Knowing What We Are Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of Postmodernity

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Knowing What We Are Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of Postmodernity Author(s): Mitchum Huehls Source: Cultural Critique, No. 61 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 55-86Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489223Accessed: 01-09-2015 21:23 UTC

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KNOWING WHAT WE ARE DOING TIME, FORM, AND THE READING OF POSTMODERNITY

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The fruit was gleaming and wet, hard-edged. There was a

self-conscious quality about it.

-Don DeLillo, White Noise

In "The End of Temporality," an essay that condenses his much

longer A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Fredric Jameson has recently described "the 'end of temporality' as a situation faced by postmodernity in general and to which its artists and subjects are obliged to respond in a variety of ways." The features of this "end" include the "shrinkage of existential time and the reduction to a present that hardly qualifies as such any longer, given the virtual effacement of that past and future that can alone define a

present in the first place" (708). Jameson depicts a fervent cult of presentness derived from the nominalist tendencies of late capitalism's socioeconomic order and exacerbated by postmodern theories such as Deleuze and Guattari's ideal schizophrenia. This thin and flimsy present circumscribes our event horizon, facilitating a pornography of violence to which our postmodernity has grown immune.

In addition to updating in temporal terms the work he performed in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, where he correlates postmodernity and spatialization, Jameson's recent work also rehabilitates long-denounced concepts such as lived

experience, the subject, and even humanism. Jameson, however, does not give experience carte blanche; for instance, he criticizes the phenomenological project-stretching from Bergson, through Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, up to Deleuze-for trusting in the transparent

Cultural Critique 61-Fall 2005-Copyright 2005 Regents of the University of Minnesota



56 I MITCHUM HUEHLS

and immediate "plenitude" of corporeal and intellectual experience. What is new here, then, is that the inevitable mediation of experiential knowledge does not necessarily preclude the truth, legitimacy, or existence of experience as such. For Jameson, temporality and our lived experience of it ground this compromise between the ostensi- ble immediacy of experience and the inescapable mediacy of representation. In other words, discursivity only precludes existence (of

experience, subject, humanity, and so on) when time has been onto-

logically reduced to space, when we live only in the present and fail to embrace a fuller sense of time that includes the past and the future. Contrary to conventional treatments of postmodernism's turn to language, Jameson insists that "to position language at the center of things is also to foreground temporality, for whether one comes at it from the sentence or the speech act, from presence or the coeval, from comprehension or the transmission of signs and signals, tem-

porality is not merely presupposed but becomes the ultimate object or ground of analysis" (706).

Using Don DeLillo's White Noise, the proliferation of critical re-

sponses to it, and several other cultural artifacts as examples, I contend that incorporating temporality as the nondiscursive grounding of linguistic and cultural difference can avoid the paradoxical and chiasmatic dead ends that mark much postmodern literature, schol-

arship on that literature, and cultural theory in general. Furthermore, I will argue that foregrounding the temporality of literary and cultural reference can fructify meaning beyond the postmodern impasse because it provides access to a formal production of meaning that resists conflation with its content.1

The present Bush administration's 2002 national security strat-

egy, equally hailed and decried for instituting the most radical shift in foreign policy since the United States' doctrine of Cold War con-

tainment, offers a timely example both of Jameson's cultural diagnosis and of how reducing temporality to presentness conflates time's form and content. The strategy's doctrine of preemption reduces a thick and complicated past and future to a present polluted with a

politics in which an unknown future predicates both discourse and

action in the present. On September 14, 2001, at the National Cathe- dral in Washington, D.C., President Bush proclaimed, "Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance



KNOWING WHAT WE ARE DOING 57

of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Bush went on to say, "The conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing." To the extent that we do not have to wait for historical "distance" to know what is required of us, we also do not have to wait for the future to determine our

response to it-abridging history and possibility, past and future,

justifies preemptive action in the present. To ensure that the conflict ends "in a way, and at an hour" of their choice, the administration has written into being what Jameson might call the total ontologiza- tion of the present:

The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater the risk of inaction-and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. To forestall or

prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if

necessary, act preemptively.

Not only does this doctrine reduce temporality to presentness, but it also sacrifices lived experience on the altar of discursive speech acts-writing and declaring the doctrine of preemption is tantamount to winning the wars before we ever start them. The conditionals and

contingencies of the strategy ("if uncertainty remains" and "if nec-

essary") do not proliferate the possibilities of experience; they reach out tentacle-like and strangle it.

Crucial to the national security strategy's success is its conflation of temporal form and content. Preemption structures time as a

symmetrical and reversible medium: because the future is now, we must act as if now were that future (an example of the chiasmatic dead end mentioned above). On this terrain (and here I am inten-

tionally metaphorizing temporality spatially), temporality as a medium of lived experience becomes so overdetermined, with both the

present predetermining the unknown future and our fear of the future's unknowability overdetermining the present, that its formal

structure guarantees its content. In other words, choosing the "hour" when the conflict will end allows Bush to control the "way" of the end-

ing, and when achieved temporally, this power to determine formally



58 I MITCHUM HUEHLS

necessarily entails the content (victory through violence) of that chosen end. Preemptive form does not just determine content, it is its

content.2 Conversely, a form that could adequately account for our

nonknowledge of the future without preempting it and dragging it into our present might dialectically accommodate its content, effec-

tively retemporalizing how we produce experiential knowledge of the world.3

At stake, then, is the availability, viability, and meaningfulness of critique, be it scholarly, cultural, or downright riotous. Theorists and critics of ideology have long understood the need to identify a nondiscursive difference immune to reflexivity, symmetry, and

meta-epistemology. For example, Louis Althusser, in his 1969 essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an In-

vestigation)," usefully characterizes the challenge this way: "Now it is this [scientific] knowledge that we have to reach . . . while speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subjectless) discourse on ideology" (173). Although most of his work up through the self-criticism of the 1970s negotiates this loopiness with structural metaphors that merely reinscribe the problem's discursivity, in his quirky 1966 essay "Cre- monini, Painter of the Abstract," Althusser abandons the iterative structure of spatialized metaphors to identify instead a constitutive absence at the center of all representation. In this essay Althusser claims that Cremonini paints difference where others paint only sim-

ilarity, creating a language of the negative that can adequately cri-

tique ideology. Cremonini's ability to manifest the negative through his art allows him to resist a representationalist ideology that only paints the nominal terms or objects that constitute a given relation. Instead Cremonini paints relations by painting "visible connexions that depict by their disposition, the determinate absence which gov- erns them" (237). Only by painting a "disposition" to a relation (the "how" of form instead of the "what" of content) can the relation be

truly manifest, and it is in this way, Althusser claims, that Cremonini

simultaneously paints and critiques ideological structures.

Althusser's description of Cremonini's painting echoes Paul Ricoeur's articulation of the "is/is not" function of metaphor. In "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,"




for instance, Ricoeur explains that a metaphor's meaning depends as much on the dissimilarities between the tenor and vehicle as it does on their similarities. For Ricoeur and the many theologians who have

appropriated this idea, the "is" trumps the "is not" to create a new, more powerful way of seeing the world. Ricoeur does not erase the "is not," however, and its constitutively negative "presence" makes this an open-ended theory of metaphor that, like Cremonini's art, does not succumb to the naivete of transparent representation.

More problematically, however, the "is not" in Ricoeur's theory of metaphor can never be a necessary difference. The ways in which love is a rose and the ways in which it is not are neither immanent to nor necessary for the metaphor "love is a rose." Given the con- stant presence of the "is not," any metaphor's tenor and vehicle could

easily switch places; the lack of necessity in the "is not"'s difference entails that we could just as meaningfully say, "A rose is love" as we can say, "Love is a rose." Here we see the logic of metaphor suf-

fering from the same reflexive symmetry that Althusser identifies at the heart of ideology. Etienne Balibar's Masses, Classes, Ideas brings these two problems together: he describes ideology as a concept cov-

ering over a foundational aporia, specifically the aporia or difference that lies at the center of metaphor and thus at the center of all

language. Balibar explains that for Marx and Engels "the concept of

ideology . . . is ultimately constituted by a denial of the essentially metaphoric nature of language" (167). We might assume, then, that a theory of metaphor like Ricoeur's, which reveals and engages the constitutive aporia of metaphor, could serve as a model for productive ideology critique. Balibar warns against this approach, however,

noting the need for a theory of ideology that remains insusceptible to the "philosophical symmetry of truth and illusion" because each new theory of ideology (like ideology itself) "reproduces in its own

way the same symmetry" (156-57). Because discursive difference is a symmetrically reversible rather than a necessary difference-because it means as much for love to be a rose as it does for a rose to be love-revealing the aporias that ideology masks is a circular and ineffective answer to ideological mystification. As I will use White Noise

to demonstrate, revealing and recognizing the metaphoricity of lan-

guage does not negate ideology, it only amplifies it because the reversible structure of metaphor makes it that much more susceptible



60 MITCHUM HUEHLS

to ideological manipulation. For example, the very revelation, "x is a metaphor," is complicit with the same structure of symmetrical difference that the "revealed" metaphor uses to produce its mean-

ing in the first place.4 Slavoj Zi'ek offers similar warnings in "The Spectre of Ideology,"

writing that "the concept of ideology must be disengaged from the

'representationalist' problematic: ideology has nothing to do with 'illusion,' with a mistaken, distorted representation of its social content"

(7, Zi'ek's emphasis). Zi'ek continues to rework the concept, ex-

plaining, "ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality" (17, Zi'ek's emphasis).5 Whereas Althusser treats this empty space as a negatively determined, structural relation with the world and Balibar locates it in language's inherent metaphoricity, Zi'ek goes on to identify the empty space of critique as a primordially "repressed real." Although Zi'ek's renunciation of representationalism is useful, his negative does not meet Balibar's criterion of asymmetry. For example, Zi'ek's meta-

epistemological definition of ideology-the masses know very well what they do but continue to do it-betrays an inherently meta-

epistemological reflexivity to his thought. To be sure, all three of these theorists of ideology suggest that as long as the empty space required for sociocultural critique remains symmetrically metaphorical and representationally positive, the relation between what and how something is said will be ignored while the relation between what is said and what is meant will be irremediably confused.

Despite the symmetry of Zifek's meta-epistemological description of contemporary ideology, this iteration of Marx's definition (the masses know not what they do) nevertheless provides an accurate

diagnosis of how ideology functions in contemporary culture. Wit-

ness, for instance, the 2001 release from Universal Studios Josie and the Pussycats, a cinematic update of the Archie comic from the 1970s about a crime-fighting girl band. In the movie, Pentagon officials collude with top executives from Megarecords to manipulate cul-

tural trends and market corporate products to teenagers by plant- ing subliminal messages on rock-and-roll albums-an unholy union rendered "natural" by the refrain, "what's good for the economy is




good for America." Within the narrative of the movie, the govern- ment and corporate executives are evil while Josie and her band

(who fall prey to the scheme for a while) represent the voice of freedom and self-determination that liberates the teen-ing masses from advertical brainwashing-all they have to do is recognize the scheme.

Things get complicated, however, when we viewers of the film rec-

ognize that we are also susceptible to the subliminal brainwashing of a movie overflowing with product placements and peripheral advertising. Target, Revlon, Cheer, Abercrombie & Fitch, USA Today, Amazon, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and many more have all agreed to have their products and logos serve as backdrops to a film ostensibly about the evils of a corporately saturated cultural land-

scape. But the movie does not just perform this apparent hypocrisy, it points it out to us and insists that we recognize it; that is, the

hypocrisy also functions as the movie's content. For example, the conclusion of the movie reveals that the program was going to be shut down because research had demonstrated that brainwashing was more effective through movies than through music (at which point a "Join the Army" message flashes on the screen for less than a sec-

ond). And throughout, the movie not only shamelessly sells other, unrelated products, but it also goes to great lengths to sell itself- but only after being "transparent" about its own self-promoting shamelessness. For example, the real-life product tie-ins that accom-

panied the movie's release appear in the movie as product tie-ins that help the evil music executives make even more money.6

But why would consumers want to buy commodities that are

explicitly revealed to be manipulations and lies? What has happened to our collective relationship to the ideological mystifications of

advertising that leads advertising executives at transnational com-

panies to think that it would be profitable to advertise their products in a movie that vilifies the very act of advertising in movies?

Either, one, exposure of the product or logo, regardless of the ethical associations attached to it, can achieve all of an ad's aims; or, two, we are supposed to value a corporation's sense of irony, its

ability to be self-deprecating, and we will reward it by purchasing its products; or, three, the ad consciously uses our recognition of its

hypocrisy against us, convincing us that we know enough of the

game to feel comfortable participating in it-convincing us that our



62 MITCHUM HUEHLS

recognition of its illusions is tantamount to our knowledge of them.

Although each of these reasons has some truth to it, I would contend that the third, the explanation in which hypocrisy is rendered

transparent in the service of an even larger hypocrisy, compels us to identify a way to talk about the vacuity of contemporary political, cultural, and social claims without simply reinscribing, revers-

ing, or being appropriated by that vacuity. Althusser, Balibar, and Zi'ek all suggest as much, but none locates a nondiscursive difference that might straighten out and make meaningful ideology's circular and iterative structures.

In both the recently published "Narrativeness" and his earlier Narrative and Freedom, two works that investigate the temporality of narrative via an experiential version of time, Gary Saul Morson pur- sues just such a project. Highlighting the ethical stakes of developing a narrative theory adequate to the temporalized process of living, Morson contends that a narrative mode resistant to temporal pre- determination and retroactive overdetermination can illuminate "how people live and think about their lives" (Narrative, 4). In "Nar-

rativeness," Morson defines the eponymous concept as "the quality that makes narrative not merely present but essential" (60). In other

words, a text manifests narrativeness when something requires the continued telling of its story, specifically, when what Morson calls

"open time"-the processual time of living-creates myriad possible futures for the narrative to pursue. In contrast to the aforemen- tioned thinkers who have a difficult time finding an adequately asymmetrical difference on which to ground a production of cultural meaning properly resistant to ideological overdetermination, Morson, who focuses primarily on Russian realist novels because

they most closely represent experiential time, looks for a temporal isomorphism between narrative reality and the world. In his book Morson names the narrative device that best manifests this isomor-

phism "sideshadowing." Unlike foreshadowing and his other neol-

ogistic creation, "backshadowing," sideshadowing relies on a concept of time as a field of possibilities that casts shadows from the side, from the domain of other possibilities. This in turn vitiates the in-

evitability of actuality, emphasizing to the reader that, like in life, the actual course of events was just one of many possibilities that

sideshadowing makes present (hazily) to the reader (117-18).



KNOWING WHAT WE ARE DOING I 63

I invoke Morson here because he and I commonly envision a mode of meaning making for which temporal form serves as the determinant criterion, and we both believe that time's overdetermination is directly responsible for a stagnation that permeates the

academy and culture at large. But Morson's admitted reliance on the realist novel, a predilection that either causes or is caused by his nondifferentiated notion of temporal isomorphism, prevents his in-

vestigation from extending beyond the confines of the constructed world of a given narrative fiction. Rereading, therefore, because it diminishes suspense and the present open time of what we read, becomes "an occupational hazard of literary critics." Because "process exists only within the narrated world, not in the artifact taken as a whole," and because "a radical divide typically separates the characters from the author, critic, or rereader," "any knowledge that the artifact [the text] is an artifact of a given sort" diminishes narrativeness (69, 70). In other words, a reader's nonrecognition of the cultural constructedness of reading heightens narrativeness; all knowl-

edge and awareness lessen it. Morson is correct to note the detrimental effects that knowl-

edge can have on a text's performance of temporality; an aleatory nonknowledge would seem ideal for ensuring that time's radical

openness grounds how literature and culture produce meaning. But Morson's theory shows that when the only constitutive absence participating in the production of meaning is the blank slate of open time's next moment, then the past and the future as meaningful cat-

egories (categories that, for example, make rereading a useful enter-

prise and not an occupational hazard) are annihilated, reduced to a

hypostatized presentness. The forward progression of experiential time does provide an asymmetry that can make the produced mean-

ing necessary and irreversible, but Morson's notion of temporality reduces to a perpetual present that transpires in isomorphic relation to its meaning-yet another model that conflates the form and content of meaning.

And what happens when we cannot help but have prior knowl-

edge because meaning itself depends on it-when preemption, being in on the joke, and knowing very well what we do while continu-

ing to do it are the primary modes of producing meaning in our

postmodern era of global, Americanized capital?7 My aim here is to



64 I MITCHUM HUEHLS

take the emphasis on temporality that we have seen in Jameson and Morson and to figure out how temporalized difference can be inte-

grated into gaining knowledge when that knowledge, as Zifek ar-

gues, seems nevertheless always already known and made.8 After a reading of White Noise in which I examine how ideol-

ogy harnesses and manipulates our knowledge of it, I will argue that we must turn to literary form as a mode of producing mean-

ing that can incorporate temporality without having to posit, like

Morson, the utter unknowability of the future. Whereas Morson idealizes a radically open, aleatory temporality, I will suggest that formal innovation and experimentation can effectively create the

experience of a meaningful temporality for readers without adher-

ing to the isomorphic relation between reading and meaning on which Morson relies. White Noise is an ideal text for this venture because its content concerns one man's attempt to gain knowledge of his future while its form exemplifies a uniquely American version of the postmodern novel closely tied to television, commercialism, and the ideological mystifications of global capital-basically the version that Jameson articulates in Postmodernism. DeLillo's novel seems to know intuitively that the subject's inability to relate mean-

ingfully to his or her specific temporality is the foundational crisis of contemporary culture, and as I will discuss later, DeLillo even

gestures toward a temporalized form of meaning making in the character of the family's youngest child Wilder. Although the model Wilder offers succumbs to the same aleatory dream that Morson

chases, my engagement with the text's formal elements will suggest how temporality can function as the nondiscursive difference that

grounds linguistic and cultural meaning-even though we live in an ideologically overdetermined society that knows very well what it does yet continues to do it.

Our most conventional understanding of ideology as a substitutive veil or illusion that occludes and shrouds the real is founded on Marx's most straightforward definition of ideology: the masses "know not what they do." White Noise takes this definition and adds

a Zifekian twist to it, portraying characters who know very well what they do but continue to do it. When subjects know not what

they do, ideology functions as a blanket substitution for the real-




action and meaning are isomorphic. When subjects know what they do but still do it, ideology functions correspondently. Instead of the two terms of the ideological relation (reality and illusion) becoming one, they remain two, and we are permitted to see how ideology functions-its differential gap of correspondence generously lets us in on its joke, and the act of letting us in vitiates any potency that

might be gained from recognizing that difference. Most theorists of ideology, intending to portray how ideology

"works," maintain a correspondent relation to ideology while those about whom they theorize suffer under a substitutive relationship. (Even when acknowledging, like Althusser, that there is no "outside" to ideology, the ability to speak about an outside at least implies a

metacritical, discursive distance.) Fiction or narrative, however, can avoid the formal problem of the speaker's subject position that the-

ory has a hard time overcoming. For the characters in DeLillo's White

Noise, ideology is correspondent, and the constitutive gap at the heart of ideology's structures of domination is exposed for all to see. For example, the repeated trips that the family takes to the grocery store (where even the fruit is self-conscious) find our narrator hyper- sensitive to the invisible force fields mediating his experience there.

Murray, one of Jack's colleagues at the college, speaks the follow-

ing (although Murray usually voices the "knowing very well what one does" position, Jack's narrative quotes him as a credible com- mentator on contemporary American consumer culture):

Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and

layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radia- tion. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spec- trum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial

phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. Not that we would want to, not that any useful purpose would be served. (37-38)

Here we see the text's characters fully aware of the mediated nature of their experience, and they even recognize the impotence of their

own awareness. Although Jack expresses some anxiety about this state of affairs while Murray obviously follows Zifek's exhortation to "enjoy your symptom," neither doubts the mediating structures



66 MITCHUM HUEHLS

of his world. Regardless of how they feel about these "veils of mys-

tery," however, the characters internal to DeLillo's text are not

empowered by their awareness of this gap. In fact, the more they

recognize-the larger the gap between the reality and the meaning of their experience-the less they can critique; their awareness func-

tions as the most seductive tool in ideology's arsenal. Nevertheless, as readers, it seems possible that we might gain some insight from

having DeLillo reveal to us this new way that ideology functions in

a contemporary society saturated by contingency and uncertainty. In other words, if standard theories of ideology reveal ideology to no

great effect, can White Noise's revelation of ideology's self-revealing

provide a space for meaningful critique? We again run up against the problem of perspective: what kind

of subject position do we occupy once DeLillo's work helps us rec-

ognize subjects who know very well what they do yet continue to

do it? I will eventually suggest that our recognition fails to become

knowledge and ultimately places us in the same position of corre-

spondence with the text that DeLillo's characters maintain with their

reality. DeLillo's work never actually calls our attention to anything; instead, White Noise only ever functions as a complicit deflection of

our attention. The text's performance of a uniquely American ver-

sion of postmodernity dominated by commercialized media (the television is always on in the background of the novel) reinscribes

a conservative relation of ideological correspondence between its

readers and the text. Before expanding on this relation between text

and reader, however, I will first offer a few examples of this corre-

spondent version of ideology internal to the text. Then I will show

how DeLillo's narrative performance of ideology's self-revealing establishes the same ideological relation between text and reader.

The frequently referenced conversation between Jack and his son

Heinrich regarding the epistemological certainty of the proposition "It is raining now" provides an example of how this model of ide-

ological correspondence functions inside the text. They sit in the car

and discuss:

"You're so sure that's rain. How do you know it's not sulfuric acid from factories across the river? How do you know it's not fallout from a war in China? You want an answer here and now. Can you prove,




here and now, that this stuff is rain? How do I know that what you call rain is really rain? What is rain anyway?"

"It's the stuff that falls from the sky and gets you what is called wet."

"I'm not wet. Are you wet?" ... "First rate," I told him. "A victory for uncertainty, randomness,

and chaos. Science's finest hour." (24)

The incongruity between the truth of the proposition about rain and the truth of the rain as it exists in the sensuous world can be read as a problem of correspondence. I would suggest that the gap of

uncertainty that enters through the difference between the world and the proposition about the world is actually a highly delimited

space that gives the interpellated subject a false sense of agency and choice (or even a sense of liberation via contingency); false, because under the influence of a highly technologized ideology, that space only serves to bind the subject to ideology even more. This decep- tively accommodating space should be read as ideology's answer

(via symmetrical reversal) to the elevated status of contingency and chaos in twentieth-century science and technology (e.g., the Heisen-

berg uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, or chaos theory). The technologized ideology that dominates White Noise takes con-

tingency into account and uses it to serve its own ends; the space opened up by correspondence, the space that is "difference itself,"

proves to be the most controlling factor ideology has going for it. This discussion between Jack and Heinrich demonstrates that calling attention to the gap of correspondence only leads to a more exacerbated belaboring of the two ideological terms, not to a considera- tion of any actual difference.

Jack's trip to the automated teller machine offers another instance in which a character in White Noise succumbs to this gap of corre-

spondence. As Jack performs his transaction he speculates, "The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with" (46). In this instance, we see that the

pure invisibility of technological ideology in fact heightens the rec-

ognition of mediation even more. The fact that Jack can recognize the system's invisibility (which effectively renders it not that invisible) is the only reason that it can be considered disquieting; if it were

truly invisible it would be impossible even to name it disquieting.



68 I MITCHUM HUEHLS

DeLillo here provides another example of ideology's correspondent function, and as with the correspondent incongruities discussed above, the awareness of correspondence is the very thing that gives the system its power. Correspondence creates a highly circumscribed space in which we as subjects still experience agency and choice when in

fact choice, under the reign of a static, highly structured ideology, is always a nonchoice. Ideology no longer occludes the real; rather,

correspondent ideology uses our ability to recognize our own dis-

tance from the real to its own occluding ends. Correspondence di-

verts the subject's attention away from the fact that if Jack needed to decide which of the two figures were his "real" account balance

(Jack tells us that the figure on the screen "roughly corresponded" to his own figure, which was arrived at through "tormented arith-

metic"), then the figure generated by the ideological system would

always win out as "the real." But how does DeLillo's elegant diagnosis of "the system" func-

tion for his readers? In any debate between Jack's personal figures and those displayed on the ATM screen, Jack, as a reader of figures, always defers to the ATM; but in any debate between the meaning that we generate out of the figures of DeLillo's narrative and those

meanings that appear ready-made throughout the text, to which do

we as readers defer? Although the content of DeLillo's system is

kitschy, fragmented, and hyperreal, the form of its presentation and the compulsively overanalytical, self-interpreting mode by which it

produces its significance renders the content's meaning not just

impotent but complicit with the system. What, for instance, does a reader do with the sentence, "The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with"? If recognizing the system's invisibility simply gives the system that much more control, then using his narrator to make this invisibil-

ity visible to his readers (and not just to the characters internal to the text) in turn gives DeLillo that much more of a didactic and ide-

ological grip over his narrative and its meaning. When Jack's cal-

culation closely corresponds to the ATM's, he notes, "Waves of relief

and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I

felt its support and approval" (46). DeLillo's text affords its readers the same support and approval, teaching its readers as it goes, slowly positioning itself as an emblematic representation of our




own understanding of the real that nevertheless permits just enough hermeneutic wiggle room to allow us to feel subjective, resistant, and active.9

Of course, these two scenes (and many others throughout the novel) demonstrate a sharp wit and wry humor that make much of White Noise funny in a very silly, absurd way. Although the humor alleviates a certain bleak dourness to much of the novel's critique, it absolutely fails to rend the "veils of mystery" that occlude via their own revelation. Because the work's parody and satire function

knowingly, the same overdetermined relation between text and reader

persists. Instead of surprising us, the humor only reinforces our

knowledge of what the characters are doing and of how we read what they say and do. Letting us in on the joke allows the deeper implications of the joke to stand. That is, just as Murray and the others have a structural knowledge of how ideological functions mediate their world, the knowingness of the humor in White Noise is also structural. When we read the conversation between Jack and

Heinrich, the humor comes not from some unexpected thing that one of them says but rather from our ability to recognize this joke as one of those jokes that depends on an incommensurability between the literal and figural properties of language. We understand the joke's structure and the humor derives from our ability to understand the conversation in those specific terms; but in laughing at the joke, we only validate the correspondent structure even more.

And so, humorous or not, as the text announces what it does and means every step of the way, the postmodern aphorisms just flow out of White Noise. Echoing a predictable Baudrillard essay, for

example, Jack and his colleague Murray go to visit "the most photographed barn in America." Murray articulates the experience (in words that apply equally well to White Noise): "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. . . . A religious experience in a way, like all

tourism"; "They are taking pictures of taking pictures"; and "What was the barn like before it was photographed? ... What did it look like ... ? We can't answer these questions because we've read the

signs, seen the people snapping the pictures" (12-13). Famously, this

is what DeLillo's book is about, but, troublingly, this is also what his book has come to do and mean for its readers. Reading White Noise is like being a tourist to Ideology World, and DeLillo, like Kodak,



70 I MITCHUM HUEHLS

has set up signs to let us know exactly from what perspective we should stop to observe its content. In this and many other scenes,

Jack remains silent while Murray expounds on the surrounding cultural curiosities. Although Jack's absent responses are conspicuous and powerful (David Foster Wallace argues that his silence "ele-

gantly diagnoses the very disease from which he, Murray, barn-

watchers, and readers all suffer" [49]), once the text accrues a layer of reading, Jack's silence becomes just another recognizable and non-

temporalized empty space. In other words, Jack's silence can only "elegantly diagnose" inside the narrative, in the realist mode of Mor-

son's type of examination. The symptom/diagnosis structure of ideology, meanwhile, ensures

that diagnostic critique cannot withstand the very logic of the ide-

ology it seeks to critique. In White Noise this problem derives from the fact that DeLillo's depiction of "the system" is itself systematic because overly tied to the representational, first-person narration of

Jack Gladney, whose anxiety about the future compels him to reduce that future to presentness by overinterpreting everything that he relates to us. He preempts meaning, transforming the text itself into

just another ideological object. Although narrative didacticism is cer-

tainly not unique to White Noise, it is formally notable here because, one, the way didactic form produces meaning is structurally homol-

ogous to the way contemporary forms of ideology manipulate and

mystify their own content and, two, those contemporary forms of

ideology nevertheless constitute the text's primary objects of critique. DeLillo's interpretive didacticism, then, is much more than bad

writing; instead, it warrants examination because of the seductive

congruence between its form and content that it offers to its readers. The two are kept sufficiently separate for us to get the joke and

sufficiently conflated for us to accept the meaning as it is delivered. For instance, at the end of the novel, after shooting and then being shot in the wrist by Willie Mink-a renegade scientist who, on the condition that she sleep with him, has been supplying Jack's wife Babette with a drug, Dylar, that makes her less afraid of death-

Jack takes Willie to a clinic in German town. As the German nuns

working in the clinic explain to Jack, nonbelievers do not truly not believe because they always at least believe that others (like the

nuns) still do believe. One nun explains (quite didactically, in fact),




"It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seri-

ously.... This is why we are here .... To embody old things, old beliefs.... If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse" (318).

Like a sit-com's canned laughter, which for Zifek exemplifies just how complicit we are with our own ideological suturing, these nuns believe (or at least pretend to) so that the rest of the world does not have to; and because they are what nonbelievers believe in, they function simultaneously as the form and content of everyone else's

belief."1 This news leaves Jack shocked, but his revelation falls flat because he has convinced himself that revelation for revelation's sake is tantamount to knowledge and transformation. But because of his perpetual deference to the system, his self-interpretation and

knowing humor, and his drive to tell all, the only question that Jack can ask himself, and the only question that we as readers can ask of the text, is how we feel about this situation. Like Jack's reality, there is little question regarding how the narrative proceeds or what it means; rather, our participation in the production of its meaning is limited to asking ourselves whether or not we can be satisfied with the self-announcement and full disclosure that have rendered us complicit. We as readers are as interpellated as the supermarket shoppers at the conclusion of the novel who try to read the ingre- dients on their products even though "in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see" because "the terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly" (326).

But, maybe DeLillo has chosen to heighten his text's didactic

self-interpretation precisely because such tendencies constitute the thematic content of the novel as well. Perhaps DeLillo not only wants to make his argument, but to enact it. Suppose White Noise is an even

greater work of literature than we have previously considered precisely because it formally performs its content, saying what it does and doing what it says. Although these kinds of speculations tread too close to the unanswerable questions of authorial intent, I will go ahead and argue that, regardless of intent, this kind of congruent relation between form and content, when expunged of temporality, can be just as dangerous as it can be elegant. In fact, conflating form and content constitutes one way in which the revelation of the gap



72 I MITCHUM HUEHLS

at the heart of a correspondent version of ideology deflects attention from that gap. That is, like the nuns, correspondent ideology as it has come to function in an age of ironized global capital simul-

taneously provides the content of our world and the way in which that content comes to be known, and this conflation of content and form ensures that, even if we now "know very well what we do," such knowledge will remain powerless.

In White Noise media and technology perform this conflation-

they form the content of our repression (they are substitutes for that which has been repressed), and their ideological function facilitates

repression in the first place. Murray enthusiastically explains the

duplicity of technology to Jack: "It creates an appetite for immor-

tality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other.

... It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies. But it's also life. . . . It prolongs life, it provides new

organs for those that wear out" (285). As "what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies," technology constitutes the "content of our world." And as "life," it is "the way in which that content comes to be known." Ideology lets its subjects worry over the two terms of the relation, never able to decide what is real and what is not, what should be believed and what should not. This preoccupation with the symmetrical difference between the two terms (a difference I will name difference'), however, simply functions to deflect our attention from the more foundational and

potentially temporalized difference (what I call difference2) from which actual change might spring. This second, more fundamental

difference, is the difference between (a) the content terms themselves and (b) the formal difference between them. Temporal irreversibil-

ity does not derive from the dialectical interaction of two content

terms; rather, it stems from the dialectical interaction of form and content in general. I schematize the difference between these differences this way:

The formal difference between two content terms: term' (difference1) term2

The difference between content and form: terms1 and 2 (difference2) difference'




By conflating its content and form, ideology uses the superficial dif-

ference1 (between the terms) to conceal and deflect attention away from the constitutive difference2 between the terms and the superficial difference, between the what and the how, the content and the

form, of meaning. The first difference leaves the two terms inter-

changeable, their relation symmetrically reversible. The two terms of the second difference are not interchangeable, and their relation is asymmetrical. Be they life and death or the content of the two balances of his account, Jack focuses on the content of the terms that

ideology, operating correspondently, has already sublated. Instead,

Jack needs to identify the other of correspondent ideology, a foundational difference predicated on the irreversibility of time itself.

Readers and critics of White Noise have been equally preoccu- pied with difference' since the mid-1980s, never able to study the text outside the knowingly representationalist paradigm that its didactic form makes so unavoidable. For example, Timothy Aubry has described White Noise as "a text which immerses the reader in the

near-deafening white noise of American consumer culture, while seek-

ing new modes of subjectivity, resistance, and agency within and

through that state of immersion" (148-49). More specifically, Aubry claims that DeLillo's text "resists the linear, focused consciousness which is rooted in a capitalist ideology of productivity and efficiency" and "seems to resist the numbed, death-like state of perpetual distrac- tion produced by our hyper-stimulating media and consumer culture, insofar as it involves a reawakening of the senses, a recognition of the uncanniness of the ordinary, a defamiliarization of the everyday sensory environment." In short, White Noise helps us postmodern subjects "know very well" the problematic weirdness of our world.

Unfortunately, Aubry is not just a straw man; instead, he represents the multitude of literary critics seduced into believing that DeLillo's work speaks as the piece de resistance of our age. To cite another example, Tom LeClair avers that each of DeLillo's novels and his entire oeuvre function as a totalizing system that, far from

perpetuating "the system," actually "presents a comprehensive cri-

tique of the ideologies-scientific, literary, and political-in which

he and his readers exist" (xi). Since its publication, scholars and critics have persisted in reading White Noise as a text that portrays the



74 MITCHUM HUEHLS

postmodern subject's attempt to cope with contemporary American culture's barrage of media and technology. There have been thematic

readings focusing on television, the tabloids, technology, and Hitler

studies.11 And there have been generic readings exhibiting much hand wringing about the proper postmodernity of both DeLillo and his novels.12 The two most recent book-length examinations of De- Lillo's literary career, Mark Osteen's American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture (2000) and David Cowart's Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (2002) rarely vacillate from the encomia-for- DeLillo party line.13

All of these concertedly emblematic readings of White Noise jet- tison the novel's formal literariness, the way the text produces its

meaning, and instead eulogize DeLillo's uncanny ability to see to the heart of our ideologically mystified world. I contend, instead, that the only thing White Noise reveals is its own formal inability to

identify a form for producing meaning out of our world that does

justice to the "subjectivity, resistance, and agency" that it and its critics so clearly want to discover. The text's form and style irrepara- bly compromise the promise of its message, and the consistent treat- ment of White Noise as a text that paradigmatically diagnoses our

ailing postmodern culture has established the work as a formal

symptom of the very maladies it seeks to diagnose. These conflicts and compromises in turn expose the tendency of any oppositionally minded, diagnostic sociocultural critique to function as its own worst symptom.

Judging from the scholarship on White Noise, how an authored text reads the world influences how scholars read the text. Thus, the

overwhelming response to White Noise tells us something not only about the novel itself, but also about what a dominant contingent of literary studies wants literature to mean. Reducing the future to the present, many literary scholars lead textual mining expeditions predicated on prior surveying studies that allow them to predict what they will find in a given work of literature.14 This effectively excises the temporality of all lived reading experiences, an excision

that cannot help but do the same to the form of the text being read.

Wilder, the youngest child in the Gladney family, can be read as an antidote to these reading strategies predicated on prior knowledge,




but the solution he offers also serves as a warning of the ditches in which a theory like Morson's leaves us. There is certainly nothing encouraging about the extremes to which Wilder must go (sublime

unintelligibility and self-endangerment) to break from the overdetermined circles of meaning that plague both the novel's characters and its readers. For example, early in the narrative, Wilder, whose

vocabulary has "stalled at twenty-five words," cries rhythmically and without waver for seven consecutive hours. No one knows what has prompted the perpetual yowling, and no one knows its mean-

ing. While sitting in the car with him for over an hour, Jack speculates religiously about his son: Wilder's crying said "nameless things in a way that touched me with its depth and richness," and "he had

disappeared inside this wailing noise and if I could join him in his lost and suspended place we might together perform some reckless wonder of intelligibility" (78, my emphasis). In this nondiscursive mode of communication with an impenetrable form, meaning and

intelligibility now become a matter of performance. Unable to inhabit this performative mode, however, the chapter concludes with Jack

noting that Wilder had been in "a place where things are said ... which we in our ordinary toil can only regard with the mingled rev- erence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and difficult dimensions" (79). As a model of meaning making, then, the seven-hour scream runs up against the limits of sublimity, and

performance remains enigmatic. Equally performative and without intelligible meaning, the novel

concludes with Wilder's daring tricycle ride across the highway. In this scene, Wilder rides his tricycle across six lanes of traffic, seem-

ingly mesmerized and oblivious to the pleas of two female observers and a packed interstate of cars swerving and honking at him. His actions are direct and resolute, and he pays no attention to anything outside himself until he falls off his tricycle, tumbles down an em- bankment into a ditch of muddy water, and decides to cry (322-23).

Unsurprisingly, standard interpretations of this scene tend to let

Murray do the interpreting for them. Earlier in the novel, Murray notes that Wilder's ignorance of death makes him uniquely powerful among the living. Thus Mark Osteen tentatively argues that the trek "may even symbolize the possibility of reincarnation" or suggest "the possibility of redemption beyond the body" (189), and



76 1 MITCHUM HUEHLS

David Cowart reads the event as "a metaphor for the precarious and doomed passage of the living among the dead, whose great congress they must eventually join" (81). These readings assume that Wilder's ignorance is a simple lack of knowledge, a function of his

age. But throughout the novel he is portrayed as deeply knowing; gazing mysteriously into the oven door or the car radio, he is not

blankly stupid but rather sees and knows something more than the other characters could ever imagine. In short, Wilder represents a reader like Morson who knows that he does not want to know, whose next moment of reading is always a blank slate. Wilder's journey demands a reading in accord with the irreversible temporality mea-

suring out his actions; he allegorizes allegory, compelling us to read, like Morson, without prediction or retrospective overdetermination.

Tellingly, his uninterpretable yet apparently meaningful actions reduce his observers to the nondiscursive realm of gesticulating performance. Although "they knew this picture did not belong to the

hurtling consciousness of the highway," the drivers "could not quite comprehend," and all they can do is veer and honk. Similarly, the two women watching "the process unfolding before them" can only speak like "foreigners reduced to simple phrases," waving their arms

wildly, searching for a way to communicate meaning, until they give up and watch silently, "outside the event."

Wilder's screaming and his tricycle ride are perhaps the only two moments in White Noise when the characters' and the reader's

knowledge are under- rather than overdetermined. But in these in-

stances, DeLillo's penchant for the mystical and the romantic swing him too far in the other direction. Because we are not young chil- dren with twenty-five-word vocabularies and because we need to communicate meaningfully beyond ourselves, we have to resist the red herring of a reading model based on the unknowability of open time; we must figure out how to read despite knowledge. Just like

Althusser, Balibar, and Zifek struggle to find the negative space that will allow them to speak meaningfully about ideology while nevertheless speaking from within ideology, any attempt to make temporality the differential grounding for linguistic and cultural meaning must also figure out how to talk about time while nevertheless being within time.15 The problem of knowledge in postmodern America- the fact that we are fully aware of what we are doing, that the future




has been preempted-entails that opponents of the national secu-

rity strategy, theorists of ideology, viewers of Josie and the Pussycats, and readers of White Noise cannot just carry on in real time and hope that an open-ended future will iron things out. Time's irreversibility extricates us from reflexive loops of meaningless postmodern aware-

ness, but pure immersion in time's flow also makes meaning and

knowledge impossible.16 Roland Barthes's notion of the writerly (as opposed to the read-

erly) text implicitly runs up against this same problem. His ideal

writerly text is not a text at all; it is all performance, all telling and no told: "the writerly text is not a thing, we would have a hard time

finding it in a bookstore .... [It] is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; ... [it] is the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem, the essay without the dissertation, writing without style" (5). Although Barthes's claims are not as dependent on the transparency of realism as Morson's, the "perpetual present" required of writerly texts certainly makes the linguistic production of meaning nearly impossible; the said destroys the saying. This

"perpetual present" requirement leads Richard Howard, in the preface to S/Z, to explain the distinction between the readerly and the

writerly by citing an unnamed author who speaks of her desire to read books that she has already read. This category of the known

text, for Howard, exemplifies the readerly, and he laments this "need to be assured of what we know in the old ways of knowing" (xi). But if a Wilder-like absence of knowledge is the best way to engage with the writerly text, then it seems strange to claim, as Howard does earlier in the preface, that the power of S/Z lies in its ability to give its readers knowledge of what they do when they read: "Only when we know . .. what we are doing when we read, are we free to enjoy what we read" (ix).

Howard is not contradicting himself; Barthes's text indeed wants both to reveal the codes that transform readers into passive consumers of meaning and to insist that the best way to read as pro- ducers is to read in a performative mode of perpetual presentness. So should we be trying to erase our brains or fill them with as much

awareness, recognition, and ironic detachment as we can? As I believe Wilder demonstrates, erasing our brains is too easy; and as I



78I MITCHUM HUEHLS

believe the rest of White Noise proves, knowledge can too easily become complicity, not power. So is eventfulness even possible in

contemporary culture, or must all postmodern events simply be de- fined by the very impossibility of their eventfulness?

Derek Attridge has wrestled with these questions over the past decade, paying particular attention to the ethical potential of what he calls the "act/event" of reading. For Attridge, who acknowledges that his work draws "concretely" on Barthes's ideas, a text's mean-

ing productively occurs when a reader's knowledge and non-

knowledge work together. He follows Barthes's lead in describing reception as "itself a mode of production" ("Singular," 60), but he

lets the passive elements of that production signify as well: "Cre-

ation, then, is both an act and an event, both something that is done

and something that happens" ("Innovation," 22). Attridge clearly values the active reader who participates in the performative text, but he also identifies a passive element to all performance; he notes

that, although performativity follows no formula, it is not all alea-

tory accident and instead requires thought, knowledge, and work. In this way, the meaning performed through reading offers the ever- elusive meaning of experience (event) while resisting the naivet" of

pure immediacy (some mediating action is still required). Attridge names the feature of a literary work that elicits and

demands the "act/event" of reading "textualterity." Claiming that the

same mixture of act and event goes into a work's creation as goes into its (productive) reception or reading, Attridge maintains that all literary works have the power to address their readers as other. He claims that this "textualterity," incited by the "act/event" of cre-

ative innovation, "is not just a matter of perceptible difference. It

implies a wholly new existent that cannot be apprehended by the old modes of understanding and could not have been predicted by means of them; its singularity, even if it is produced by nothing more than a slight recasting of the familiar and thus of the general, is absolute" ("Innovation," 22).

Attridge here articulates a nonquantifiable difference of kind- not a negatable Hegelian Other but rather an existential, experiential, and fully temporalized difference. Attridge's work on these topics never explicitly broaches the temporality of the reading experience,




but he implies the temporalization of its difference in several in- stances. First, he notes the inability to predict the meaning of literature's singularity, a feature of reading's "act/event" that avoids the pitfalls of preemption and overdetermination discussed above. In the eventful relation of reader to work, meaning is genuinely unknown. As Morson has already shown us, however, the unknowable

meaning of the fully temporalized event is not without its difficul- ties. Attridge acknowledges as much when in a more Derridean vein he identifies innovation as an impossibility: "The irruption of the other into the same does not and cannot sit comfortably within any of the explanatory frameworks by which we characterize the possible" (29). And this impossibility comes directly from the unknowa-

bility that the event's temporalization effects; the absolute singularity of the otherness makes it impossible to know it in advance because the moment the other is known, it is no longer other.

Although Attridge concludes "Innovation, Literature, Ethics" with this paradox, the passive, noneventful part of the reading experience might point the way toward an escape hatch. That is, despite being a singular event, the experience Attridge describes need not be a

single event. He insists throughout his work that his model applies equally to initial reading and rereading-a claim Morson cannot make. While the surprise of a first reading would aptly manifest the eventful aspects of a reading experience, the event need not be the

only mode of producing meaning (this is Morson's implicit claim,

although he names the text's eventfulness "narrativeness"). Whereas Morson theorizes time as a "field of possibilities" in which the text exists and from which it chooses the path of its meaning, Attridge locates the expansiveness of possibility in textual form. In other

words, a reader's relation to a text is not, in fact, infinitely wide open to aleatory eventfulness; instead, a text's eventfulness is delimited

by the consciously mediated acts that contributed to its creation. For

Attridge, such mediation does not mitigate the temporalized eventfulness of reading: "the cultural context in which and by means of which the reading takes place, constantly change[s]" while "the knowl-

edge of what is to come in a text one has read before and the mem-

ory of the experience of earlier readings are both aspects of the

singular event of re-reading" ("Singular," 61). In short, the primacy



80 1 MITCHUM HUEHLS

of form in literature's production of meaning facilitates the potential for novel repetition, suggesting that a combination of knowledge and nonknowledge constitutes the most useful approach to a text.'7

Because reading literature (understanding "literature" as writ-

ing in which form shares the responsibility for meaning) always entails more than the mere transformation of content-signifiers into

meaning, merely analytic language lacks the capacity to enact the

singularized event of reading in a way that can be repeatedly new.

Paul Ricoeur reaches the same conclusion in volume 2 of Time and

Narrative:

If my work has any originality, it is to the degree that it succeeds in

pointing out, within what one calls the referential aim of history and fiction respectively, two different but complementary replies to the aporias which the phenomenology of time brings to light. This reply is that of a poetics to the extent that history and fiction produce the resolution that speculation is powerless to contribute to the aporias of time. (4)

Lacking the formal capacity to perform (and thereby adequately temporalize) its production of meaning, discursive speculation cannot accomplish the same meaningful effectivity that literature can.

Arguing that poetic form can avoid the symmetrical reinscription of

the problems of time it wants to solve, Ricoeur explicitly charges discursive speculation (particularly that of the phenomenological tradition) with a formal sterility that can, at most, perform the knot-

ted relations it seeks to diagnose.'8 As he writes in the third volume

of Time and Narrative, "the striking fact about the theory of time [is] that any progress obtained by the phenomenology of temporality has to pay for its advance in each instance by the ever higher price of an even greater aporicity" (11). In their justifications for their

respective recourse to the literary, Attridge implicitly and Ricoeur

explicitly embed an experiential notion of temporality in literary form. For Attridge, rereading yields as much eventfulness as read-

ing because literary form makes room for the irreversibility of a tem-

porally lived experience. But this is only one half of the dialectical

equation: despite the singularity of its engagement, readings differ

not only because the time and context of reading change but also because literary form (that aspect of the work responsible for the how-ness of reading) is always multiplicitous.




If literary form remains crucial to a work's adequate temporalization, therefore, the act of reading does not entirely solve the problem of knowledge I identified in White Noise-there must also be

something unique to narrative form that enables its temporalization. As few have been more concerned with the temporality of narrative than Paul Ricoeur, his work would seem to be the right place to turn. But for Ricoeur narrativity stands in for and thus precludes a phenomenological experience of time (i.e., for Ricoeur fiction and

poeisis are what rescue philosophy from the aporias of temporal questions), leaving him with a positive and reflexive theory about the

relationship between time, experience, and narrative: "time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence" (1:52). The circularity of this argument re-

quires perpetual states of both pre- and postunderstanding, which reduce time to a discursive function to the extent that the circular-

ity deprives time of its irreversible features.19 Such is the conservative failure of White Noise: its formal per-

formance conflates form and content, reducing temporality to presentness and exhibiting a knowingness that leads scholars to repeat the same ideological structures on a critical level. Ideology critique can neither mimic nor reverse the forms of meaning and knowledge that it hopes to amend; this includes any attempt to treat temporality as an aleatory, open-ended future because such an approach merely reverses contemporary ideology's preemption of the future.

Literary form, however, provides a wide array of temporal models

(other than open time) that can institute temporality as the nondiscursive grounding of linguistic and cultural meaning without having to give up the possibility of meaning and knowledge. For example, Nabokov's Ada combines two different genre styles (metafiction and

nineteenth-century realism) to narrate a story that takes place in the two historical moments most closely associated with those styles (the 1960s and 1880s, respectively). The reader can have knowledge of both codes and nevertheless suffer severe temporal whiplash whenever the two collide. Or, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon is

narrated by temporal parallax: the same story is told by several different narrators at different moments in time spanning nearly a cen-

tury. Like Chinese boxes, Pynchon embeds the different narrative



82 I MITCHUM HUEHLS

moments within each other so that readers both know and do not

know from whom, when, and where the narrative comes. These com-

promised, ambivalent approaches to knowledge, when combined

with the differential effect of time's irreversibility, point to a more

fruitful mode of critiquing and gaining knowledge of contemporary

postmodern culture.

Notes

1. I use "form" expansively throughout the article to designate all literary features and characteristics relevant to how something is said or the way texts produce meaning. As such, textual qualities as diverse as rhetoric, narratorial perspective, and syntax are all considered formal. For example, the didacticism that I will discuss in relation to White Noise is certainly a rhetorical feature, but I would also consider it a formal aspect of the text.

2. Slavoj Zifek makes similar observations in "The Iraq War: Where Is the True Danger?" See http://lacan.com/iraq.htm.

3. Developing a full picture of just what such meaningful production might look like is part of a much larger project. For a highly theoretical exam-

ple, see Theodor Adorno's recently translated and published lectures on Im- manuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In these lectures Adorno wrestles most

thoroughly with Kant's "Transcendental Doctrine of Elements," the section of the first critique most explicitly concerned with time. Adorno theorizes a relation between temporal form and content in which "these two elements mutu-

ally produce one another in a way that can be determined but not so that one can be reduced to the other [i.e., overdetermined]" (148). In Negative Dialectics Adorno argues that the difference preventing this same dialectic of form and content from tautological conflation is the necessary nonidentity of history's immanent historicity (54). This is an example of how temporality might function as a "non-discursive difference." This article concludes with two other literary examples.

4. This abstract, structural problem has some very political implications. For example, the epistemological act of identification ("x is y") underpins the

essentializing moves of identity politics. This same structure is at play in the more current discourse of recognition-based ethics, which argues that revealing differences and discrepancies can lead to enlightenment and sociopolitical change. This also has implications for how racial-justice movements talk about race: any such discourse accompanied by a rigid sense of what is and is not racist participates in the same logic of identification responsible for racism in the first

place. For a useful overview of these political and ethical problems, see Amy Gutmann's edited collection, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition.

5. See Eugene Goodheart's The Reign of Ideology for an opposing view.




Goodheart believes that ideology critique argues "that there is nothing but

ideology," and he calls for a return to "aesthetic value," "reason," and "transcen- dence." This opposition between ideology and absolutes, however, is tenden- tious-a simple, oppositional reversal that structurally reiterates the opposition between "truth" and "concealment" that Goodheart wants to abolish. He is correct to argue that exposing and recognizing the ideological underpinnings of a

language whose meaning is purportedly open for us all to see is no longer a sufficient critical task. But demystifying ideology critique's demystifications is also no longer sufficient because ideology no longer functions as mystification and illusion. Thus, attempts like Goodheart's to avoid or transcend ideological mystification have simply become ideology par excellence.

6. Of course, Josie is very funny, but, as I will discuss later with regard to White Noise, it is knowingly funny. In fact, the director's commentary included on the DVD displays utter incredulity at the number of people who "never got the joke." The directors fail to consider that getting the joke is not tantamount to having the power (or the money) to laugh last.

7. David Foster Wallace struggles with the implications such knowingness has for contemporary writers in "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction."

8. For other examinations of the relationship between time and postmodern literature, see Ermarth; Heise; and Elias.

9. This effect is nicely described in Frank Lentrecchia's introduction to New

Essays on White Noise. He cites two undergraduate students' reactions to read-

ing White Noise, and both seem to argue that the book does not just speak to them but that it is them: "'This is the first book in the course about me.' Another

undergraduate tells me that he did not 'read' White Noise; he 'inhaled' it" (7). Lentrecchia does not reveal if inhalation is here a metaphor of life or addiction.

10. Willie Mink, who has become a Dylar-popping lunatic by the time Jack finds him at the hotel, provides an extreme example of this form-content conflation. One side effect of Willie's compulsive Dylar intake is that signifiers, merely uttered words, appear to him as their signifieds. Thus, because the words are the actual things they name, Jack can attack Willie by simply saying "Hail of bullets" and "Fusillade." The scene suggests that we might think we are better off because we know that words are not things, because we can see the difference between them, but our recognition of that difference is dangerous because reversible. That is, our recognition of the difference simply reverses the word-

thing relation, leading to Heinrich's self-satisfied (and no less dangerous) com-

placency with all things just being words. Zifek's laugh-track discussion can be found in The Sublime Object of Ideol-

ogy (35). 11. See, for example, Lentrecchia, and the essays therein by Lentrecchia,

Thomas Ferraro, Michael Valdez Moses, and Paul Cantor; Duvall; Billy; doCarmo; Heller; and Boling.

12. See, for example, Hayles; King; Reeve and Kerridge; Heffernan; Caton; and Phillips.



84 MITCHUM HUEHLS

13. I cannot resist citing one of the most egregious examples from David Cowart's book: "Born within six months of each other, Pynchon and DeLillo are the mythic cousins of American postmodernism. One imagines their mothers, like Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary, spending time together before the two impor- tant births." Cowart goes on to argue that DeLillo, apparently widely regarded as John the Baptist to Pynchon's Christ, might ultimately prove to be "the one who most consistently transforms the water of routine storytelling into literary wine" (7).

14. For a compelling discussion about the problematic use of the preposi- tion "in" in literary studies, see the discussion of New Historicism in Wai Chee

Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy. 15. Vladimir Nabokov's Ada takes up this problem in earnest. Van Veen,

the novel's protagonist and narrator, muses, "no wonder I fail to grasp Time, since knowledge-gaining itself 'takes time"' (538).

16. This paradox of time and meaning forms the crux of Derrida's Given Time and The Gift of Death.

17. Attridge does not hesitate to use the capacity for novel repetition as an index of a work's inventiveness, the primary quality responsible for its ethical capacity ("Singular," 60-61).

18. Jacques Lezra's Unspeakable Subjects links this symptom of speculation to modernity's hypostatization of the event at the expense of its immanent tem-

porality. One characteristic of "modernity" for Lezra is the tendency for intellectual disagreements to "repeat the debates that they are trying to explain," and he explains this tendency by noting modernity's "constitutive blindness to its own historicity." The event's historicity only "emerges with the occlusion of its accidental character, with its conversion to an aesthetic principle, or with what one can call its sublimation" (4).

19. Ricoeur readily admits to the circularity of his argument, but he claims that the mutual reinforcement makes the circularity useful instead of vicious (1:72).

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Knowing What We Are Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of Postmodernity

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