City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2007 Engaging the Eighties: Ethics, Objects, Periods Kevin L. Ferguson The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1972 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ENGAGING THE EIGHTIES: ETHICS, OBJECTS, PERIODS by KEVIN L. FERGUSON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2007 UMI Number: 3245072 Copyright 2007 by Ferguson, Kevin L. All rights reserved. UMI Microform 3245072 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 ii © 2007 KEVIN L. FERGUSON All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Nancy K. Miller 1/19/07 Date Chair of Examining Committee Steven Kruger 1/19/07 Date Executive Officer Nancy K. Miller Wayne Koestenbaum Gerhard Joseph Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract ENGAGING THE EIGHTIES: ETHICS, OBJECTS, PERIODS by Kevin L. Ferguson Adviser: Distinguished Professor Nancy K. Miller This dissertation examines a recent decade in American history whose unique notion of self-periodization generated important questions of ethical engagement and withdrawal. Situated during a time of an increasingly complex relationship between literature and theory, thinkers in the 80s self-consciously shifted towards making claims about their present moment which were based on the logic of rupture, and which thus created an either-or logic of pessimism or optimism in response to this rupture. These kinds of self-periodizing notions generally are collected under the rubric “postmodernism,” and the first chapter deals with a transatlantic movement between theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard who imagine the threat of rupture and what it suggests for individual subjects living in times mandated by so many theorists as constituting a radically new epistemological model. To analyze this perceived novelty in the American cultural landscape, the next three chapters focus on “objects of knowledge,” a term borrowed from Michel Foucault to describe stereotypted models of conduct: brats, surrogate mothers, and yuppies. The 80s’ vision of childhood was crystallized by the notion of “Brat Packs” such as the literary one that included Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, discussed in Chapter Two. Building on that novel’s construction of the brat’s role in relation to dying mothers, Chapter Three deals with the important “Baby ‘M’” case, which, despite involving Biblical-era medical technology, v was presented as a novel legal situation that refocused arguments about how to define motherhood, particularly along the double line of a masculinist, postmodern “crisis of legitimacy” and late-70s, psychoanalytically-informed feminist debates about mothering. Chapter Four takes up the yuppie and demonstrates how that figure was associated at the end of the decade with the recently-popularized serial killer, when both were represented briefly in Hollywood cinema by the “Yuppie Psycho” film. Finally, as a counterpoint to these objects of knowledge, Kathy Acker in Chapter Five models a literary practice of “engaged withdrawal.” While postmodernism’s “catastrophic or redemptive” choice provides only one model for social relations, Acker’s texts move past this, taking up the interrelated questions of autobiography, of the woman writer, of mothering, and of women’s history. vi Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge my deep debt and gratitude to Nancy K. Miller, and to thank her for her kindness and guidance during the writing of this manuscript. She took me under her wing at a time when I was rather at sea, and rescued me with her generosity. I would also like to thank Wayne Koestenbaum and Gerhard Joseph for their continued support and advice not only with this project, but also with the fortunes of the academy. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Engaging the Eighties: Subjects after Theory . 1 Chapter One: Beginning from Ends: Postmodernism and Periodization (Jameson/Lyotard/Coupure) . 25 Chapter Two: Brat Pack Mommies (Bright Lights, Big City) . 83 Chapter Three: . Mater sed certissima and “In the Matter of Baby ‘M’” . 143 Chapter Four: Yuppies and Yuckies: Gender and Power in Young Urban Killers . 206 Chapter Five: Engaged Withdrawal: The Four Questions of Kathy Acker . 267 Works Cited . 319 1 Introduction Engaging the Eighties: Subjects after Theory “Any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign (free, apolitical, serious), uncharacterizable as a whole (it is too complex to be described in general and tendentious terms) and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried--out of sheer critical obstinacy--is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start.” (Edward Said, in Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic, 156) Before examining specific instances of the intellectual and cultural history of America during the 1980s, it is necessary to break ground for the political and ethical stakes of the discussion by defining a few terms. The moment of this project is the 80s, but since the subject (in both senses) of that decade has a much longer pedigree, the central problem I grapple with is how I can “engage the eighties,” and what to me are these 80s other than a play between the generic marker of my own childhood and the sense that it was also a meaningful period of remarkable growth for others? Forced to set aside my own relationship with the decade, it is difficult to see a way to state convincingly that there is some unifying thesis at work--that it would be fair to label the 80s a coherent “period” and not simply a “decade.” If this is the case, then the 80s, like other decades, may be no more than a collection of stories, among which we may pick 2 those that best serve our individual sense of the moment. The problem with a decade of such recent memory is that efforts to characterize the present or near-present require us to set it off against other characterizations of what came before and what comes after; we need a historical point upon which to pivot our analysis, to say that this story belongs to a period and that one does not. For the 80s, as for other decades, much of this is covered over by our numerological fascination with the wholeness of the number ten, but in justifying this we need something more precise to point our finger at and say “here.” In short, a mark to count as our break. By our break I have in mind one different from the epistemological break held so dear by many postmodern theorists, who in the 80s focused on a discontinuity with older forms and styles variously grouped as modernism. Postmodernism serves as an umbrella term for what comes after, and the many debates over the proper or improper use of that word prove not only that it is a fluctuating category, but also that the meaning ascribed to the break which makes postmodernism possible also has a fluctuating cultural value. These two questions--has there been a break, and should one feel positively or negatively about it--recur throughout postmodern theory and, more important, throughout American culture in the 80s. But, is there a way of conceiving postmodernism that gets outside the question of positivity or negativity, a way to grapple with the break without reifying it in terms of this duality? The figure who offered the most promise for coming to terms with such a problem in the 80s is Michel Foucault. Reimagining his dormant project of “a history of the experience of sexuality” (there was an eight year lapse following the 1976 French publication of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction), Foucault in 19841 repeatedly 1 Foucault died of AIDS-related complications 25 June 1984; much of the work I discuss was published in English posthumously. Rabinow and others have commented on the demarcations of the earlier periods of Foucault’s thought--most notably a transition from structuralist to post-structuralist thought, and I believe another turn was in evidence at the end of his life. 3 turns to what he viewed as the key problem for Greco-Roman civilization: epimeleia heautou in Greek, souci de soi in French, or “care of the self” in English. The process is as follows: around the concept of the care of the self--an injunction central to one’s own daily self-management, but also prior to one’s ability to master social relations with others--springs a whole host of historically differentiated “techniques of the