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Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons English: Faculty Publications and Other Works Faculty Publications 1-1997 Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again Pamela L. Caughie Loyola University Chicago, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/english_facpubs Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Caughie, PL. "Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again." PMLA 112(1), 1997. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in English: Faculty Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. © Modern Language Association, 1997. PamelaL. Caughie Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again PAMELA L. CAUGHIE teaches Unlike the stereotypical feminist model that suggests women best come to voice in an .. I students to work in an twentieth-century literature and atmosphere of safety ., encourage ... atmo- sphere where they may be afraid or see themselves at risk. theory at Loyola University, Chi- bell hooks, TalkingBack cago. She is author of Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism(U of Illinois P 1991) and is complet- the a ing manuscript of book, HIS ESSAY attempts to intervene theoretically and pragmati- Passing and Pedagogy:The Dy- cally at a critical moment in our profession, when literary stud- namics of Responsibility (U of ies in colleges and universities across the United States is increasingly Illinois P), which includes a ver- becoming culture studies.' This transformation over the past two decades in the social, philosophical, and political bases of the humanities is due sion of this essay. Another ver- partly to the academy's efforts to acknowledge diversity, by institution- sion of the essay will appear in alizing multiculturalism and various "studies programs" (women's stud- In Other Words:Feminism and ies, gay studies, ethnic studies, composition studies) in response to the Composition Studies, edited by influx of nontraditional students since the early 1970s, and partly to Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Wor- poststructuralism's efforts to theorize difference and to destabilize the sham (MLA, forthcoming). very categories of identity on which those studies programs are founded. Such programs, particularly women's studies, have traditionally been devoted to a humanist concept of the subject as "source and agent of conscious action or meaning" (P. Smith xxxiii-xxxiv) and committed to opening this subject position to previously marginalized groups. In con- trast, poststructuralist theories, including some feminist theories, have revealed the humanist subject to be a sham insofar as it is the effect, not the origin, of representation. As this essay suggests, when antifounda- tional theories that deconstruct the self converge with studies programs that revive it, anxiety arises over the positions we find ourselves in as scholars and teachers in the newly configured university.2 Culture studies would seem to offer a pedagogy for working through the tensions between these two perspectives on the subject since issues of identity formation and of subject position are central not only to its object of study but to its method of inquiry. Culture studies has shifted 26 This content downloaded from 147.126.10.123 on Mon, 02 Nov 2015 17:50:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PamelaL. Caughie 27 the focus of literarystudies from interpreting,trans- In recentwritings, I have deployed the termpass- mitting, or preserving individual texts considered ing to describe our subjectpositions in postmodern representative of particularcultures to analyzing culture and by extension in a culture studies para- cultureas a historically specific ensemble of social digm.4Passing traditionallyrefers to the practiceof practices and signifying systems that provide, in representingoneself-for social, economic, or po- Mary Poovey's words, "the terms through which litical reasons-as a member of a particulargroup humansunderstand our world [and] from which we not consideredone's own. Historically,the practice derive our identity" ("Criticism"618). Given that is mainly, though not exclusively, associated with the reading,writing, and teachingwe do as academ- the assumptionof a white identityby light-skinned ics partially constitute the cultural formations it AfricanAmericans. Passing is generallyimplicated seeks to interrogate, culture studies necessarily in a racist social organization.The painful psychic takes the work of teachersand scholarsas one of its consequences of passing attestedto in many narra- tives objects of scrutiny.Concerned with "the complex are corporeally depicted in Agnieszka Hol- land's 1991 film based on Solomon ways in which identity itself is articulated,experi- Europa,Europa, Perel's in which the a enced, and deployed"(Nelson, Treichler,and Gross- autobiography, protagonist, German tries to conceal his from his berg 9) and with the "politics of location" (Faigley Jew, identity Nazi what remains of his 218), culturestudies requires its practitioners"to in- companions by pulling clude in their critical view the conditions of their foreskinover the tip of his penis and tying it in place own existence" at the same time that it identifies with a piece of thread. In its traditionalsense, often carries itself "polemically with certain social constituen- passing pe- connotationsof and cies"-for instance,blacks, women, workers(Bath- jorative deception, dishonesty, When used as a with the rick 323-25). The classroombecomes a site of both betrayal.5 metaphor, opera- tive as, the termcan applyto situationsin which one culturalintervention and continualself-critique. To engages in impersonationfor the purposeof fraud. practice culture studies, as Susan Rubin Suleiman But in my use, passing (without the as) figures the writes in anothercontext, "is to implicate yourself, always slippery difference between standing for your self, in what you write"(2) and what you teach. something (having a firm position) and passing Yet however strong, however sincere, our com- as something (having no position or a fraudulent mitment as literature professors to certain social one), between the strategic adoption of a politi- constituencies and to continual self-critique, when cally empoweredidentity (e.g., when blacks pass as ethnicity becomes "the new frontier,accessible to white) and the disempowering appropriationof a all" (hooks, Yearning52), when men become femi- potentially threateningdifference (e.g., when men nists and become when African straights queer, pass as feminist), and between what one professes Americanstudies and women's studies become cul- as a teacher(the positions one assumes in the class- tural when a feminist can studies, prominent write, room, often speaking for another) and how one is "I to wonder whetherthere was began any position positioned in a society, an institution, a discourse, from which a white middle-class feminist could say or a classroom. Marking a discrepancy between on the without anything subject [of race] sounding what one professes to be (and what one professes, like white middle-class In exactly [a feminist].... as a writer or teacher) and how one is positioned, which case it be might better not to say anything" passing is risky business-but, as this essay pro- (Miller, "Criticizing"364)-something, it seems, fesses, unavoidable. For there is no occupying a has gone wrong. The practitionersof culture stud- position without passing. Thus I offer passing not ies experience a double bind in which the desire- as a solution to the double bind I outlined above indeed, the imperative-to speak as or for members but as a descriptivetheory of its dynamics. of a particularsocial group conflicts with the anxi- Unlike the more common notions of speakingas eties such a practiceevokes. The writerwho deliber- and speaking for, passing disrupts subject posi- ately assumesanother's position risks being accused tions. The difference between these two ways of of unconsciouslydoing so.3 conceptualizingthe problem is highlighted by two This content downloaded from 147.126.10.123 on Mon, 02 Nov 2015 17:50:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 28 Let It Pass: Changingthe Subject, Once Again sentences that appear on the same page of Linda The impasse between Alcoff's two sentences Alcoff's "The Problem of Speaking for Others," gives rise to the structural dynamics that I term which analyzes many of the issues and impasses I passing. The slippage between the volitional and confront in this essay. For Alcoff, the problem of the performativesubject makes passing inevitable speaking for arises from the recognition that the whenever any I claims to speak for itself.8 Even if "positionality"of the speaker"bears on" the mean- as teachers and critics of culture studies we ac- ing and truth of what the speaker says (an insight knowledge our social locations as multiple and un- that women's studies and AfricanAmerican studies stable, shaped by specific histories and subject to programs were founded on) and that some privi- various representationaltechnologies, we always leged locations are "discursively dangerous" no talk of subject positions and self-critique as if we matterwhat the speaker'sintentions (6-7).6 Realiz- were immune to performanceand thereby resusci- ing
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