Writing
This is a selection of papers and lectures I have written in the context of graduate seminars at UC Berkeley. I have only included the first paragraph of each. For full versions, please email me at phurtado.ortiz [at] berkeley.edu.
“Carceral Feminism: An Introduction” (2018)
Elizabeth Bernstein coined the term “carceral feminism” to describe what she perceived to be an increasing reliance by feminist activists and policy-makers on the penal state to address feminist grievances (Bernstein: 2007). The term by no means describes the universe of feminist projects and approaches, but many commentators argue that carceral feminism is the most substantial, thriving sector of feminist policy-making and activism (Halley: 2018; Bernstein: 2012). Feminism did not single-handedly bring about the punitive turn but it has, inadvertently or not, fanned its flames. The rise of the penal state has coincided with the rise of feminism. This paper tracks the decisions that led some feminists to wield the penal hand of the state, and the costs and benefits associated with those decisions. I ask, What projects have been left out? What are the symbolic and material effects of this emphasis? How is gender reconfigured as a result of this punitive impulse? In other words, how has the punitive turn been affected by feminism? How has feminism changed as a result of its love affair with punishment? Aya Gruber (2007), Marie Gottschalk (2006) and Susan Watkins (2018) offer wide-ranging accounts of the history of feminism. They all portray a previous historical moment in feminism where ecstatic projects for social transformation were being formulated and battled over, mostly at the grassroot level. And then a subsequent moment where feminist commitments in practice, if not in theory, became significantly less pluralistic and decidedly statist. What happened?
“Ethics and the Dialectic” (2019)
For a while now it has seemed to me important to try to take stock of a very great challenge to ethics or morality that I would associate with the Borges of “Deutsches Requiem” and “Three Versions of Judas;” with the Stevens of “Esthétique du Mal” and “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” (“The good is evil’s last invention”); as well as with Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. All of these, I should specify right away, date from 1940 to 1946, a period, needless to say, haunted by the threat of fascism. Indeed, as you may know, Otto Dietrich zur Linde, the narrator of “Deutsches Requiem,” avails himself of the insights of the greatest luminaries of German high culture to justify his commitment to Nazi ideals and practices. And in the more archaic “Three Versions of Judas,” Judas Iscariot emerges as a more credible Son of God than Jesus Christ himself. Both stories have been taken to pivot on the motif of interpretation, demonstrating what happens when protocols of reading go awry, both stories themselves apparently the cerebral exercises of someone (namely Borges) too smart for his own good (literally). These readings, however, are suspect because they seem too eager to paper over the void. To me, these exercises—earnest and desperate—are extraordinarily disturbing precisely because they point to an absence at the heart of ethics itself. The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment show the Marquis de Sade to have struck a similar chord, which is appropriate enough given that my wager today will be that the dialectic itself (the discovery of this mode of thinking) has everything to do with this new and frightening situation. I want here to give an account of Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of de Sade and their critique of Kant’s morality, and to bring their periodizing account to bear on the subject of ethics more generally. But before that, I want to review a bit of history, especially the history of the dialectic as a mode of thinking.
“Ideology and Utopia in Roland Barthes” (2019)
Many paths can be hacked through a work like Roland Barthes’s, whose long and extraordinary career has seemed to me paradigmatic of a whole period, an intuition authoritatively confirmed by Fredric Jameson, who calls it “a veritable fever-chart of all the significant intellectual and critical tendencies since World War II” (“The Ideology of the Text” 23-24). The particular trajectory that we will be interested in registering is that of the slogans ‘Ideology’ and ‘Utopia,’ which are, as it’s well known, something like the salt and pepper, the one-two punch of Marxist cultural theory. Indeed, not the least of our interests will be to register the ways in which a fellow-traveler like Barthes wields these tools, and how they come to be sharpened, blurred or refracted by his various investments, chief among them, language.
“Language and the Dialectic: A Reading of ‘Morality’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology” (2020)
No doubt too much has already been said about Hegel’s peculiar mode of argumentation in the Phenomenology of Spirit. But if he’s right, and if what is most valuable about this work are not the substantive positions themselves but the way the sentences organize the transitions between them, then it seems that the methodological or meta-philosophical perspective ought to take precedence. (In any event, the substantive positions—on ethics, practical philosophy, history and so on—are more fully articulated in the later work.) I will be arguing that Hegel’s mode of argumentation in the Phenomenology is best characterized by a certain alertness to language itself, and that this is a better way of understanding what’s at stake in terms such as dialectics or dialectical thinking than the usual stereotypes of ‘the unity of opposites’ and ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’—although, predictably enough, these stereotypes will have to be reckoned with and properly arranged in the fuller picture. The Morality chapter, in the Spirit section of the Phenomenology, presents us with as good a place as any to observe this language-inflected thinking at work, not only because it is something of a climax of the book—this is the moment when Spirit recognizes the power it has to determine its own Notion (or Begriff)—but also because it crucially oscillates between the descriptive and the normative, the ‘is’ and the ‘ought,’ two perspectives which will be language’s job to bridge and articulate as one. This chapter also makes the explicit claim for language as a necessary middle term at various points in the movement. So, we will be interested in tracking both the way in which language finds its way to Hegel’s substantive positions, as well as the more implicit manner in which linguistic terms and metaphors enable Hegel to think and arrive at these positions. But ‘enabling’ seems an incomplete way to describe language’s effect on the thinking of someone who so often insists on the alienation brought about by language. Thus, we will also ask what kind of imprint or liability does language leave in its wake? When Hegel says, for example, that the transition from ‘honest consciousness’ to ‘conscience’ brings about a change in die Sache selbst, from predicate to subject (§641)—how does this expression or metaphor (if it is one) impinge on our understanding of the phenomenon he describes? How is die Sache selbst betrayed or alienated by this way of phrasing the matter?
“Psychoanalytic Bric-à-Brac in Lolita” (2020)
Humbert Humbert is a clinical case (we all are) and a particularly interesting one, not least because he is a self-conscious, critical reader of the psychological and psychoanalytic literature. We are invited—or rather, taunted—to come up with a satisfactory interpretation for his actions: he tells us that he has spent time in psychiatric wards, being analyzed, and managing to deceive the experts; he has a nervous tic (which Lolita makes fun of); he shares his dream; not to mention that his actions (pedophilia, murder) are abnormal and frowned upon by his contemporaries. The problem of interpreting Humbert is obviously compounded by two other structural problems: first, the fact that the novel raises the issue of verisimilitude—intending clearly to throw a wrench into our default, common-sense practice of interpreting this character as we would a person. Secondly, there is a directionality to his speech-act—he wants to be forgiven, or so we think—which triggers our mistrust or paranoia. Indeed, paranoia is the operative word here, and we are in the position of Humbert himself, grasping at every possible sign—being misled into mistaken filiations (Trapp-Quilty)—and wondering what kind of meaning to extract from it. Nabokov’s own intimidation campaign against psychoanalysis or against Freud (le charlatan viennois as he once called him) is not justification enough, it seems to me, to make us drop this interpretive mode, since even if Humbert’s own case study defies Freudian models (does it?), the novel as a whole is clearly resolving some social problem or contradiction and thus can be read for its political unconscious (something I won’t attempt here). By way of a first crack at the problem of Humbert’s psychology, I want to make note of an impression I have about this book, which is that since it everywhere bristles with relentless verbal play and resonances, one almost feels that psychology is here being rewritten as thoroughly linguistic, involving not quite concepts but words, or shadows of words—making the book something of a Lacanian fever dream. I’ll come back to Lacan at the end.
“Property Rights as Development Strategy: A Legal Critique” (2017)
This paper criticizes Hernando de Soto’s development strategy based on securing property rights for the poor of the Global South. I bring up several critiques that one could make, and that seem to me legitimate, before focusing on the misconceptions about law and property that underwrite de Soto’s project. The bottom line is that prescriptions such as “strong property rights” and “the rule of law” are administered in lieu of sorely needed economic and political theories about what constitutes appropriate or good development. They are offered as solutions to development issues when in reality they are problems themselves since they stand to exacerbate the original issues and add new ones to the mix. A basic critique of de Soto’s project is that it is not sufficiently descriptive, a function of the moralizing vagueness of its legal terminology. One of the underlying questions is: Why does a project that is so unsophisticated (from a legal doctrine point of view) have so much purchase? What does that say about law? My wager is that the project is intentionally daft about its view of law and property because the lay misconceptions could (and already do) underwrite a political, ideological culture where misconceptions become ideal types, and where lawyers strive to construct legal regimes that aspire to them. I return to this theme at the very end.
“On Chartier’s The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution” (2019)
A student of the 18th century, steeped in Kant and Rousseau, might well be dissuaded from giving a discussion of ‘origins’ too central a place in their historical reflections. Not so Roger Chartier who enters the fray with a work brazenly titled The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, a translation of his 1991 book, Les origines culturelles de la Révolution française. The English version by Lydia G. Cochrane appeared in a series edited by two eminent historians—Keith Baker and Steven Kaplan—on the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Chartier’s, however, is a performance much more tentative and eclectic than the aura of legitimacy that surrounds it might suggest: here, positions are taken up, tried for size and then discarded in a historiographic equivalent of free indirect discourse; semiotics of the Louis Marin variety coexists happily with the statistical orientation of the Annales School; and the gist of causality seems, on the whole, hesitant to a surprising degree: one reaches the end of the book with a vast trove of evidence and petits faits vrais but endless provisos as to how to organize this material hierarchically. Rather than sheer idiosyncrasies or shortcomings, however, these should be seen as battle wounds a particularly self-conscious historian exhibits as he toils under the sign of a situation whose coordinates are too numerous to name but most surely include: the controversies surrounding the notion of representation; the extraordinarily effective public pedagogy campaign spearheaded by François Furet to disprove the “myth” of the French Revolution; and that momentous threshold known as the end of history. One of our interests in giving an account of Chartier’s book is to track the ways in which the French Revolution of 1789 and the philosophy of history emerge transformed out of this force field.
“On Rousseau’s Second Discourse” (2019)
Why, if I may be so bold, should we care about what Rousseau has to say? I probably don’t need to tell you that we live in a deeply unequal world and that among the most unequal societies the United States ranks pretty high (especially among so-called developed countries). So, whatever his diagnosis, at the very least Rousseau is addressing a contemporary problem of some relevance if not urgency. On top of that, we live in what is widely regarded as the epicenter of world capitalism, and while Rousseau never mentions the word, he addresses the system’s foundational concept, private property. If only as a matter of theoretical hygiene (if not ethical self-questioning), it strikes me as worthwhile to have one’s earnestly held beliefs and investments so cuttingly thrashed and dissected. I want to focus my remarks today on three different themes or motifs: property, human nature and the meta-motif of origins. I will discuss these to get at the questions which are most pressing in Rousseau: what are the foundations of our very unequal society? Why does it exist? And is it legitimate or justified?
As always, we have a two-pronged agenda: to lay out Rousseau’s substantive views and positions, as well as to track the form of his thinking: what kinds of arguments does he make? How does he come to the conclusions he comes to? What kinds of materials does he draw from? Despite the commonsense view of the Enlightenment as having excessive faith in reason, Rousseau (and he’s not alone) was often extremely skeptical of our ability to reason through difficult problems. What makes Rousseau’s work so poignant—or so it seems to me—is precisely his inveterate commitment to pursuing the strands of his thought all the way through, even if that means landing in places utterly strange and alien. His resolve is such that he’s willing and able to come up against the limits of his thought, and in so doing he raises the question of whether we are constitutively equipped to know or to find answers to our most urgent problems. I myself have found it helpful to think of Rousseau as always searching and indeed finding creative ways to hedge the limits of his reason—an assertion I will come back to at the end.
“Putting Bourdieu and Jameson to Work: Reading Les Gommes by Alain Robbe-Grillet” (2019)
“In the spirit of a more authentic dialectical tradition, Marxism is here conceived as that ‘untranscendable horizon’ that subsumes such apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them.”
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Preface, x (1981)
“This is tantamount to saying that, instead of being one approach among many, an analysis in terms of field allows us methodically to integrate the achievements of all the other approaches in currency, approaches that the field of literary criticism itself causes us to perceive as irreconcilable.”
Pierre Bourdieu, “Passport to Duke”, 454 (1997)
In a fraught and combative field, where general statements are routinely stigmatized as totalitarian, and where meekness and antiquarianism are held up as acceptable strategies for shirking the will to power, Jameson and Bourdieu’s interventions are surely to be welcomed, if only for their synoptic or syncretic function—their ability to enlighten the space of literary criticism by offering workable models of it. This paper, however, will make the further claim that it is for something like the truth-value, rather than the sheer bravado, of these propositions that we should admire them. This is a claim that we will seek to uphold despite the glaring fact that their projects seem to be in opposition to each other, and indeed our position on the question of who can “subsume” or “integrate” whom will be a strictly agnostic one. In other words, we will have to defer reckoning with these statements in earnest—a task that presupposes knowledge of “all the other approaches in currency”—in favor of a more modest exercise, which will consist of bringing to bear their respective ‘methods’ on a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Les Gommes, from 1953, was Robbe-Grillet’s first published work.
“Historicity in Las aventuras de la China Iron” (2020)
I know I’m not alone in noticing that our situation is rife with aesthetic objects and practices that wish, rather insistently, to evoke the past in some way: counterfactual histories, costume dramas, period films, monuments and memorialization of all kinds abound. The persistence of this wish—a wish for history—seems telling, and it can be squared, albeit counterintuitively, with that other diagnosis of our time as being one where historical consciousness is weakened in a deep and generalized way: the proliferation of historicizing gestures is, to paraphrase Fredric Jameson, ‘a symptom and symbolic compensation’ for that very enfeeblement of historical consciousness. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017) participates in that gesture in a particularly powerful way since it promises to reorganize our sense of the Argentinian 19th century by way of José Hernández and his classic poem, Martín Fierro. But I follow Jameson in thinking that any worthwhile contact with the past or with history must also raise questions about our own time, to pass judgment on our cherished presuppositions, as well as project forward into a potential future which, in inchoate form, is already here. With that in mind, we ask, what experience of history does this novel afford us?