Sovereignty, the State of Exception and Counter-Culture: Toward a Transnational Critique of State Power in 20Th and 21St Century Anglophone Fiction

Sovereignty, the State of Exception and Counter-Culture: Toward a Transnational Critique of State Power in 20th and 21st Century Anglophone Fiction by Nicholas Morwood A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto © Copyright by Nicholas Morwood (2011) ii Sovereignty, the State of Exception and Counter-Culture: Toward a Transnational Critique of State Power in 20th and 21st Century Anglophone Fiction Doctor of Philosophy (2011) Nicholas Morwood Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto Abstract This dissertation examines the way in which contemporary fiction is highly concerned with sovereign power and the state of exception, as described by Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception. While in the last decade Agamben’s work has provided a new locus for the study of state power, I argue that disquiet over the reach of state power into everyday life has existed in fiction since at least the 1980s. Reading James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo and William Gibson alongside Agamben’s theories of state power and the state of exception sheds light on fictional representations of modern developments in power, the state and the corporate world. Through close analysis of philosophical and fictional texts, I draw out the complex politics of contemporary novelists and underscore the importance of both fictional and theoretical representations of contemporary political power. The dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter One examines what I contend is new about Agamben’s work on power which is that, unlike Foucault, he accounts for the kind of power that may produce a concentration camp, and examines the place of this power at the heart of contemporary politics. Through analyses of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale I examine the ways in which Agamben’s theories move us towards a clearer understanding of representations of state power in contemporary fiction. In Chapter Two I discuss sovereign power in Rushdie’s postcolonial India and England, and I describe how the iii national identities of citizens of, or migrants to, those countries take shape in a society whose very fabric is affected by power that is frequently unrestricted by the law or by democracy. In Chapter Three I consider the “aftermath” of sovereign power in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro. In particular, I argue that he represents the extent to which sovereign power conditions culture and society, and how contemporary art and intellectual thought have failed as effective countermeasures to the power that may produce the state of exception. In the final Chapter, I consider the ways in which violence constitutes a form of resistance to sovereign power in the novels of William Gibson and Don DeLillo’s White Noise; further, I assess Gibson’s new narratives of space as potential counters to the state of exception. While Agamben’s work provides an opportunity to highlight the extent to which sovereign power and the state of exception are at work in contemporary novels, I contend that fiction represents these phenomena and their significance more completely than Agamben is able to. The use of figurative and experimental language and narrative techniques is highly effective in conveying the nuances and the experiential realities of state power, thereby moving the reader’s understanding beyond the abstract and the conceptual. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Mary and Bryan Morwood. Without your continual support this project would never have been written. I would also like to thank my brother, Mike Morwood, who always reminds me that there are more important things in life than my next selfish venture, and Nicholas Audsley, my best friend. It is important that I acknowledge the many influential people who encouraged me to pursue literary study and helped my development: Helen Kedie, Paul Wallace-Woodruffe, Keith Baron and Julian Yarnold from Eltham College; Jeff Ulrich, Colby Scudder, Joan Hogbin, Trevor Jones, Grant Wakeman, Jim Kerkham, Steve Halcrow and Barry Ferguson from the world of sport; Steven Morrison, Adam Roberts, Ralph Strehle, Robert Hampson and Elizabeth Wells from Royal Holloway, and Nick Mount from the University of Toronto. Thanks to my committee, Mari Ruti, Neil ten Kortenaar and Sara Salih, for providing invaluable advice and criticism. You have all been both sympathetic and rigorous, and have pushed me to produce a better dissertation. My external examiner, Glenn Willmott, also provided detailed and generous feedback on my work. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Toronto Fellowship and the Department of English over the course of this PhD. Friends whose words and actions have helped me over the years are too numerous to mention, but particular credit must go to Tanner Mirrlees and Lauren Kirshner, who made me feel at home, finally, in Toronto, and Roger and Michelle Harris, whose love of debate enthused me from an early age. On the subject of early influences, I will always be indebted to my grandparents, James and Kathy Morwood, for caring so much for my brother and me at an important stage in our lives. Finally, I would like to mention three individuals who have had special impact on this project. Esther de Bruijn has not only been an emotional partner to me but an intellectual one too, both supporting and testing me in such a way that I have no doubt this dissertation owes a great deal to her. Dave Yost, coach and sportsperson extraordinaire, showed me that I too could excel (if not as much as him), and his mental toughness and work ethic continue to serve as models for my own approach to life. Lastly I am very grateful to Bob Eaglestone who has always gone, and continues to go, very far indeed for others. His enthusiasm for my work, and for me, gave me the confidence to imagine a future with a PhD. Thanks to all three of you, you are inspirational. v Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter One Law, Literature and Sovereign Power 14 Chapter Two From “Magic” to “Tragic Realism”: Rushdie’s new novels and the 52 critique of State Power Politics Chapter Three: Aftermath 96 Chapter Four An Empire of Technology and Violence: DeLillo 142 and Gibson’s vision of counterculture Conclusion 200 Appendix 205 Works Consulted 209 vi List of Appendices 1. Major Kusanagi floats toward the surface after her dive in Ghost in the Shell. 2. Kusanagi looks down, thinking she sees herself in a yellow jacket, in Ghost in the Shell. 3. Kusanagi looks back up to where she sits/was sitting in Ghost in the Shell. 4. Kusanagi views herself in a shop window among the ghosts of the city in Ghost in the Shell. 5. “Ensuring Lifelike Performance” in Ghost in the Shell. 6. Kusanagi looks down her rifle sights at an unprotected vehicle in Ghost in the Shell. 7. Kusanagi notices the cloaked machine shielding the car in Ghost in the Shell. Morwood 1 Introduction This project was originally intended to be a re-appropriation of “postmodernism” in the context of the study of contemporary fiction. I wanted to show that, as all literary production changes with time, so postmodern orientations to the world had altered from the period of the 1980s and early 90s out of which so many influential studies of that phenomenon had grown. Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and many others had produced so wide a range of scholarship on postmodernism that, paradoxically, I felt that the authoritative heft of their articles, books and high-level university positions had rather frozen or imprisoned an area of cultural enterprise that, by its very nature as a “post”-x incidence or trend, was necessarily always moving and metamorphosing. I wanted, in short, to advance a study of my kind of postmodernism: the novels, theory and criticism that I felt, taken together, described so appropriately my experience of the modern world. I hope that I have achieved this last goal, but it is at the cost of one very significant omission: that of “postmodernism” itself, the very term that started it all. As soon as I had made significant distance into a more comprehensive survey of postmodernism’s major thinkers, I realised that there were two enormous problems with using the concept as a foundational term for a scholarly dissertation. The first was that almost no cross- party agreement, as it were, or consensus had been reached as to what postmodernism actually was, particularly in the light of the fact that most authors associated with the word by critics seemed to be uninterested in, or completely disavow, the term’s relevance to their work. What critical alliances there were seemed to be, perhaps partly as a result of the bitter “theory wars” in university literature departments, embroiled in the reductively basic question of whether this multi-headed hydra of a cultural phenomenon was a “good” or “bad” thing. (Post-)Marxists like Morwood 2 Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson were quite obviously in the latter camp, convinced that postmodern art was just the cultural propaganda wing of an ever more sophisticated homogenising global capitalism. Those such as Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale and, of course, Jean- Francois Lyotard, were more celebratory, proposing that the postmodern was the only appropriate, and indeed ethical, response to a world split asunder by the unassimilable horrors of World War Two, the atomic bombs, and the Shoah. There were, of course, more moderate and nuanced voices, most notable among which is Linda Hutcheon. Even she, however, by declaring in an updated version of The Politics of Postmodernism, during the suitably titled “Epilogue,” that postmodernism is “over” – making it sound more like a love affair than a critical and cultural phenomenon – showed that her conception of the term was markedly different from mine (Hutcheon 166).

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