Cornell University Press 2023 Literary Studies Magazine

LITERARY STUDIES

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Three QuesTions wiTh ALICE DAILEY

author of How to Do Things with

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

One of the early flashes of inspiration I had at the beginning of this project occurred at the Gug genheim Museum in New York. While looking at one of Warhol’s paintings of the electric chair, I was struck by how closely the chair resembled a throne. “That’s how the stage looks at the opening of 1 Henry VI,” I thought. Although it took several years to figure out how to work productively with that inspiration, since that day at the Guggenheim the homology between the throne and electric chair has been, for me, one of the gravitational centers of the book.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

This project has been informed by extensive read ing in fields not my own: art history, photographic theory, film studies, histories of medical imaging, and queer and crip theory, to name but a few. I wish I had had all this reading at the beginning of the project, though I expect that would not make me feel significantly more satisfied now at the end. I am perpetually frustrated by the limitations of time and mental space allotted to us mortals. There will always be more that I want to read, see, and think about.

Dead People

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

It is my hope that my unconventional scholarly work will prove enabling, in whatever small way, for a younger, more diverse generation of scholars. I want younger scholars to feel authorized to pursue a broad range of research questions—questions that are not determined by the hegemony of any one critical method but by the sheer expansive po tential of their intellectual curiosity. I want literary studies to have the generosity and space to wel come people who think differently, who represent unusual perspectives, and who come from a range of personal and intellectual backgrounds that are celebrated through methodological openness.

“I am perpetually frustrated by the limitations of time and mental space allotted to us mortals.”

YOUNG FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, 1846-1847

by Thomas Gaitan Marullo

In early 1846, the young Dostoevsky was the toast of the town. The applause was deafening. Ev eryone wanted to meet the new writer who, with the publication of Poor Folk, was hailed as a savior, a prophet, and an idol whom God had chosen to lead Russian literature from alleged deserts to promised lands. It was a mea sure of the angst and concern for the fate and future of the national written expression that readers, writers, and reviewers embraced Dostoevsky with such excitement and joy. All wanted to meet the young man, to shake his hand, to talk with him, to introduce him to society, and, most important, to claim him as a colleague, teacher, and friend. “But who is this Dostoevsky?” people exclaimed. “For God’s sake, show him to me, introduce me to him!”

Two individuals were particularly taken with Dostoevsky. One was the critic, Vissarion Belinsky; the other, the poet and editor, Nikolai Nekrasov. Both were avid proponents of progressivism in Russian literature and life. Both men also took heart that the national written expression, after an embarrassingly slow start, was moving to world-wide prominence and respect. They were particularly thrilled with what came to be known as the “Petersburg tradition” in Russian literature: fiction about “little” men and women who lived and loved, worked and died, often tragically, in the imperial city. Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk which they saw, wrongly, as an expose of a poor soul and his would-be love in urban “depths,” filled their bill nicely. It resonated handily with Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” (1833), with Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospekt” and “The Nose”, and with so-called “phys iological sketches” of Russian metropolitan life that appeared regularly in newspapers and journals, al manacs and anthologies throughout the northern metropolis.

If Russian readers, writers, and reviewers were expecting a strapping Goliath, they got a sickly David.

Belinsky, Nekrasov, and others were in for the shock of their lives. Dostoevsky could not have made a worse impression. If Russian readers, writers, and reviewers were expecting a strapping Goliath, they got a sickly David. In private, the writer of Poor Folk appeared frail and pale, chagrined and confused. In public, Dostoevsky was like an erupting volcano. His body shook and shuddered; his face was stormy and dark; his lips twisted and turned. The writer of Poor Folk did not accept people at face-value or with good intentions. Rather, he sensed threats and agendas from all. Anxiety and paranoia came to the fore. Anyone and anything raised his temper and fists.

There were three plausible, if problematic reasons for Dostoevsky’s behavior. The success of Poor Folk had gone to Dostoevsky’s head. A legend in his own mind, he had become insufferable. The bragging and boasting were non-stop. The young writer was heir to Lord Byron, Pushkin, and Gogol. His second work, The Double, would challenge, if not vanquish Gogol’s Dead Souls.

He was also insecure as a writer. Despite the brag gadocio, Dostoevsky was having great difficulty with The Double. He also would have grave doubts over his next three pieces: “Mr. Prokharchin,” “The Land lady,” and “A Novel in Nine Letters.” Understandably, the young writer wondered if he had had beginner’s luck with Poor Folk, if he were a flash-in-the-pan who would exit Russian literature as quickly as he had en tered it.

Finally, Dostoevsky was alien or indifferent to the socio-political liberalism that Belinsky and, Nekra sov wanted in literature. Rather, he focused on internal causes of human suffering. He explored schizophrenia, deviancy, and execution of self and others. He reflected on what made people tick – and explode.

Predictably, Belinsky and company were furious over what they saw as personal and fictional perfidy. The abuse, public and private, was unending. Dostoevsky was for them yesterday’s news. He was a traitor, a fop, and a fraud. What else could they think when portraits of a schizophrenic clerk, a churlish miser, scheming cardsharps, and a head-in-the-clouds intellectual in a ménage à trois with a young maiden and her father, husband, or lover (it is not clear whom) only reinforced stereotypes of Russia and Russians as backward, barbaric, and perverse?

Dostoevsky also struggled with demons from within and without. He forgot God. He abandoned family and friends. He fought with Belinsky, Nekrasov, and others. He ran afoul of editors, publishers, and booksellers. Disorder and dissoluteness claimed heavy tolls. Debts and loans mounted precari ously. Illnesses—real and imagined—promised an early grave. Dostoevsky was also facing stiff com petition from colleagues—Ivan Turgenev and Alexander Herzen among others—who had also begun their careers with a bang, but with strength and speed in subsequent writing.

There were bright spots. Dostoevsky held fast to brother Mikhail. He became friends with Stepan Yanovsky, a physician and a kindred spirit. He enjoyed the company of select families: the Viel gorskys, the Beketovs, and the Maykovs. Dostoevsky also had his fans: the poet, Alexei Pleshcheev, and the critic, Valerian Maykov, who understood his writing in way that no one else did.

Most importantly, Dostoevsky held fast to his dream as writer. Beyond fictional works, he penned a series of articles, entitled “A Petersburg Chronicle,” in which he detailed his fascination with “dream ers,” i.e., individuals who rebel against their lot in life and who, in his mature novels, would wreak havoc on themselves and the world. It comes at little surprise that when Dostoevsky reflected upon his youth in the twilight of his existence, he saw the first two years after Poor Folk as a time when he both cursed and embraced the darkness. It is also safe to say that later in life, Dostoevsky came to understand the years 1846 and 1847 as an initial foray into a self-styled, self-imposed and self-di rected Golgotha during which twelve years of crucifixion were followed by twenty years of gradual resurrection and renewal. Whether Dostoevsky attained the latter is a matter of debate; whether he achieved the former, especially in the first two years after Poor Folk, is beyond a doubt.

The abuse, public and private, was unending. Dostoevsky was for them yesterday’s news. He was a traitor, a fop, and a fraud.

THE EXCERPT

Turn to . . .

To elaborate (travailler) a concept is to vary both its extension and its intelligibility. It is to generalize it by incorporating its exceptions. It is to export it outside its original domain, to use it as a model or conversely to find it a model, in short it is to give to it, bit by bit, through ordered transforma tions, the function of a form.

Catherine M alabou

How can a thing through its performance and operation, its poetics and politics of circulation—become an analogical and metaphorical axis for critical reflection and for thinking across disciplines and subjects not strictly related to the thing itself? It is on a note of relationality that an object may stimulate a theoretical formulation. Stefan Helmreich, for instance, borrows from Peter Galison, a historian of science, the concept of a theory machine to argue that mundane objects, under appropriate circumstances, can help generate complex theoretical structures. Among other examples, Helmreich notes that for physi cist Sadi Carnot “water was a theory machine.”1 Zygmunt Bauman sees mo lecular and scalar properties of water in modernity. Peter Sloterdijk looks at globalization as foam. Hydrographic formations help the framing of ideas around a community, introduce issues of constructionism and mutability, and inspire dialectics between state, flux, and flow in identity formations. For

Epigraph from Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 7.

1. Helmreich, “Nature/Culture/Seawater,” 132. See Galison, “Einstein’s Clocks.”

instance, “thinking with water” encourages relational thinking, as theories based on notions of fluidity, viscosity, and porosity reveal. Veronica Strang ar gues that the metaphoricity of water in hydrological thinking is inspired by “relations that are decidedly material.” Water, she argues, “is a matter of rela tion and connection. Waters literally flow between and within bodies, across space and through time, in a planetary circulation system that challenges pre tensions to discrete individuality. Watery places and bodies are connected to other places and bodies in relations of gift, transfer, theft, and debt. Such relationality inaugurates new life, and also the infinite possibility of new communities.”2

Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis see in water a mode of being called “gestationality”— a flow of thought that dismantles binary, “defies the either/or structure of activity and passivity, is neither active nor passive, and yet both active and passive.” Here, water as theory machine is seen to have “a gestational orientation” that brings into existence that which is “not yet.” Gestationality, thus, challenges “sovereign ontology,” promoting “protoethi cal material phenomenon” and an “unpredictable plurality to flourish”— a kind of “aqueaous thinking.”3

Surfing can also be seen in its metaphoricity and relationality. Deeply an alogical to our critical thinking–ways across cultures, politics and traditions, wave riding— being intrinsically dependent on a host of forces (swell, wind, tide, sea-current, sand bar, weather system, pressure)—is an entangled and well-factored phenomenon but also “unreliable, inconsistent, and unstable.” It argues out the notion of convergence and agencement representing a place that is in the state of becoming—webbed, meshed, and interactive.4 Surfing, in its reconstitutive matrices, offers us a good critical-representational theo rization of geopolitical culture and performatics of how we understand the place-space phenomena in contemporary discourses on globality. 5 So the surfed wave is interpreted as a relational space, as assemblage and conver gence, and as a kind of “theorizing from the sea.” 6 Helmreich notes that “scientific descriptions of water’s form, molecular and molar, have become

2. Veronica Strang, “Introduction,” 12 (emphasis in original).

3. See Chandler and Neimanis, “Water and Gestationality,” 62.

4. “Agencement/Assemblage,” 108–109.

5. Anderson, ‘Relational Places,” 576. See also Anderson, “Transient Convergence and Rela tional Sensibility.”

6. Anderson, “Relational Places,” 572.

prevalent in figuring social, political, and economic forces and dynamics.” He argues that “seawater has moved from an implicit to an explicit figure for anthropological and social theorizing, especially in the age of globaliza tion, which is so often described in terms of currents, flows, and circulations,” and in the light of such tropes he suggests that “globalization might also be called oceanization.”7 Proposing his “athwart theory,” Helmreich points out how theory can neither be set as above the “empirical nor as simply deriving from it but, as crossing the empirical transversely.”8 Theory (and, for that matter, seawater and, here, for me, plastic) is an abstraction, a materializa tion, and a thing in the world. Theories constantly cut across and complicate our descriptive paths as we navigate forward in the real world. Be it water, surfing, or plastic, we are in the midst of trying to decipher the syntax of materiality. So how athwart is plastic?

The analogical predication around a thing or an event (whether plastic or surfing or water) builds with certain properties and attributions. Here, if plastic is the word, plasticity is the “enclosure scheme”: it is about seeing how plastic concatenated the enclosure schemes of plasticity, plastic movements, and plastic formations as found in critical-creative thinking in particular and arts in general. It is the poesis of plastic-analogy. The plastic, in its material ity, both within and outside the laboratory, builds a somewhat equivocative substitution, differentiations in expressions and distinctive conditions of un derstanding in relation to how the arts and thinking around man-material interface develop and ramify. Analogical coevalness and co- occurrences are the relevant points of concern and connect. They help us to distinguish be tween “the symmetrically analogous (by proportionality and denomination) and the asymmetrically analogous (metaphors).” 9 It is the latter that deepens the framework of my arguments.

Classically, analogy works through two classes— denominative analogy (relational analogy) and analogy of proportionality (based upon the relations of relations). The relational matrices within the context of my understand ing work on the scale and axis that brings x (say, material) and y (say, the aesthetic) not through a direct symmetry or equivalence, but, through intra schematism; x and y start to contrast each other, make sense and meaning

7. Helmreich, “Nature/Culture/Seawater,” 133.

8. Helmreich, “Nature/Culture/Seawater,” 134.

9. See Ross, Portraying Analogy, 86. See also Itkonen, Analogy as Structure and Process

out of their asymmetricities into separate meaning-enclosures in the form of xy (the material overlapping the aesthetic, one substituting the other) and x- y (the material relationalizing the aesthetic without either of them losing their distinctive identities). Riding on equivocals (analogy is not about being anal ogous on all points of contrast because discriminative overlaps are always in order), relational analogy brings into the intrascheme contrast plastic as a ma terial (x) and plastic as an aesthetic in itself ( y). It is out of the asymmetry (plastic sea as against world literature or plastic polymerization as against modernist intertextuality, x- y) that meaning-relevance emerges, building on the conceptual and performative predication of each other.

Theory machine works on such meaning-relevance and asymmetrical metaphoric meaning-making. The material and aesthetic (plastic polymerization corresponding with artistic intertextuality), the matter and matter ing (micro plastic-behavior analogized with literary materialization), and the object and the poetics of object-behavior (microplastic dissemination and its invasive ways gridded on to the complexities of world literature across na tionalist and cultural borders), are implicative, associatively contrastive, and analytic. The material-aesthetic builds its own contexts for intrascheme enclosures of understanding. Explaining through denominative analogy, James F. Ross looks at the variation that representational denomination brings where x represents y and x functions like y and x is a picture of y. Plastic and thinking around the arts analogize on the coordinates of formation, pro cessing, structure, behavior, and properties. There is a transposition of content— the material plastic with its content (x) asymmetrically contraposed with doing literature and arts ( y) that have their distinct content-processing (x- y)— and indications, mostly hidden, generated through a certain line of perception, chain of association, and understanding.10 The denominative (x as y), deductive ( y drawn from x), representational (x like y), and (a)sym metrical (x- y and xy) are all part of the figural and metaphorical.

The turn for me hinges on the x- y and xy, where the hyphenation in par ticular brings about the analogical or metaphorical motor: plastic behavior (x) in its materiality, material formation, and mutation builds a productive hyphen with literary behavior and orientation ( y), resulting in the material and the aesthetic conjoining through a vestibule of meaningful exchange as

10. See Zilberman, Analogy in Indian and Western Philosophical Thought

represented through a hyphen (x- y): the material-aesthetic. This inhabitation in the hyphen opens up our thought-boxes— the supplementaries— beyond the mere simplistic post- Goethean understanding of plasticity as generative, transformative, and creative.

Plastic, in this book, is a discourse, at once conceptual and material, and it is an aesthetic figure that emerges from the material. As a material and material-problematic, plastic has its own structure of representations and meanings; however, as a discourse, it builds an oppositional network of con cepts and signifiers. Adi Efal observes that plastically speaking, when one uses the term “figure,” one usually refers to a situation in which exists a synchronous delineation of two surfaces, one con taining, surrounding, enveloping or carrying the other, as in the following scheme: A figural situation denotes a gesture of framing, cutting out, a dis tinction of an outline of a surface or a platform, which implies necessarily the containment of one form by another form. Therefore, the figural dynamics contains a bilateral movement from a form to a platform and back from the platform to a form.11

The “material-figural” plastic, as part of a bilateral movement in which plastic keeps revising its status as a form and a platform, builds a plexus of oppositional thinking that routes and orients itself across its heterogenous existence within the laboratory and outside it. In a figural dynamics wherein the material con tains the aesthetic and the aesthetic enframes the material, plastic demonstrates a coexistence within identities of different orders (chemo-eco-cultural) and within an incommensurability of emotions ranging from love and enthusiasm to shock and annoyance to helplessness and habituality. It is a thought and also continuity in thinking. Plastic, in this book, is a material form, discourse, repre sentation, and negation of understanding, in both its materiality and its aesthet ics of materialization. In its material presence, plastic becomes referential, desig natory, and significatory. By radicalizing the material through the aesthetic and the aesthetic through the material and its characteral conditions, plastic exists as an event through the book: visible, haptic, diagrammatic or geometric, referen tial, structural, curvilinear, differential, and hence, figural.

11. Efal, “Gravity of a Figure,” 39.

Plastics in their materiality—whether as microplastics in the sea or plastic mineralization through the landfill or plastic in a variety of forms washed up on the seashore— are loaned a language in forms that are semiotic and aesthetic. Working through Deleuze’s enoncable or signaletic material, we find that the material-plastic can be made utterable through images and dis courses that are affective, rhythmic, kinetic, and sensory.12 Language condi tions the non-language material (plastic) through the construction of an aesthetic; plastic, in the pages of this book, becomes “significatory” and ar ticulative through metacommentaries on world literature, comparative liter ature, creative thinking, reflections on geo-formations, and various other discourses. It is here that the material-aesthetic (with the hyphen) emerges and takes a complicated life of its own: the material-signifier, the materiality of the signifier, and the material as signifier come together to form their dis cursive formations. In such a dialectic between the nonlanguage material and language as conditioning the expressive potential of the material, plas tic becomes both the line and the letter, as well as a resonance, a material marker, and a code.

This dialectic also makes plastic a “material metaphor” where the axis of transference gets built between the material and sign-concept. The material plastic transforms itself to generate certain notions of materiality, which then produce their levels of conceptual-aesthetic signifying power.13 Plastic figur ality combines an interiority of its function and existence in forms that we can express through formulas and diagrams (as chapter 2 demonstrates) and an exteriority that complicates and diversifies representation and understand ing of presence and operation (as enunciated in chapters 3, 4, and 5). The signification and meaning in both states of expression call for what I argue to be the “Plastic Turn,” where the focus and emphasis is never outside the plastic, both in its voluble presence (in sight) and in its absence (out of sight). Plastic talks as a material in its material formations, in modes of structura tion, and in metaphoric figurality that imports “excess signification” into our aesthetic understanding and critical thinking. My arguments in the book continually connect the first and the second order levels of meaning into a reciprocal space of negotiation where the material-plastic is argued to con

12. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 29.

13. See Boomen, “Interfacing by Iconic Metaphors.” See also Hayles, “The Transformation of Narrative and the Materiality of Hypertext.”

Three QuesTions wiTh MICHAEL TRASK author of Ideal Minds

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Here’s one that stands out even in the decade that gave us pet rocks. In 1977, the est guru (and exused car salesman) Werner Erhard founded “The Hunger Project” to raise consciousness about famines. Rather than attempting to mitigate the material causes of global starvation, Erhard en couraged his followers simply to imagine the world without it. This cause attracted household names like John Denver and Valerie Harper. It captured the lengths to which people were led in the belief that thoughts alone could achieve dramatic social change. Ideal Minds turns many such campy

monolith and rejecting it on those grounds poses real challenges to collective life or the delivery of a robust social safety net.

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

Literary studies has long been fixated on the idea that “subjectivity,” “normativity,” and “reason” are passé fictions or relics of a lost (Enlightenment) world not worth salvaging. This notion is incoher ent (no one really believes it in practice). It is also eccentric, in a bad way, to how other academic humanists (philosophers in particular) think. We should abandon our attack on individual con sciousness and first-person identity. It isolates

anecdotes into good accounts for deepening our sense of the decade’s possibilities and limits.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

The animosity toward statist bureaucracy, or what Foucault calls “governmentality,” is not an exclu sively right-wing phenomenon. It crisscrosses the political spectrum. Often the most avowedly lib eral people share their conservative counterparts’ loathing of what Donald Trump’s loyalists have taken to calling the deep state.

This reflexive hostility, which I trace to the late1960s rejection of utilitarianism, understood as the theory underpinning the practices of the wel fare state, dominates cultural and social-science disciplines. Casting the state as a power-hungry

literary studies from other fields by preventing a common set of terms or starting points; no convincing criticism has ever proceeded from the premise that subjectivity is false.

“Rather than attempting to mitigate the material causes of global starvation, Erhard encouraged his followers simply to imagine the world without it.”

The Article

PLASTIC TURN: REFLECTIONS

by Ranjan Ghosh

I am trying to remember the first time I might have heard the word “turn.” I can only speculate on this, of course, for it is nearly impossible to have any real memory of one’s first acquaintance with common words. English is not my first language, by which I mean that it is not the language of my parents. I would have met the word outside of my family. I will allow myself to imagine that I had met it first on a cricket field. Spinners could turn balls that destroyed batsmen, their innings, and their team. To be a suc cessful batsman one had to identify the “turn” and play to the call of the movements and moves. I suppose this understanding of the term has remained with me unconsciously since then. For as a student of literature, I would gradually become conditioned to identifying characteristics of various turns at different points of human history.

I came to introduce the term Plastic Turn in response to a call for papers from the editors Andrea Bachner and Carlos Roja for a double issue called “The Turn” for Diacritics, a forum has been defining critical theory and thinking for the last fifty years.

As I lined my thought-dots and connected the edges and bends for a long essay called “Plastic Turn” (which finally came out in 2021 in Diacritics), I knew this turn would not be a philosophical elaboration on the principles of plasticity only. More thoughts on how this turn could be premised and projected came through an invitation in 2018 from the Critical Theory Institute at University of California, Irvine, to present a mini-seminar series on the concept of “Plastic Turn.” The groundwork was in the making and coming alive.

As part of our petromodernity, plastic fixes and unfixes the energy regimes that expose us to a range conditions. These conditions include the complex range of materiality, sociocultural conditions of consumption, the politics of garbology, commodification and desire, and the globalization of need and disposability. As extraction and extrusion, material acculturation and submission, egalitarian util ity and waste-power, plastic as oil-detritus speaks in the language of profit and loss, a petrochemi cal living, survival, sacrifice, and extinction zone. Plastic, within certain eco-techno-cultural systems, builds its material points of expression, and, with it, generates new forms of value-making. So the de nominative and inevitable narratives emerging out of the proposal for a plastic turn bring an obvious and expected retinue of issues that has been explored elsewhere in a variety of books and papers: the

As part of our petromodernity, plastic fixes and unfixes the energy regimes that expose us to a range of conditions.

philosophy of plasticity, the cultural history of the material plastic and its impact, plastic pollution as it harms our physiological systems, transforming sexualities across species and changing our clinical identities, the fall-outs of climate change and anthropogenic setbacks, disastrous marine pollution, and the plastic economy as it brings its own discourses on capitalism, precarity, and global capital flow. But the plastic turn I proposed is not about these issues. It is not about ecological activism, an ti-plastic campaigns and forms of globalization as revealed through capital generation, exploitation and peripheral zones of sustenance within a labyrinthine petro-culture. This is not the turn to plastic that I wanted to speak about and conceptualize.

I propose a “plastic turn” that emphasizes not the formal quality of plasticity but which takes in spiration from the materiality of plastic itself. It is on the form of plastic and the material-aesthetic platform of plasticity and non-plasticity of plastic. The Plastic Turn reads into plastic behavior: includ ing its properties and structures, complexities of polymerization, chemo-poetics and aesthetics of chemistry, the impact and indulgence of plasticizers, micro-plastic dissemination and contamination and various other material issues to configure how we might start to read and experience poetry and paint ings, anthropogenic and Earth art, world-comparative literature, the poetics of globalization and other criti cal concerns. It is plastico-poesis – not an undifferen tiated poetics of plasticity – invested in the material, materialization, the mattering, and their aesthetic po tentialization and figurality.

The “turn” is plastic on two counts: first, plastic came into being as a material for ready and daily use, with an extraordinary reach, variety and efficacy. And second, most importantly, I argue how the emergence of plastic as a material brought forth what I call the “material-philosophical-aesthetic.”

For me, this means the chemical-organic-material-experimental-global-structural-technological out growth and ramification of plastic correspond, theoretically and organically, with our thinking in arts, metaphysics, ecologies, poetics, and literature through the twentieth century. The formation, hap pening, and performance of plastic correspond with the configuration, consequence, and concepts that permeated and impacted our thinking in literature and the arts.

Plasticity, therefore, for this book as with the paper and the mini seminar, is not a pre-materialistic phenomenon but a material-figural event that comes after the discovery of plastic; our consciousness is never without the plastic-material. The anchors are dropped deep and wide on material plastic. The Plastic Turn never slips away from the material and in the material and materialization of the plastic discovers the potencies of the aesthetic; the turn is into what I call in the book the materi al-aesthetic of plastic.

The book also raises the prospects of how we start to rethink the discipline of plastic humanities and continues the thought train from the material-aesthetic to how plastic constructs its own figures, which is what I call figural plasticity. These figures appear in the field of religion, politics and history, nature-studies, plant thinking, and other fields through my next book Plastic Figures which is sched uled to appear from Cornell University Press again in a couple of years’ time. As The Plastic Turn makes its way into the world, I can only hope that the pages of the book will keep turning.

I propose a “plastic turn” that emphasizes not the formal quality of plasticity but which takes inspiration from the materiality of plastic itself.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

Listening is not easy. This is a book about writers in the mid-nineteenth-century Russian Empire listening attentively to, recording, and repeating the words of people unlike themselves, often Slavic peasants but sometimes nonpeasants or even non-Slavs. They sometimes presented this listen ing as action toward freedom for the serfs; as a way to inform readers about the empire’s population; as an expression of their faith in Christian unity or their own virtue; as an attempt to preserve an endangered past; or as a step toward better writing in a more vibrant literary language. At the same time, these writers, and their critics, saw their tasks of listening and recording as likely to be done wrong. Writers might get distracted or listen unsympathetically; they might record and circulate something inaccurate, unrepresentative, or defamatory; they might fail to understand the words they hear or not grasp what they mean in context; those they listened to might fear them and not speak frankly; they might appear to be illegitimate vehicles of the words they convey; and they might produce bad writ ing, in an awkward or unclear language.

This picture is familiar: nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals are famous for feeling that there was something wrong about their relationship to the narod, the people. Generations of commentators have described this anxiety as an expression of writers’ radical beliefs. I conduct a methodological experi ment by looking at texts, people, and ideas that specialists in Russian liter a ture and history know, but drawing on ideas from sound and media studies

and from linguistic anthropology. I examine a series of autobiographical or fictionalized accounts of listening across social lines by foreign visitors to Rus sia and by Russian writers. I notice that when they tell stories about listening and recording by themselves or their fictional stand-ins, these writers draw at tention to sound and its transmission and to paper and its uses, and they tend to compare one person’s successful listening to another’s less successful listen ing (though often these rival listeners are two facets of a single person). In these scenes, the technical aspects of listening and recording, their political and ethical significance, and their practical and aesthetic import are interconnected. I draw on these observations to argue that these writers, even as they responded to the circumstances of the Russian Empire, were also members of a global mid-nineteenth-century media generation who competed to display their mas tery of modern modes of hearing and recording. They sometimes wrote as though the sounds they heard and recorded were pure objects awaiting cap ture, like the wild birds some of them hunted for pleasure; I also explore mo ments when they recognize the spoken words of “the people” as perfor mances, produced in the moment and meant to draw attention.

Take Ivan Turgenev’s 1847 story “The Office” (Kontora), part of his cycle Notes of a Hunter (Zapiski okhotnika), which juxtaposes several listeners. The firstperson narrator, a landowner, is out hunting when he is caught in the rain. He naps in the office on a neighboring landowner’s estate and awakens to hear, through a crack in the wall, as a clerk, Nikolai Eremeich Khvostov, himself a serf, abuses and manipulates a series of petitioners. The hunter continues listening, but lies back down and pretends to be asleep when anyone comes to check. The final petitioner is a barber-surgeon, a serf who wants to marry another serf, but the clerk spitefully prevents the marriage. Turgenev’s friend, the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky, thought the story was one of Turgenev’s best; he praised Turgenev for approaching the “people” from a new angle and “acquainting us with people of various statuses and ranks.” His judgment initiated a tradition of categorizing “The Office,” like the collection to which it belonged, as a denun ciation of arbitrary and corrupt estate management and of serfdom itself.1 In France, where Turgenev lived much of his adult life, his friends believed the ru mor that reading Notes of a Hunter convinced Tsar Alexander II that the serfs needed to be emancipated.2 The idea of the power of his writing and the import of the choice of a person such as himself to listen attentively to “the people” and to write about them fit into their image of Russia as Europe’s last bastion of serfdom, a place where ethical people were censored, but where one person’s brave outcry might reach its target and liberate the oppressed.

Even as it critiques serfdom, this story dwells on listening and recording as skills practiced by clerks. Its writer knew something about offices: Turgenev’s

mother had a kontora (a term that entered Russian from German and literally means “counting-house”) on her estate near Orel, and Turgenev himself had worked in his early twenties in the St. Petersburg office of Vladimir Dahl, an im perial official and lexicographer whose dictionary integrated standard words with dialect terms gathered around the empire.3 When Turgenev’s hunter enters the office, he meets a young clerk who shows off his handwriting in a calligraphed complaint about noise that combines non-standard language with officialese:

You are ordered immediately upon receipt to find out who walked through the Aglish [Aglitskii, an archaic variant of the word for “En glish”] garden last night, under the influence of alcohol, with inappro priate songs, and woke up and disturbed the French governess, Mme. Engenie [presumably Eugenie] . . . . You are ordered to investigate the above in full and immediately inform the office.4

This document, numbered 209 and bearing an enormous official seal, is signed by the estate-owner herself and addressed to the steward, who, as the clerk explains, is illiterate, which means that it must be read aloud to him. The pic ture of clerks elaborately documenting drunken nighttime singing makes the kontora and the practices that it fosters of recording sound on paper seem ab surd. From that angle, the story appears to be a criticism of the heartless bu reaucratic listening of the clerk and his minions, in favor of the empathetic listening of the eavesdropping hunter: if this story stages a moral contest, then the hunter who does not write (at least in our presence) is the winner.5

This bifurcation, though, ignores the hunter’s similarity to the clerk. Tur genev uses the same Russian verb to describe their actions, prislushat’sia (or prislushivat’sia), meaning a kind of attentive, self-aware listening by someone who is doing their best to take in everything they hear.6 Even as he made fun of the clerk’s exhaustive transformation of sound into words on paper, Tur genev, like the hunter who was his stand-in, was doing something similar. And Turgenev too came in for critique. Although he praised the story in print, Be linsky wrote to a friend that he was worried that Turgenev might get carried away by his enthusiasm for “onomatopoetic [zvukopodrazhatel’noi, literally sound-imitating] poetry.” He found Turgenev’s use of regionalisms, especially the term zelenia, distasteful “nonsense”: “he oversalts (peresalivaet) in using Orel dialect words.”7 Zelenia, which means the first shoots of a crop, appears when one petitioner says a sentence that I translate, using a Scots term that prob ably startled the nineteenth-century London ear much as zelenia startled Be linsky’s St. Petersburg ear, “Remarkable braird this year, sir, don’t you say?” (Удивительные, можно сказать, зеленя в нынешнем году с).8 Though he knew the word was spoken in the Orel region, Belinsky thought it should not

1988), 150.

be used in writing, and especially not in the author’s voice.9 In complaining that zelenia made Turgenev’s story taste too salty, Belinsky indicated his pref erence for a nationally accessible literary language, less adulterated by regional oddities.10 Turgenev, in Belinsky’s estimation, was at risk of using other people’s language inappropriately, and, like the clerks in the kontora, getting carried away by the desire to show off his abilities at verbatim recording—putting too many words on paper, indiscriminately, to no one’s benefit.

The illustration to Turgenev’s story made by Petr Sokolov in 1891–1892 re sponds to its thematization of office supplies and its presentation of listening as a contest between the hunter and the clerk. The fourth wall of the two rooms is missing; it appears that we are looking at a stage set and the listeners are performers anticipating the audience’s judgment. In a simply furnished room on the right, a thin man speaks as a stout man behind a desk listens im passively; paper and feather pens appear on his desk, and paper fills the cabi nets behind him, is piled on top of them, and, following the filing system that was used in Dahl’s office, hangs on hooks on the wall. In a room richly deco rated with oil paintings and a glowing samovar on the left, a man whose face we cannot see listens attentively through the wall. The scene conveys dramatic

Figure 1. Petr Sokolov, illustration to Ivan Turgenev, “The Office.” Zapiski okhotnika I. S. Turgeneva v akvareliakh Petra Sokolova (St. Petersburg: Izd. Fon Bool’, 1891–1892). Scanned from Iu. P. Pishchulin, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Zhizn’. Iskusstvo. Vremia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia,

irony, since we know he is listening, but the men he hears do not. The heads of the three men form a line that bisects the image, and the white shirt of the man on the left picks up the color of the paper on the right. For a person like Turgenev himself, informed about the rural paper industry, this could serve as a reminder that paper was the product of rags made from such clothing even as it ties the hunter to users of paper.

In this book, I look closely at such scenes of writers, or people like them, listening to “the people.” These scenes thematize rivalry with other listeners, the modernity of the subject’s listening skills, communication technology, and at times, as in “The Office,” all three. In the rest of this introduction, I intro duce my cast of characters as a media generation, I explain what I mean by attentive listening as a perfor mance, and I end by listing thirteen ways to iden tify the winners of the listening contests that these texts stage.

Penitent noblemen as a Media Generation

The couple of dozen subjects of this book include a selection of famous writers, such as Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky, the collector of epic songs Pavel Ryb nikov, and less-well-known belletrists and folklorists, as well as a few foreign visi tors such as the Marquis de Custine; they also include some of these writers’ fictional characters. In travel narratives, folkloristics, prose fiction, and popular collections of “scenes,” these writers (like many others) depicted listening across social lines. They understood that they were attempting something new as they tried to listen attentively to, and use the words of, people unlike themselves. My project is a group biography that focuses on their shared experience of a shift in social attention and media use; it is an ethnography of these ethnographers. My primary subjects are men, but they sometimes delegated the work of recording to women; the reverse occurred more rarely.11 These writers, many of whom knew each other, were members of Turgenev’s generation defined broadly, meaning that they were mostly born in the first third of the century (the foreign travelers were born a bit earlier). They started to publish after the 1825 Decem brist revolt, a failed coup led by military officers agitating for reform or abolition of the monarchy, and before the end of 1861, the year of the imperial edict of emancipation. They came of age under Tsar Nicholas I, when literate people discussed the freeing of the serfs who belonged to the state or to individual land owners and who constituted the majority of the empire’s ethnic Russian popula tion. When emancipation would happen, under what terms, and what the results would be preoccupied Russian society during these writers’ youth, as its after math concerned them later.

The idea of a person trying hard but nonetheless listening inadequately to the “people” evokes the classic image of pre-revolutionary Russian intellectu als as tormented by the awareness of their own privilege, and thus it is worth some space to explore why that image was so convincing once, and why it is less so now. Historian Cathy Frierson sees midcentury writers’ fascination with rural people as inspired by a fantasy of “redemption through rapprochement with the peasantry” that by the late 1880s would end with the abandonment of intellectuals’ hopes of societal reconciliation.12 Her term, “redemption,” evokes the Christian notions of unity that animate some of the heroes of this book, and it echoes a phrase that came into use a few decades after Turgenev published “The Office,” when people began to say “penitent nobleman” (kai ushchiisia dvorianin) to describe gentry who worried about their own complic ity in the abusive system he had described.13

This term was popularized by the critic Petr Boborykin in an 1885 article in French, “The Cult of the People in Contemporary Russian Liter ature.” He wrote that only in Russia did writers think of “the people” as “a new source of social renewal for the class of educated people.” 14 He attributed this not to the Europe-wide reverberations of Herderian Romanticism, but to the interaction between two specifically Russian intellectual camps of the 1840s: the West ernizers who argued for reform along the lines of the revolutionary regimes in France and the United States, and the Slavophiles who argued that any change needed to be inspired by local history and Orthodox spirituality.15 The two sides disagreed on many things, but, he argued, Russian intellectuals’ ex pression of obligation toward the peasants demonstrated the penetration of Slavophile instincts into Westernizing ideology. Boborykin wrote that “the revolutionary youth felt like criminals relative to the masses; a unique type de veloped, the penitent young nobleman, who arrived at the complete negation of all his rights, all his influence, even just as a simple member of the educated class.”16 In translating a Russian participle that could mean “remorseful” or “repentant” as “penitent,” he made these people seem to be performing a re ligious ritual, and he decried this trend as a national “illness” or “crisis” that had infected them with mysticism. He described the cult of the people as an unfortunate Russian obsession. Boborykin contributed to a French tendency to critique the Russian Empire as fostering despotism and inequality and thus creating the conditions for communism, and also to a tradition of attacking Russian thinkers for bringing into the political sphere a self-flagellating fervor better confined to religious spaces.17

The critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky asserted that whatever Boborykin said, he, Mikhailovsky, was the one who had originated the term, in an 1876–1877 set of sketches, whose narrator identifies himself as a “penitent nobleman” and

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

Waste/Archives/Feminism

Among all the waste there are the intense stories And tellers of stories.

—Muriel Rukeyser, “Letter to the Front” (1944)

In a letter to Denise Levertov in 1965, Muriel Rukeyser writes, “I feel like being fat is a visible sign of my dark side.” Levertov responds by qualifying, “You actually give the impression of lioness grandeur, of hugeness, but not of ugly fatness.”1 When I first read this in my early twenties, I was struck by the wicked perniciousness of sexism—that two of the twentieth century’s most exciting and radical women poets would spend time talking about their bodies in such a way deeply depressed me. But of course, now I realize that’s not the only thing they were writing about. They were really writing: What does it mean to be a woman who takes up space—not just physical space but intellectual, verbal, literary, and political space? And what does taking up that space imply about desires, appetites, affiliations, bodily acts, and artistic impulses? In Rukeyser’s first and only novel, Savage Coast—written through a formal approach that could not be classified as any one genre, one that exceeded the boundaries of form—she speaks of how it feels to be “a big angry woman.” Her editor rejected the

novel in 1937 on the basis of a reader report that described it as “BAD” and “abnormal.” After one of the first lectures I gave on my rediscovery of the lost, unfinished novel and the reasons for its initial rejection, someone from the audience approached me and said, “I studied with Muriel, she was a wonderful teacher, but so ugly.” Others have spoken of the difficult and expansive unevenness of her work in the context of her difficult personality, and reviewers of her work in public and private also mistook her literary output for her gender manifestations, writing of her body and her sexuality while criticizing her texts and her politics, so that it can be difficult to tell what is under review: her inability to conform to gender orthodoxies or to textual orthodoxies.2 She was called a “Helen, who was a lesbian,” “a hussy” who wrote like a “deflated” Whitman, a worn out “sibyl,” and “the Common woman of our century, a siren photographed in a sequin bathing suit,” who was “confused about sex”— criticism that both imbued her work and body with power while degrading that power at the same time.3 This critical doubleness recurs religiously in critiques of Rukeyser, figuring her as both a central and a peripheral figure in the twentieth century.4 It is no surprise, then, that Rukeyser herself would write about the reactions to her work and her body at the same time. What she muses on in the letter to Levertov near the end of her life, about what her body exposes about her intellectual, sexual, and formal interests, is an indication of how much gender politics has informed the reception of her work.

This is a familiar story for feminist scholars to encounter and theorize, both within a subject and within themselves.5 Through the recuperation and reevaluation of modernist women writers like Rukeyser, critics have developed a prolific and theoretically nuanced approach for thinking about the slippages between the literary act and the bodily act. The poet Anne Carson sums up this genre succinctly, writing that “putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to present,” and that women have been thought to have “two mouths.”6 We have a long history of women writers taking this slippage and nurturing it, turning the interstitial into the avant-garde revelations and narrative proclamations that have transformed the way we read and write over the past two centuries. While we’ve theorized the conflations of body and aesthetic, traced a tradition, named and made

a lineage, women’s experiences of being gendered bodies are still the essential filter through which their works and lives are received and read. Thus misogyny continues to cut across us in a myriad of ways—whether we like to admit it or not, whether we identify as male or female, whatever class or race position we occupy. It’s there to “cut off thinking,” as Rukeyser would write, informing how we read and how we think. Our current public debates about women still center on what kinds of voices and bodies are allowed to have power, and the ways in which the restrictions on those voices and bodies affect the kinds of artistic work, intellectual labor, and political activity that women produce and that we, as readers or viewers or citizens, ultimately can access. These questions of access and agency remain the central crisis in our understanding of women’s textual production and political power today, and they are as central to understanding the movements of the last century as they are to our own times.

In examining Rukeyser’s vast archive of unfinished texts, one finds there is no way to understand the erasure of so much of her work without understanding how gender functioned at the inception and in the reception of women’s writing during the Cold War, and how that informs our own thinking about gender and texts today. The impact of this has come into renewed focus through our recent and ongoing reckoning with how sexual harassment and gender bias shape not only women’s careers but political, legal, and cultural frameworks as well, as exemplified in the #MeToo movement. One moment in particular has felt especially illuminating for me in thinking through larger questions of women’s artistic production. A few months after the groundbreaking New York Times exposé on the long and disturbing history of serial sexual harassment and assault by the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, the actor Salma Hayek published her personal account. It was one painful story in a flood of testimony that, like all great floods, is changing our landscape. Hayek was writing about her experience making and starring in her innovative film about Frida Kahlo, whose radical, avant-garde, feminist modernist vision changed modern painting and the way we view women’s artistic subjectivity. In the chilling New York Times op-ed, Hayek describes how Weinstein pursued her for years after he had agreed to produce her movie, asking her to have sex with another woman in front of him. She refused each time.

Figure 1. “Mistresse / Mastress.” An undated note in a miscellany file in Rukeyser’s archive at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

During filming, he began to demand things—that she sexualize Kahlo, change her traditional Tehuana dress, modify her bold eyebrows—and then, as she was finishing the film, Weinstein approached with an ultimatum: if Hayek did not add a full-frontal sex scene between Kahlo and

the photographer Tina Modotti (played by Ashley Judd), he would kill the movie, shut down production, and bury it. Hayek wrote of having to make a choice: either capitulate to his humiliating fantasy, and vicarious sexual assault, in public, for every viewer to see in perpetuity, or lose the self-defining artistic project she had worked on for years. How, she writes, after so many people had contributed, could she let all this “magnificent work go to waste?”7 She did the scene and was nominated for an Oscar, popularizing Kahlo’s status as a feminist cultural icon as well.

In writing her #MeToo story, Hayek exposed a truth about women’s lives that is rarely articulated; it is a narrative about the struggle to produce work, to have a career, to be a public citizen under patriarchy, to say “NO,” but she also exposes how the aesthetics, history, and politics of an artwork, and an artist, are shaped by private “tyrannies and servilities,” as Virginia Woolf describes them in Three Guineas.8 Hayek conveys how the artist and work are not metaphorically but quite literally shaped: edited, altered, changed, redrawn by the desire, both singular (Weinstein’s) and global as well, to punish and humiliate women, particularly women who refuse to submit to gender and artistic norms. This is not a new revelation; in fact, one of Rukeyser’s most famous lines, “what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / the world would split open,” has become ubiquitous for framing #MeToo stories.9 While this kind of silence-breaking has been an essential part of previous women’s liberation movements, what is new about this iteration is how effectively these stories have mapped the persistence of inequality in more exact ways for understanding the forces of change and reaction that have shaped the last one hundred years. Hayek’s sexual exploitation and abuse are written into Kahlo’s narrative, into the narrative of Mexican modernism, and into Modotti’s narrative. Every viewer of the film will also sexualize Kahlo in the way that Weinstein wanted Hayek, as Kahlo, to be sexualized, a sexualization that Kahlo self-consciously struggled against in her own work, in her own life. So the effects of Weinstein’s harassment influence multiple strands of women’s history and aesthetic legacies, and Hayek’s narrative shows us the precarious space between disappearance and visibility in which women’s work exists.

When I read Hayek’s piece, I had recently found in Rukeyser’s archive in the Library of Congress an unpublished essay on women writers titled “Many Keys.” The essay was commissioned by The Nation in 1957 but

Three QuesTions wiTh MICHAEL TRASK author of Ideal Minds

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Here’s one that stands out even in the decade that gave us pet rocks. In 1977, the est guru (and exused car salesman) Werner Erhard founded “The Hunger Project” to raise consciousness about famines. Rather than attempting to mitigate the material causes of global starvation, Erhard en couraged his followers simply to imagine the world without it. This cause attracted household names like John Denver and Valerie Harper. It captured the lengths to which people were led in the belief that thoughts alone could achieve dramatic social change. Ideal Minds turns many such campy

monolith and rejecting it on those grounds poses real challenges to collective life or the delivery of a robust social safety net.

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

Literary studies has long been fixated on the idea that “subjectivity,” “normativity,” and “reason” are passé fictions or relics of a lost (Enlightenment) world not worth salvaging. This notion is incoher ent (no one really believes it in practice). It is also eccentric, in a bad way, to how other academic humanists (philosophers in particular) think. We should abandon our attack on individual con sciousness and first-person identity. It isolates

anecdotes into good accounts for deepening our sense of the decade’s possibilities and limits.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

The animosity toward statist bureaucracy, or what Foucault calls “governmentality,” is not an exclu sively right-wing phenomenon. It crisscrosses the political spectrum. Often the most avowedly lib eral people share their conservative counterparts’ loathing of what Donald Trump’s loyalists have taken to calling the deep state.

This reflexive hostility, which I trace to the late1960s rejection of utilitarianism, understood as the theory underpinning the practices of the wel fare state, dominates cultural and social-science disciplines. Casting the state as a power-hungry

literary studies from other fields by preventing a common set of terms or starting points; no convincing criticism has ever proceeded from the premise that subjectivity is false.

“Rather than attempting to mitigate the material causes of global starvation, Erhard encouraged his followers simply to imagine the world without it.”

2023

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