BRENT RYAN BELLAMY

science fiction studies, American literature and culture, energy humanities

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Aesthetics of Exhaustion, McCarthy Years Later

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.[1]

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) describes a journey from one place to another, a passage through an inhospitable landscape in elegant sparseness, stripped down dialogue, and with luminous descriptions of the devastated countryside. The Road is a story about a man and a boy who travel down the presumably post-nuclear, U.S. East coast in search of warmer climes. McCarthy consistently draws attention to the precarious nature of their survival. In the novel, the man and the boy have been left behind by the boy’s mother who opted to take her own life rather than face the ravages of cannibal gangs or the devastation of life in this unrecognizable United States. 

The novel presents us with an impasse—the totality within the narrative provides empirical examples of only a few logical ways to live collectively: struggling as the man and the boy do, surviving in a cannibalistic gang (a mode the novel cautions that should be strictly avoided), or living in the seemingly benevolent family group that emerges at the end of the novel. The Road seems to have already moved beyond the problem of the family, but still returns to it as a fundamental question. What remains at stake is the way The Road simultaneously and on a different register engages historical structures and processes that have marked it both visibly and invisibly.
From the very start, The Roadinsists on the characters’ inability to locate themselves–socially, geographically, politically or even in a more physical sense. On the opening page, vision is figured as a rapidly dwindling facility: “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (3). The destination of the travels remains unclear and clouded not only for the reader, but for the man and the boy themselves. 

The novel comes closest to making its inner logic visible when the boy describes a toy he had in a dream: “this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary” (36). After his father reassures him, the boy concedes one final detail—the key on the penguin was not turning. No one was responsible for winding the penguin, yet it moved of its own accord. Here, the boy expects windup toys to operate in accordance with a particular logic—the key should move along with the toy and require someone, a boy for instance, to wind it before the mechanism could release this stored up kinetic energy. What the boy finds “really scary” is as much the ostensibly magical dance of the penguin as the logical breakdown of his own relation to the external world, a world that the novel registers as entirely unplottable. The dream not only records the demise of the expected order, but also registers an unintentional truth: these unpredictable objects mark the novel’s inability to posit a future where the boy could be in control at all. This is a fact only reinforced by the novel’s close where, at the very moment the boy is alone, he is discovered by a friendly group and any chance he has of developing a new mode of survival or belonging in the world is severed.[2]

The dream is frightening for the boy not because it is reminiscent of the end, but because the toy continues to move without his input: the penguin’s mobility is a signature of the invisible dynamic guiding the frighteningly autonomous-seeming object, the motivating force behind the apparently free figure, what Louis Althusser called the absent cause, which has been understood both as the logic of History, along the lines of Althusser and Fredric Jameson, or as that of capital itself, following Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman, and outlines the invisible core of the novel.[3] 

The novel imagines this absence in terms of social responsibility or collective support. What keeps the two nameless protagonists from interacting with others is the fear of death, rather than the preference of solitude or something like racial or social prejudice. The novel posits the problematic on a political register as the loss of the social contract. The boy’s fear of the dancing penguin, however, underscores the breakdown of a far larger set of relations, namely capitalist social relations as such. His horror gestures to a contradiction behind the sign of the magically dancing object, behind the veil of the political, namely an economic contradiction of production and scarcity. The novel attempts to resolve an economic problem on the level of political social organization – the relation of strangers within a national context and the relation of individuals within a familial one.[4]

What generates the nation and the family, however, is the economic necessity of production in terms of national competition and state organization, and also the regulation and social reproduction of the working class family and the reserve army of the proletariat, things that, in reality, have long been irrelevant as residual forms of the ideology of an earlier organization of production, ones which have since been sublated and exported beyond U.S. borders in the global or better yet transnational configuration of capital. At its conclusion the novel puts these contradictions on the table, but does not attempt to sort through them: put another way, The Road ends with an insistence on the family as the dominant social form, an aporia it fails to read as a contradiction, or at the least a ‘dead end’ that cannot be resolved within the novel form which raised it in the first place. My argument about post-apocalyptic fiction cannot stop here, however; and, perhaps, tying a number of these failures together under the category of genre may serve to paint a better picture of the particular failure of the novel apparatus in The Road to offer resolutions to the problems it emplots.

Notes
Althusser, Louis and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: Verso, 2009.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. 
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage P, 2006.

Szeman, Imre and Eric Cazdyn. After Globalization. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.


[1] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage P, 2006), 3.
[2] The boy is discovered by a nuclear family in John Hillcoat’s film The Road (2009).
[3] See Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 2009), 208-9; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981); and, Imre Szeman and Eric Cazdyn, After Globalization (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
[4] For relation of strangers within a national contexts see Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 6.

Old and New Americas

It is less useful to gawk at the “ungraspable” numinous essence of the frontier than it is to analyze how the West has been symbolized, and to consider the historical, ethical, and ideological ramifications of such symbolizations.
— David M. Higgins

To move into and across “empty” spaces…is to occupy and claim those spaces.
— Carl Abbott
The representation of the frontier in David Brin’s The Postman (1985) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) not only allows for a critique of the “old” ideological strength of frontier imaginaries, but also opens up questions of the “new” return of these imaginaries during the end of the cold war at the height of the entrenchment of neolibrialism in the United States. The Postman and Blood Meridian operate on both old and new registers at once: each novel’s historical register can be seen largely through the imaginary of the frontier and the historical moment known as the 1980s. In these novels, the frontier is the mediating factor for a history in what once was a push into the space of west is now a push of deregulation and the free market (with their own hidden or obscured spatial attachments). These novels, in markedly different ways, recast the question of the frontier, presenting an opportunity for a political reading that traces the various “old” forms of violence within these novels through frontier history back to their source in a global economy now become neoliberal. This is not to say The Postman and Blood Meridian represent the frontier or their own period in precisely same way; for the former, the strategy remains largely embedded within a narrative frame that reveals how the development of relationships, in this case those of the liberal subject, works by displacing them onto an imagined future. There, the social relations giving way to a shrinking of the state and free market ideology are restaged in the displaced environment of the post-catastrophe west. While in the latter, the narrative strategy is one of disclosure: a de-romanticization of the frontier myth through a fictional situation which plays out the violent dispossession and murder of all parties opposing or merely in the way of Glanton’s gang. Blood Meridian simultaneously rewrites a history of the frontier as it generates a spatial mapping and details a process of accumulation in the west.
Before working through a reading of novels I would also like to put Fredrick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis on the table. Turner’s thesis posited that American development could not be entirely explained by production in the east, but had to take into account “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession and the advance of American settlement westward” (qtd, in Walsh 11). According to Turner, the disappearance of the frontier “closed the first period of American history” (qtd. in Walsh 12). In her 1981 study The American Frontier Revisited, Margaret Walsh points out that there are three ways of considering the frontier: “firstly as a condition or as unused resources awaiting exploitation, secondly as a process of recurring stages of settlement, and finally as a specific location or geographic region” (13). Walsh puts pressure on the implications of this within Turner’s argument asking, does freeness simply mean empty or does it mean available at little or no cost? She finds neither satisfactory as these lands were not empty and their seizure entailed an exchange marred by continuing deep inequalities.
Indeed, Turner’s thesis maintains a logical similarity to the Marxian concept of uneven development. Uneven development reads the contradiction of the accumulation of wealth by the capitalist class through the exploitation of the working class geographically, so that particular zones of capital accumulation appear to be more sophisticated or developed than other zones precisely because of their deeper exploitation of the latter. For David Harvey geographical unevenness causes a differentiated return on investment meaning that as different places compete with one another to attract investment this unevenness deepens, staging one local, regional, or national class against others (295). The frontier can be read as a particular zone of lesser development that was consumed in the process of its “Americanization,” to use Turner’s term, for cheap resources and land. The other side of this, something allegoically present in both novels, is the way in which the offshoring of production connected with neoliberal free markets continued the process of “Americanization” that Turner first registered until the label of the “frontier” (which in no way is meant to think the spread of national spaces necessarily as identical with the intimately related subsumption of spaces and peoples under global capital).
the postman as the return of the liberal subject
The Postman follows Gordon Krantz, mounting a liberal political-philosophical development as character development: from a Lockean state of nature, through to the birth of the liberal subject, and then on to the development of a social contract. The first state is short lived: as Krantz is robbed by some bandits but finds personal safety inside of an abandoned, hidden postvan. Here he muses on his situation, “Post-Chaos America had no tradition but survival. In his travels, Gordon had found that some isolated communities welcomed him in the same way minstrels had been kindly received far and wide in medieval days. In others, wild varieties of paranoia reigned. Even in those rare cases where he had found friendliness, where decent people seemed willing to welcome a stranger, Gordon had always, before long, moved on. Always, he found himself beginning to dream again of wheels turning and things flying in the sky” (33). This passage captures the first stage of the novel, and it also displays Brin’s layered narrative style where we can read Krantz’s observations as if they were his own through the mediation of a narrator. Krantz is always “finding” things are a certain way, which works against the frontier fantasy of starting anew.
The next stage of the postman’s progress involves a curious lie. In order to be accepted by small groups and communities, such as the town of Oakridge, Oregon, Krantz claims that he is a postman from the “Restored United States” and that he is one of the first sent to re-establish a line of communication. When challenged about his authority Krantz replies, “Gordon Krantz of the United States Postal Service. I’m the courier assigned to re-establish a mail route in Idaho and lower Oregon, and general inspector for the region” (76). It remains clear that no such restored body politic exists. Here, Krantz lies to be fed and eventually to gain consent for a restored mail route. The interesting consideration for us is that lies that are nation-building cease being lies at a critical point and become reality; as Krantz circulates the mail and his lies about a “Restored United States” reach more people they start to believe in his cause. Their belief is strong enough to allow people to change their behaviour and enact Krantz‘s lies, making them come true—the social contract is reborn.
Krantz sutures existing social relationships, forming a coalition between townspeople, a group of scientists called the Servants of Cyclops, and eventually a group of peaceful farms from South Oregon. Feeling the pressure of his lies, Krantz considers abandoning the coalition, but an emergent conflict intervenes. Just as he is about to abandon his position as postman, the Holnists – a gang of lawless toughs – attack the seat of the coalition’s power: Corvallis, Oregon. Krantz responds by diving into battle: “Gordon had no illusions that he was a real leader. It was his image that held the Army of the Willamette together…his legendary authority as the Inspector—a manifestation of the nation reborn” (200). The characters feel the symbolic power endowed to Krantz by his postman uniform immediately and explicitly: the power vested in the uniform signals the lurking power of the nation that is actively imagined by Krantz as a still-available form for mobilizing bodies and harbouring belonging.
This movement of narrative focalization, from individual, to town, to state, although always centred on Krantz, is expanded on at the closing of the book: Krantz dreams of California and what survivors it may hold. The novel stages a broad series of events in the development of the liberal state working through the state of nature, the idea of the social contract, the formation of alliances against common enemies, and the expansion of the space of the state (both in the sense of territorial expansion and ideological expansion). A set of social relations are unfolding subtly at the same time under a developing mode of production. Here the development of liberal political-philosophy is shadowed stage by stage as the political economy of the collective moves from subsistence survival, to the reproduction of daily life, and then on to the possibility of full-scale agriculture and production within the diegesis of the novel. The fantasy of starting anew and yet replaying the stages of historical development that led to our historical present conjuncture marks the novel’s attempt to meditate on a different future. It does so in the sense that the displacement of the liberal narrative onto an imagined future space, despite its ideological residues, still attempts to imagine that this narrative future could be a better one. Which, it turns out, is the opposite of the drive in Blood Meridian, which instead re-imagines the past in its sheer brutality.
blood meridian an alternative history of the west
Some critics of McCarthy’s novel argue that it reworks a history of the south west that struggles to overcome the deeply racialized ideological oppositions that most frequently characterize frontier imaginaries. Billy Stratton argues that McCarthy’s treatment of the “emblematic mythico-historical themes” of the frontier “deconstructs the conventional narrative of the Western adventure novel that Blood Meridian initially seems modeled after” (152). Historian Neil Campbell reads Blood Meridian as an accurate representation of frontier history over and above Turner’s thesis: “According to Turner’s influential analysis, the frontier signified advancing waves of conflict across a wide and ever moving geographic plain where the social Darwinistic contest between Euro-American and Indigenous cultures took place, at the same time demarcating the boundaries for the symbolic ‘meeting place between savagery and civilization’” (qtd in Stratton 155).
Unlike The Postman, where the opening sharply displays the fantasy at the heart of some apocalypse survival stories, it is the ending of Blood Meridian to which I turn for an interpretive opening onto its gruesome exegesis. This passage comes at the end of the entire work, recalling the movement of Glanton and his gang, the bizarre archival activities of Judge Holden, and the horrible end faced by the kid; that is to say, it remains a critical tool for glancing into the registers of the text. I quote at length:
In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again. (337)
In the passage, the man’s progress is not only marked by interplay between a metric and logic of extraction, the narrative offered around this sequence of extraction draws out a level of possibility within the passage which posits several categories for subjectivity: First, there is the man progressing; then, the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search marked by their posture of restraint by prudence or reflectiveness,; finally, there are the bones, the gatherers of bones, and those who do not gather.
The Epilogue plays out the novel in meta-fictional miniature: Glanton’s gang are those who search, of course they include or generate their opposite, those who do not search, who remain static. Straton points out that the phrase, “and they rode on” is the most repeated one in the novel—it occurs more than thirty times. The last, short sentence of the epilogue explicitly states: “Then they all move on again.” The Epilogue also considers the repetition of the phrase in the novel through the digging of the fence posts, which each signify the next in a series and together construct a limit—property. This spatial-temporal relation is entrenched by the form of the passage on the level of the sentence—the process is described first in a long figurative Faulkner-esque sentence, and then encapsulated and serialized in the repetition of the phrase “He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel.” And then, of course, they all move on.

But this moving on is also a violent making room for what follows historically. The bones have been found, now they ontologically are and are being gathered by some but not by all. This uneven relation implies the Marxist category of primitive accumulation—a process characterized by the gathering of resources, here bones, until the sheer accumulation in the hands of a single set of individuals inaugurates the constitution of the exploiting class as can be seen in the number of bones (i.e. quantity) dialectically shape the formation of a new class (i.e. quality). In the passage at the very limit of the book this process is cast and recast as what was only just now described as quality – a new class – becomes quantity once more – serialization.
The Epilogue stands in as the centre piece for a reading of Blood Meridian interested in the implicit process of primitive and capitalist accumulation within an imaginary of the frontier, and its history, which is not to say Blood Meridian is history, but rather it is committed to thinking about how historical change takes place on two registers: a history of the frontier and a history of the present. In his opus on science fiction and theories of genre, Darko Suvin writes, “the spatial dominions of even the largest feudal landowner are finite: capital, the new historical form of property…has in principle no limits in extrapolated time” (73)—as an aside, financialization and debt both stand in as definite temporal limits, but that’s for another paper. For Blood Meridian, the “spatial dominions” of the frontier are finite as well, even as Turner noted in his famous frontier thesis. What Blood Meridian neatly, quickly accomplishes here is a crystallization of the development of the American west as a moment of primitive accumulation in the history of capitalist development.
considerations
Where Brin’s novel imagines a future history, McCarthy’s novel operates both as a sort of history leading to the present and an expose of the violence that lead up to western development, that is why the closing of the novel, which is also the fencing off of the frontier, remains so crucial for both novels. The answer to the question these novels generate, that is how do these novels write back to and about the 19th century American frontier, sounds rather straight-forward in retrospect: the frontier remains so persistent in 1984 because the ideological oppositions remained unsolved, because the driving force of capitalist expansion is recasting itself anew in the neoliberalization of the state and the market. The frontier persists as a key category for American imaginaries because it still captures the motor of capitalist expansion, whose movement always seeks new zones to make productive of capital (that is the valorization of capital in the Volume 1 sense through the exploitation of labour power in production and social reproduction that then generates surplus capital).
The American west, north-west and Mexican border region, stand as both zones in which capital can be allegorically represented and where it sought out new means and forces of production—from space to perform its operations and build its infrastructure to resources that fueled that expansion. These spaces were never empty zones from which to pull free resources or settle lands. In the fictional space of the American west within these novels, as well as the contemporary historical moment from which they emerged, there is no “outside” space. These spaces have already been worked over, torn up, and reconstituted. Capital as a total system with varying degrees of development requires and makes possible the graphically harsh violent relations of the frontier, and the insidious systemic violence of the system that made and remade the American west and that made and remade the seemingly free and open global south during the 1980s. Both The Postman and Blood Meridian, as much as they engage in the history of the frontier, can be read as attempts to think the present historically. Both attempt to think beyond closure either by representing a form of future history like The Postman or by formally intervening at limit point of the novel like Blood Meridian. Fredric Jameson, writing in 1982, argues that “closure or the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go” (283). This is the contradiction I would like to end with, that in recognizing a real limit we can identify “where thought cannot go” and thus generate a sort of utopian moment: a utopian moment that is a negative version of the frontier where empty space is not so much what is clearly stretching out ahead, but that future form of relations so impossible it cannot be imagined, which is not to say that in trying to imagine it will we fail . . .
* – Originally  presented in Waterloo, Ontario at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in a joint session of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English/ Canadian Association for American Studies panel American Literature’s New Frontiers (28 May 2012).
Notes
Abbott, Carl. “Bigger Than Texas!” Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West. Lawrence, UP of Kansas, 2006. 176-187.
Brin, David . The Postman. (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1985).
Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.
Higgins, David M. “Science Fiction and American Wests.” Science Fiction Studies. 35.1 (2008): 105-109.
Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia.” Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. (New York: Verso, 2005). 281-295.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Stratton, Billy J. “‘el brujo es un coyote’: Taxonomies of Trauma in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Arizona Quarterly 67.3 (Autumn 2011): 151-172.
Turner, Fredrick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966).
Walsh, Margaret. The American Frontier Reconsidered. London: MacMillan, 1981.

Airplanes, Scarcity, and Survival

Heller’s The Dog Stars repeatedly demonstrates its awareness of and takeness with post-apocalyptic fiction and the U.S. post-apocalyptic novel by massaging and tweaking previous post-apocalyptic accounts through its loose epistolary style. Subtle reference is made to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), for instance when the protagonist, Hig, finds not just a can of coke but a whole truck of the stuff, or to David de Vries’s Life After People (2008 – 2010). The fragments and notes that form the narrative of the novel are much like the scraps, the bits and the pieces that Hig must use to survive, which brings us to the greatest vehicle for survival in the novel – indeed an actual vehicle: the airplane.

One might typically balk at the suggestion that any sort of vehicle could still operate after the end of the production of oil, after auto garages – or in this case airplane hangers – for repair, after infrastructure maintenance crews, etcetera. But, Heller’s novel provides the kind of thoughtful and logical account one can be pleased with. Ever the resourceful protagonist, Hig is a knowledgeable pilot: he understands the short life span of unleaded gasoline, where to find the freshest airplane fuel, and how to best extend its shelf life. Following this consistency, the novel is deeply satisfying on other registers as well. For instance, there is no pretense about Hig being one of the good guys, he even quips at one point that he’s not sure he is “carrying the fire” (in another McCarthy reference). Hig, it turns out, is just as much the subject of circumstance as he is resourceful – he’s immune to the disease that kills almost everybody, he’s an aspiring poet (thus the epistolary style), and an airplane pilot – this is how the novel accounts for its conceit.

  
The novel does more than satisfy the skeptics among us, however, as it also traces the limits of Hig’s own knowledge and expertise. One recent review by Caroline Leavitt suggests that “The pages of The Dog Stars are damp with grief for what is lost and can never be recovered, but that “there are moments of unexpected happiness, of real human interaction, infused with love and hope, like the twinkling of a star we might wish upon, which makes this end-of-the-world novel more like a rapturous beginning.” I prefer to read the novel along the lines of Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (2009), as the novel remains dedicated to thinking through the local in a moment of the global scarcity of oil, though appearances in the novel suggest otherwise. Just because Hig has figured out, in post-apocalyptic Erie, Colorado, how to maintain his plane and find the fuel necessary to patrol the perimeter of his shared territory doesn’t mean he can fly any short of extensive scouting missions, or travel beyond a certain distance. It should be noted, that this flying of the perimeter is part of a deal he has with his interminable compadre Bangley, with whom the deepest moment of connection is a shared “Fuckin A.”[i]That is, each trip to scout their small territory is limited by the amount of fuel required to get home again safely, by a point of no return, by a limit beyond which Hig cannot go. 
The Dog Stars doesn’t stop at that limit, and this is where my interest in it enters the scene. On one of his trips around the perimeter Hig intercepts the briefest signal from a distant control tower. It is choppy and cuts out, but leaves him in a slowly mounting dilemma, indeed it takes a full three years before he decides to act. Should he investigate this message, trading in his life of repeated tasks and Bangley’s insistence that he not get lost in what Bangley calls “Recreating” (56) to chase this ghostly faint signal of a new, different situation?[ii]
 
In answering this question Hig reveals his symptom as Bangley and, later, other characters judge him for leaving behind the stability and safety of his life by the hanger. Arguably, what pushes Hig over the edge is his loneliness and the haunting absence of his partner, Melissa, now a decade dead from the disease. Melissa haunts his dreams, affecting his relationship to stability and possibility. The faint signal from Grand Junction, Colorado represents a chance to actively search out a life like he used to have. It is crucial to keep in mind that U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction, on one account, works through the complexities of the contemporary moment by simplifying its attendant structures (i.e. late capital) and relations (i.e. class), so that just as we can read the scarcity of airplane fuel as a spatial limit, Hig’s absent wife and partner figures as the absence of the maternal tout court, registering as a limit to the future, indeed, a limit to any future whatsoever.
 
The publisher Knopf Doubleday ran a sweepstakes to
win the above pictured “The Dogs Stars Survival Kit.”
The disease ridden Mennonite family that Hig often visits is dying off as surely as Hig and Bangley will, unable to reproduce a new generation of people. The shift from considering The Dog Stars as a novel making an ecological intervention, towards one that registers the politics of gender, marks its allegory as a deeply masculine one. What is Hig, the ‘reasonable’ white male who both hunts and abhors violence, writes poetry, cooks, and weeps at the disappearance of trout from the world, to do without a wife, without someone to sexual and socially reproduce his purpose in life through progeny, love, and care? Though chasing the stray signal from Grand Junction into the unknown could (without giving away the plot) restore some balance to Hig’s life, we have to wonder if there isn’t something else going on here, something to do with how we conceptualize and depict the limits that bar us from a radically different, radically collective future.
 
What The Dog Stars exposes then, is the connection of the problems of the present with the representability of these problems in the first place. Late in the novel Hig reflects: “Still, some nights I grieved. I grieved  as much at what I knew must be the fleeting nature of my present happiness as any loss, any past. We lived on some edge, if we ever lived on a rolling plain. Who knew what attack, what illness. That doubleness again. Like flying: the stillness and speed, serenity and danger. The way we could gobble up space in the Beast and seem to barely move, that sense of being in a painting” (311) The double scarcity – of resources and distance, reproduction and futurity – faced by Hig, then, also stands in for the scarcity of narrative solutions to the crises of the present, whether or not we have a plane to safely fly these limits it remains a project of the post-apocalyptic novel to outline, however faintly, that point beyond which thought itself cannot go, be it oil or gender, towards an unthinkable future marked by its absolute difference from the present.
 
Notes
Heller, Peter. The Dog Stars. New York: Knopf, 2012. Print.
Leavitt, Caroline. “The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.SF Gate (8 Aug. 2012). Web. Accessed 12 Dec. 2012.

Wesley, Rawles, James. Survival Blog (12 Dec. 2012). Web. Accessed 12 Dec. 2012.



[i] Both Bangley with his penchant for gun maintenance and repair and Hig with his wilderness expertise seem like ideal subjects for James Wesley, Rawles “Survival Blog: The Daily Web Log for Prepared Individuals Living in Uncertain Times.
[ii] “Recreating” is The Dog Stars’ term for a form of nostalgia for past relationships, both intimate and social that, in Bangley’s view, could prove to be a fatal distraction.

In Stasis *

Brian Evenson’s Immobility (2012) meditates on stasis as it follows an amnesiac, paraplegic carried by two “mules” (special clones designed to carry a burden for several days before deteriorating beyond use) across a torn and hostile post-nuclear landscape. The novel thinks  three or four, depending on how you count them, ways out of stasis. Though,  it may seem, at times, like taking on one of these ways out would simply be trading one mode of stasis for another. The starting point of the novel’s meditation on immobility is that of the paraplegic protagonist, who cannot use his legs and is told he needs to receive a drug-cocktail shot to his spine every 24 hours or so in order to slow its deterioration. Oddly, though the novel’s focus seems to be on stasis, it posits a world where one can never be sure what or who will survive and return; indeed, characters often offer one bit of advice when dealing with bandits or the unknown: “Always remove the head” (232).

The beauty of the novel, in almost classic science fiction fashion, is that we have to learn with the focalizing character just where he is, what he is, and what has happened. In one sense, then, the entire novel offers a political lesson in estrangement. Though the novel appears deceptively simple in retrospect, it is complex and detailed. Each descriptive element cannot be outlined with brevity but must be allowed to fit into the network of the book and then be explained using the novel’s own logic. Put another way, the novel needs to be read immanently.
The novel can be described efficiently as cyclical with four spatial phases each linked by a journey from one space to the next: first, the awakening of the character and explanation of the theft; second, the first encounter with identity and the first way out of stasis; third, the flight, rescue, and another way out; third, a strange encounter; and, fourth, the return, closure, and completion of the circle. The word immobility, while favoured by the novel, doesn’t speak to the problematic I see the novel addressing most vehemently, which is of the running-inahamster wheel varietywhere no amount of energy or input on the part of the hamster will allow it to move in any direction, even though it travels a great distance round and round. What has got to happen is for us to notice the mechanism that maintains the stasis of the present. Immobility isn’t able to tell us exactly what holds us in place so much as it reminds us to look around us for signs that things could be different.
others unlike him: the awakening of the character and explanation of the theft
The novel opens with the main character slowly coming to consciousness and confusion – he eventually remembers his name is Joseph Horkai. We discover that Horkai has been awakened from some sort of deep freeze storage in order to accomplish a task for his “community,” and we also learn that he is unlike any of the people within his community –  he alone has the ability to withstand the hostile environment outside. Horkai is selected for a mission because of this and because he is a “fixer…called upon when nobody else could solve a problem…willing to use any means necessary to make things right” (40). Despite this explanation of his role, Horkai remains uncertain about his identity, location, and whether he can or should trust anyone. He nicely sums up the exposition of the novel in a note he writes to make sense of his situation:
What I Know
1. I was stored for thirty years.
2. I have been woken up to perform a task.
3. Something is wrong with my memory.
But he rather quickly revises his list, “with his thumb he brushed over the words ‘with my memory’ until they blurred and became a glowing splotch. Something is wrong” (49). But, as he is tasked to retrieve a stolen item crucial to the community’s survival, Horkai does as he is told and sets off with the mules.
others like him: the first encounter with identity and the first way out of stasis
Horkai discovers that the others who are holding the stolen item are just like him. The reason he was selected for the mission becomes slightly less opaque – the reader has to put the pieces together at the same moment Horkai does, even though it’s clear that he already had suspicions about his community and the mission. Under Granite Mountain in a vast underground facility there are a number of others like him in storage, like he was, though Mahonri, the one who greets Horkai, assures him that they are there voluntarily.: Mahonri explains that their procedure of leaving one sentinel out while the remaining beings sleep allows them to guard a number of preserved seeds as the freezing procedure extends their lives and thus their stewardship (hopefully long enough to witness a return of flora and fauna and, with it, humanity). There is a moment during Horkai’s stay where the future seems uncertain; he could attempt to retrieve the stolen item from the deep freeze or stay along with Mahonri and help them in their temporal bid to restart the experiment of life on Earth. Ultimately, and violently, Horkai maintains fidelity to his “community,” attacking Mahonri and escaping with the mysterious stolen item. But, he doesn’t “removedthe head,” and so Mahonri revives and gives chase.
one like him: the flight and rescue and another way out
Horkai escapes, the mules both perish, and he tries to drag himself the rest of the way back to the community. Much of this section comes in fragments filtered through Horkai’s delirium. He is visited by at least two groups during this period: the first take some of his precious treasure and the second rescues him and nurses him back to health. Between both encounters we learn about the stakes of Horkai’s mission: the stolen container holds frozen fertilized human eggs. Horkai has in his hands the potentiality of an ambivalent future. Also, he learns from his saviour, Rykte, that he is not paralyzed after all. In fact he heals and can walk. (Why not write a note  to yourself now, Horkai?! ‘Dear self, the community lied to me: I can walk. The tension in this section arrives when members of Horkai’s community find them and beg him to return. He now faces yet another choice, another version of stasis in the form of a life with Rykte: to follow Rykte and let the humans die; or, to deliver the seeds. Yet again he decides to return, but not without wondering: “Is Rykte right…is it better for humanity to die out?” (227).
one unlike him: a strange encounter
On his way back to the community Horkai is sidetracked by a strange building he remembers from a moment of delirium. What he discovers marks both the most opaque moment in the novel, a moment the novel itself cannot seems to resolve, and the closest Horkai comes to deviating from his path and breaking, what we’ll see in a minute is, the cycle of stasis: “He moved carefully forward, rifle ready. The body was relatively recent, not the desiccated corpses he’d seen while travelling with the mules.  It was naked. A stake had been hammered into its chest. It was extremely pale and hairless, just like him. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman; the facial features were ambiguous and the hips could have belonged to a boyish girl or an effeminate man. It had what looked like the beginnings of breasts, but the body itself was chubby and the nipples looked more like those of a man than a woman. Between the legs was no sex, neither male nor female, but instead what looked like series of a half dozen strings of pearls in a strange gelatinous casing that seemed to have been extruded from the flesh itself. He bent to have a closer look, but couldn’t figure their purpose. He was just reaching out to touch them when the creature opened one eye” (231). This moment of the strangest occurrence, in a somewhat unparaphraseable book, is followed immediately by the moment when Horkai’s decision to return to the community is the sharpest. Horkai thinks, “Back to the original purpose. . . focus Horkai.” (232). This encounter is not only the shortest in the whole book, it’s also the most difficult to fit into the cycle of the plot. As such, it is also the moment when we realize that there is still much of this strange, post-apocalyptic world that we do not understand. I’m not trying to say the solution to Horkai’s situation (or our own) necessarily lies in an encounter with the unknowable, but that doesn’t mean he should rule it out either. What is most telling about this encounter then is the fact that he so quickly returns to the well worn path of service to a community, a group that by now we realize have out and out lied to him.
others unlike him, again:  the return, closure and completion of the circle
The twist at the end is almost unsurprising, especially after Horkai turns away from each alternative space with its attendant narrative possibilities. Even though Horkai completes his mission, or maybe precisely because he does, he is muscled back into deep freeze. A short fifth section concludes the novel, ending with the line: “Ah, he thought, just before the sudden inrush of extreme cold. I’ve been in storage. They must just be waking me up” (253). At this moment in the novel, I am reminded of an essay from the early 1980s where Fredric Jameson remarks, “a narrative must have an ending, even if it is ingeniously organized around the structural repression of ending as such” (283). It is the ingenious anti-closure and resistance of climax in Immobilitythat make it a novel worth considering as an exercise in thinking through possible escapes from stasis. The way Paul Tremblay puts it emphasizes the stuckness the novel describes: Horkai’s choices, those 0s and 1s of Immobility’s binary code, determine his downward spiral, a spiral that ultimately has no end, as this apocalypse is only a beginning, destined to repeat itself, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. While the overt lesson seems to be one about political attachment and faith (maybe ideology would be a better word), its true lesson comes as the cycle apparently starts over again: this has all happened before, so how can we remember and take a path that leads out of the cycle of relapse?

works cited
Evenson, Brian. Immobility. New York: Tor, 2012. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopian and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. 281-295. Print.

Tremblay, Paul. Broken on the Wheel of Apocalypse.LA Review of Books 16 Aug 2012 . Web. Accessed 6 Dec 12.

* Special thanks to Alex Carruthers for her suggestions after giving this a thorough read through.

We Still Need the Women’s Army *

You can watch the whole movie here. * – Originally presented at a panel of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association “Realism and Utopia in Cold War Cinema” on 27 May 2012

The uprising is set in the future, and it follows a successful socialist revolution. At a moment of deepening crisis, when progressive movements are confronted by a cacophony of claims that we have reached the end of history, of ideology, of utopia, [Born in Flames] is significant in its juxtaposition of the shortcomings of traditional left politics with the ongoing dream of a better future.
—Peter Fitting
 
I don’t want to tell a story. I have no story to tell. I have problems to figure out. 
—Lizzie Borden
It remains difficult to settle on any one particular scene or moment in Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film, Born in Flames, with which to open a discussion of the film. Marked as it is by its fragmentary nature—its resistance of narrative structure and commitment to representing multiple plots through varied standpoints—Born in Flames neatly refuses to be summarized through any of its constitutive parts. In an interview with Anne Friedberg, Borden attests to the film’s difficulty: “Two things I was committed to with the film were questioning the nature of narrative…and creating a process whereby I could release myself from my own bondage in terms of class and race” (43). Its take on both categories—narrative and collectivity— remains its internal strength.
Two questions that we can answer rather quickly about the film are the where, we are in the socialist democracy of the U.S.A.; and the when, ten years after a peaceful revolution. True to its form, the film opens with a celebratory voice-over detailing the victories of the socialist state followed with a series of scenes in which poverty and destitution sublate the speaker’s jubilation. A program accompanying the film explains this sublation: “The Social Democratic Party that the women had supported had not fulfilled its promises. The women in the film are not anti-socialist. In fact, they see themselves as the true socialists, whose hopes for an egalitarian society have been destroyed” (qtd. in Friedberg 37). It is the repeated and continuing process of sublation that marks both the film’s importance to a history of feminist cinema, described by Teresa de Lauretis (155), and the continuation of a Marxist-feminist project of abolishing gender, as much as abolishing capitalist social relations, articulated by Maya Andrea Gonzalez (223).
A quick gloss of the film, which took five years to make on a budget of $40, 000, is best accomplished by discussing particular spaces and groups within the film, rather than by summarizing its series of events. There are several dominant groups from the punk-poetic Radio Ragazza to the empowering Phoenix Radio—these two stations merge later in the film operating out of stolen U-Haul trucks—to the educated female editors of the Socialist Youth Review, to various striking organizations—secretaries and women out of work—and then of course there is Women’s Army itself. These groups are represented in a sometimes sporadic and rapidly cut way almost always with music playing in the background—The Crayons’ “Born in Flames” being a near constant presence throughout. In this way the film generates the outlines of a set of relations which are heavily represented, yet not narrativized.
Often operating in what Alexandra Juhaz and Jesse Lerner describe as a “fake documentary” mode, the film does not account for the origin of some of its shots. In particular shots of the Women’s Army and intimate moments between its organizers are often grainy and blue, implying a security or spy camera capturing the shot. While the origin of the footage remains unclear, this formal element resists the impulse to read this film as a singular narrative about the struggles of one political entity and encourages a reading that takes the social totality, in a Hegelian sense, into account. For instance, in a series of scenes that raise the specter of internationalism by taking place in North Africa, one organizer goes to learn about the struggle of women. In these scenes the film is a very fuzzy blue with a strange overlay print. This footage seems to come from some sort of spy network, but on a practical level it is clear that the particular appearance of these shots are a budgetary solution to shooting these scenes off-location—that is somewhere in New York rather than on location in Africa. Still, the film never claims to be documentary in form, insisting rather on being read as a specific configuration of scenes and events rather than as a particular filmic genre.
The turning point of the film, a moment when the Women’s Army moves from a marginal group interested in a politics often pushing up against its own limit—anti-rape bike squads, home care, child care, women’s advocacy, etc.—to a moment when they take up arms in the cause of radical equality, comes with the death of organizer Adelaide Norris. Norris stands as the closest thing the film has to a central figure. A butch, homosexual, black woman, who grew up caring for her younger siblings, Norris is laid off from her construction job, making her a central race, class, and gender contact point for the Women’s Army to rally around. Her death, a deeply allegorical moment of the film due in a large part to its interpretation as suicide by the state and as a political assassination by the Women’s Army, marks the film’s struggle against standard narrative forms—in a sense Norris was too representative to continue within the anti-narrative frame of the film. Born in Flames posits that the individual subject should not and cannot be the central force or focus of a feminist-cinema or of anti-capitalist, feminist revolutionary action.
The set of historical conditions that gave rise to Born in Flames do not limit, but extend, its political import to the present. Similarly, de Lauretis is not surprised by the emergence of the film at this point in history—“a time when severe social regression and economic pressures (the so-called ‘feminization of poverty’) belie the self-complacency of a liberal feminism enjoying its modest allotment of institutional legitimating” (166). She argues that the success of a swash of commercial “woman’s films” at the time was won at the price of “reducing the contradictory complexity…of concepts such as sexual difference, the personal is political, and feminism itself” (166). It is crucial to note that Born in Flames arrives on the scene after two successive moments of feminist film culture: one of “affirmative action in behalf of women as social subjects” and the other of negativity in the form of “radical critique of patriarchy and bourgeois culture” (154). For de Lauretis, this echo resounds through conversations surrounding feminism and cinema in the mid-to-late 70s, where one side called for “immediate documentation” and “positive images of women” the other side “insisted on rigorous formal work on the medium—or better,” suggests de Lauretis, an understanding of “the cinematic apparatus” as a “social technology” (155).
According to Laura Mulvey, the first period was “marked by the effort to change the content of cinematic representation” i.e. realistic portrayals of women engaged in real-life activities, and the second, a moment much more focused on forms of representation and the “use of and interest in the aesthetic principles and terms of reference provided by the avant-garde tradition” (qtd. in de Lauretis 155). Still following Mulvey, this second moment deemed that in “foregrounding the process itself” the spectator’s attention would be drawn away from a now disrupted aesthetic unity towards the “means of production of meaning” (qtd. in de Lauretis 155). But, as de Lauretis shows, were we to take this imperative to intervene on a formal level seriously—that is to extend this intervention—we would encounter yet another level of mediation, a new contradiction. Namely, that to consider feminist cinema or feminist aesthetics in the first place is, according to de Lauretis, “to remain caught in the master’s house” (158). Rather than take this as an aporia, de Lauretis insists that “feminist theory should now engage in the redefinition of aesthetic and formal knowledge” (158). For us, the question then becomes how Born in Flames organizes a symbolic space in such a way that it addresses its spectator as a woman, regardless of the gender of the viewers, and how this aesthetic and epistemological question extends from gender to race and to class? (160).
I have already indicated that the answer to this question lies in the film’s formal apparatus with its near constant sublation of what is represented. The film’s form is due in part to its production—a collaborative process between Borden, actors, and feminist community organizers who largely played themselves in the film, often improvising their lines and discussions (Lane 127). Largely self-aware, if not self-conscious, Born in Flames takes up the question of feminist representation by resisting both the purely positive and entirely negative formal categories detailed by Mulvey. This is not to celebrate the film’s approach to production and cinema as a set approach, or as a one size fits all political strategy, rather it is to highlight the specific historical situation that produced this film, and to begin to ask question about how it unfolds dialectically. According to Christina Lane, in Feminist Hollywood, Born in Flames found Borden as a “self-identified feminist interested in pushing the representational limits of women’s experiences” (128). Lane describes the film as “a kaleidoscope of women’s perspectives” (128) and de Lauretis argues the film posits a radical form of difference, elsewhere too often plastered over by liberal discourses of multiculturalism and the celebration of difference for difference’ sake, that is, difference as a solely positive term.
Difference, both in the film and for de Lauretis, becomes a crucial term here. She answers the central question of the female spectator, asked above, arguing that the film holds “the spectator across a distance, projecting towards her its fiction like a bridge of difference” (165). This “bridge of difference,” for de Lauretis, is built through the film’s “barely coherent narrative, its quick-paced shots and sound montage, the counterpoint of image and word, the diversity of voices and languages, and the self-conscious science-fictional frame of the story” which leads me to ask what she means by difference in this context (165). de Lauretis claims that what gives her a place in the film is the contradiction of her history and the political-personal difference within herself (165). Difference here is meant not in terms of liberal, multicultural tolerance, but as an intensely dialectical and laboriously negative term: what de Lauretis identifies in the film is that capital no longer organizes the proletariat in terms of identity so a negative definition of difference through exploitation and domination becomes the way towards collective struggle (Gonzalez 220). Born in Flames, I argue, represents both sides of the feminist aesthetic divide—activism and rigorous critique—not as separate approaches, but as intimately related ones. I do not mean to suggest that they can simply be held together, forced to remain still, but rather that it is in the process of their antagonism that something like politics can hope to emerge. This emergence, or rather these emergences, mark utopian moments in the film. Moments where we begin to glimpse not only the next set of contradictions, but how even those might be sublated.
Utopia itself as a category stands as the most radical form of difference, a negation of the present set of social relations and an overturning of political-economy. What is at stake here, in thinking about the radical difference at the heart of Born in Flames is its deep commitment to holding open the possibility of utopia. It is very clearly not utopian in its imagination of the future—only the rampant gender and racial inequality need be mentioned here—instead it contains that, to me endlessly more interesting, form of utopia Fredric Jameson calls the utopian impulse, which can only be posited as a “radical, even unimaginable break…that unimaginable fulfillment of a radical alternative that cannot even be dreamt” (“A New Reading of Capital 13). As early as Marxism and Form (1971) Jameson’s own intellectual project was deeply interested in imagining this radical difference: “The Utopian moment is indeed in one sense quite impossible for us to imagine, except as unimaginable; thus a kind of allegorical structure is built into the very forward movement of the Utopian impulse itself, which always points to something other, which can never reveal itself directly but must always speak in figures, which always calls out structurally for completion and exegesis” (142). Born in Flames does not follow any particular subject as an exemplar of its moment, but instead patches together fragments of narrative in order to present the coming into consciousness of a revolutionary movement—which “calls out structurally for its own completion.” It registers this most sharply with the death of Adelaide Norris, which enables a new form of collective practice to emerge. Again, I argue that this moment needs to be read on an allegorical level as the death not of Norris herself, but of a certain mode of politics and agency. What emerges in the wake of this moment is a radical collective and revolutionary agent—the women’s army itself.
The utopian impulse of the film imagines radical equality not only in terms of the utopian horizon of the future, but as an act that must be made in the present through the embodied actions of daily life. Two montage scenes in the film depict a variety of seemingly incongruous activities, what Lane refers to as a “disjunctive collage of women’s individual and collective work” (129): cutting hair, caring for children, putting up posters, wrapping poultry in a grocery store deli, placing a condom on an erect penis etc. This montage maps out a portion of capitalist production that appears to be outside traditional sites of value production, but is actually constitutive of it. In her recent essay in Communization and Its Discontents, Gonzalez argues, the relations between men and women form an essential element of the class relation and cannot be thought as a separate ‘system’, which then relates to the class-based system” (italics in original 225). So, actions from feeding and clothing to cleaning, caring for, and cooking, to bearing children are all constitutively connected to the production of capital. Gonzalez continues, “In capitalism, the lives of the surplus producers are constitutively split between the public production of a surplus and the private reproduction of the producers themselves. The workers…continue to exist only if they take care of their own upkeep. If wages are too low, or if their services are no longer needed, workers are ‘free’ to survive by other means (as long as those means are legal)…Here is the essence of the capital-labor relation. What the workers earn for socially performed production in the public realm, they must spend in order to reproduce themselves domestically in their own private sphere” (227). Born in Flames, through these montage scenes, formally makes legible snap-shots of social reproduction too often depicted as separate from the sphere of production. The Women’s Army becomes a powerful counter to the gendered division of social reproduction by embodying anti-capitalist or post-capitalist social relations in the present. Members care, feed, clothe, house, and educate one another, which should be considered a starting rather than a limit point for radical politics.
Rather than polemically presenting violence or pacifism as viable solutions, Borden outlines a number of rhetorical, activist and political positions and approaches, allowing them to play out their antagonisms in the representational space of the film. This positions the fantasy at the heart of Born in Flames closer to a formal or structural fantasy than to a dream of the perfect revolutionary movement: Borden stages not a set of relationships but the very possibility for those relationships in the first place. She asks, ‘what if the barriers to collective action typically encountered between women who are also feminists and activists were far more easily transcended?’ That is, rather than a moment where contradiction is masked or worked through prior to the film, Born in Flames posits a filmic space where disparate groups can work through antagonisms, where the conflicts within and between categories of race, gender, and class are not washed over by liberal, multicultural ideology. Lane points out that Borden was “accused of ignoring the material, economic, and racial problems that keep the kind of coalescence she envisioned from actually coming about” (133). However much this may be true of the film on the level of content—no characters directly engage these problems and at times they surface symptomatically, like in a talk show interview, to quote a long example in the middle of a sentence: “I think statistics will show you that percentage of rape and prostitution at this point is significantly lower than in it was in pre-revolutionary society and obviously this is an advancement; it’s a step forward. It’s impossible to talk about complete abolition, because this is not the nature of this government, they don’t abolish. . .because it’s about a gradual move towards something and I think this is leading up to the point where those things simply fade away”—it works through them on the level of form. How else are we to read the montage sequences but as the stitching together of disparate workers performing the labour of both production and social reproduction? The form itself brings groups typically antagonistic to one another together slowly and not without conflict—for instance there is a conflict between the women’s army and radio raggaza or the Socialist Youth Review women and the child care workers etc. In the end, the film posits some interesting and radical alternatives, for instance the free floating combined Phoenix-Ragazza radio station stands as a marker of utopian hope for the Women’s Army. It remains a challenge to select a single crystallizing scene or moment within Born in Flames, indeed its dialectical form, a form that maps a spacial resistance to singular narratives and an insistence on collective agency, remains its political lesson. It is not the question of how the film accomplishes this, but of how we might begin thinking about jumping registers ourselves, from the aesthetic-epistemological register of the film to the collective register in our own cities, our own social relations that constitutes the limit today.

Notes

Born in Flames. Dir. Lizzie Borden. Film. Perf. Honey, Adele Bertei, and Jean Satterfield. First Run Features, 1983. Film. 

Fitting, Peter. “What is Utopian Film? An Introductory Taxonomy.” Utopian Studies. 4.2 (1993): 1-17. Print. 

Friedberg, Anne. “An Interview with Lizzie Borden.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. 1.2 (1984): 37-45. Print. 

Gonzalez, Maya Andrea. “Communization and the Abolition of Gender.” Communization and Its Discontents. Ed. Benjamin Noys. New York: Minor Compositions, 2011. 219-234. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. “A New Reading of Capital Vol. 1. Mediations. 25.1 (Fall 2010): 5-14. Print.

—. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. Print.

Juhaz, Alexandra and Jesse Lerner. “Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary.” F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006: 1-35. Print. 

Lane, Christina. Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2000. Print. 

de Lauretis, Teresa. “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women’s Cinema.” New German Critique. No. 34 (Winter, 1985): 154-175. Print.