Disinterring the real

The article argues that Bellamy's experimental novel represents a privileged text for understanding the persistence of the material (especially the materiality of the body) in the era of ‘immaterial production’. In making the case for the importance of Bellamy's narrative, the article also addresses contemporary debates about the death of the postmodern, the value of Lacan's notion of the real for thinking about materiality in contemporary culture, and the potential for a queer politics of materiality. I hope the essay begins to go a little bit of the way towards doing justice to her remarkable novel. I would also like to thank the following people who read multiple drafts of this essay: Joe Amato, Lee Brasseur, Kass Fleisher, Elizabeth Hatmaker, Valerie Kaussen, and Rebecca Saunders. Finally I would like to thank Peter Boxall, the editor of Textual Practice, and the anonymous reader for the journal, both of whom have made this essay much stronger with their incisive feedback. Notes Dodie Bellamy, Academonia (San Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2006), p. 82. For a discussion which replaces the category of the postmodern with a recalibrated concept of modernism, see Marjorie Perloff, 21st Century Modernism: The New Poetics (London: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 154–201 and Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’ in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds.), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 189–207. For discussions of the end of the postmodern, see Rachel Adams, ‘The ends of America, the ends of postmodernism’ Twentieth Century Literature, 53.3 (Fall 2007), pp. 248–272, and Andrew Hoberek, ‘Introduction: after postmodernism’ Twentieth Century Literature, 53.3 (Fall 2007), pp. 233–247. For accounts of post-postmodernism, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, ‘Periodizing the 80s’ in Carsten Strathausen (ed.), A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 54–79 and Alan Kirby, ‘The death of postmodernism and beyond’ Philosophy Today: A Magazine of Ideas, 58 (May/June 2009) http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond. For a defence of the category of the postmodern as period within a singular conception of modernity, see Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 1–13, 211–214. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 11. Hoberek, ‘Introduction’, p. 234. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 3. My discussion of Bellamy's engagement with the abject, of course, draws upon Julia Kristeva's famous formulation of the concept in Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 1–31. While I know the term ‘late capitalism’ can function, at times, like a theoretical placeholder, I still find the term valuable as a way of periodizing a number of interrelated developments in contemporary capitalism. The term enables one to make the distinction between the aesthetic practices of postmodernism on the one hand and what Jameson and Hardt and Negri have differently suggested are the dynamics of economic postmodernization and what Harvey calls post-Fordism (both of which can be described as late-capitalist), on the other. As the current global financial crisis suggests, the contemporary global economy seems still to be very much defined by the move towards financialization and the uneven development of immaterial production that are both part and parcel of late capitalism. What seems to be too hasty is both Jameson's and Harvey's conflation of postmodern aesthetics with late capitalism tout court. While aesthetic postmodernism may be one semi-dominant response to late capitalism, I want to suggest that it is hardly the only one; moreover, in the present, we may find ourselves still within a late capitalist present, while no longer being of cultural or aesthetic postmodernism. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 280–324; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 141–188; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. ix–xxii. For Bellamy, the horror genre is particularly laden with meanings for feminist issues of embodiment: ‘Horror films are obsessed with the division between inside and outside, with the very integrity of our bodies, a sense of physical invasion. I think these are core concerns for many women. I find it enlightening to study how women are so often associated with the monstrous’. Quoted in Julia Bloch, ‘Steamy Pages: Dodie Bellamy’, Curve.com. Bellamy is one of a group of writers active in San Francisco in the last 30 years whose work has been described under the rubric of ‘new narrative’. New narrative writing represents a return to narrative, but a return that is informed by all of the ways in which the category itself has been problematized by the work of poststructuralist theory as well as experimental fiction and poetry in the postmodern era. New narrative writers such as Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Bruce Boone, Sam D'Allesandro, and Bellamy herself both employ the descriptive, and indeed conscriptive, power of narrative to organize thought, imagination, and experience and attempt to complicate or subvert this power by continuously disrupting the naturalizing effects it conventionally produces. One way in which they achieve this disruption is by writing liminal narratives. Their narratives continuously defy genre expectations, gleefully combining the fictional, the autobiographical, the theoretical, the poetic, the novelistic, the academic, and the popular in order to produce texts that privilege instability. The new narrative return to narrative, then, attempts to maintain the critical force of deconstruction, particularly as it was actualized in the ‘Language’ poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, while also moving beyond its hermetic negativity to reconnect language, however problematically, with the world. Thus, the writings of new narrative authors represent a form of contemporary writing that moves beyond (even as they draw on) the exclusively discursive or linguistic preoccupations of much poststructuralist or postmodern theory to engage with the material underpinnings of everyday life. See Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–28; Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1987), pp. 26–30; Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 9–11, 53–60; Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 1–54; Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 39–65. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 65. My thinking about the representation of the object world in literature is, of course, influenced by the work of Bill Brown. See Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 1–19. Slavoj Žižek discusses the contradictory substantialist and nonsubstantialist definitions of the real in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 161–164. While there seems to be a move in recent theory (including Žižek's most recent writings) to privilege the nonsubstantialist definition of the real, to me this privileging comes at the price of effacing the materialist dimensions of Lacanian psychoanalysis and turning it instead into an abstract formalism almost indistinguishable from deconstruction. For some examples of dematerialized conceptions of the real in recent theory, see Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 1–61 and Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 3–13. For my own, materialist theorization of the real see Christopher Breu, ‘Signification and substance: toward a leftist ontology of the present’ in Carsten Strathausen (ed.), A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 177–207. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 9. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 53–64; Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 43–70. Nina Aurbach. Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 1–9; Lawrence Rickels, The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. xii–xiv. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 291–271; and Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), pp. 11–64. There are, of course, significant differences between the paradigms proposed by each of these thinkers, with Braidotti's woman being closest to what Bellamy is articulating with her vampires. Yet with each of these paradigms there is a turn towards the discursivization of the material. It is precisely such a turn that Bellamy's vampires resist. For Butler's take on Braidotti's criticisms of her performative subject, see Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 192–198. As indicated below, I find Haraway's recent work in animal studies a much more amenable paradigm for thinking about bodily materiality as Bellamy represents it. See Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 3–42. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 96. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 30. On Stoker's Mina as a figuration of modernity, see Jennifer Fleissner, ‘Dictation anxiety: the stenographer's stake in Dracula’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22.3 (Fall 2000), pp. 417–456 and Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric typewriting: Dracula and its media’ ELH 59.2 (Summer 1992), pp. 467–493. David Buuck, ‘The powers of horror’ EBR, 7 (Summer 1998) http://www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev7/r7buu.htm Interview with Christopher Breu. I conducted this interview with Bellamy on 3 August 2007 in the Chicago queer and queer-friendly neighborhood of Andersonville. Bellamy, Interview with Christopher Breu. Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1998), p. 90. For Bellamy's discussion of her battle with bulimia, see Bellamy, Academonia, pp. 103–109. The distinction between the Fordist and the post-Fordist city comes of course from David Harvey. See Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 66–98. For his discussion of neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1–38. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. xxv–xxvi. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), p. 9. For a discussion of habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 169–225. These meanings are part of what Paula Treichler has described as the ‘epidemic of signification’ that accompanied the AIDS epidemic. See Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 11. Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 1–26. See Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Douglas Crimp (ed.), AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 197–222. See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 1–24 and Edelman, No Future, pp. 1–31. Bellamy, Letters of Mina Harker, p. 51. Here I am drawing on Freud's classic account of the primal scene in the ‘Wolf Man’ case history. See Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), vol. 17, pp. 29–47. On the real as traumatic kernel, see Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 161–164. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public’ in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 354–367 (355). Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, pp. 5–38. On the lethal moralism that infects much new right and even mainstream liberal thinking about AIDS, see Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism, pp. 252–271. Bordieu, Distinction, pp. 190–196. Ross Chambers, Untimely Interventions: Aids Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004), p. xxviii. Bellamy, Letters of Mina Harker, p. 168. Ibid., pp. 176–177. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Translation in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 80. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 85–90. Žižek, Looking Awry, p. 1. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, p. 88. Bellamy, Interview with Christopher Breu; Bellamy, Letters of Mina Harker, pp. 182, 184. Bellamy, Letters of Mina Harker, pp. 182–183. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), p. 35. Thus Bellamy argues that the difference between her writing about sex and conventional sex writing is that she approaches ‘the subject more from a position of abstraction and fragmentation–seeing it as a state of being rather than a set of actions’. See Dodie Bellamy, ‘Dodie Bellamy’ Chicago Postmodern Poetry.com. This ontological dimension of Bellamy's writing about sex is nowhere more visible than in the sex with death passage. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 55. For a brilliant, extended discussion the ethical dimension opened up by the real, one that has had a strong influence on my own related but slightly different account of the ethics of the real, see Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, pp. 211–245. Bellamy, Letters of Mina Harker, p. 195. Bellamy, Interview with Christopher Breu. Bellamy, Academonia, p. 82. Bellamy, Letters of Mina Harker, pp. 188–189. Ibid., pp. 187–188, 191. And I write this as someone who has undergone 15 surgeries for complications from an unnecessary surgical ‘correction’ of severe hypospadias, a condition in which the urethra comes out at the base of the penis. Hypospadias is routinely and unnecessarily ‘corrected’ in children and routinely produces complications and multiple surgeries. One of the reasons I find Bellamy's writing so resonant is that she captures the experience, indeed the taste and feel, of the hospital better than any writer I know

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