Denise Riley

‘A voice without a mouth’: Inner Speech

If a flower-streaked inward eye could constitute Wordsworth’s bliss of solitude, the inward voice has fared less glamorously. Its merest mention doesn’t so much conjure up the consolation of inner riches recalled sotto voce as the pathos of this chattering internal radio for the anti-social; a poor comforter of enforced solitariness, or some misanthropist’s illusion of company on his culpable flight from society. Inner speech is the touchstone of a privacy which needn’t depend on the isolation of its silent speaker, for it may mutter forcefully in our ear even when we are among some animated social gathering. The very topic of inner speech conjures an aura of loneliness, whether hapless or wilful. It covers an emotional spectrum shading from the selfconsciousness which eavesdrops on itself to the manias of aural possession. There’s a thick history to this, intersecting with historical fluctuations in the idea of solitude and its worth. At periods the solitary became decorative; so hermits were hired to grace, hairily, the grottoes of eighteenth-century estates. And if there was an acceptable sex of solitude, this wasn’t usually female, unless un sexed by saintliness. But compulsive or enforced sociability is a very modern aim and prescription; on the other hand, some psychoanalytic thought has held to the value of our being able to tolerate being alone.

Bodies, Identities, Feminisms

In my first chapter there were allusions to what I called the peculiar temporalities of ‘women’. But what are the consequences of this for feminism; what does it mean to insist that ‘women’ are only sometimes ‘women’, and wouldn’t this suggestion undercut feminism anyway? As part of my argument that it would not, we could start with a fairly straightforward version of what this temporality might be.

On the Lapidary Style

“The lapidary style” suggests a manner of writing that runs close to working a material—carving lettering into rock, cutting a gem into fine facets. Poised between the properties of the stone and of the jewel, this term holds the tensions of stone’s solidity and light’s refraction. This discussion will range over the curious nature of this style, its virtues of concision and incisiveness, and what it might say about the “materiality” of language. The “lapidary” shows us the profound implication of a gestural style with meaning.

Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1969)

Visual and Other Pleasures is a series of linked meditations on the politics of representation. Written from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, the pieces reflect commitments and changes within the Women’s Movement during that period: Mulvey’s self-reflexive account shows the broadening out of the Women’s Movement from a political organisation into a more general framework of feminism, a development that as regards consideration of representation runs from the interruptions of the spectacle of the 1970 Miss World contest to the later elaboration of a fully fledged cultural feminism, responsive to and newly inflecting theoretical trends. The critical appropriation of psychoanalysis, to which Mulvey contributed, was one such crucial inflection and is mapped out by the various pieces as they examine matters of spectacle and melodrama and avant-garde practice, ending with two major reconsiderations — one of which appears below — of the terms and politics and feminist theory. The celebrated essay on ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, conceived as radical intervention, used psychoanalytic theory to suggest a complex interaction of different ‘looks’ particular to cinema, arguing that conventional film establishes, irrespective of the sex of the viewer, a masculine voyeurism that must be refused, ‘destroyed’. That idea of the hold of the male gaze fixed to the female passivity it represents was then complicated by subsequent reflections on women’s enjoyment as spectators in the cinema, on the possibilities of visual pleasure. Yet how, other than as sexualised images, are women to be represented?

Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (1998)

This study of the mutual influences of modernism and psychoanalysis provides a largely missing and much-needed critical dimension for the understanding of British cultural and intellectual history in the war and post-war years. In common with the LDS books of Jacqueline Rose and Denise Riley, The Destructive Element moves between intellectual history, psychoanalytic and psychological theory, and feminist thought. The title is derived from Conrad’s Lord Jim ‘In the destructive element immerse’; an injunction that is here taken up in an examination of how theories of emotional aggression, the death drive and unconscious violence developed within and inflected or reinforced literary, critical and aesthetic directions in the mid-twentieth century.

Stanley Shostak, Death of Life: The Legacy of Molecular Biology (1998)

There is perhaps no more debilitating feature of modern thought than the almost unbridgeable division in the modern academy between science and the humanities. The dangers that C. P. Snow attempted to indicate in his 1959 Rede Lecture The Two Cultures have only increased in the decades since he wrote and no amount of Leavisite fulmination can get over the divide. If the history and philosophy of science can now be considered one of the key disciplines for defining the relations across the disciplines, it is still not the necessary point of reference that it should be. Stanley Shostak takes Cinderella as his muse, when, as a practising biologist, he sets out to describe the historical rise to power and the contemporary inadequacy of molecular biology. He reads the story of the rise to supremacy of the study of the gene as the death of the Cinderella of sciences, biology. His heretical account questions at every level the current dominance of molecular biology and suggests that it depends on a series of factors that have nothing to do with the kind of disinterested inquiry which science is meant to represent. His call for a much richer and more diverse biology makes clear how damaging the current divide between science and humanities is to both parties.

The Concept of Language We Don’t Need

The analysis of mainstream linguistics and philosophy of language, which I have presented in the form of six principles, as a background or foil against which to construct ‘another philosophy of language’, one that would enable me to understand both bad words and the productions of fous litteraires, suffers from one obvious defect: over-generalisation. I lump together schools of linguistics and philosophical positions between which there are serious, and sometimes unbridgeable, differences, and sharp polemics. The best I can claim for my six principles is that they are linked by Wittgenstein’s family resemblance: all the various trends in mainstream linguistics and philosophy of language will resort to one or several of them, hardly any to the six of them. So, in order to make my critique more convincing, I must look in some detail at one subsidiary of this main stream, with its own coherence and limitations. I hope that this will make the necessity of the construction of another philosophy of language clearer.

Jean-Jacques Lecercle; Interpretation as Pragmatics (1999)

The Language, Discourse, Society series has published several studies of language which have gone far beyond the familiar territory of a professional linguistics — most notably the translations of Jean-Claude Milner’s For the Love of Language and Michel Pecheux’s Language, Semantics, and Ideology. Resembling these in its departures from the customary range of linguists’ preoccupations but otherwise distinctive in its detailed and scrupulous iconoclasm, Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Interpretation as Pragmatics offers a new account of what it is to interpret a text. Exemplifying a thoroughly Deleuzian stress on the incalculable yet traceable workings of language from the outside, and following on from the author’s earlier The Violence of Language with its espousal of the forceful yet fertile seepage of words beyond their commonly supposed bounds, this book proposes that literary interpretations may be sometimes just and sometimes false, while never true. Interpretation here ceases to be seen as a tin-opener and is conceived instead, in neo-Wittgensteinian diction, as a language-game with several players: author, language, text, encyclopaedia, reader. The radiating centrality of the text in this new model does not, however, suppose any radical separability of the fictional from the quotidian, let alone any unique superiority of a literary—critical approach. Rather, the work of literary interpretation proceeds, as Lecercle demonstrates in painstaking detail, in ways closely comparable to what happens in face-to-face dialogue. Because the implications of such a pragmatic account of interpretation also have repercussions for a theory of how the human subject is linguistically installed and pinned in place, Paul Hirst’s early commentary on Althusser’s concept of interpellation (in his LDS volume On Law and Ideology) and Judith Butler’s more recent consideration of interpellation (in her Excitable Speech) receive an incisive critique and Lecercle develops an empathetic account of interpellation’s spasmodically emancipating harshness.

Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism (1990)

Stanley Aronowitz’s The Crisis in Historical Materialism was first published in the United States in 1981 and then reissued with new material in the LDS series. It is one of the key texts to have come out of the experience of the sixties, a decade marked by a wave of new interest in Marxist thought as the Stalinist hegemony dissolved. Figures such as Korsch and Lukacs whose work had been subject to the prohibitions of the Comintern resurfaced and the publication of Marx’s own early thinking on the relation between philosophy and economics in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts stimulated radical rethinking. Most importantly perhaps, Marcuse’s reworking of themes from the Frankfurt School and Althusser’s redrawing of the distinction between science and ideology provided many of the emphases that were to issue from the movements of 1968. But if the thinking of the New Left was an essential part of the heterogenous mix of economics, politics and culture which made up the sixties, that thinking was itself fundamentally unaffected by the heterogeneity of which it was a part. The great merit of Aronowitz’s book is its sustained attempt to produce a historical and social understanding fully adequate to that experience.

The Concept of Language We Need

So far, I have provided only a negative account of such a concept. I have criticised a specific concept of I-language as the concept we absolutely do not need. For Chomsky’s philosophy of language has a number of advantages for us. Not only is it entirely explicit (and outdated), but it offers the converse of the concept of language we need. His theory is a photographic negative of the right concept — this should make our task easy: all we have to do is to say ‘black’ whenever he says ‘white’. This is, however, unduly optimistic: such simple conversion is not enough, as it is obviously still dependent on the concept of language that has been criticised. Hence the second negative account I have provided, when I suggested, as the inverse of mainstream philosophy of language, a series of six counter-principles, which go far beyond Chomsky’s theory of I-language, as they also involve a critique of Anglo-Saxon pragmatic linguistics and of phenomenological theories of language such as enunciation theories. The very names of those six principles (non-immanence; dysfunctionality; opacity; materiality; non-systematicity; historicity) smack of negative theology. Even the apparently positive names, ‘opacity’, ‘materiality’ and ‘historicity’ receive negative, or reactive, interpretations. Thus, ‘opacity’ is non-transparency, it is second to the transparency that is one of the tenets of mainstream philosophy of language; ‘materiality’ is abstract non-ideality, the reference to ‘matter’ and ‘materialism’ being at this stage only a philosophical gesture; ‘historicity’ in this context is mostly the antonym of ‘naturalism’, the name of the thesis that, as far as language is concerned, the very slow time of evolution is not fast enough to be relevant (this is what I have called, again and again, in deliberate exaggeration, the ‘non-time’ of evolution: Greek aion in its traditional, not its Deleuzean, sense as opposed to chronos).