Citation:
Cohen, Tom. Ideology and Inscription: “cultural Studies” After Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.
Contents:
Introduction: Webwork, or ‘That spot is bewitched’
Part I. Ciphers – Or Counter-Genealogies for a Critical ‘Present’:
- Reflections on post ‘post-mortem de Man’
- The ideology of dialogue: the de Man/Bakhtin connection
- Mnemotechnics: time of the seance, or the Mimetic blind of ‘cultural studies’
Part II. Expropriating ‘Cinema’ – Or, Hitchcock’s Mimetic War:
- Beyond ‘the Gaze’: Hitchcock, Zizek, and the ideological sublime
- Sabotaging the ocularist state
Part III. Tourings – Or, the Monadic Switchboard:
- Echotourism: Nietzschean Cyborgs, Anthropophagy, and the rhetoric of science in cultural studies
- Altered states: stoned in Marseilles, or the addiction to reference
- Contretemps: notes, on contemporary ‘travel’.
Author:
Tom Cohen’s work began in literary theory and cultural politics and traverses a number of disciplines—including critical theory, cinema studies, digital media, American studies, and more recently the contemporary shift of 21st century studies in the era of climate change.
Context:
late 90s attempt to retrieve the legacy of De Man after the accusations of apolitical solipsism on Derrida and deconstruction
Thesis:
“The argument of these essays is that, rather than being surpassed by the intervening “returns” to history, mimesis, humanism, and identity politics, the materiality of language lingers as a repressed trauma” (1)
Methodology:
each chapter pairs De Manian thinking with thinkers such as Bakhtin, Benjamin, Zizek, and Neitzsche
Key Terms:
“materiality” , the De Man equivalent of the real
mimetico-historicist reading of history
inscription as opposed to ideology
Related Texts and Ideas:
De Man “The Use of Theory”
Criticisms and Questions:
dense language, does not apply exactly how a use of materiality could lead to political readings, engaged more with theory than with an application on texts
Rather than a concept of history centered on interiorized and m
imetically conceived
models of the subject and community, Cohen proposes, following
such critics as de Man,
Benjamin, and Adorno, to refocus the understanding of history o
n a concept of “mate-
riality” that can not be empirically apprehended or mimetically
represented, and that
always lies in excess of all models of interiority. Historicist
and mimetic representations
that do not relinquish their claim to the concept of identity—e
ven those that attempt to
represent “alternate” histories or forms of identity—are not on
ly blind to this materiality,
but also border on a dangerous form of conservatism that would
block out the possibili-
ties that a non-interiorist history represents. De Man consider
ed mimetic representation
to be a form of ideology, one that is focused on anthropomorphi
sm and meaning at the
expense of a historical materiality that exceeds both. Cohen re
minds us that, even under
persecution from fascism, Benjamin identified “the enemy” as no
t the fascists themselves,
but a form of historicism that presumes to contain or comprehen
d its object. Both de
Man and Benjamin considered language to be intrinsically relate
d to historicity and
materiality, especially inasmuch as it represents the possibili
ty of intervening—or “in-
scribing” a different kind of history—into mimetic-historicist
structures.
Keywords:
theory, ideology, language
Notes:
Benjamin explicitly questions how an alternate practice of writing-reading to current epistemo-critical models — largely mimetico-historicist— is required to rupture the fixed and inherited narratives of a foreclosed notion of “history” (3)
De Man- movement beyond metaphor or mimesis raises issue of “materiality” (Adorno) irrecuperable to an overtly referential (Marxian) model of mimetic politics.
-a la Derrida, a critique of a hermeneutically or “ideological” invested positions is not only derivable but seems impossible to arrest.
-language is not interiority and so not apolitical
-what is overlooked is that politics within signifying practices is always also a politics of memory, of “inscriptions” and how they are managed, guarded, purged, restored, protected.
Althusser – ideology has no outside, but at the same time is nothing but outside.
De Man’s project – at attempt to use the model of reading to situate epistemology as the site of the political. Since representation at all times involves the ritualized backloop of memory, the prerecorded inscription, of the ritual apparatuses of ideologies, chiasmically dissimulating the incursion they represent.
Undecidability is not a moral paralysis or apolitical, but a technos of historical intervention — habitual chains of reaction or logic formed in circumstances no longer historically applicable. Things, after all, are only “decidable” due to a long installed habit of language. “Undecidability” is where a preinscribed historical value – narrative has been deprived of momentum open to renegotiation.
-opening up unprescribed futures- not mere close reading – is what De Man is all about
I have followed the insights of several theorists such as Tom Cohen who works in Ideology and Inscription to overcome the bind between the textualization of history in ‘Theory’ and the mimetic bias of Cultural Studies by returning to the materiality of language as a socially determined and historically situated practice. Language is only opposed to history if we imagine history as centered on interiorized and mimetically conceived models of the subject and community. When we acknowledge instead that all forms of mimetic representation depend on the ways that language is used at a certain time and place—whether it be two rural workers or the presiding consciousness of the didactice novel—we can bring attention back to the political stakes of language itself. As the medium that either offers a stable field upon which to project the ideology of mimetic representation or as a contested mechanism that offers up spaces of radical alterity, language is itself the terrain of political coercion and ideological transformation. Concentrating on the situatedness of speech and the pragmatics of dialogue reveals how the language of the novel is always contingent on class structures and that its politics are only intelligible against the movement of ideology in language. The political imagination of a novel, then, will be understood as the ways in which an author grasps class as overdetermined and socially invisible by working through the historicity and materiality of language.
