An Essay on the Normativity of Forgetting
Part 2 of 2
Recap
The Following is the second part to “An Essay on the Normativity of Forgetting.” Part 1, which can be read here, included the sections: “Preface to the Substack Edition,” “Introduction: the Break with Objectivity,” and “The Power of Forgetting.” After the discussion of Nietzschean forgetting at the end of the last part, this second part begins with a relation of the concept of forgetting to the concept of myth found in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. It will be argued that through Barthes’s concepts of myth and ex-nomination, Nietzschean forgetting gets brought into the present as a taking-for-granted of that which is always in front of us. This idea, applied to experiences of prejudice, help us understand how certain identities are rendered hyper-visible while others are functionally invisible (though current efforts to challenge this reality are yielding some success in changing the situation). I hope you will find interesting the conclusion of this essay and look forward to the opportunity to answer any questions about its argument.
The Forgetful Power of Myth
It is now time to give one or two examples of mythical speech. I shall borrow the first from an observation by Valéry. I am a pupil in the second form in a French Lycée. I open my Latin grammar, and I read a sentence, borrowed from Aesop or Phaedrus: quia ego nomitor leo.[6]
Our grammatical example is indicative and therefore already presented in the observant tome of factuality. Could one say no to it? It is only a sentence fragment, one which taken literally means almost nothing, and yet the noun, indicating not a lion but lions abstractly, is laden with significance that extends amorphously beyond any specific history. It signifies all the qualities, all the associations, one has with the lion: a creature of regal power, though the attachment of regality to its power is wholly human. Do we begin to see the deceptive analogies yet? There is another, much more biting, example that follows:
I am at the barber’s, and a copy of the Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture […] I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro [sic] in serving his so-called oppressors. I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a [B]lack soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier.[7] (Emphasis original)
Where in the encounter with monumental history one forgets that one is not and cannot become George Washington, here one forgets that the man saluting is an individual. He is a trope, a stand in, a deindividualized representation of a whole class of persons: a deceptive analogy not for my identification but my identification of others. He does not appear as the celebrity or the historical hero who I desire to repeat and in whose repeating to become—both are speaking roles—but as a symbol nonetheless. He is silent because his speech would break the illusion and return him from the general to the particular. That is, if the signifier should regain its particularity, its meaning, then the signified will disappear from view just as the signifier has had to disappear in order to bring into focus the signified. Were the example a pen, then it would have been of necessity that the pen not be individuated, that it not have any particular features to draw it out of universal pen-ness. Since the example is a person, his personality, his personal history, his break with trope, must be silenced. His significance as a nationalistic colonial subject is all that matters to the myth. He is a stand in for all French colonial subjects who are implied through him to be French patriots. But even as he is deindividualized, he is not ex-nominated. As a figure, he is hyper visible. He is more than himself. The trope attached to him modifies the signification of his action so that he could not be just any man saluting: he is the colonized saluting the flag of the colonizer assuring them that he too is identified with their project. An ex-nominated white man saluting a flag would either be a particular man saluting a flag, in which case the emphasis would be utterly on his personality, or an action without an agent: that is to say, a signification of an action by no one in particular. The difference is that the ex-nominated figure either represents their self or everyone, whereas the nominated figure is first trope, and only if they overcome trope then potentially themselves.
The forgetting power of myth, however, extends even further beyond the capacity for emptying signifiers to produce abstract significations, or transforming individuals into deindividualized tropes. It structures the de-historicized space of the natural, that is, it is the function that enables historical forgetting and thus sustains monumental history:
It is again this duplicity of the signifier which determines the characters of the signification. We know that myth is a type of speech defined by its intention (I am a grammatical example) much more than by its literal sense (my name is lion); and that in spite of this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by this literal sense (The French Empire? It’s just a fact: look at this good Negro [sic] who salutes like one of our own boys). This constituent ambiguity of mythical speech has two consequences for the signification, which henceforth appears both like a notification and like a statement of fact.[8] (Emphasis original)
The myth effects the forgetting of the historicity of the French Empire in much the same manner as the Nietzschean subject must enclose the memory of their history within a sufficiently small horizon as to permit their living. This forgetting renders the French Empire an eternal fact of life and therefore absolves it of the atrocities of its becoming both regarding how France became an empire and also how it has maintained itself as one in the face of anticolonial opposition. In effect, the function of the myth is the normalization of French imperialism through the forgetting of its historical contingency. The eternal present of the myth enters the room in such dramatic fashion as to make itself the focal point and, to extend visual art metaphor further, in declaring itself the positive space defines what constitutes the negative. The mythologized nationalistic fervor of colonial subjects supersedes the questions of imperialism and the desire for decolonization, the myth supersedes even their biographies, their personalities. It is this forgetting of the superfluously unmythical that produces the mythical as natural fact. The fact is, like nature. It is a present unchanging so as to always already be past, this is unalterable, and yet to collapse the distance between now and the future through its surety. The French Empire is eternal. It is eternal because it is a present fact. It is a present fact because I have forgotten the historical contingencies of its becoming. This is all forgotten through the hyper visibility of the Black man as a Black man—that is, not indivisible like a white man’s being a white man—saluting. Myth is a disappearing act that relies upon visibility.
Ex-Nomination as the Mythical Forgetting of Subjectivity
Our society is still a bourgeois society. […] Now a remarkable phenomenon occurs in the matter of naming this regime: as an economic fact, the bourgeoisie is named without any difficulty: capitalism is openly professed. As a political fact, the bourgeoisie has some difficulty in acknowledging itself: there are no ‘bourgeois’ parties in the Chamber. As an ideological fact, it completely disappears: the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation, from economic man to mental man. It comes to an agreement with the facts, but does not compromise about values, it makes its status undergo a real ex-nominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class that does not want to be named.[9] (Emphasis Original)
The bourgeois have disappeared. Really, there is a further disappearing act here as well, which is that the bourgeois were always already the white bourgeois, not the Black bourgeois, or the colonized bourgeois, and so on. That the whiteness of the bourgeois—which is always inseparable from their not being colonized but colonizer, even if at a distance from the colony—also disappears and is, in fact, even more invisible than their status as bourgeois, if degrees of invisibility are possible, is by no means insignificant. If anything, the inattention indicates that their whiteness is even more essential to their ex-nomination than their status as bourgeois. Ex-nomination produces them as the invisible norm of society—as the perspective from which society operates so that even if to look back upon them, as if in a mirror, were possible, what is not possible is to exit their view while retaining the societal perspective. It is this feature of perspective, that what one sees least clearly if at all is its source while everything exterior to it is rendered immediately visible, that produces ex-nomination. Neither ex-nomination nor myth are phenomena that can be abolished or overcome. Perspective is necessary for seeing, forgetting is necessary for living—the critical history always seeks to become the monumental. There will always be an ex-nominated position as there will always be myth, but what perspective is ex-nominated and what is mythologized are always contingent questions, and these are questions of imminent ethical concern. Only the current myths would have us believe in their inevitability now.
Before concluding, we should take a moment to step back and examine an experience—there is not inherently only one—of breaking with the ex-nominated norm from the individual’s perspective:
Another scene from another time: away from home my partner and I are on holiday on a resort on an island. Mealtimes bring everyone together. We enter the dining room […] I face what seems like a shocking image. In front of me, on the tables, couples are seated. Table after table, couple after couple, taking the same form: one man sitting by one woman around a “round table,” facing each other “over” the table. […] Rather than just seeing the familiar, which of course means that it passes from view, I felt wonder and surprise at the regularity of its form, as the form of what arrived at the table, as forms that get repeated, again and again, until they are “forgotten” and simply become forms of life.[10]
Forgetting the repetitious hyper-presence of heterosexuality produces the queer subject as hyper visible for breaking with the repetition of forms. Ahmed is, of course, present with her partner, and together they mark a break in the gendered rhythm of the space: a missed beat, or a note repeated in place of the anticipated interval. Heterosexuality is negative space, against which queerness becomes a focal point. The focus on queerness produces heterosexuality as negative. Ahmed, through her inhabitation of her own perspective, reverses the special polarization. The extreme presence of heterosexuality calls it to attention so that it is no longer naturalized in its milieu and shifts from negative to positive. In making the hyper presence of heterosexuality the focal point queerness becomes negative space: because of our inhabitation of Ahmed’s perspective it is now the taken for granted background of life. Here we illustrate the inevitability of the norm: to call to attention is necessarily also to forget, and what is forgotten becomes the perspective that produces the image. In overturning the previous norm, in calling attention to the last myth, we form one anew. The norm is always behind me. It is wherever I am not looking. If I spin around fast enough I will still not catch it because it will spin with me. We cannot look in every direction at once. My horizon cannot expand to infinity without being trapped in endless becoming, without suffering a perfect memory, without losing the possibility of forgiveness not because others fail to extend it to me but because I could not extend it to myself, without becoming imperceptive of myth.
The Queer break with the norm that is ex-nominated is not analogous to the break experienced by Black people or other people of color, or even, when a distinction is made between Queer and trans—though the two are often conjoined—with the trans break with ex-nomination. At the same time, however, none of these categories are mutually exclusive. Each way of being made visible against the norm is unique. Moreover, the experience of being named against the ex-nominated norm and being used as a signifier based upon that break are not necessarily correlated. That is to say, the perception of myth and the experience of the mythologized are not the same. This necessarily follows from the essential fact that other people’s experience of us does not correspond to self-experience. But there is not space or time to continue this discussion further here, and the topic will have to be left for later.
Concluding Parable
Why am I a fascinating object of the study of gender and not others? For weeks a cisgender man bothers me by email seeking the certification of his theory of gender based upon my experience. My every refusal to certify his theory produces greater determination on his part until I decline to answer any more emails. Before I stop replying, however, I suggest he turn his study towards a concern with the conditions of cisgender experience. Yet this suggestion, evidently, does not correspond with a possible theoretical occupation on his part, for he adamantly refuses to take it up, stating bluntly that he does not wish to question his own experience. His own experience of cis gender is utterly inaccessible to him in a way that my experience of trans gender, apparently, is not. How could such an absurdity be? The answer is simple: the cis experience of gender is precisely one of inattention, that is, it is the experience of its own ex-nomination. It is so utterly taken for granted that the attempt to sustain a focus upon it is like pouring water on a duck—it slips right off. The very content of cis gender is the negation of anything that could call attention to itself and therefore constitute a subject of study.
In visual art, negative space defines the focal point: what my vision slips off defines the space of my attention. Simultaneously, what form, what value, what color calls out to my gaze to land and stay fixed upon it defines the negative space of my inattention. Surveying the gendered landscape, transness erupts from the lawful regularity of universal order as a break in the sequence of events that constitute the easy flow of becoming. An abrupt redirection and refraction of its current renders womanhood from boyhood, manhood from girlhood, and a cacophony—or is it a polyphony?—of forms where before there were two in simple counterpoint. But the disruption is not disruptive. Rather, it anchors the landscape so that the flatness all around it appears truly flat. My mind—ever inseparable from what I see, that is, from the object of my eye—does not search for some subtle irregularity as on the boarders of a Rothko where the fault lines between brushstrokes produce contrasting textures. My view is taken up by the eruption against which the flatness refuses all attention. The break with order produces order. The transgender focal point, when it is so arraigned to anchor this landscape, produces the cisgender norm. To name the deviant is to ex-nominate the ‘normal’ subject.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2006.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. 1972.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997
Pelham, Rose. “Foundations of a Transgender Phenomenology: On the Incompleteness of Totality and Infinity.” New York: Women in Philosophy Journal. Forthcoming.
[6] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 115.
[7] Barthes, Mythologies, 116.
[8] Barthes, Mythologies, 124.
[9] Barthes, Mythologies, 137-8.
[10] Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 82.