Billy, it's that imperious, violent call to interpellation. With an interesting relationship to consider between Bill's & Monica's heterosexual thing, and Claggert's and Billy's homoerotic. Political ramifications mostly aside.
>From _Epistemology of the Closet_, "Some Binarisms (1); Billy Budd:
*After the Homosexual*", pp. 98-100
Like *The Bostonians* but by a more definitive, less contigent path, *Billy Budd* enforces, through the reader's drama of disorientation and tentative empowerment, an equation between cognitive mastery of the world in general and mastery of the terms of homoerotic desire in particular.
[from Billy Budd]
But for the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature these hints are insufficient. To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross "the deadly space between." And this is best done by indirection.
Long ago an honest scholar, my senior, said to me in reference to one who like himnself is now no more, a man so unimpeachably respectable that against him nothing was ever openly said though among the few something was whispered, "Yes, X--- is a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady's fan. You are aware that I am the adherent of no organized religion, much less of any philosophy built into a system. Well, for all that, I think that to try and get into X---, enter his labyrinth and get out again, without a clue derived from some source other than what is known as 'knowledge of the world'--that were hardly possible, at least for me."
. . . At the time, my inexperice was such that I did not quite see the drift of all this. It may be that I see it now.
[end Budd]
Where the reader is in all this is no simple matter: where, after all, can the reader wish to be? The terrorism wielded by the narrator's mystifications makes the role of "normal" incomprehension at once compulsory and contemptible. The close frame of a male-homosocial pedagogy within which alone the question of X--- can be more than whispered (though still not so much as asked), but "*against*" which the question of X--- must be all the more sharply distinguished, is specified as a bygone possiblity at the same time as it is teasingly proffered by the narrator to the reader. Knowledge of X---, in an image whose ghastliness is scarcely mitigated by its disguise as commonplace, is presented as a testicular violence against him, while to fail to crack his nut is oneself to be feminized and accessorized. The worst news, however, is that knowledge of X--- and "knowledge of the world" turn out to be not only not enough, but more dangerous than no knowledge at all: to know X--- is not, after all, to deliver the single *coup* of the nutcracker but, rather, with a violence suddenly made vulnerability "to get into X---, enter his labyrinth"--requiring the emregency rescue of some yet more ineffable form of cognition to prevent the direst reversal of the violent power relations of knowledge.
The reader, thus, is invented as a subject in relation to the "world" of the novel by an act of interpellation that is efficacious to the degree that is is contradictory, appealing to the reader on the basis of an assumed sharing of cognitive authority whose ground is hollowed out in the very act of appeal. The reader is both threatened with and incited to violence at the same time as knowledge. This is also the rhetorical structure of a pivotal moment of the plot of *Billy Budd*. The sudden blow by which Billy murders Claggart in their confrontation under the eye of Vere is preceded by two interpellatory imperatives addressed by Vere to Billy. The first of these instructs Billy, "Speak, man!. . . Speak! defend yourself!" The second of them, brought home to Billy's body by Vere's simultaneous physical touch, is "'There is no hurry, my boy. Take your time, take your time'". It is possible that Billy could have succeeded in making himself intelligible as either "man" or "boy." But the instruction to him to defer as boy, simply juxtaposed on the instruction to expedite as a man, "touching Billy's heart to the quick" also ignites it to violence: "The next instant, quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right arm shoe out, and Claggart dropped to the deck." It is, of course, at this moment of Claggart's murder that Billy has been propelled once and for all across the initiatory threshold and into the toils of Claggart's phobic desire. The death of the text's homosexual marks, for reasons we must discuss later, not a terminus but an initiation for the text, as well, into the narrative circulation of male desire.
In *Billy Budd*'s threatening stagint, then, *knowledge of the world*, which is linked to the ability to recognize same-sex desire, while compulsory for inhabitants and readers of the world, is also a form of vulnerability as much as it is of mastery. Some further, higher, differently structured way of knowing is required of the person who would wish for whatever reason to "enter [Claggart's] labyrinth *and get out again*." We have already suggested, in a formulation that will require more discussion, that the form of knowledge circulated around and by Claggart ought to be called paranoia. If that is true, then what form of knowledge can in this world be distinguished from paranoia, and how?
[end excerpt]
Maybe someone could do a reading like this of the Starr text! Rock on!
-Alec
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