Download - Is There Linguistic Guilt

DENISE RILEY

Is there linguistic guilt?

The I of each is to

the I of eacha kind of fretful speech

which sets a limit on itself

± Marianne Moore, `Black Earth' 1

A confession. I've long been nursing a shapeless suspicion ± one I can'tmake presentable ± that there's a particular guilt, associated both withwriting and with taking on an identification, which is itself partly generatedby the workings of language. Might not language itself arouse an anxietywhich it must also try, through its other circuits, to assuage? These notes,though, aren't directly to do with the psychology of guilt; while I'maware that an edge of psychoanalytic theory will want to know to whatextent the proximity of `language' to `the unconscious' is being eitherassumed, or ignored. Perhaps to try to speak about a guilt carried atthe level of language will turn out only to feebly parrot those familiarLacanian accounts of the subject already constituted in division, of theunconscious structured like a language.2 Or to be a weak rehashing oflalangue, but this time as connected to `the remainder of language',Jean-Jacques Lecercle's phrase.3 And `guilt' itself is a notably vague,catch-all, and easy word, one of the few mildly negative emotions which isreadily admitted to, as if it's quite innocuous; which is in itself suspicious.Some imaginable maxim along the lines of `the greater the guilt, the moreswollen the ego that it masks' snakes into my mind. Nevertheless, I'vea sense that there may still be something rather different at work, ifalso quite modest ± a surface emotionality of language which is carried,simply and broadly, on that level. And that this is somehow acutely in playwhen it comes to writing; a literary as well as a linguistic guilt. Perhapsthere's not only a grammar of guilt, but also a shamefaced sociology ofauthorship, although such occasions for unease are persisted in. Unwilledplagiarism is one facet of this, which sparks a second confession:discovering that such murky but insistent intuitions have had a literatureof their own since at least the 1950s makes me not only an impostor but an

especially ignorant one, stumbling along forty years after on the tracks ofbooks I should have read, so that taking notes becomes a humiliatinglyreassuring act of jettisoning them as I go, finding out that it's all beenbrilliantly achieved decades earlier.

My suggestions in these notes are tentative; and any generalisationsabout poetry will be taken with the proper dose of salt, since they're madefrom a partial aesthetic, leaving out other persuasions which wouldn'thave an interest in what this is on about. I'm speculating in some hinter-land between psychology and linguistics, in a patently amateurish manner.Neither entirely of the psyche nor entirely of the logos, this notion that I'mcreeping towards of à linguistic guilt' fishes up the drowned etymologyof psychology. And then this interrogation must painfully bite its own tail.For while I cross-question the first person, I also deploy it heavily.

1 Ì' lies

The feeling of not being able to tell the truth, of inauthenticity undercertain linguistic circumstances, and, however strenuously one struggles ±isn't this feeling much commoner than is usually acknowledged? Self-description can often be a torment, but its impediments aren't only personalpathologies. If I say Ì am an x' ± or indeed its opposite ± then I'm confidentonly that now I am a liar. As an article of rather blind faith, I'm com-pelled to suppose that this feeling isn't purely idiosyncratic. In the comingpages, I'll have some stabs at why.

An obvious way in: the very structure of the language of self-referenceseems to demand and indeed to guarantee an authenticity which is closelytied to originality, while simultaneously it cancels this possibility. AnyI seems to speak for herself; her utterance comes from her own mouth, andthe first person pronoun is hers, if only for just so long as she pronouncesit. Yet as a human speaker she must know that it is also everyone's, and thatthis grammatical offer of uniqueness (which always gets horribly conflatedwith authenticity) is radically untrue, is always being snatched away. TheI which speaks from only one place is simultaneously everyone's every-where; it's the linguistic marker of rarity but is always democratic. Ofcourse I never does exist except (and critically!) as a momentary site ofspace-time individuation, and its mocking promise of linguistic originalitymust be, and always is, thwarted in order for language to exist in its propercommunality.4

All this is old hat. Wittgenstein floated the idea of a private language inorder to capsize it as oxymoronic; such interiority was impossible because itmade for unintelligibility. Derrida, among others, described the emptiness

76 Critical Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1

of linguistic ownership: `The structure of theft already lodges (itself in) therelation of speech to language [. . .] The speaking subject discusses hisirreducible secondarity, his origin that is always already eluded; for theorigin is always already eluded on the basis of an organised field of speechin which the speaking subject vainly seeks a place that is always missing'.5

My autobiography always arrives from somewhere outside me; mynarrating I is really anybody's, promiscuously. Never mind the comingstory of my life; simply to enunciate that initial Ì' makes me slow down inconfusion.

But maybe the `structure of theft' is still closer to home than ìn therelation of speech to language', perhaps it's waiting in the language itselfand, a bold burglar, has put its feet up there, long before the unsuspectingspeaker strolls into it. To be stripped bare isn't the only kind of linguisticdispossession, which can also come about through plenitude. Sheerproliferation bewilders. Artaud writes desperately of forgetting how to beable to think, of interruptions and `fissures' which fail his articulation andwhich can never be mended. Often this is because he is rushed downdiversions which branch out unstoppably: `There is therefore one singlething which destroys my ideas [. . .]. Something furtive which robs me ofthe words I have found, which reduces my terseness of mind, progressivelydestroying the bulk of my ideas within its own matter.' 6 He insists that thisbroken thought is `terribly abnormal', radically destructive, not merelywhat happens to everyone. Ìn a way, we might consider the impossibilityof formulating and prolonging thought on the same level as the stammeringwhich overcomes my external utterances just about every time I want tospeak. Then it is as if my thought shrinks every time it wants to manifestitself and this is the contradiction which slaps my inner thought downinwardly, compresses it like a spasm. The thought, the expression stopsbecause the flow is too powerful, the brain wants to say too many things, itthinks all at once, ten thoughts instead of one rush towards the exit, thebrain sees thought as a unit in full detail and it also sees all the multiplepoints of view with which it could ally itself and the forms with which itcould endow them. A vast conceptual juxtaposition, all seemingly moreessential and also more dubious than the next and which all the syntacticbrackets in the world would never be able to express and explain.' 7

His readers, filled with the empathy of recognition, may want tochallenge his assertion of the abnormality of this experience. With duerespect to Artaud's conviction of the uniqueness of his misery, I've quotedhim as voicing a familiar chaos which cannot be tidied away by the conceptof the I 's shortcomings. The false feeling of an I-pronouncement can'tsimply be to do with its air of claiming to originate while one senses that

Is there linguistic guilt? 77

one's first being spoken to by language, and that Ì' is a pretender to animpossible throne. So Heidegger describes language as an invocation towhich man, although its ostensible `speaker', must resonate; or as ThePlatters less gloriously had it, Òh yes, I'm the great pretender.' Yet it wouldbe absurd to attach so much blame to the grammar of Ì', which is, after all,necessarily everyone's for language to be possible; as if secretly you longedfor a marker, like that private language Wittgenstein mocked, all of yourown. The concept of the I 's linguistic alienation can only get so much done,and an unhappy mess soon overwhelms its efforts at housework. DespiteWittgenstein's notion of philosophy as a broom and its task as sweeping-up, I'd prefer to stand by this stubborn heaped untidiness of uneaseattached to writing in the first person.

2 A liar writes

When I ± for I daren't speak for anyone else, and yet probably this emotionis very widespread ± when I write I and follow up the pronoun with a self-description, feelings of fraud grip me. Not always, of course. I can easilysay Ì'm worn out, I've just got the shopping back on the bus from Sains-bury's' but certainly can't say, for instance, Ì'm a writer' and only underbaroque circumstances would I wish to utter Ì'm a woman'. Steeringclear of the great sociological or sexual categories of identity, which arealmost easier to analyse in their historical discomfiture, just what isthe awkwardness of the self-description Ì'm a writer'? Is it the halo ofself-regarding leisure alone ± or my dread of the demand that I shouldprove it by coming up with the goods? Is it the incongruence of theostensible stamp of originality, the authorial I, with the cultural capital,always derived and borrowed, on which I draw? Is it that the only noveltyof anyone's I resides not in its utterance but in its accidents ± its styleunwilled and incriminating as a fingerprint, its lingering cadences, itsflavour or its smell, almost? The writer may, even to her own revulsion, hiton a tone as arbitrary and inimitable as a signature. These aspects arecompletely beyond my management, a fact which may or may not beworrying. But it does force a disassociation between ideas of òriginality'and of `control'. There's a hum of language at my ear, I swat it away, it risesto resettle in thick clouds. It's outside me, I do not make it up, and it doesn'tquite make me up. I go on struggling inside this doubled failure oforigination. My guess is that while indeed there's an embarrassingsociology of `being a writer', there's also something more intimately to dowith the imperatives of writing as an intensification of a common enoughguilt. I learnt my English from books, which perhaps increased my sense


of learning it as a foreign language, as a borrowed or a stolen thing, butI'm sure that the impression of displacement isn't ever solely due to anysuch psychobiographical accident.

To claim to be a writer is like making a special claim to be a breather. It'seasy enough if you have the minimal materials, and so the activity can becarried out furtively, secretively. A student confesses Ì don't want to admitto my friends that I write, I won't come out to them.' But everyone does it,I want to reassure her, it's quite natural, nothing to be ashamed of. Myphrases would resemble unconvincing sexual emollients which only serveto sharpen anxiety. Then her next worry would come hard on its heels:Ànd exactly because everyone does it, what right do I have to make publicmy own concerns? Why should my life's ordinary preoccupations be ofthe least interest to anyone else?' I've heard this concern (and voicedoverwhelmingly by women who are beginning to write poetry) a hundredtimes. It's a real, a serious question, and it can't be properly addressedthrough the terms it usually receives ± that it shows an individualpsychology of low self-confidence. Many who've survived creative writingclasses must also feel silent doubt when exhorted to describe only whatthey've experienced. It seems a further well-intentioned cruelty to exhortsuch students to `find their own voices', especially when, under the sameinstitutional roof, another pedagogy of literary criticism may be rehearsingthem in the intertextuality of literature, where everything's quotation. Thisresembles the problem of writing an original love letter, or rather aconvincing love letter, since originality in love is hardly possible ± a letterthat could convince me, its author, of its constancy and mine, wheninevitably I find myself repeating the same expressions I have used toothers before. Falling in love repeatedly is humiliating when the apparentrarity of feeling announces itself as, after all, condemned to verbalrepetition; while it seems cheapskate to echo the phrases one's written, inall sincerity, over the years. CosõÁ fan tutte is from this angle a hideouslyupsetting opera, since in its cruel and backwards logic (I sidestep anypossible truth of this) what generates love is playing the part of a lover. Butif there's no originality in emotion, there's none in language. This reflectionis hardly consoling.

Some further doubts which turn on self-description: I can't believe in aselfhood which is other than generated by language over time; yet canreadily feel inauthentic if I speak of myself as a sociologised subject. Thisdescribing Ì' produces an anxiety which can't be mollified by any theory ofits constructedness. The falseness of my persona telling its, my, taleresounds in my own ears, despite my best intentions, and howeverplausible it may sound to an audience. What purports to be Ì' speaks back


to me, and I can't quite believe what I hear it say. My unease isn't so muchwith lying to others, which I think I'd know about, as with lying to myself,which I wouldn't. Polonius's strictures in Hamlet, `to thine own self be true,and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to anyman' offer me not tautology but hopelessness. I am hard to please myself,and can't take much comfort from the usual evasions ± for example, thatwhat I write is merely floated out with no destination, no expectation that itshould be read. Or that writing is one prolonged piece of self-informingrepudiation; getting rid of it, but in order to find out just what it was youthought; for then the rational gesture would be ± to delete the work. Thenthere's the writer costumed as a tease, the jack-in-the-box who'll elaboratelymislay himself to bob up again. Underlying any such equivocations, whatpersists is the recognition of being as derived as I am derivative. What's astyle? A veneer, imposed irresistibly, yet by no identifiable agency. As withmy physical appearance, it's not what I'd have chosen, given a free hand,but it's what I'm stuck with, and have to live with. I can trace a writing stylein others, but can't refashion it in myself. I could just about parody myselfbut couldn't work up a fresh style, even by theft. But in the case of poetry,it's often seemed a relief not to possess that familiar desideratum, à voice',and not to resemble oneself; like Foucault's mantra: Ì am no doubt not theonly one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and donot ask me to remain the same'.8 Like, I imagine, many others, I can onlyleave alone a poem once it no longer resembles any product of mine, even ifits fate will be to get read as characteristic. The strange convention of thepoetry reading ushers in a theatrical self with a vengeance, the performingI bringing her accidents of voice and costume and mannerisms to flesh outher starved text, married and reconstituted with it in fullness before alleyes, like wartime powdered egg soaked in water. Inside this show andworking against it, the borderline inauthenticity of the lyric Ì' gets relievedonly inside the performed I's speaking, where everyone, you hope, finallysees the truth of the matter ± that it isn't you. Yet there are far moreplausible ways of defamiliarising oneself. Does the writer none the lessrepeat the dubious I with an agnostic's wager of making, against all odds, asuccessful appeal; or in a trusting dream of telepathy? Despite suspicions,I still circulate something, and sometimes people speak as if only the act ofpublishing can fix any trace of this half-repudiated I onto the world'ssurface. If self-description remains a dangerous fiction, there is in the samebreath the anchoring power of a signed piece of work; MargueriteYourcenar has spoken of `Ce moi incertain et flottant dont j'ai contesteÂmoi-meÃme l'existence, et que je ne sens vraiment deÂlimiteÂ que par lesquelques ouvrages qu'il m'est arriveÂ d'eÂcrire'.9


Is this discrepancy between the glue of the printed signature and thehesitancy of the lying writer the reason for that sharp embarrassment at thesight of something of mine in print? Posting my typescript to its publisher,I've thrown away that work; I haven't exactly disavowed its contents but itmust takes its chances, I don't know how I'd defend it if asked to, andcertainly don't ever want to see it again. Once it's written and sent off, thenit's also written off. Somewhere in her diaries, Virginia Woolf mentions theembarrassment of noticing a letter she'd sent lying around in the house ofthe friend who'd received it. What familiar shame, though, is this? It allarouses faint thoughts of the sequel to the end of the affair, when you'd farrather not clap eyes again on the person who once aroused such devastatingemotion. It's unseemly to see my letter, once sent; it's no longer for my eyes.Is glimpsing it disconcerting because it's relentlessly out in the world, takenover, no longer mine to recall and revise? `The word in language is halfsomeone else's. [. . .] Language is not a neutral medium that passes freelyand easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it ispopulated ± overpopulated ± with the intentions of others. Expropriating it,forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult andcomplicated process', wrote Bakhtin.10 But suppose you suspect that theword is already not `half ' but is wholly `someone else's', in fact everyoneelse's, and that it's well beyond retrieval, can only be copied, or stolen backagain? Then suppose that things are worse again than this; perhaps some ofmy discomfiture is that, while I quietly believe that I don't exist, any lettersigned in my handwriting gives the lie to this conviction of mine, it'sevidence before all else for the ontological prosecution. It looks as if after allI must exist, since I leave ± and choose to leave ± these papery trailseverywhere behind me; yet no one should be taken in by them. EmilyDickinson describes a disembodiedness here, but she revels in it: `A letteralways feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone withoutcorporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems aspectral power in thought that walks alone.' 11 Less spiritual, I can only feelthat to catch sight of myself as if dead is awkward, and that to become arevenant is ± to feel sheepish. Why? ± given that I'd rather go withphenomenology's truth and accept that I live `outside myself ', am clean ofall depths, am no darkly glowing cavity stuffed with dreaming secrets. So afirst inspection of Damien Hirst's Mother and Child Divided came as anunexpected relief ± neither the dead cow nor the dead calf 's skull offeredthe least vacant space for the soul or the unconscious, for all was crammedfull of pallid organs, right up to the edge of the skin. Pronouncements,published in speech, must also lack interiority. Enunciation comes from theoutside, or does so in its most magisterial forms. The weekly winning


lottery numbers, once announced, take on a blinding self-evidence. Ofcourse it's 2, 16, 44 etcetera ± how come I hadn't remembered their propersequence when I bought my ticket? These are numbers always known, yetsomehow stupidly forgotten, incorrectly transcribed. Broadcast, they haveall the gravitas of an Ian Hamilton Finlay maxim handsomely lettered onstone, noble, inevitable. They are given from elsewhere, like Moses's tabletsborne down from the mountain; alas, all such retrospective knowledgearrives too late. I should consistently espouse this being `outside from thestart' in its lived intelligibility ± `Nothing determines me from outside, notbecause nothing acts upon me, but on the contrary because I am from thestart outside myself and open to the world' 12 ± but it must have its limits forme, since the surprise of my letter glimpsed sitting at its destinationremains a mild near-death experience. As if it's a sliver of what it's violentlyimproper for me to see ± my own death. My letter, though, is living on verynicely without me; it flourishes far better alone, since it's one witness to mypast I can no longer argue with.

There's enough documentary evidence of autobiography as thanatology.`Everything that we inscribe in the living present of our relation to othersalready carries, always, the signature of memoirs-from-beyond-the-grave'Derrida writes.13 `Tout discours de `̀ ma vie'' est un discours sur la Mort'concludes Parret.14 And even the modern fable of `the death of the author'condemns the still-living writer to return, unhappily, to haunt her ownproductions, though without any door to walk through; it's not gratifying tofind oneself the unheimlich who hasn't quite expired, and who can't be inany position to make a comeback.

If my letter survives me even in my lifetime, how radically am I dis-possessed by my graphic traces? Am I, in practice, written? Sometimes itsounds more desirable that I should be written. I'll sketch in a thought ofwhy. In an ironical twist, perhaps, to the very necessary if largely unwrittenhistory of modern rhetoric, it's Heidegger who proposed a benevolentaccount of a linguistic passivity. His is a blocking-in of ideas, itspropositions tied, arched in together, like dry-stone walling. Any summarymust be shaky ± but in brief: his positive conception of invocation renderscalls as summons into being, like God's and Adam's joint exercises innaming species before the Fall, and not as accusations. An active silencecalls forth a naming far from any self-generated descriptiveness: `Man actsas though he were the shaper and master of language, while in factlanguage remains the master of man. When this relation of dominance getsinverted, man hits upon strange manoeuvres. Language becomes the meansof expression. As expression, language can decay into a mere medium forthe printed word.' 15 In place of such debased expressivity, there's an ideal


power of stillness to which speaking is a response. Stillness is a fullness,and its `peal' is bidding, or invocation. To hear becomes dynamic, aconcentrated attentiveness. Then `Language speaks'. It is in charge, but itsrule is not repressive; on the contrary, it's markedly inventive. `Does itmerely deck out things with words of a language? No. This naming doesnot hand out titles, it does not apply terms, but it calls into the word. Thenaming calls.' 16 So, for Heidegger, to name is not the same as to bestow anidentification. It does not work through a wound. Originary naming iswithout threat, unlike other ideas of from-on-high categorising, such asAlthusser's interpellative tableau, in which naming conveys being byissuing an aggressive charge against its addressee. Heidegger's calling doeshave its own energetic tension, and invocation also guarantees a livelydistance. To answer his own questions of `What is it to speak? What is thisnaming?' Heidegger goes straight to the praxis of poetry. `Language speaks'in the poem, and marks a productive non-identification. `Language speaksin that the command of dif-ference calls world and things into the simpleonefold of their intimacy', but in the same breath, `Language goes on as thetaking place or occurring of the dif-ference for world and things'.17 Here is ahigh conception of poetic function which elevates language above `man'and towers well above local concerns as to the guilt of individualauthorship. I'll resume a beetle's-eye view.

3 The liar tries lyric

Poetry in its composing is an inrush of others' voices. So `finding one'sown voice' must be an always-frustrated search, fishing around in a strangefry-up or a bouillabaisse in which half-forgotten spiky or slimy thingsbubble up to the surface, shaking its blandness. Words crowd in un-invited, regardless of sense, flocking not through the brain but through theear, like the Byzantine iconography of conception. This is well established.Jakobson says mildly `paronomasia, a semantic confrontation of phonemi-cally similar words irrespective of any etymological connection, plays aconsiderable role in the life of language'.18 In poetry you may succeed inexploiting its tacit permission to put sound in command over semanticmeaning. Sound runs on well ahead of the writer's tactics. The aural laws ofrhyme precede and dictate its incarnation ± and this is only one element ofan enforced passivity in the very genre where that irritating thing`creativity' is supposed to most forcefully hold court. Style in itsidiosyncratic rarity is often recognisable without its author's writtensignature. This tone isn't produced by my deliberation, any more thanI can alter my stature by taking thought. This fact can be an irritant. It's


all well beyond my control. But the lyric `I' offers a simulacrum of controlunder the guise of form; a profound artifice, and the writer and reader bothknow it. There's an offer here of craft, but of a strange sort since it can onlybe exercised retrospectively; held by form I work backwards, chippingaway at words, until maybe something gets uncovered which I canacknowledge as what I might have had to say.

There are, though, venerable alternatives to this notion of thoughtbeing made in the ear. Again it's Heidegger who proposes a high anda genial account of poetry as dictation. It utters, and is heard as, a calmand clear call. `For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speakswhen and only when he responds to language by listening to its appeal.[. . .] The responding in which man authentically listens to the appeal oflanguage is that which speaks in the element of poetry.' 19 Heideggerproffers his own brand of knowing through an attentive waiting, heldin a listening reserve to hear the commanding peal of stillness.What's important is `learning to live in the speaking of language', andthis needs a capacity to respond through listening, by `anticipat-ing in reserve'. A dynamic hearing, then, is necessary. Poetry marksa resonant absence, and Heidegger, elucidating one of Georg Trakl'slyrics, demonstrates practically what he means by listening to its calling.But ± aren't things more agitated from the point of view of the writer,even one who's most serene once beached on the page?

Those who work in any medium which uses quotation and allusion,whether paint or celluloid or sound, will be all too familiar with thephenomenon of associations rising spontaneously, crowding in, giving youa constant editing headache. An inescapable, and disconcerting, accom-paniment of writing is unwanted intrusions, an autopilot intertextuality todrive you spare, unwilled quotation as white noise. There's a characteristicexcess in working with lyric, that buzz of ramifications through sound-echoes, not in the first place sense-echoes; like forms of speech disturbancefrom the psychiatric literature on schizophrenia. You need to process theminto a controlled madness, but you can only exert such control afterwardsand not before or as they arrive; as writer, you may manage to cut throughthe blur of sound-associations, but only retrospectively, after you'vedetected them on the page. Do they stay or do they go? There's a feelingof being seized against your will by too much language, of being inscribedby language, when the sounds or shapes of what you've written, not theirmeaning, determine what comes next ± an untidy, semi-conscious,vacillating affair after which you have to dust yourself down, maybe torealise `what's really been going on here' only in retrospect. If you do ±perhaps the writer is the last person to know. Some tentative concept of


`retrospective knowledge' is endlessly enticing, full of doubtful charm, andmay hold wide sway, for how often in life do you discover what you meant,or felt, via some backwards route? But it's an odd idea. What does it meanto only come to know backwards, and what kind of credit can anyone evertake for such an over-the-shoulder knowing? What does it mean, to come toknow what you `meant to say' only after it's written down? How shouldI speak for something that has preceded me? As Tristan Tzara remarked,with dazzling accuracy, `Thought is made in the mouth' 20 ± it reverberatesalso in the ear, a more passive orifice. And here I've got so puzzled by thatnecessary, if fertile, passivity involved in finishing a piece of writing, whichliterary criticism then over-generously hails as exemplifying `control' ± yetit's in practice a febrile `being written', which has always seemed to me toturn half-mechanically on the stuff of words. I don't mean the contingencyof the relation of sound to sense, which MallarmeÂ worried over when heexplained that both the words `la nuit' and `le jour' sounded wrong to himfor what they denoted, because the sound of `nuit' had a light timbre (as itdoes in the English `night') yet the sound of `jour' had a dark timbre.21 Butsomething differently contingent: that this process, labelled as knowingcraft, is actually given through the active materiality of the word. Any`rationality' gets exercised only in retrospect, through self-editing; whilewriting, you can feel like a blindfolded sculptor slapped around the head bydamp lumps of clay, which you must try to seize and throw back at thehaphazardly-forming art object before it stiffens itself into some shape younever quite intended. This sense had embarrassed me, not only because thiswriting through the energetic materiality of words went unacknowledged ±or rather, for many years I'd not found any hint of it ± but because I didn'twant to have to espouse awkward theories of `irrationality' to cope with it.This working process also begins to sound rather close to the idea of self-knowledge gained through psychoanalytic means. But I'm thinking aboutsomething more immediate, the experienced retrospective knowledge thatswims up at you from the surface of the fresh page when you suddenly seesomething of what `you have really written'. And this may be quite alarm-ing ± but not at all because of some worrying content, but because thepower of linguistic process itself is revealed in a disquietingly obliqueway ± not because of what it says, but because of the way it has said it,which is somehow across the writer. Not `through', not the writer asconduit; and not quite `despite', but across.

The problem of this adverb `across' is how to understand its direction-ality. A spatial metaphor of high to low, or the reverse, would be easier; anespousal of either abasement to or control by language. And yet. We knowabout `the death of the author' ± still, in the morgue toes can itch to twitch.


Heidegger writes that speakers inhabit the house of language. Yes ± butwhen the landlord must call round to collect the rent, isn't there likely to besome back-chat? Agreed, the feeling that one's being made, like a nervoussecretary, to `take a letter' by the old-fashioned boss, Poetic Language, mustbe common enough. Yet I'd still want to revive some half-disgraced notionof the dialectic, some quite modest notion of mutuality between the greatdictator language and the writer, even if the boss inevitably retains theupper hand. If kneaded by language, then needed by language. Reachingout for a fragment of mastery may always fall short. But you do try.Otherwise there are two standard ways of considering the matter. Youcould make an aesthetic out of varnishing your fingernails, of recliningunder the autonomous power of language in a blissfully resigned surrenderto the process of being written ± or else you could set your jaw at a sternangle and beat the language-trollop into behaving herself as you shape herup nicely in verse. Neither aesthetic seems to be enticing or accurate. Towrite is at once a more modest, yet a more disconcerting matter than thesetwo unattractive metaphors imply. And it's arguable that the slogan of`allowing the free play of the signifier' or `putting the signifier in control'secretly elevates an old notion of authorial power, since the writer is thenspecial by appointment as the vatic mouthpiece through which languagefrolics. Its opposite, an unwavering control over the signifier in the name of`craft', is dully unrealistic.

In practice, a hurried pruning and snipping away at the thickets of verbalfoliage luxuriating everywhere across the page can turn the poet into adetermined topiarist, hell-bent on shaping a peacock where a wilfulbushiness is running riot. The embarrassment lies partly in finding out,too late again, that one has been despite one's vigilance once more doneover by language. Sound-determinations and puns have surreptitiouslyissued their usual forceful silent dictations so that I have written both aboveand beneath what I `really meant'. Then comes a confession of near-helplessness, like W. S. Graham's:

What is the language using us for?I don't know. Have the words everMade anything of you, near a kindOf truth you thought you were? MeNeither.22

So a shamefaced reaction of `That is not it, that is not what I meant at all'may arise in response to some amiable critic whose commendations to thepoet on her `choice of language' she can't accept with a clear conscience,since she senses that language has arbitrarily chosen, has lighted upon her.And that really she had intended rather less than the critic has so


conscientiously unearthed from her text. The impact of sheer contingencymay get a hearing, but often as a defence against the accusation thatan obscure reference is `eÂlitist'. So the writer can retort `No, it's not eÂlitist,it's aleatory ± it's chance, I wanted to incorporate accident into my work tosuggest randomness, a lack of solemnity, and so let the air in a little.' But ifyou don't happen to buy that line, then the domination of accident goesunmentioned. The missing question here can't be put as a problem ofauthorial volition, or a failure of linguistic accounting, like Jean-ClaudeMilner's question about the linguist's specific domain, slipped into hisL'Amour de la Langue under a sardonic banner of `proud to be boring'.23 Itwon't be, What does the author or the linguist want? but, What does thelanguage want?, a question with something of the rhetoric of Graham's:

What is the language using us for?It uses us all and in its darkOf dark actions selections differ.24

Roman Jakobson dwells on the poet's lack of control over what's up,prefacing his remarks with a qualification from Saussure; `Que le critiqued'une part, et que le versificateur d'autre part, le veuille ou non'.Sheer accident could not, he thinks, possibly determine the poetic com-plexities he can dig up through his own linguistic analyses; such a richdesign must be accorded to the poet, since `any significant poeticcomposition, whether it is an improvisation or the fruit of long andpainstaking labour, implies a goal-oriented choice of verbal material'.25

But the poet is not always, continues Jakobson, the deliberating chooser.`There remains, however, an open question: whether in certain casesintuitive verbal latency does not precede and underlie even such aconscious consideration. The rational account (prise de conscience) of thevery framework may arise in the author ex post facto or never at all.' 26 Thisis delicate and compelling ground, rarely discussed practically; but thereare some historical instances which Jakobson retrieves. So Schiller,corresponding with Goethe, held that the poet starts off `merely with theunconscious', but Goethe replied that he himself wanted to go further, toassert that true poetic creation happened unconsciously, while everythingdone after careful reasoning happened only casually. And the Russianformalist poet Khlebnikov `joined all those poets who acknowledged that acomplex verbal design may be inherent in their work irrespective of theirapprehension and volition (que . . . le versificateur . . . le veuille ou non)or ± to use William Blake's testimony ± `̀ without premeditation and evenagainst my Will.'' ' 27 Jakobson scrutinises Khlebnikov's own analysis ofhis `Grasshopper' to establish that even the poet's retrospective analyses


of its sound patterns ± which occurred, as Khlebnikov says, `without thewish of the one who wrote this nonsense' ± fell well short of beingexhaustive. Linguist easily outstrips poet in his exegesis of the phonemes'patterning: `The chain of quintets which dominate the phonologicalstructuration of this passage can be neither fortuitous nor poeticallyindifferent. Not only the poet himself, originally unaware of the underlyingcontrivance, but also his responsive readers spontaneously perceivethe astonishing integrity of the cited lines without unearthing their foun-dations.' 28 Jakobson, however, ploughs on to reveal a formal ingenuity, ofwhich its author is innocent: `The poet's metalanguage may lag far behindhis poetic language and Khlebnikov proves it not only by the substantialgaps in his observations'.29 Then who, or rather what, has done thisingenious poetic choosing? Jakobson's tentative phrase is ìntuitive verballatency'; this seems very close in its implications to Jean-Jacques Lecercle'sphrase `the remainder of language'. Especially if one pushes the latter alittle to mean `the unconscious of language'.

But suppose one just rejigged the idea of `poet' to mean ± anyone whosubmits to words for the time being, but with the clear plan of fighting back,through self-editing, later? Or is this what's tacitly understood and acceptedby most people anyway, and am I only labouring an unremarkable pointwhich ought to be quietly taken for granted, when I dwell on thisbackwards aspect to writing? Quite probably. Still there's an obstinatetemporal problem in here, though; it's a more immediate puzzle about timethan is embraced in the conception of the writer who's constituted as suchby habitual self-checking. There's a strange time of rhyme. (The rhyming ofthese two words in English almost makes me a full-blown Brissetian,longing to throw in `mime'.) You anticipate the rhyme, but you hear it inretrospect; aurally it works forwards and backwards, though on the pageyou can see it coming. Though conventions like the couplet or terza rimawill establish their own aural regularities, for less shaped writing only anaural hope can be entertained by the ear. Then it works by anticipation andits gratification, or through jarring and denial. Here Jakobson talks of a`regressive action' in language, illustrating this with à typical slip' by aradio announcer, in which `the convention was in session' became `theconfession was in session', and à regressive assimilative influence' hadbeen exerted by `session' upon `convention'.30 It's the sort of example whichTimpanaro would discuss later in The Freudian Slip 31 ± while an orthodoxFreudian reading would gladly have made more of that substituted word`confession'. It's also a case of reading-into-speech, in which the radioannouncer's eye has run ahead on his script and his eye has instructed histongue. But writing is a different case, for sound-anticipation runs in the ear


well before the eye gets to track and to pull back what's typed on the page;instead, the ear instructs the eye, but reason is only ever able to intervenelater. This eccentric temporality, the time of rhyme, is a concrete instance ofretrospective knowledge. But this hardly diminishes its strange undecid-ability.

Lecercle's electrifying The Violence of Language does, however, producethe foundations for that desirable third path between capitalised notions ofa sheer hegemony of Language on the one hand, and the controlling Writeron the other. Although he politely concedes to the authority of the poet,this is a concession that, I think, the implications of his own work undercut;and usefully, for they bring longed-for relief to the poet's privateawkwardness at being written and at scrabbling for belated self-editing. Itgives a convincing and a non-psychologised account of this process, in partthrough a description of how metaphors work ± through ramification. Itelaborates the odd potential of that `multiple analysis' of languageespoused by `the delirious French linguist who believed that man isdescended from the frog', Jean-Pierre Brisset. His method was ètymologygone mad': that etymology isn't just the truth about words, but about theworld; that àll the ideas expressed with similar sounds have the sameorigin and all refer, initially, to the same subject'.32 One of the manyquestions raised by Lecercle in his engaging book is: to what extent, and inthe teeth of which modern linguistic opinion, does language actuallybehave as Brisset suggests? My marginal note to this surmise would ask ifthis isn't a phenomenon which dogs the act of writing poetry. Not thefamiliar critical idea of an àmbiguity of meaning', which suggests finelypoised alternatives among richly suggestive interpretations under thecontrol of the skilful poet ± but a far less malleable affair, continuous whitenoise, an anarchic constant whirring-away, unstoppable, relentless, sinkingsometimes into the background, sometimes dominant in full cry. Sohomophony is just one fertile menace among many others here ± wordswhich deploy the same sounds for different semantic ends, like `rough' and`ruff ', congenitally at risk from the interference of their double or triplemeanings. Once you hear them in a room which demands close listening, oryou scrutinise them laid out on the page, those suppressed other meaningscannot but spring forward. And what reading a poem entails is obsessivelyfacing it down, staring at it until you're at risk of dissolving it into aplurality of possible meanings, or a little further towards nonsense. Or itreduces you to helpless wanderings down its byways, down thin goat-pathsof association. You put it at your mercy but you are put at its mercy.You're never sure which of you has got the upper hand, or quite what tomake of this half-acknowledged struggle.


These concerns are familiar enough in different non-poetic contexts,and the idea that there's method in linguistic madness is venerable.Freud differently exploits it in his many analyses of dreams andjokes. The Interpretation of Dreams offers `condensation' as one sub-classof those overdeterminations which characterise the content of dreams, ashe unpacks a chain of jammed-together meanings out of the `nonsense'words or strange neologisms which the dreamer utters or reads.33 A vastscholarly literature now annotates or interrogates this work. Among themildly sceptical, Sebastiano Timpanaro's carefully undogmatic dis-cussion of parapraxes deploys philology, the effects of banalisation,and printers' errors to cross-question Freud's The Psychopathology ofEveryday Life, enquiring to what extent all linguistic slips may be attri-buted to a `Freudian' motive. And whether, instead of `the polyglotunconscious', a more prosaic but more accurate explanation in terms of`superficial psychology', such as a haplography (the shortening of a soundduplicated in a word) may be found.34 Timpanaro doesn't, he explains,want to follow Freud's belief that neurophysiological and other mechanicalsources are, while real enough in themselves, significant largely asoccasions to let a psychically driven slip flourish. Instead, he tentativelyventures a revised version of the unconscious: could there be `a muchmore mechanical-instinctual unconscious, and thus one less connectedwith the individual history of the person who committed the `̀ slip''?' 35

How close in their ultimate effects, although not in method, Timpanaro'ssuggestions are to Lecercle's conception of `the remainder' of language isdebatable. Both seem to propose a sort of underbelly of language, vastenough to overhang the territory of any speaker. Less demanding is theanti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing's liking for examples of the misattributedinsanity that follows if you fail to decipher the meanings of condensedspeech; so a young schizophrenic patient declares of herself that she `wasborn under a black sun. She's the occidental sun', and Laing delightedlycomments that she really was `the accidental black son', unwanted,scorched by family hatred.36

Whereas poetry, you could say, is purposively and systematically `madlanguage': not because of its authors, but because the half-latent crazinessendemic to ordinary language is professionally exploited by poetry. That ±and not something more ethereally glorious ± is what poetry does; and whatit is. The writer is then in the delicate position of giving her limited assent tothis craziness in its infinite ramification of sound-associations and puns.How grudgingly or how readily that assent will be given depends partly onthe fluctuations of taste and fashion. In short it's a matter of history, of thesolid history of words in the world. Wallace Stevens suggests that `a


language, considered semantically, evolves through a series of conflictsbetween the denotative and the connotative forces in words; between anasceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of all association,and a hedonism tending to kill language by dissipating their sense in amultiplicity of associations. These conflicts are nothing more than changesin the relation between the imagination and reality.' 37 Or, you might preferto say, changes in intellectual fashion.

4 Taking credit where credit isn't due

It's a peculiar business to work today as a writer of lyric who suspectssomething about her own death, yet who still fears her own disinterment.I'll mention, apologising for self-references, what I guess must be a commonexperience. When reviewers interpret a poem, inevitably they'll confidentlymisconstrue an allusion. Often they'll think up the most ingeniouslyelaborate sources for something in the text that had a plainer association ora less baroque connection behind it. I don't mean the genre of reviewswhich are imagined character-profiles or amateur psychoanalyses of theauthor (all too common) or technical commentaries (all too rare), butreviews which base their evaluation upon detailed textual interpretations.Sometimes these arrive before they're published, sent to the author by thecritic. As we both know that I, as writer, have virtually had it, I have toperform an awkward trick of propping myself up on my deathbed on oneelbow before collapsing artistically prostrate again (as in the painting ofanother famous impostor, Thomas Chatterton) to say `Of course, I'mgrateful for your careful interpretations and all your attention to this text,but as it happens all that I was referring to by `̀ x'' was y, but naturallyI don't want to set myself up as some privileged author, or claim anyspecial weight for the allusions I actually intended in my text here.' Thereviewers habitually ignore the author's politely spectral murmurs. They goright ahead and publish their original draft, as if they hadn't ever beenimpelled to make their detour to the monument of the moribund author. Asif they'd embarked on a pilgrimage, but one undertaken after the knowingloss of their faith ± like post-marxists who'd despite themselves reallywanted to set out for the shrine of Marx in Highgate cemetery, but could,disappointedly, discover only withered carnations from the North Koreanembassy there. Then since the writer doesn't ever respond to publishedreviews ± if she follows the usual etiquette ± that's the end of it.

Or secretly it isn't, quite. Her near-death experiences leave her floatingabove her body on the ceiling of the operating theatre in some unease. It'sodd to be left gasping sotto voce `But I . . .' when one doesn't believe in a


lordly I of the writer or the sacral `being a poet'. Maybe there is a moment,just before one's death-via-publication, when the organic connectionbetween the author and her text isn't quite severed ± or, in the old meta-phor, when the umbilical cord hasn't yet been cut, so that the work hasn'tquite come to birth as a text which will trot off on its own. But as soon assomething has been posted off, printed, and distributed, one loses allattachment to it, and is drawn on to the next project, or more likely swearsto give the whole business up. This underwrites the temporal disjunctionbetween the writing person and her later incarnation, or entombment, asauthor who's frozen into that being only by the act of undergoingpublication. Maybe such hair-splitting is mildly useful because it suggeststhat `the author' really was always-already dead. The moment before thewriter is interred, through the process of publication, into the catacomb-category of `the author' is the moment of protest ± one wants to sit upsuddenly in the bath like the villains at the end of the movies Les Diaboliquesand Fatal Attraction, and roll one's eyes . . .

There are other difficulties concerned with `taking responsibility for' thatwhich has half-written its writer. The ethics of allusion go largely un-discussed, which seems a curious absence. It brings up the problem ofprivate reference; suppose you have textual associations, odd referenceswhich your audience aren't necessarily going to know, because why shouldthey ± do you cut these out of your work, in the interests of intelligibility oraccessibility? Footnoting can cover this, although it may lay you open tocharges of being pedantic. But the case of misattributed allusions perplexesme. For example, I'll get haunted by sound-echoes, aural traces of linesfrom, say, Wordsworth or Auden. Occasionally I have to give in to theirpersistence, put my hands in the air and settle to use them in some lyric ofmine, hoping that they'll be recognised as borrowings by the reader. Acritic, however, reviews the thing according to his own prior reading, andoverlooks the origin of those lines whose tones and cadences I've stolen,against my will, senselessly and under compulsion. He credits me orupbraids me with them. Then I feel ashamed and want to say `No, I'msorry, I was stupidly making an allusion I couldn't help, do forgive thistendency of mine, one can't always use footnotes, not for this kind ofinsignificant sound-allusion.' I can't, though. There are no channels forcommunications for the dead. The only answer to this dilemma, I suppose,would be to excise all such traces from my work; to my horror they'realways liable to creep out of the text again, just when I'd thought them allfinally cleaned up. There seems to be very little which isn't driven bysound-association, maybe in the form of puns, maybe in the form ofcadence, maybe in the form of half-realised borrowings. I don't mind not


being òriginal', there's no possibility of originality ± but I do mind beingcredited with something I didn't invent. My guess is that what I've called`retrospective knowledge' operates intensely at the site of the guilts whichI now think are related: of writing and of refusing to be or not to be named.If I am called a poet, on the site where I'm least inventive, then I'm toldwho I am but can't be convinced by it, because I know better. I know whatthe language, across me, gets up to. Like Althusser, I feel guilty. But atpresent there is no available theoretical outlet through which I can declaremy guilt.

If my spectral demurrals, under the unattractive flowery hat of poet,about some `misreading' of my text aren't to have the power to sway acritic, then neither should an academic's objections to any `misreading' of aslice of his theory. The literary text's author's intentions aren't pertinent;then nor is the critical text's. What's sauce for the literary goose should besauce for the theoretical gander. But the critic doesn't usually behave insuch an egalitarian fashion. He argues in print, he exudes defences andrefutations, he publishes À Reply to John Lewis', he refutes misinterpret-ations, he writes yet another book to disarm his critics, and he engages infully armed defensive warfare. Its severity is limited only by his ethicalconvictions, his modesty, and his interest in the letters page of the New YorkReview of Books. He wriggles to reinsert himself, a Houdini reversed, intohis book; and wriggles posthumously, for he won't be gracefully killedoff by the act of its publication, he fights for control of its destiny after-wards. He uses his lungs to argue his case, which he is confident is simul-taneously his book's case. And academic publishing and journalisticconventions encourage him to do this. Meanwhile the poet's book isreviewed and her character, read therein, is admired or interrogated,her sexual history guessed at, her unconscious readily analysed, herreading and her ìnfluences' inferred or invented. But, as literary author,she has ± and quite rightly ± no redress.

There's a curiously different treatment of the academic text and itsauthor, and of the `creative' text and its writer. That there's markedly littleby way of a critical history of criticism itself only serves to syntheticallyisolate the supposedly originary integrity of the `creative' work. Theacademic's text is more open to intellectual attack from its professionalcontemporaries, but it has more channels for its protection under the alibisof à stimulating exchange' or à scholarly debate'. The poetic text is moreopen to biographical speculation, against which its author, given hermoribund state, has no come-back. The critical author, champion of his owntexts, lives to dissect the always-already-pickled literary author. If the poemis tough enough, that doesn't matter. As Heidegger, quoting from Trakl,


commented, `Who the author is remains unimportant here, as with everyother masterful poem. The mastery consists precisely in this, that the poemcan deny the poet's person and nature.' 38 The less tough poem, however,gets criticised in that name of its author which it can't disavow. But I aswriter can always disavow it. If I am to deploy my suggestions in thesepages, then I did not quite write that poem which almost wrote me butdidn't quite.

By now, all this is beginning to sound suspiciously like something else;something rather different but which also depends on a doubled disavowalof agency, twisted through time ± and which I'll also characterise as aninstance of linguistic guilt.

5 Who, me?

In remoter Cornwall, supposedly magical wells and chapels still flourish.An alder tree overhanging the sacred spot will be draped with flutteringwhite rags tied on as votive offerings by modern pagans. Encouraged bythese festoons, the secular onlooker furtively hangs her own torn-up paperhandkerchief on its branches. Ìnterpellation' is another shrine which stillcompels revisiting and attracts fresh commentary layered upon oldercommentaries. Althusser's scenario was built in only a few paragraphs,39

but it retains the lure of a grotto in the woods, a site of possible illuminationto which the faithful or the curious are repeatedly drawn. I traipse wellbehind two very recent visitors to this shrine.40

For a native French speaker the resonances of une interpellation are, I'mtold, to do with calling someone to account, but it makes an awkward wordin English. It remains a gallicism. That pedant's refuge, the Oxford EnglishDictionary, gives it a sixteenth-century currency but holds that it was re-imported from French in the nineteenth century to signify `The action ofinterrupting the order of the day (in a foreign legislative Chamber) byasking from a minister an explanation of some matter belonging to hisdepartment, 1837'. The dictionary also pleasantly cites Carlyle's ìncessantfire of questions, interpellations, objurgations', close to its etymologicalsense of interrupting, thrusting or breaking across another's speech.Ìnterpellation' wasn't so much an originary act of authoritative naming,but more of an aggressive interrogation to cut across normal business. Theformer sense, however, overshadows this key word in Althusser translatedinto English.

But first, laboriously faithful to Althusser's injunction to `read' an originaltext, let's inspect what he wrote in his decisive 1970 essay. He'spainstakingly cautious to lay out his scenario. Ideology, he explains,


functions to turn individuals into `subjects' through interpellation `whichcan be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police(or other) hailing: `̀ Hey, you there!'' [. . .] Assuming that the theoreticalscene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual willturn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty degree physical conver-sion, he becomes a subject. [. . .] Experience shows that the practicaltelecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man:verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognises that it is really himwho is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one whichcannot be explained solely by `̀ guilt feelings'' despite the large numberswho `̀ have something on their consciences''.' But he footnotes this passagein an awkward sentence studded with asterisks to the point of self-parody:`Hailing as an everyday practice subject to a precise ritual takes a quite`̀ special'' form in the policeman's practice of `̀ hailing'' which concerns thehailing of `̀ suspects''.' 41 That is, Althusser carefully denies that guilt is thesole motor of interpellation. He then announces that interpellation,irrespective of his puppet show in the street, issues a call which alwaysgets it right. Yet he's sketched in a powerfully distracting vignette. What hehimself terms his `little theoretical theatre' is a prop which he addsexpressly in order to undercut it, by rapidly rewriting it without itstemporal sequence, so that now it's to be understood as `always-already' inplay. For, he explains, interpellation and subjection both happen in one andthe same blow. Actually there is no balletic spinning round, and nooutdoors either: `But in reality these things happen without any succession.The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals assubjects are one and the same thing. I might add: what thus seems to takeplace outside ideology (to be precise, in the street) in reality takes place inideology.' And ideology, he continues, always works, as subjects `work allby themselves'.42

I want to concentrate on what seems ± at first sight ± to be the sheerperversity of this scenario of Althusser's; I mean its tendency to underminea conception it's ostensibly devised to illuminate. The timing of the turn isdeliberately wiped out by its creator, who explains that all this happenssimultaneously. It looks as if his model is quietly corrosive of his thesis, thatit starts to eat into his own theory of subjects who are always, as such, inplace. It gives rise as well to some glaring misgivings as to why the callalways gets it right, if it does; and its bothersome details must have vexedmany practically minded readers for years, since realism suggests that anyhalf-competent villain would refuse the temptation to glance round butwould carry on purposefully walking or leap insouciantly onto a bus; whilemost passers-by would, if the shout was forceful enough, crane round


themselves. Yet interpellation's fascination as a model obstinately outlivesany such commonsensical complaint. How? A provisional answer maycome from a detour around the strange timing of guilt ± which might offer amore convincing way of accounting for the theory's durability than anycritique founded solely on its idea of simultaneity.

Why should interpellation so often entail guilt? Partly this is becausemost interpellations (like Althusser's tableau of the shout on the street) justare verbal attacks. `You angel!' is a cry that I don't, alas, often get to hear.But isn't there a circularity here, when the Althusserian subject, whominterpellation calls into place, is produced as guilty of being himself? And ifa ready guilt lies dormant and in wait for its own incarnation, longing to befleshed out by interpellation's accusatory grammar of `You x !' then theremust be a half-hidden psychology latent in Althusser's story ± oddly likeone of Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories ± of `How The Subject Comes to Be'.Some readers may turn contentedly to his autobiography L'Avenir DureLongtemps, or The Future Lasts a Long Time, as clinching evidence for thispoint ± as if the guilt latent in the essay on interpellation has finally becomemanifest in this last self-examination of the elderly killer.

I'm not at all sure, though, that the psychology of confessional guiltwhich undoubtedly courses through the autobiography is the same sort ofguilt which shadows the scenario of interpellation. I begin to think thatthese two operas have different phantoms. To dwell first on the former ± inany life story, a sense of being an impostor may well follow automaticallyfrom its formal architecture of the `I' plus the past tense, an inescapabledeceit exacerbated by failed memory and blurred reconstructions oflost events. But, well beyond such ordinary hesitancy, Althusser'sautobiography lays bare explicit worries about imposture. He doesn'tretrace his ideas of interpellation as such, yet what's patent is his discomfortwith his assigned childhood and adult roles, both at his mortification and athis readiness to `take them on' ± even if he did so resentfully or, morefrequently, histrionically. But he also feels horror at succeeding in them;and this horror of being taken at face value seems crucial to his account ofwhat it ever is to play a social part.

L`Avenir Dure Longtemps is shadowed by a slide from appel to appeal, inthat what Althusser claims he fears from others is being seduced by them.He becomes rather good at initiating such enticements himself, so hedespises himself for his own performative powers. His sense of being animpostor is intensified by shame not so much at an achieved act of cheating,but at being so fluent in rendering himself deceitfully seductive. His wholechildhood existence, secured, he says, by metaphorically seducing hismother, through appearing to be what she wanted him to be, depended


solely on pretence. To save himself from his ìmaginary sense of guilt' hemust devote himself, quite inauthentically, to his mother. Lamenting theintimacy between semblance and achievement, he describes how the artificeof seduction was bound up with deception, so he had not truly won herheart. Incidents of èmotional' guilt pack his story, responses to a real or animagined accusation; the couple of shots fired in a noisy crowd at a sportsstadium, into which he and his father had slipped without paying for theirtickets, were `meant' for him.43

His mother had misnamed him. The `who, me?' of interpellation isalways, from one perspective, wrong in Althusser's life as he narrates it ±it's one prolonged case of misidentification. Yet even a misidentification asan interpellation is always inevitably right too, as it works, it does securethe subject it wants for itself. He feels that he has no existence since evenhis name isn't his; his mother loved not him but an original Louis, and his`Louis' was always really meant for another, the name of that man, lui,his mother had wanted but who had died. The son was a successfulimpostor although planted in place by someone else: `Deep down,unconsciously (and my unconscious desires endlessly found expressionin reasoned arguments), I wanted at all costs to destroy myself becauseI had never existed. And what better proof of my non-existence couldthere be than to draw from it the conclusion that I should destroy myself,having destroyed those closest to me, all those on whom I could rely forhelp and support? It was then that I began to think that my life consisted ofnothing but endless artifice and deceit, that it was totally inauthentic, withnothing true or real about it'.44 Althusser's guilt at his own being preparedto be the seductive impostor he describes does resemble the underpinningof his theory of interpellation ± but, I think, at the critical level not of itspsychology, but of its temporality. If everyone spins round when interpellated,that's only because each is well primed in advance, so each feels always-already guilty. And the guilt is right. It secures the subjecthood of thosefattened like geese for this end with a contrived inevitability reminiscentof John Milton's doctrine of divine `right reason' ± Ànd reason He maderight'.

J.-J. Lecercle announces his own work on the ubiquity of theoreticalimposture as an act of filial piety towards Althusser after his death, ofdragging the corpse away from the vultures and safely back inside the citywalls. To counter a rash of triumphantly psychologistic and reductivereadings of the autobiography, and against its author's own confessionsas analysand, he studies it àgainst the grain of the text, as an instance ofirony. I want to take imposture not as a confession of truth or apsychoanalytic symptom but as a philosophical concept, even if the


narrator himself seems to insist on a psychoanalytic reading.' 45 He tries todeflect `psychological' readings of L'Avenir by offering an ingenious andpersuasive philosophical-linguistic one, turning, roughly, on the inescap-able and mutual parasitism of text and theory. Though guilt as a unifyingdevice in the autobiography returns with a vengeance, its deployment is, asLecercle remarks, almost `too pat'. And certainly when you read throughL'Avenir you do get a vivid impression of someone who's telling himself, likea case history. Lecercle holds that Althusser was in effect, not in intention,displaying the possibilities of irony as a trope. I think myself that irony isn'tquite the word, because the sense of a pupil repeating a lesson is too strong;and Lecercle's account of the ubiquity of imposture, although in itselfcompelling, leaves the schoolboy and adult Althusser still alone, stilldevoured by the guilt which had always haunted him.

Maybe the figure of the impostor is close to the figure of Echo, thenymph unloved by Narcissus. I've retrieved her elsewhere as a trope forlyric's troubled nature, in that both are condemned to hapless repetition.46

Echo's copying was involuntary, but the deliberating impostor is alsoburdened by an additional weight: on top of anyone's vulnerability andderivative helplessness in the jaws of language, he's also an intentional aswell as an accidental thief. Then if, like Althusser, he's conscientious, he willfeel shame. That is, Lecercle's polemical idea of an ubiquitous linguistic-theoretical imposture is not necessarily contaminated by a psychologismif we do attach to it a concept of guilt, albeit of a distinctive kind. Youcan't entirely replace individual shame at cheating with a concept ofcollective cheating blamelessly endemic to every writing and reading life.So I wonder if there's a position between understanding the genesis ofimposture as linguistic, and the emotion of guilt as psychologistic ± inwhich that real feeling of being an impostor, which remains intact at the endof Althusser's story, could be recognised as not so rare, culpable, orpathological at all, but as itself immanently generated, as feeling, by theeveryday machinations of interpellative language. That's a way ofsuggesting that some guilt is linguistic, or that it may have a linguisticcomponent to it.

6 A strange temporality of guilt

Time taken up in pleats is quietly critical for Althusser's idea of howsubjects come to be themselves ± not least because they do so `in no time atall'. Sequentiality is obliterated by his thesis of the simultaneity of thesubject's interpellation and its recognition of its collective place. This, underthe logic of grammar, seems implausible ± but such questions have


generated their own extensive scholarly literature. Althusser himself,of course, knew all about the temporal strangeness embedded in histheory, indeed had deliberately made it integral to his polemic. Stickingto the matter of the oddity of the interpellation vignette's internal timing,I wonder if it can be clarified through its temporal logic only in so far asthat's shared with guilt.

Perhaps Althusser's famous adverbial adjective, his `always-already',with its strange-but-true temporality, itself possesses a shading of guilt. Orit has an elective affinity to guilt, the emotion that runs in advance of thedeed and is always primed to be activated. The temporal structure of guiltis bizarre. Unlike shame, it can precede some wrongdoing which may nevermaterialise; it can often be an anticipatory emotion. The whole scenario ofaggressive interpellation only works through its silent understanding thatthe temporality of guilt does indeed run backwards. Then first, before anycrime, comes the subject, ripe to be instantly turned into himself by meansof an accusation. Not forgetting the truth of Madame Althusser's death, theautobiography is also crammed with memories of guilt for what its authorhad in fact not done, or which he's relieved not to have yet done. This is alltoo like a textbook illustration. In this vein there's a well-known popularpsychology of the guilt which invents the misdeed; police time is regularlywasted by habitual confessors who are inept innocents, for whom to feelguilty of something is to have already committed it, if only in the hope ofachieving wickedness. That florid thirster after the happiness of the knife,Nietzsche's `pale criminal', lay at the ready for his accusers through themouthpiece of Zarathustra ± `Listen, ye judges! There is, besides, anothermadness, it is before the deed.' This pale criminal's `highest moment waswhen he judged himself ' and only afterwards did he contrive a crime tomatch his anticipated punishment: `But one thing is thought, another isdeed, another is the picture of the deed. The wheel of reason rollethnot between them. A picture made this man pale.' 47 And Freud's own`criminals from a sense of guilt' are close cousins to others among his vexedcharacter-types, `those wrecked by success'. They star in some of his mostcelebrated case histories.48 Less dramatically, one of his patients, he wrote,might well contrive to do some wrong act but without the mitigatingcircumstances of youth and, provocatively, while undergoing analysis:`Analytic work then brought the surprising discovery that such deeds weredone principally because they were forbidden, and because their executionwas accompanied by mental relief for their doer. He was suffering froman oppressive feeling of guilt, of which he did not know the origin, andafter he had committed a misdeed this oppression was mitigated. His senseof guilt was at least attached to something. Paradoxical as it may sound,


I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, thatit did not arise from it, but conversely ± the misdeed arose from the senseof guilt.' 49 For Freud, in such patients, the Oedipus complex was hardat work.

But the guilt of Althusserian innocents who'll readily respond to aninterpellation, though they haven't committed a mortal sin and pray thatthey never will, is of a somewhat different order. Indeed, if you wereintending to steer scrupulously clear of wrongdoing, you might, dis-piritingly, feel worse because you realised that you'd forbidden your-self any prospect of relief, through commission, for your anticipatoryguilt. Perhaps something shallower and broader is at work for those whorespond with a stubbornly persisting disquiet which defies the factthat rationally their consciences should be quite clear. But that's theusual effect of being accused ± to be made to feel guilty, whether or notyou actually are. Then doesn't any critical interpellation, with its syn-tactical structure of an attack, automatically produce a reflex guiltinessin even the most sanguine? So do we next decide that a certain tem-perament, an especially anxious soul, will linger over this structure andits pointing finger, while another, more robust, will quickly brush itaside? But if there really is a linguistics of guilt to be distinguished froma psychology of guilt, then the former can't rely on any such finerspecification of the psychological.

Let's go back to the threatening double syntax or grammar of anaggressive interpellation, which demands consent and incites refusal. I'musing the words syntax and grammar loosely to indicate that this demand isenacted almost at the level of language; the individual subject can't quiteeither be or not be in the collective category, can't coincide with it or easilyescape it; these aren't genuine alternatives. Then is Althusser's idea ofinterpellation blind to the facts of its provisionality? No, rather a degree offailure is quietly built in to the model. Because it announces `you are thiscategory' it's structured as accusing, yet as soon as it's pronounced, the wayis thrown open to partly refuse it, because no one quite so smoothly submitsto subjectification. Interpellation has to falter almost as often as it succeeds;and for linguistic and historical reasons, but not necessarily for idiosyn-cratic depth-psychological ones. Perhaps some special sense of guilt is anecessary concomitant to the shortcomings of categorisation. As an Ì' sidlesinto a category, it both gains and loses. Both Ì am an x' and Ì am not an x'can cause unease, whether through the fear of arrogance or the risks ofbeing scrutinised for psychic damage. Demurring about not being awholehearted deviant, an unflagging nationalist, or whatever, can be aconsequence of the unlikeliness of either settling solidly into a category, or


of cleanly evading it ± either way, guilt can accrue at having to disappointthe boss Language, at refusing its dictates whichever way you jump,whether to obedience or to rebellion. But such apprehensions are notnarrowly linguistic. They are properly rhetorical ± because they are alsopolitical and historical.

`You are an x' does, as I've mentioned, just have the shape of anaccusation, as it almost always is. Maybe especially in the ears of anyonewho has a history of being bad-mouthed, interpellation signals no good.Still, one possible retort to the cry of `Hey, you! You bad x!' is `Who, me?'uttered with a raised eyebrow; cross-questioning the category and itswould-be conscription. Or someone may hesitate because she can'tauthentically enter in to an attribution, can't internalise it. And as a wayof `answering back', a refused interpellation can, occasionally, be faintlyreassuring. Yet to back away from something so apparently reasonable as aliberal self-indictment can also produce a feeling of stubborn wilfulness, aguilt that one can't wholeheartedly sign up for a club. The stammer ofdisengagement can follow some invitation as a guilt at refusing guilt; fornot agreeing to acknowledge one's co-responsibility for the Third WorldDebt, say, or for not taking on collective blame for racism. There's the `ButI . . .' which wants to slide away from the confessional, to retort `But I'mnot a criminal, I'm not guilty'. Yet we could also remember the guilt of atoo-easy enrolment in its ranks. Then must becoming a subject always belinked with a helplessly unhappy subjectification? Interpellation isn'tusually a benevolent invitation into a `good' category; but it can berefurbished as a sardonic entry into a `bad' one, like those old slogans ofpolitical empathy: `we are all foreign scum', `nous sommes tous juifs '. Onecan always flounce. The importance of irony and its inventive rhetoric herecan never be underestimated. This touches on the long history of`progressive' identifications, of how emancipation movements havereworked and parodied themselves rhetorically ± as, say, the history ofthe designation `homosexual', half-recaptured, half-jettisoned as `queer'.Are there always costs to be paid for the adoption of a collective identity;yet to what extent was there ever a choice? Each collectivity necessi-tates its own answers. So I can cheerfully argue that sometimes I am andsometimes I'm not a woman, because of the historicised and politi-cised nature of that category's deployments. But is it harder to agree tosay, I am a poet, because ± disregarding the matter of vanity ± of the lackof much critical historicisation of that category? It's sometimes easier toovercome such an occupational hesitancy by replacing a categorisingnoun with a verb ± `All right, I am engaged in x-ing, but that doesn'tmake me an x.' This, though, is reminiscent of that well-meaning advice


on child management: don't say he is an insensitive boy, just tell him thatyou don't like him torturing the cat.

All such speculations have been recently refashioned by Judith Butler. Inthe course of her powerfully illuminating discussion of subjectification, shegoes straight to the nature of authority, asking Ànd how is it thatAlthusser's sanctification of the scale of interpellation makes the possibilityof becoming a `̀ bad'' subject more remote and less incendiary than it mightbe? The doctrine of interpellation appears to presuppose a prior andunelaborated doctrine of conscience, a turning back upon oneself in thesense that Nietzsche described in On the Genealogy of Morals.' 50 She arguesthat Althusser's whole conception of ideology is filtered through aconception of religious authority, or through à divine power of naming'.The subject's whole existence as social is secured by a readiness to benamed as guilty, through a passionate onrush to the law. Her analysisseems fully convincing: that for Althusser ìnterpellation is essentiallyfigured through the religious example'.51 It follows that his own use ofscriptural references as an instance of interpellation can be reversed, so thatinterpellation in itself becomes theological. Here I wonder whetherinterpellation as near-divine injunction still preserves in amber somestiffened traces of Heidegger's sense of language as an invocation with theEdenic power to bring into being what it names. Even if Althusser's versionhas lost all optimism, and is darker: naming as threat. Still, there's apotentially brighter rendering of this iconography of God's index fingerdescending from the sky to seek out, with unerring aim, its unresistingsubject for baptism by interpellation's fire. That is, that interpellation can'trestrict itself as a grandiloquently normative marker, or else there'd be nocritical politics of social categories, no persistent badness, and no privateattempts at the flip-side of dodging a category, that is, by not having anorthodox conscience. I'd add that an aura of the doctrine of original sinenshrouds Althusser's account; now at last, in a scriptural embellishmentof Judith Butler's analysis, I can find a use for my childhood training.

The author (God, perhaps?) of the Book of Genesis strikes me as a well-versed Althusserian. For Adam and Eve were forced to recognise that theywere guilty; in the instant that they ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of theknowledge of good and evil, so they immediately acquired a conscience-ridden fear of God, and they became self-conscious, where no shamehad been. It might be tempting, to certain theorists anyway, to supposethat their abrupt knowledge of good and evil coincided with the firstcategorising in human history of sexual difference ± but faithfulness to thescriptures tells us that at least a partition of the sexes by designation didprecede the Fall. God was chief namer, naturally, but Adam also named


what God had allowed him to, the beasts and fowls of the air, and alsoWoman `because she was taken out of Man' and then after the Fall,specifically as Eve `because she was the mother of all living'. What markedthe Fall, then, was not names but shame: Ànd the eyes of them both wereopened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leavestogether and made themselves aprons'. So Adam, discovered by God,confessed Ì heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid, because I wasnaked; and I hid myself '. Among the punishments visited on the pair wasto become godlike in a depressing sense: `the man is become as one of us, toknow good and evil'. As God had warned in respect of the fruit of the tree,such knowledge was also a killer, `for in the day that thou eatest thereof,thou shalt surely die'.52 This warning the serpent had twisted to insinuatethat not death, but divine knowledge alone, would follow the eating of thefruit. Giving chapter and verse for what Judith Butler has characterised asinterpellation's èssential religiosity', this glancing exegesis also implies thata prime site of `the religious example' of interpellation, the Book of Genesis,tells us a great deal more about the naming and categorising of species andthe bestowal of Christian names. The dawning of guilt therein coincideswith the acquiring of conscience as the capacity to differentiate, not justnominally but ethically, to know good and evil. To be sure, in the NewTestament, the Gospel of St John, with far greater economy, simplyidentifies Logos and authority: Ìn the beginning was the Word, and theWord was with God, and the Word was God'.53 This recipe is quick, anddoes omit any intervening guilt. Althusser, though, was no evangelist, but adecidedly post-lapsarian philosopher.

So the structure of the guilt embedded in his concept of how subjectsare made is theological after the example of Genesis and its DivineInterpellator, as well as temporally skewed by guilt's ordinarily prom-issory logic. Althusser, however, himself expounds what he calls withmisleading simplicity the `Christian religious ideology' by drawing onPeter, leader of the apostles, as his first exemplary subject, named andinterpellated in one fell swoop by God.54 Yet once again Althusser ±presumably deliberately ± has offered a somewhat perverse illustrationfor his main thesis; he has curiously evaded his own Catholic indoctri-nation. He could not have escaped knowing that Peter, meaning the rock,was merely re-christened as such by Jesus in His earthly lifetime,in recognition of the solidity of his faith and as a fisher of men ± ùponthis rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall notprevail against it'.55 Peter, then, was hardly psychically submissive inthe face of an originary designation. More banally, he'd already earnedhis new appellation in advance; first he was it, and then he got to be


called it. Once again a suspicion of retrospective knowledge settles in;and this time it's dictating the facts to Jesus. And this illustration ofthe supposedly perfectly interpellated subject is more uncertain stillthan Althusser's theory avows. For it overlooks Peter's career of fre-quently departing from his rock-like attribution to be pigheaded andwavering, shaken to the core with grave doubts at the time of Gethsemane,even to the point of thrice denying any knowledge of Christ, his namer.Interpellation didn't always do too well with Peter. In general, too,its grammar is hardly monolithic, it remains practically ambiguous; soas well as the submissive guilt that makes me walk in to an interpellationwith my hands held high, there's plain misgiving or the defiant guilt thatretorts `Actually, no, I'm not an x as you understand it, and I don't like yourterms'. That makes possible, but is also produced by, those objections tocollective identifications which, historically, act to form political move-ments. Not that these reworkings of collective identities ever proceedstraightforwardly, privately, in a linear fashion, or without emotional costs;and they can also possess a tactical element. Knowing that others will find itless of an irritant if they can characterise and then pigeonhole yourtendency, you may, while preparing to undermine their rhetoricalbasecamp, adopt an identity satirically. Or you might elect to do so forthe time being ± a measure which, unlike poor Althusser's future, is certainnot to last long.

7 What I was really trying to say was . . .

Why should these notes have moved, under the uncertain cover of thenotion of linguistic guilt, from remarks about poetic writing to remarksabout being picked out as a subject? Only along this chain of connectionsthat I've hazarded: that a shared phenomenon of a retrospective`externality' is native to the three genres that I've touched on here. Nodoubt one could add to this number; and certainly I don't want to defendthis tentative notion of linguistic guilt as, in itself, fundamental or prior.

These three all come `from outside themselves': the business of beingnamed and taking on a social category, the working experience of writing,and the guilt which wonders what it might have done. All entail puzzlesabout agency; and if you look at them as purely psychological anxietiesabout a lack of control, you could rapidly dismiss them as of interest onlyto, in that awful phrase, a control freak. I persist, though, in feeling thatthere is something more engaging here, to do with their common temporalelement of working backwards ± of being externally given, at the heart of asupposed inwardness. In those very areas where I am in theory most


sharply and inimitably myself, where my originary capacities might mostbe supposed to reign ± in what I freely write, in what I am, in what I willtake responsibility for ± there's instead a task of retrieving from the outsidewhatever I can for my own domain; yet only after the event has handed methe materials I am to work with, or against.

There's the aspect of self-description's problematic aspect of inclusive-ness; neither identity nor non-identity can quite work. But a moresignificant angle of guilt as a linguistic candidate lies, I think, in itspeculiar temporality. Merleau-Ponty's comment that `all our experiences,inasmuch as they are ours, arrange themselves in terms of before and after,because temporality, in Kantian language, is the form taken by our innersense, and because it is the most general characteristic of `̀ psychic facts'' ' 56

is modified by guilt's reversed and anticipating character. Its constantimpulse is to take responsibility for something that hasn't yet happened,and its determined megalomania repeatedly suffers, then survives, its owndefeat. So that guilt is in itself very close to that property of writing, or atleast, of particular kinds of writing, where what you `want to say' youdiscover not initially by deliberation but only over your shoulder,humiliatingly late on in the process.

I've taken the writing of poetry as an acute exemplar of such retrospectiveknowing, which it isolates and exaggerates. Words are brought forward asthings, while their semantic element is, at least conventionally, notcompletely overthrown. Stuff predominates, but sense insistently wells upthrough it later. This generates some awkwardness at being called a writer;because really I am largely written. I wrote it, but rather more interestinglyI didn't write it, and I am not its agent nor vice versa. For my suggestions inthese notes to have any plausibility, this phenomenon is critical. As writerI must be the source of my own work, yet I know that I've only been theconduit for the onrush, or the rusty trickle, of language. I'm pinned in aposition of `I did and didn't do it'; there's an inescapable oscillation at theheart of such authorship. So the temporal oddities of how according toAlthusser's interpellation you become `who you are' aren't so far removedfrom those of writing, where you find out `what you know' through abackwards process in which you, the ostensible author, are at best the editorof whatever language has forcibly dictated. Your status as originator isvacuous; and you become a writer only insofar as you consent to struggle,more or less reluctantly, with what has already been carried to you from theunderbelly of words and sounds, and as you skirt the mined field ofinvoluntary plagiarism where nothing is ever for the first time. That is, yourwork always arrives on your page largely from the outside ± just as youridentification does. In both instances, questions arise of what you are


willing to take on with any sense of integrity. Who, me? I couldn't havewritten that ± well, all right, my wrist and hand did, but it wasn't my self atwork. It was my ear that had a field day, and the accidents of rhyme in timeran through their pathways in my passive skull. Wanting to refuse to be awriter has, I suspect, to do with practically recognising the poverty oflinguistic `originality'. Such knowledge is not in the least assuaged bymeditations on the inevitability of mutual plagiarism; or on the anarchicvirtues of the signifier's free play, which only mystifies (in the early-marxistsense) the figure of the writer; or on the delightful communality of thisculture in which who first wrote what is beyond retrieval.

This guilt of writing, both as composition and as authorship, is a sharpfacet of a broader guilt. Given by what I shall call itself and be called, thisguilt acts in one and the same moment through an emotional grammar anda linguistic psychology. The pseudo-integrity of the category of psychologyis disaggregated, and at least some of it is dispatched to language. How,or if, this sits with other claimants to the vexed terrain of the unconsciousis another question: and is this speculation merely a shaky invention ofthe Lacanian wheel? For Althusser himself characterised Lacan's `para-dox, formally familiar to linguistics, of a double yet single dis-course, unconscious yet verbal, having for its double field only a singlefield, with no beyond except in itself: the field of the `̀ signifying chain'' ',57

but he went on to insist that `the factual primacy of language' wasinadequate, and to reassert the law of language in human order. Thesuggestions in these notes are more to do with the practical, and lawless,materiality of words. Maybe at this point there's more of an intimate linkbetween `language' and `the unconscious' than that afforded by the usualparallelism of analogy, of the unconscious structured like a language ± andwhich, in the manner of all intimate links, rather blurs the character of bothpartners to the arrangement. That is, to what extent might it ever beinteresting to speak of an unconscious of language itself? This last phrase isan abbreviation of J.-J. Lecercle's conception of language as having `aremainder', although it's a pleat which he might want to let down again.Couldn't a grand act of compression fuse elements of present concepts of`the unconscious' with language-and-its-remainders, yet not by analogy, oreven as scribe? 58 Sometimes it seems attractive to be completely flat. J.-C.Milner almost, but not quite, makes the elision when he glosses Lacan'slalangue as `that by which, with one and the same stroke, there is language(or beings who can be qualified as speaking, which comes down to the samething) and there is an unconscious' and again that `Language is then whatin practice the unconscious is, lending itself to all imaginable games, so thattruth, under the sway of words, speaks'.59


Less ambitiously, what now seems most apt for my title question as towhether guilt is linguistic is ± an equivocal answer. No, if some battle forsupremacy against other claimants is imagined. Yes, if this adjective`linguistic' can indicate that guilt is also structurally given by its non-sequential temporality, and that this in itself produces unease about agency,responsibility, culpability, subjecthood, identification, composition, andauthorship. And to consider that guilt also drifts at the broad level oflanguage may be a de-dramatising move, in that it restores it to ordinarinesstoo, lifting it away from a purely idiosyncratic psychopathology ofomnipotence by reinstating it in a common place. This place is emphaticallynot the collective unconscious. It cheerfully lacks depths, and is also trulyhistorical, because language is historical, and truly materialist, becauselanguage is solid. Following this line of musing, then, there are familiar,unexceptional effects which do operate strongly and directly on a terrain,not of the older psycholinguistics, but pitched somewhere betweenemotionality or psychology, and linguistics. That is, an individual `psychicunconscious' would not be rigorously opposed to some general `linguisticunconscious'. No inflexible ridge would demarcate them. Instead onewould, ideally, reconcile both via a subtle alteration of each.

But here I'm ineluctably reminded of the fate of Doris Lessing's hero-ine, shifted from a youth of espousing communism to a middle age ofprofessing marriage guidance.60

Notes

1 Marianne Moore, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), 59.2 See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1973;

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).3 I'm greatly indebted to Jean-Jacques Lecercle for exchanges of work, and the

present notes are really an extended footnote to some of the ideas advanced inhis The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990). All misinterpretationsand involuntary plagiarisms are mine.

4 Herman Parret, ` `̀ Ma vie'' comme effet de discours', La Licorne, 14, 1988,161±77. Parret writes `L'autobiographie de `̀ ma vie'' est avant tout l'histoired'une temporaliteÂ dont Je suis absent. Le Je, effet de discours, est essen-tiellement un simulacre, un eÂpipheÂnomeÁne, et c'est ainsi que le Moi-eÂcrit nepeut avoir affaire avec le Je temporalisant et spatialisant qui existe au niveaude la deixis grammaticale des surfaces discursives' (p. 175).

I owe this reference to Robert Smith's vividly helpful Derrida andAutobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), which laysout the deathliness of that genre.

5 In La parole souffleÂe, Tel Quel, no. 20, winter 1965, trans. Alan Bass, in JacquesDerrida, Writing and Difference (London: RKP, 178).


6 Letter to Jacques RivieÁre, 29 January 1924, quoted in Antonin Artaud, CollectedWorks vol. 1, trans. Victor Corti (London: John Calder, 1968), 31. Artaudpresses on: `But to analyse such a state of mind correctly, the conscious doesnot err because it is brimming over but because it is empty, for this teemingand above all unstable and changeable juxtaposition is an illusion. There wasno juxtaposition initially, for it seems clear that in every conscious state thereis always a dominant note and if the mind has not chosen a dominant notemechanically it is through weakness and because nothing dominated it at thatmoment, nothing cropped up strongly enough or prolonged enough in thefield of consciousness to register. Thus instead of being overloaded with asurplus, there is a shortage instead, without any precise thought being able tofind a fissure when it manifests itself and so we have this slackening, disorder,and instability.'

7 Ibid., 214±15.8 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan Smith

(London: Tavistock Books and New York: Pantheon Books), 17, fromL'ArcheÂologie du Savoir (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969).

9 Marguerite Yourcenar, cited in Herman Parret, `Ma vie comme effet dediscours', La Licorne, 14, Poitiers, 1988, 161±77; 161.

10 Mikhail Bakhtin, `Discourse in the Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination, FourEssays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1981), 293.

11 Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUniversity Press, 1958), L388.

12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 456.

13 Jacques Derrida, MeÂmoires, for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, JonathanCuller and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

14 Herman Parret, ` `̀ Ma vie'' comme effect de discours', op. cit., 177.15 Heidegger, `Poetically Man Dwells', from Poetry Language Thought, trans. and

introd. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 215±16.16 Heidegger, `A Meditation on Trakl', Poetry Language Thought, op. cit., 198.17 Ibid., 207.18 `Quest for the Essence of Language', in Roman Jakobson, Language in

Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass. andLondon: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 413±27; 423.

19 Heidegger, `Poetically Man Dwells', from Poetry Language Thought, op. cit.,216.

20 Dada Manifesto on Weak Love and Bitter Love, 1924, one of the Sept ManifestesDada, in Tristan Tzara, Oeuvres CompleÁtes, vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1975).

21 Stephane MallarmeÂ, Divagations (Paris 1899).22 `What Is The Language Using Us For?' in W. S. Graham, Collected Poems

1942-1977 (London: Faber, 1979), 195±6.23 Jean-Claude Milner, L'Amour de la Langue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978),

translated by Ann Banfield as For The Love of Language (London: Macmillan,1990), 64.

24 W. S. Graham, `What Is The Language Using Us For?' op. cit., 194.25 `Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry', in Roman Jakobson, Language in

Literature, op. cit., 250±61; 250.


26 Ibid., 251.27 Ibid., 251.28 Ibid., 252.29 Ibid., 253.30 `Language in Operation', Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, op. cit.,

50±56; 54. Jakobson borrows his example from R. G. Kent, `Assimilationand Dissimilation', in Language, 12, 1936. Or, as Jakobson more generouslyconcludes his chapter on `What is Poetry?' with an analogous point aboutanother formal uncertainty: `Why is all this necessary? Why is it necessary tomake a special point of the fact that sign does not fall together with object?Because, besides the direct awareness of the identity between sign and object(A is A) there is a necessity for the direct awareness of the inadequcy of thatidentity (A is not A). The reason that this antinomy is essential is that withoutcontradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and therelationship between concept and sign becomes automatised. Activity comesto a halt, and the awareness of reality dies out' (p. 378).

31 Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip, trans. Kate Soper (London: NLB,1976), 224, from Il Lapsus Freudiano (La Nuova Italia, 1974).

32 J.-J. Lecercle, in The Violence of Language, op. cit., discusses Jean-Pierre Brisset,1837±1923, on pp. 61±2 and elsewhere.

33 Sigmund Freud, `The Work of Condensation in the Dream-Work', in TheInterpretation of Dreams, ed. James Strachey (London: The Penguin FreudLibrary, vol. 4, 1991), 383, 387.

34 Sebastiano Timpanaro, op. cit.., 141.35 Ibid., 224.36 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock Publications, 1960), 203±4.37 Wallace Stevens paraphrases Bateson like this, on p. 13 of an essay written in

1942, `The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words', in The Necessary Angel(London: Faber, 1960), 3±36.

38 Heidegger, `Language', from Poetry Language Thought, op. cit., 195.39 Althusser, `Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in Lenin and Philos-

ophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971), 121±73; 163.40 J.-J. Lecercle, in `The Imposture of Theory: Louis Althusser's Autobiography',

forthcoming in The Pragmatics of Interpretation (London and Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1997), and Judith Butler, Subjection (in press, Stanford, Ca:Stanford University Press, 1997). See also Mladen Dolar, `Beyond Inter-pellation', in The Subject in Democracy, vol. 1 (Ljubljana: IMS, 1988), and JudithButler's commentary on this essay in her Subjection. Since finishing thesenotes, I've also stumbled across Slavoj Zizek's discussion of Althusser'sinterpellation in his Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994); he links itto Lacan's letter which always finds its addressee.

41 Althusser, op. cit., 163.42 Ibid., 169.43 Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey (London: Chatto

& Windus, 1993), 46, from L'Avenir Dure Longtemps (Paris: Editions Stock/Imec, 1992).

44 Ibid., 277.45 J.-J. Lecercle's `The Imposture of Theory: Louis Althusser's Autobiography',

op. cit., 4.


46 Denise Riley, Àffections of the Ear', 1995.47 Friedrich Nietzsche, Òn the Pale Criminal', in Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book

for All and None, trans. Alexander Tille (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 45;and noted by Freud in his own paper on `Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', invol. 14, Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press,1964), 332±3; 332. Also, Karl Jaspers' discussion of guilt in The Question ofGerman Guilt, 1946, English translation 1947.

48 Strachey notes the case studies of `Little Hans' and the `Wolf Man' here.Freud's `Those Wrecked by Success' is in `Some Character-Types Met With inPsycho-Analytic Work', 1916, in vol. 14, Standard Edition, as above, 316±31.

49 `Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', op. cit., 332.50 I've benefited from the chapter on interpellation in the typescript of Judith

Butler's forthcoming Subjection. For the general idea of historicising categoriesof people, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley(New York, 1978). For a recent example of the historical vulnerability andpolitical adaptability of discursive strategies, see Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes toOffer; French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUniversity Press, 1996).

51 Judith Butler, op. cit., 18.52 Genesis, chapters 2 and 3, Holy Bible (Authorized Version).53 John 1:1, Holy Bible (Authorized Version).54 Ìdeology and Ideological State Apparatuses;, op. cit., 165.55 Matthew 16:18, Holy Bible (Authorized Version).56 The Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., 410.57 Althusser, `Freud and Lacan', in Lenin and Philosophy, op. cit., 181±202; 191±3.58 Moustafa Safouan, L'Inconscient Et Son Scribe (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982).59 Jean-Claude Milner, op. cit., 64.60 In The Golden Notebook (1962; St Albans, Herts: Panther Books, 1973), 638.


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