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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
IN THIS ESSAY I WILL ATTEMPT TO SITUATE BYRON'S ERRANCY EASTWARDS, or, in more concrete terms, to situate his writing of this deterritorialization--a writing that deterritorializes the writer--within the historical conjuncture that overdetermines its emergence, hence my reference to private/public overdeterminations. (1) By private I mean the singular and traumatic, contingent and coincidental materiality of the signifier that makes Lord Byron unique. By public I intend the publishing process that transfigured Byron into a stereotypical signified for public consumption, as well as the global, geopolitical and sociohistorical situation that set the stage for both his life-writing and his theatrical performance of this life of writing. (2)
The deleuzo-guattarian notion of deterritorialization is difficult to define. The simplest way to do so is to call on one of Deleuze and Guattari's exemplary cases: "Bird-songs: the bird sings to mark its territory." (3) This aggressive and defensive territorialization becomes more complex until it is transformed into a "song of courtship," a reaching outwards, a pure singing for the sake of sound that enables the bird to exceed its territorial limits, to mate with birds of the opposite sex, and to interact with the ecosphere: "Many birds `imitate' the songs of other species" (TP 324, 331).
Deterritorialization can also be defined in world-historical terms--that is, in terms of emergent capitalism. The Reformation produces a sectarian proliferation that un-grounds "God" as a foundational "despotic signifier," while emergent globalization uproots economic exchange both from the land, in particular from the Island England (the ideological, imaginary or egological `unity' of the British Isles), and from the feudal mastery encoded by the terms "Lord" and "King." (4) The emergence of capitalism transforms the English experience of the world-system into a wild circulation of signs: counterfeit coinage, paper speculation, ad-venture capital, the reflexivity of Elizabethan theatrical representations, militant Puritan factions, emigrants, colonists, etc. King James the First's arbitrary dispensation of titles reduces knighthood to an empty performative, while his sovereign abuses, excesses and transgressions irreversibly void the doctrine of absolute kingship.
James, given the rise of the modern family, predictably appeals to the signifier Father--the King as Father of the nation--to bolster his absolutist claims, yet the "name of the father" inevitably loses its unconditional aura as the signifiers King, God and Lord whirl about the "distracted globe" of "the book and volume of my brain": "`The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The King is a thing--' / `A thing, my lord?' / `Of nothing.'" (5) If this fantasmic situation is one of global deterritorialization, then James's anachronistic reliance on the paternal signifier to legitimate authoritarian control of a distended social body, (6) is, like Shakespeare's nostalgic investment of a feudal coat of arms--Non Sanz Droit--a reterritorialization.
If I write that I will "situate Lord Byron's errancy," I do so to distance myself from a tendency to take deterritorialization as a fait accompli: to reduce writing to a consumable feast that compensates for the lack of a politically viable alternative to the rigidly segregated and over-coded social body of capitalism. The writings of Deleuze and Guattari--writings to which this essay is obviously indebted--evidence this reductive tendency when the dynamic duo represent deterritorialization as an ecriture of becoming opposed to the fixities of Being:
One writes, then, on the same level as the real of an unformed matter, at the same time as that matter traverses and extends all of nonformal language: a becoming-animal like Kafka's mouse, Hofmannsthal's rats, Moritz's calves. A revolutionary machine, all the more abstract for being real. A regime that no longer operates by the signifier or the subjective. (TP 512)
It is as if writing incarnates the ontological reality of a cosmic deterritorialization, a "revolutionary machine" or "the real" of "matter" itself. (7)
To conceive of the cosmos as a kind of metaphysical Thing is, however, unhelpful if one is trying to relate a deterritorializing life-writing to political struggles. Instead of attempting to mediate the relations between writing and the social, Deleuze-Guattari seek to perform deterritorialization as if this textual performative of a "literary enunciation" was sufficient to alter "objective conditions"--relations of production, uneven spatial relations, social institutions of domination, etc.: "When a statement is produced by a bachelor or an artistic singularity, it occurs necessarily as a function of a national, political, and social community, even if the objective conditions of this community are not yet given to the moment except in literary enunciation." (8) There is, in other words, little attention paid to how the artist speaks for or represents (in the sense of political representation) class fractions by means of aesthetic presentations within a pre-existing force field of "objective conditions." (9)
Since deterritorialization is "a function of a national, political, and social community," insofar as this social body is doubly overdetermined by unspeakably private and unrepresentably global dimensions, it is to these "objective conditions" that I now turn. I begin, however, with Jerome Christensen's Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (1993), a very strong book indeed, for Christensen is a dedicated historicist, a savvy post-structural theorist and a fierce reader. I cite: "It is in [Byron's] invention that his strength appears. And it is as an ethos of invention that his poetry matters" (CH xviii).
Christensen is attempting "to acknowledge the `essential importance of a concept of action' and to `elaborate a satisfactory account of the competent and knowledgeable human agent' without `relapsing into a subjectivist view, and without failing to grasp the structural components of the social institutions which outlive us'" (Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration [1984]; quoted in CH xxii). A post-subjective accounting of this type replicates the deleuzo-guattarian stricture against operating in terms of "the subjective," but does not banish the signifier in favor of a non-materialist (in the Marxist sense) transcendental empiricism of immanence. (10) Christensen is more concerned with the Lacanian "agency [instance]" or "materiality of the signifier" (parapraxes, puns, freudian slips, literal overdeterminations of figural meaning), since it is this rhetorical drift of language--exemplified by the Byronic digression and employed by Byron's endlessly inventive strength--that prevents the poet from being reduced to the stereotypes reiterated by public consumption. (11)
Byron is this drift: "the mattering of the signifier whose eccentric and inexorable itinerary is its Romantic biography" (CH xxii). To trace these drifts--biographic and excursive--is to track the travails--local and global--of his errant letters: To find out what makes Lord Byron go. Deleuze and Guattari's conception of "unformed matter," on the other hand, refuses the chaotic, not-yet-meaningful flux instanced by the materiality of the signifier. (12) Their insistence that writing, once they have reconceived it as reading ("Kafka's mouse, Hofmannsthal's rats, Moritz's calves ..."), instantiates the ontological truth of the "Chaosmos," performs a political displacement from agency to consumption, a displacement that repeats, mutatis mutandis, the fetishization of Byron's writing into the Byronic hero by the reading public as a compensation for political agency and as a defense-formation against being ingloriously implicated in Imperialism (D 299). Byron initiates, as my conclusion will stress, this compensatory defense-formation by desiring to arrest the "mattering" of his writing. The reflexivity of the signifier, however, frames this desire as an arrested development of the Byronic drift.
How does a public worlding of geopolitical worlds relate to Byron's eccentricity, an errancy riddled through and through by trauma? What mode of reading will enable us to forge or mediate this relation between emergent globalization and a secret, private and traumatic past? Christensen adapts Abraham and Torok to trace the "secret impulse" that pushed Byron into writing (CH 33). He reads "the strength of the encrypted inscription" in terms of "a past that persists in the present by virtue of its encrypted alterity" (CH 33, my emphasis). (13) My more globally oriented trajectory will be overdetermined by the "encrypted alterity" of "Augusta" (Byron's half-sister-cum-object of an incestuous affair) vis-a-vis "Augusta" (an ancient, Roman name for London popular in the 18th-Century); Albania (a way-station on Byron's pilgrimage) in relation to Albion (an archaic, nationalist name for Imperial Britain); and cryptonyms of ingenium. The aim of my essay is, if you get my drift, simple: to globalize Byron's case history:
Un gros meuble a tiroirs encombre de bilans, De vers, de billets doux, de proces, de romances, Avec de lourd cheveux roules dans des quittances, Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau. C'est une pyramide, un immense caveau, Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commun. (14) Les Fleurs du Mal (Spleen et Ideal) LXXIX SPLEEN [The English Malady]
What, then, is Byron's problem: "all the woes we see--And worse, the woes we see not--which throb through The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new" (Childe Harold IV.1132-34)? Yet to insist on a "handily metaphoric secret (such as incest or homosexuality)" is to traduce the Byronic text by fixating on a stereotype of Byron produced by the publishing process: the capitalist exigencies of production, distribution and consumption (CH 16). The traumatic secret must remain secret, "the absence of the cause" that makes the text go, thereby catalyzing the historical overdeterminants that inflect its itness: private and singular, productive and inventive (LC II.57). An overdetermined drift, as it were.
Overdetermination is my sortie into a psychoanalytic mode of biographic reading that supplements a strictly "poststructuralist biographical criticism" (CH xxii) by attempting to get beyond Oedipal stereotypes, a "pas au-dela" or "pas du pas" that has been stressed, in different ways, by Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Abraham and Torok (as read by Derrida or de Man). (15) Byron encrypts, as I will detail, the figure of the incestuous ingenue, a trope, and not the biographical persona named Augusta Leigh. Incest is, according to the Anti-Oedipal critique, a key articulation of the stereotypical Oedipal triangle of mommy-daddy-me: "Only incest is possible ... `Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!'" (AO 210, 45). Fantasms of incest displace and re-articulate the barred desire for the Mother that upholds the patriarchal coding of the history of sexuality as a reiteration of "the repressive hypothesis." (16) Repression, in turn, presupposes and re-articulates the desire for a true or "full speech," or, in romanticist terms, a lyrical selfhood. (17) My "step beyond" Oedipus and the social body this centered discourse over-codes is, in other words, simultaneously an attempt to get beyond a belief in the possibility of extracting the self-determining truth-content of a life-writing.
Fredric Jameson has pointed out that the "hysterical" extremity of Deleuze and Guattari's critique of"the Oedipus complex" presupposes that a grain of truth inheres in the object of this critique. (18) Oedipus names the truth of the social structuration of sexuality "we" have been acting out from the Romantic Century onwards. I am unconcerned with the lived truth--content of Byron's relation to his incestuous relations, and am interested, instead, in the encrypted readability--local and global, national and geopolitical--of the ingenue figure. By readability I do not mean a concatenation of themes that can be accessed via a textual exegesis of the Byronic figurative experience of a private/public double bind. I prefer an a-thematic style of reading that will, of course, have no other option than to proceed by explicating the matedality of the text in terms of themes in order to traverse thematic fantasms "such as incest," "homosexuality," or "daddy-mommy." The Byronic figurative experience in question is, however, the situation of the reader adrift in the signifying materiality of Byron's text. To follow the Byronic drift is to uncover a "drive-structure" [Triebstruktur] (19) that explicates romanticism's enthusiasm for empire, while also explicating--the drive is, after all, fundamentally ambivalent--resistance to imperialism. To resist empire is also a death drive, since id amounts, I argue, to an embrace of the being-put-to-death that makes writing mean beyond the imperial intent of the scriptor (George Gordon Byron).
Death is not a soft name for M(Other) Oedipus. The Thanatotic dramatrauma has been theatrically over-inflated into irrelevance. To die, simply means, as Derrida noted long ago, to commit oneself, always already, to writing. (20) Lastly, empire is not a moralistic term of condemnation (except insofar as this moral book-keeping or "culture of culpability" is explicitly inscribed by Byron's articulation of a Protestant guilt-complex), (21) but the concrete condition--sine qua non--of Byron's ambivalent desire for the name globally distributed by Fame, a canonization that is required if the resistant encryptions are to be given a chance to get beyond, exceed or outwit the stereotypes Fame rests on. To resist empire is to resist the social field of communication--an "imaginary community" of print capitalism gone deliriously global--that infrastructures the theatrical staging of one's life-writing, a staging of self that is resisted by the writing's interminable drive-structure and not by the life (1788-1824).
A psychoanalytic mode of bio-graphic reading enacts, in other words, the death of the biographical subject--that ubiquitous hidden mover of literary formalism, criticism and historicism--and the after-Barthes of the reader as the writerly explicator of a not-quite global historical situation, a not-quiteness that remains, nevertheless, the lived experience of globalization. (22) Incipit Lord Byron as a "fantasy or protonarrative structure," "as the vehicle for our experience of the real," or, as far as the fantasmic figure (in contradistinction to the historical) Lord Byron is concerned, for our figurative experience of "emergent globalization." (23) How, then, to situate his Lordship's death-by-writing in relation to the material mise-en-mot of the public/private aporia within which Byron finds, or, rather, fails to find, himself?
Two key words adrift in Christensen are "virtue" and "invention." Invention translates the Greek term heurein (to find...
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