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Overview
Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, Alworth demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life.
Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists—the supermarket for Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol; the dump for William Burroughs and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; the road for Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John Chamberlain; the ruin for Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smithson; and the asylum for Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Jeff Wall—and shows how this site mediates complex interactions among humans and nonhumans. The result is an interdisciplinary study of American culture that brings together literature, visual art, and social theory to develop a new sociology of literature that emphasizes the sociology in literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400873807 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Site reading
Fiction, Art, Social Form
By David J. Alworth
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-16449-6
CHAPTER 1
Supermarket Sociology
Émile Durkheim would not live long enough to see the arrival of the supermarket in France. Nor would he witness its expansion into the more flamboyant form of food retailing aptly named the hypermarché. It was not until after World War II and during the Marshall Plan, in which food aid was a central component, that American-style supermarkets began to crop up all over Europe. And it was not until 1963 that the Carrefour Company constructed the first of its hypermarkets just outside Paris. After assimilating the dictates of Bernardo Trujillo, an Ohio-based business educator who was affectionately known as "the pope of modern commerce," Carrefour designed a food retailing institution that was unprecedented in both size and style: 2,500 square meters (approximately 1.5 square miles), 450 parking spaces, and a variety of items (clothes, household appliances, low-cost petrol) and amenities (a cafeteria, a bakery, a dry cleaner's) that were not aggregated in quite the same way anywhere else. Hypermarket grand openings were characteristically hyperreal. They featured circus amusements and games hosted by a TV personality. And they included large-scale binge drinking: ten thousand liters (about 2,641 gallons) of vin de Touraine served from a marquee on the parking lot. It is possible that the founder of modern sociology would have had something to say about such a scene, but his death from exhaustion just after World War I leaves us free to speculate on what that might have been. It leaves us on our own, that is, to imagine a supermarket sociology.
Such a speculative fantasy is more serious than it may seem, for it stages a series of instructive encounters: between fin de siècle Europe and postwar America; between high theory and vernacular culture; between the systematicity of social science and the heterogeneity of lived experience; and between one period-imaginary (the industrialization, fragmentation, and anomie of modernity) and another (the globalization, decenteredness, and depthlessness of postmodernity). More specifically, to picture Durkheim strolling the aisles of a supermarket that he never could have visited is to imagine a counterfactual scene in the history of ideas. What kind of sociology might have emerged had he lived long enough to shop for groceries the way most of us do? The answer, this chapter proposes, is the sociology of Bruno Latour. In Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Latour proffers a thorough critique of Durkheim, deploying what he calls a "metaphor of the supermarket" as a means of illustrating his argument that the social is best conceived as a network of human subjects and nonhuman objects. Against more familiar ways of conceptualizing and allocating agency, Latour claims that nonhumans must be understood as actors or actants: fully agential participants in the drama of social relations. "How long can a social connection be followed," he asks, "without objects taking the relay?" (RS, 78). This conception of the nonhuman has influenced a wide swath of interdisciplinary scholarship — especially the work associated with "thing theory," "posthumanism," "vital materialism," and "speculative realism" — yet it relies on a critical idiom derived from narratology and semiotics. For this reason and others, Latour's sociology is deeply indebted to the enterprise of literary analysis, to the project of developing a critical vocabulary for apprehending the structure and significance of literary texts.
Taking Latour's engagement with the literary as a point of departure, this chapter offers a new model for thinking between the disciplines of literary studies and sociology. At the crux of this model is a site, the supermarket, that dramatizes nonhuman agency as a mundane yet complex fact of social experience, a fact that Latour theorizes throughout his writings and that a host of literary authors, above all Don DeLillo, have sought to explore in different ways. Although extensive critical commentary has positioned DeLillo's White Noise (1985) in relation to the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and, more recently, Ulrich Beck, I read the novel's treatment of the supermarket as a literary exploration of several interlocking questions that animate Latour's thinking. My overarching goal, however, is not merely to offer a reading of the novel in terms of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) but rather to demonstrate how a site that is crucial to both the novelist and the sociologist could facilitate a new interdisciplinary conversation, a mode of inquiry that would divert from a more traditional sociology of literature whose objective would be to identify the deep significance of literary form in the social forces that subtend aesthetic production. Instead of reading White Noise as an epiphenomenon of the social, in other words, I want to understand the novel as a sociological endeavor in its own right, a profound attempt to explore the nature of sociality itself. Insofar as this approach to DeLillo constitutes a sociology of literature, then, it seeks to discover the sociology in literature. This means emphasizing the former of the two possibilities suggested by Pierre Bourdieu in his influential study of Gustave Flaubert: "In sum, on the one hand, Flaubert's sociology, meaning the sociology which he produces; on the other, the sociology of Flaubert, meaning the sociology of which he is the object." What is the sociology that DeLillo produces? The most compelling answer to this question, I argue, appears in his figuration of the supermarket as a site of interaction between humans and nonhumans.
To make this argument, I deploy the method of site reading that I outlined in the introduction. Although my emphasis falls on how Latour and DeLillo figure the supermarket, the site also plays another part in this chapter, as the central node within a cultural network that includes literature, visual art, design, advertising, and journalism. Inspired by Latour's rethinking of the text/context distinction, as well as by recent calls to reimagine our interpretive procedures, site reading aims to disclose the sociology in literature, while tracing connections between literary and nonliterary phenomena, ultimately to bring otherwise concealed affiliations among literature, art, and mass culture into clear resolution.
THE SUPERMARKET SOCIOLOGIST
Latour's literariness is, in some ways, nothing new. "From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards," writes Wolf Lepenies, "literature and sociology contested with one another the claim to offer the key orientation for modern civilization," yet despite this rivalry, the sociologists of Durkheim's era often looked to literature for inspiration. "What literary sources offered," Susan Mizruchi argues, "were not only characters more richly drawn than those in history books but a common storehouse of culturally specific types — both situational and human — whose properties could resonate in a variety of unpredictable ways, depending on the context." It seems fitting, then, that the most thorough critique of Durkheimian sociology to have emerged in recent years should proceed with and through literary theory. Reassembling the Social challenges Durkheim's understanding of the social as autonomous, sui generis, and composed of uniquely social (as opposed to, say, natural) materials. Latour argues, by contrast, that the social is best understood as a constitutively impure and ever-shifting assemblage of humans and nonhumans. For Latour, in other words, there is no "specific sort of phenomenon variously called 'society,' 'social order,' 'social practice,' 'social dimension,' or 'social structure'" that can be defined against other phenomena, such as the material, the psychological, the economic, or the natural (RS, 3). Rather, there are only networks of actors in contingent and momentary relationships that must be traced before they can be understood.
Thus, some portion of the real, what Durkheim called "the particular and the concrete," can be considered social only after it has been delineated as such by the work of ANT. Instead of being treated as a preconstituted domain, then, the social is literally figured out by ANT: it is given a kind of figural expression in the sociological monograph, not unlike that which is proffered by narrative prose fiction. Hence the reason literary theory is so important to this sociology. "Because they deal with fiction," Latour explains, "literary theorists have been much freer in their enquiries about figuration than any social scientist, especially when they have used semiotics and the various narrative sciences" (RS, 54). While Latour frequently acknowledges his debt to Michel Serres, he is referring here to thinkers such as Louis Marin, who exemplifies "the metaphysical freedom of semioticians," and Thomas Pavel, who exhibits "the incomparable freedom of movement of literary theorists" (RS, 54–55). It is not that "literary theorists would know more than sociologists," Latour assures, but that "some continuous familiarity with literature" might enable sociologists to "become less wooden, less rigid, less stiff in their definition of what sorts of agencies populate the world" (RS, 55).
Agency is a key term in Latour's thought, and its redescription is perhaps the most important contribution of ANT. From his point of view, agency is always figured in one way or another whenever it is conceptualized, regardless of how abstract or concrete that figuration. If agency is, most simply, the capacity for action, then whatever accomplishes an activity is always endowed "with some flesh and features that make [it] have some form or shape, no matter how vague" (RS, 53). To preserve the distinction between agency and its figuration, Latour relies on the term actant, which he gleans from the narratology of A. J. Greimas, as well as from the more recent work of Jacques Fontanille. In Semiotics and Language, Greimas and J. Courtés make clear that "an actant can be thought of as that which accomplishes or undergoes an act, independently of all other determinations," meaning it is "a type of syntactic unit, properly formal in character, which precedes any semantic or ideological investment."
The technology of narrative, according to Greimas and Courtés, includes six actants paired in binary opposition — subject/object, sender/receiver, helper/opponent — and these actants, once "invested" or figured, become actors. The narratologists write: "An actor may be individual (for example, Peter), or collective (for example, a crowd), figurative (anthropomorphic or zoomorphic), or non-figurative (for example, fate)." Thus, agency in this narratology is extended to nonhumans, both material and nonmaterial, and it can be rendered either abstractly as an actant or concretely as an actor, which is why Latour tends to use those two terms interchangeably throughout his work: "any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor — or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant" (RS, 71). To observe a change in a "state of affairs," moreover, is to glimpse agency in and as its effect, not to treat it as some mysterious cause. As long as we are inside a narratological framework trying to apprehend a narrative text, this schema of agency, actant, and actor seems reasonable, but it becomes less comfortable when our object of analysis is society and our analytical device is an emergent social theory. We have no trouble understanding "a fable," as Latour puts it, in which "the same actant can be made to act through the agency of a magic wand, a dwarf, a thought in the fairy's mind, or a knight killing two dozen dragons" (RS, 54). It is more difficult, however, for us to think of the social as a network comprising both humans and nonhumans as fully agential actors or actants.
Unless we stroll through the supermarket. Latour himself heads there when he needs a familiar environment in which to situate his defamiliarizing claims. What Latour calls the "metaphor of the supermarket" appears at two key junctures in Reassembling the Social (RS, 65). In both, it serves to distance ANT from traditional sociology while clarifying the distinction between agency and its figuration. There is "a shelf full of 'social ties'" — to be distinguished from the economic, material, psychological, and biological ties that bind the goods on other shelves — in the "imaginary supermarket" of traditional sociology (ibid.). From the point of view of ANT, however, the entire supermarket should be understood as a social whole, a network whose goods serve as actants variously figured by "their packaging, their pricing, their labeling" (ibid.). In the ANT supermarket, the human subject is not only one of the many actants constituting the network but is itself constituted by the nonhuman objects in its environment, the "bewildering array of devices" that buzz and jingle and flash in every aisle and on every shelf (RS, 210). In the ANT supermarket, moreover, "when one has to make the mundane decision about which kind of sliced ham to choose," one always benefits from the "dozens of measurement instruments" that capacitate the subject as a consumer (ibid.). Thus, it makes no sense to polarize subject and object in the ANT supermarket, just as it would be impossible to restrict agency in this site to the human particular.
This conception of agency, as distributed among humans and nonhumans, emerges throughout Latour's work, and it has been theorized in various ways by political scientist Jane Bennett, archaeologist Alfred Gell, and media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen, among others. For Latour, this concept has a firm basis in narratology, so it seems reasonable to wonder how a literary narrative might contribute to an understanding of distributed agency as a social phenomenon. "[W]hen everything else has failed," Latour quips, "the resource of fiction can bring ... the solid objects of today into the fluid states where their connections with humans may make sense" (RS, 82). What happens when White Noise is read as a sociological "resource" in this manner?
A NOVEL VIEW OF SUPERMARKETS
"The supermarket is full of elderly people," begins chapter 22 of the novel, "who look lost among the dazzling hedgerows. Some people are too small to reach the upper shelves; some people block the aisle with their carts; some are clumsy and slow to react; some are forgetful, some confused; some move about muttering with the wary look of people in institutional corridors." Depicting the experiential pandemonium of the live supermarket, this passage exemplifies two key features of DeLillo's prose: descriptive precision and deadpan irony. The use of anaphora, moreover, produces a sociological effect insofar as it generates a taxonomy of social types — old shoppers, confused shoppers, clumsy shoppers — that we can all recognize; this is one reason why the novel has been called "a social science fiction" that reads "like an ethnography of sorts." Recognition is central to the humor of White Noise, for it includes so many scenes that the reader will have encountered in the real world: "There were two new developments in the supermarket, a butcher's corner and a bakery, and the oven aroma of bread and cake combined with the sight of a bloodstained man pounding strips of living veal was pretty exciting for us all" (WN, 167). Here and elsewhere, though, DeLillo presents familiar details only to defamiliarize them with irony and hyperbole, thereby rendering the supermarket and its sociality both recognizable and strange.
"In White Noise, in particular," DeLillo told Anthony DeCurtis in 1988, "I tried to find a kind of radiance in dailiness," and the supermarket seemed like the right place to look: "Imagine someone from the third world who has never set foot in a place like that suddenly transported to an A&P in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Wouldn't he be elated or frightened? Wouldn't he sense that something transcending is about to happen to him in the midst of all this brightness?" Although DeLillo renders that brightness in original ways, he was not the only postwar American author to focus on the particular details of this site. Just as Ira Levin's protagonist in The Stepford Wives (1972) walks through "the market's opening-by-themselves doors" to enter "the usual Saturday morning parade," so too Philip K. Dick's protagonist in Time Out of Joint (1959) "passe[s] through the electric eye, causing the door to swing wide for him." Shelves rather than doors caught the attention of Paul Auster, who imagined the supermarket as a setting for psychological drama, depicting a "schizoid break" that causes a character in The New York Trilogy to start "taking those big jugs of apple juice off the shelves and smashing them on the floor." When Joan Didion turned to the supermarket, she too was concerned with pathos. Maria Wyeth, the depressed protagonist of Play It as It Lays (1970), "shop[s] always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent." Such items, Maria thinks, "giv[e] off the signs" that she is happy and well adjusted, but for people who have never been to a supermarket, they are completely bewildering, as Spalding Gray suggests in Swimming to Cambodia (1987) when he discusses the Laotian Hmong tribes who were relocated after the Vietnam War to immigrant condos in Washington State. "The supermarket confused them totally," he explains. "Thinking it was a bar of soap, they bought a big, yellow block of Velveeta cheese."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Site reading by David J. Alworth. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xiINTRODUCTION: THE SITE OF THE SOCIAL 1
1 SUPERMARKET SOCIOLOGY (Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol) 25
TEST SITES 49
2 DUMPS (William S. Burroughs, Mierle Laderman Ukeles) 51
3 ROADS (Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, John Chamberlain) 73
4 RUINS (Thomas Pynchon, Robert Smithson) 96
5 ASYLUMS (Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, Jeff Wall) 121
AFTERWORD: SITE UNSEEN 149
Acknowledgments 157
Notes 161
Bibliography 187
Index 201
What People are Saying About This
"How do novels model social thinking? And how do the sites and settings of fiction offer clues to the shape of the social world? In this fascinating book, David Alworth explores the entanglement of real and fictional spaces and of human and nonhuman actors. The result is a rich and very rewarding line of argument that will appeal to scholars of modern and contemporary fiction as well as anyone curious about new trends in the sociology of literature."—Rita Felski, University of Virginia"Site Reading will appeal to scholars and students not only in the rising field of ‘post45' literary studies, but also in literary theory generally, as well as art history, cultural sociology, and American studies. Alworth has a keen analytical intelligence and writes with admirable clarity and vigor. His book is unfailingly interesting, offering shrewd insights on every page, and opening major new pathways for research in the sociology of culture."—James English, University of Pennsylvania"Site Reading is a richly suggestive and stylish contribution to American literary studies that places Alworth at the center of the conversations now shaping our sense of the contemporary and its history since World War II. He takes the idea of social life—which all too often can signal nothing in particular or everything in general—and examines it with rigor, clarity, and tremendous imagination. His compelling accounts of postwar art and fiction connect works of culture to the various spaces, built environments, and object-worlds that they inhabit."—Mark Goble, University of California, Berkeley