“J.”, or: the Black Holes of Hillis le mal

Abstract

This essay examines Hillis Miller's recent critical use of terms from physics (black holes) and mathematics (the zero) as a theoretical strategy that recasts our understanding of his performative aims. It proposes an other Miller to the familiar explicator and pedagogic disseminator of literary deconstruction he is often taken for, putting his work in contact not only with Benjaminian practices but coming horizons in global esthetic politics.

Notes

This essay owes its development to the interest and critical suggestions of Rolland Munro, which I am grateful to him for.

Portions of this paper were delivered at two different conferences. One was the “J.” Conference at the University of California, Irvine, 19 April 2003; another was in response to J. Hillis Miller's paper, “Zero”, at a session of the IAPL, University of Leeds, 30 May 2003. Since the latter paper, in different parts, was presented at both settings, it seemed to mark for itself (or its author) a cryptonymic puzzle. Why would “J.” leave his or its autobiographical mark in a meditation of zero?

In referring to Miller's conception of black holes in texts and semiotic systems I refer the reader to J. Hillis Miller and Manuel Asensi (1999).

Robert Kaplan (1999).

Routinely, Miller will anchor an essay or talk by unfolding an aporia at the representational core of a received program of interpretation or institutional logic within contemporary culture or the esthetic “canon” as such. And then, as if turned upon as well as produced by what had all along been a certain unweaving, he arrives at (or simply isolates) the self‐engorging figure that seems to emerge, in return, as a new armature and coalescence—what he calls, with the relaxed tone of a familiar, the black hole. These mosaic sites can be heard as textual and mnemonic singularities, monads in which entire histories are being contested. Part of what he has been doing emerges as irrecoverable by the protocols of any one of his roles or voices, even to the labors of the good J.

Alain Badiou (1999, pp. 13–14). Inversely, one might call good or just (as Derrida does here) a strategy to bracket a “Good” that is “the real source of evil itself” in the blinding programs of memory it is produced and organized by—where le mal assumes, as it does in this riff, near refugee status, that of a migrant critique without citizenship proper.

For tentative turns toward a term (the “planetary”) designed to escape the totalizations of the “global” but, as of yet, void of semantic texture, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003), specifically the third chapter, “Planetarity”, pp. 71–102. Also see Wai Chee Dimock (2001), and Masao Miyoshi (2002).

See, for instance, the special issue on “Mourning Revolution” of Parallax 27 (April–June 2003).

Here the model of the phantasmal future reserve plays a constituent role—retirement accounts, gargantuan deficits that cannot be calculably serviced, imaginary rescue feats of techno‐science to come.

But here an aside and a triangulation. There would seem to be in Miller an oscillation not only between these two Js—that of the honored proper name, let us say, and that of the anonymous mark—but two Ds: the exponentially expanding fields of Derrida's writings, upon which Miller continually elaborates and comments, and the truncated oeuvre and self‐engorging sentences of de Man, to which a separate band of commentaries is devoted, though the two names are not usually brought together. Miller has speculated how the structure of de Man's persona and thought, and not the campaign to assassinate his legibility, may have been allergenic—a chemistry, say, before which others feel their powers of personification and putting on of face blocked, irreversibly, or sucked away.

We hear the word con resonate, as it does in Melville's Confidence‐Man, with cognates of cognition and rhetorical performance.

In a work Miller does not address here, Faulkner seems to show us this preoriginary eruption that suspends both location and the leap of origin (in question is a “spring”) before a figure of technicity behind the props of the natural itself. This occurs at a site where a zero figure too appears from behind the set—as, in Sanctuary, the prosthetic Popeye emerges from behind a bush at a spring, or Ursprung, where the lawyer Benbow had come for refuge from the world. There is no sanctuary from the zero. Popeye's eyes are like black holes and his name insinuates animation (cartoons) even as it evokes a hyperbolic rupture of and in sight, or the ocularcentric model. Popeye, in the course of distrustful questions as to why a figure of the law should be at this site, asks Benbow what he has in his pocket—which, rather than a gun, is a book. “Do you read books?” the illiterate and prosthetic Popeye asks. It is as if the tele‐technic Popeye, likened to electric lights, precedes the orders of the book that include the writing itself—as when we deduce Benbow's volume is Madame Bovary from an allusion to Emma's corpse, and to a black bile as if running out of her mouth in death. Emma Bovary, literalizing and doomed reader, the corpse of the origin (or Ursprung) of the modern novel (if one excludes Cervantes or, for that matter, Homer), is preceded even by the illegible and illiterate specter of Popeye—in Sanctuary, which itself corncob's any interiority accorded to this tradition, or literature itself, displacing in turn the entirety of the tradition of the book from the perspective of a figure of graphic animation (Popeye) that preinhabits it. Benbow's book emerges from his pocket in the place of a gun (or corncob)—yet is also what Mallarmé calls the locus of the only real or possible explosion.

If one (only one) name for this has been whatever stands behind “Bush”, pulling the levers, one cannot evade the familial pretext that struggles to confirm itself—not only the struggle for dynasty and altering of inheritance laws, but the trap of a simulation of a simulant “father”, which opens a mimetic black hole in the mediacratic imaginary—in which the category of the public lie becomes undecidable: the family plot, as Hitchcock writes it, accelerates its own undoing in the pretext of recovery, “homeland security”, faux interiority. An example of these “states of emergency”, at once virtual and literal, may be allegorized in a suppressed Pentagon report on climate change emerging, in total contradiction of American public policy, as a greater threat than “terror”, in which a spectral and faceless enemy, self‐replicating and placeless and without temporal horizons, pretends to give a human face and agency to a threat internal to the “homeland's” entire definition and status. A recent Pentagon sponsored report on the virtual horizon—dismissed for its virtuality—presents a window on how the logic of the secret works in the mediatrix today. In Mark Townsend and Paul Harris' report in the Observer (2004), we read the videogame speculation: “Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by the Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega‐droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.” The report was, reportedly, not passed on to higher levels of the Administration because its account was thought to confuse risk analysis with prediction—and was dismissed, in effect, as all virtual and extreme. The report can be accessed at www.ems.org/climate/pentagon‐climate‐change.pdf.

If as Brian Rotman suggests, the monotheistic era was introduced with alphabetism and stands to have been redistributed by the electronic accelerations of the video‐era, and the redissolving of graphic‐based epistemologies, then what letter would better return to accompany that passage and redistribution, say, than the “J”—resolved into a preletteral graphic, a slash or staff, in which the digital and the one linger as virtual or incorporative tropes? Serially, it generates a metric—this resurrection of a “bad J”. It even inhabits in and perhaps reclaims the other letters of Hillis Miller's name—since the digit‐like stroke has the power to dissolve its remaining letters into a sort of stutter, a series of cuts, repeating and assembling a row of Is and ls, double‐barred Hs and Ms in a row (H‐I‐l‐l‐I‐S M‐I‐l‐l …). See Brian Rotman (2002): “The alphabet is an extraordinary simple, robust technology with a powerful viral capacity to disseminate and consolidate itself … across multiple linguistic platforms” (p. 93). Its ability to morph into and inhabit the image, the “exogenesis of the psychic body”, as in the link between marks and memory, is commented on: “philosophy's inability/refusal to countenance the presence of images in its texts, its unease in the face of the picture, is too thorough, unexamined, universal and deep‐rooted not to suggest other—iconophobic or anti‐visualist—forces at work” (p. 100).

Take one example drawn from how the historical sensoria is programmed. Ocularcentrism is a broad example of this collusion between esthetic ideology and historial epistemes, between the bodily sensorium and the course of political co‐optations. Long naturalized, it occludes the interdependence of the seen with archival templates and mnemonics. Its prosthetic version of the eye still links knowing to seeing (extending the Platonic eidein) in a faux immediacy, and it is programmed, still, on a model of the chase and eating recurring to prehistorial needs. It is also a program that generates identification and mimesis or aura, upon which the facade of tele‐mediacratic “democracy” self‐cancellingly depends—where the telegenic import of a leader's face presents a necessary trance.