Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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Editors' Introduction / Alan Clinton and Marc Ouellette
<1> Genre, in its imbrication with the Latin gens, inevitably presents itself as a family romance. But, as in the Freudian sense, this romance is also "tragic," full of intrigue, violence, and disintegration. Just as we don't know our place in the family, we cannot know genre. It is always exceeding and leaving itself, its members dismembered, then coming back to be remembered in various acts of incest. Jacques Derrida, primarily in his discussions of Hélène Cixous, insists on the possible singularity of the genius, the writer who cannot be brought within the family of genre. Although certain artists may foreground this character more than others, it is indeed the possibility that we encounter whenever presented with the question of bringing the family of genre together. Genre is the family that is impossible, for multitudinous reasons, to keep together. But no matter how far a genius runs, he or she cannot escape genre either, so the concept of genre helps us, as critics, to provisionally map its prodigalities and incestuous events as distortions of what was never possible. We desire genre in the form of its distortions. Northrop Frye, a notable fan of genre criticism famously claims that the genre itself is speaking through the individual text. Steve Neale similarly, but differently offers that the generic expectations condition the reception. We recognize it only via its liminality, for genre exists at the threshold between analogies in form and a recursive version of the proverbial children's game, "one of these things is not like the others."
<2> The two essays in the first part of this special section are thus about "Leaving the Family" even as the family, ultimately, cannot be left. Tom Lavazzi's "The Moving Figure: Dialogism in Williams' ‘The Great Figure'" simulates this effect in both its title and structure. William Carlos Williams' poem "The Great Figure" is one of the great moments of literary Imagism even as it points forward, in its emphasis on movement, beyond the photographic sensibilities of the movement as practiced by figures such as H.D., Ezra Pound, and of course, Williams himself. Lavazzi shows how this motion inspired the artists William Demuth, Jasper Johns, and Robert Indiana to carry Williams' snapshot of motion into their own interpretations which simultaneously leave "The Great Figure" behind and return to it in the complexities of a dialogism that could be said to create, via the work of both the artists and the critical acumen of Lavazzi, a provisional, nomadic genre that we might call "The Great Figure" genre. As a poet himself, Lavazzi's detailed descriptions of these works and their dialogism produces its own visual contribution to this genre, so that we can no longer see criticism as something that exists outside of its objects and so that we can also imagine critical writing as its own form of leaving itself, its own self-distorting genre. Cyrus Manasseh's "Playgrounds of Disturbance" discusses how deviations in one genre (video art), in the case of Bruce Nauman, exert pressures on the "homes" in which genres live, in this case the home of the (high) modernist art gallery. Working in a critical mode, Nauman's installations reveal how the generic home of the gallery operates, like more traditional homes, as a space of containment and surveillance. And yet, from a Deleuzian perspective of invention, Nauman not only suggests ways to escape the confines of generic homes, but to move tactically within them, creating lines of flight both within the gallery and its familiars.
<3> One of the most confining elements of the generic family is the mythologies it creates to program its participants' behaviors, a question addressed by the two essays in the "Genre Fictions" category. Darren Jorgensen's "On the Mediocrity of Arthur C. Clarke's Science Fiction" questions the motives behind sci-fi critics' attempts to valorize their genre by elevating it "from its status as both marginal and popular by considering it to be cognitively engaging." First of all, this attempt does not really recognize the huge variety in science fiction (not to mention the fact that almost any book written in the post-digital age could qualify as an instance of the genre). Critical attempts to redeem it all as "high" may not only be misguided as to the aims of sci-fi writers and filmmakers, but also prevents us from considering, as Jorgensen does, how mediocrity itself may be as much a key to sci-fi's relevance in the post-war context as any other potential perspective. Focusing on the banality of characterization in Clarke's ouevre, Jorgensen suggests how "space" and "space exploration" serve as something akin to the commodity fetish, something that promises to render our experiences of capitalist alienation irrelevant. Focusing specifically on the Clarke/Kubrick collaboration on 2001: A Space Oddity, Jorgensen points out the critical effect of banality in science fiction even as he leaves the idea of authorial/directorial intention an open question. Regardless of that intent, mediocrity becomes an authorial, if not generic, voice. This, too, reminds us of the liminal even as science fiction attempts to map foreseeable futures based on a pedantic present. Evon Hawkins' "Mutating Masculinity: Embodying the Hu(man) in The Hills Have Eyes," in turn, questions critical consensus with respect to the genre of horror films. Drawing upon Anne Ferguson's definition of the "gynandrous," Hawkins imagines the possibility of the horror film, which already exhibits a fascination with bodily mutilation and mutation, partaking of a redefinition of gender in the terms Ferguson describes, where "the symbolic implications of gender-associated traits will be detachable from bodies altogether." In this sense, the slasher film, traditionally seen as one of the most retrograde gender genres, has the potential to be a leader in producing partial objects whose recombination can help us think through new gender possibilities.
<4> Of course, the extent to which "slasher" films participate in radical gender bending could be read as equivalent to the extent they have left the slasher film genre. In this sense, modifications of genre—be they retrograde or progressive—are what make a rigorous concept of genre criticism impossible. Indeed, the concept of a radical genre may in itself be an impossibility, as suggested by the two essays in the "Impossibilities of Genre" category. Yet, rigorous criticism via the generic remains and flourishes. Bradley High continues the problematizing of gender genre in the essay, "Boys Will Be Boys With Boys: the Real and queer subjectivity in film." Analyzing the disappointments of mainstreamed queer cinema in the wake of so-called New Queer Cinema's dilution in the 1990s, High uses several recent films to explore whether, in a heteronormative society, a truly queer cinema that is also popular can even exist. If so, it would seem, the public itself must be retrained to accept queer sexuality onscreen just as it does "straight" sex. But, acknowledging the question of what sex is, whether its filmic representation can ever approach the missed encounter that the Lacanian Real would locate at the core of subjectivity, High brings together activism and aporia. It would seem that we can "continue to refashion and re-sexualize queer bodies in public performance and to continue an exploration of queer subjectivities not formed in relation to the heterosexual hegemony," an act which must necessarily combine Foucault's notions of govermentality with Sedgewick's "epistemology of the closet," but we must also recognize that such interrogation and refashioning will never lead to a real queer subjectivity which, like all subjectivity, circulates around a hole. This is no mere reformulation of the question of how to represent without representing. But, this recognition of limits is itself a denial of normativity that does not deny experimentation but in fact forms its basis in a world that has accepted a heterosexual reality even as it has denied the Real of sexual subjectivity. Finally, we might say that genre itself is a missed encounter. Like Derrida's archive, it is irrevocably changed each time it is added to, interpreted, even looked at. And, just as Derrida acknowledges that an archive must be read as not only something that makes use of technology, but as a complex technology unto itself, Jennifer Cover and Tim Lockridge are forced to consider whether, in the age of the Internet, the blog does not represent the "implosion" of genre however liberally defined. Although their extensive study of LiveJournal.Com makes use of a rhetorical, taxonomic approach to genre, they admit that such an approach is an impossibility given the opacities of communication afforded by the Internet. Cover and Lockridge, in fact, literally end up "looking for signs" as to what may constitute genre in blogs, focusing on the icons that LiveJournal contributors attach to their posts. But with posts we are left with the impossibility of genre itself. It is the problem of where to begin, the aporia Derrida faces when confronting something as simple as a postcard. What is most important—the picture on the front, the writing on the back, the postage stamp, and sometimes, but only rarely, the recipient? Where does one begin to read, to classify? The decision one makes is the first step one makes upon the endless steppes of genre.
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