Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 33.

1 March 2007: 177-98

Adorno, Foucault, and Said: Toward a Multicultural Gothic Aesthetics1

Andrew Hock Soon Ng Monash University

Abstract
This essay attempts to answer the question, albeit tentatively, what is the Gothic aesthetics? and then to suggest how this aesthetics might serve as a critical apparatus for the reading and appreciation of narratives not usually associated with the genre. I first appropriate Adornos theory of ugliness to map out some initial coordinates of a Gothic aesthetics, and within this framework I look at the recurring Gothic themes of loss and transgression. Secondly, I re-examine the relations between psychoanalysis and the Gothic: deeming psychoanalysis vital to an understanding of Gothic aesthetics, I defend it from recent claims that it lacks historical specificity, in its Gothicizing approach to texts, by turning to Foucaults What is an Author? and Saids Freud and the Non-European. Finally I endeavor to show how Gothic aesthetics, in its capacity to make clear on a foundational level how various kinds of transgression occur, can be a multicultural aesthetics, that is, can help us to elucidate not only Western literary texts but also NonWestern ones. This de-Westernizing (or de-colonializing) of Gothic aesthetics is indeed inevitable once we assume that it (perhaps like any aesthetics) must be prepared to face resistance from, and undergo transformation by, any of the narratives whose deep structures it attempts to illuminate. I also use Karatani Kojins notion of aesthetic unbracketing in support of my claim that the Gothic aesthetics may be multicultural.

Keywords
the Gothic, aesthetics, the ugly, Adorno, Foucault, Said, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism
I would like to thank my two anonymous readers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. This essay is an extension of my meditation on the Gothic as a multicultural aesthetics, which was first conceived when writing the introduction to my book, Interrogating Interstices (forthcoming 2007).
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The Gothic as Aesthetics of Ugliness

In the tradition of Plato and Kant, aesthetics (aesthesis means perception in Greek) has been concerned with our perception of beauty (and thus too of what is not beautiful). However, theorists like Berel Lang and Emory Elliot have observed that such a power to evaluate (or to judge to use Kants term) historically belongs to those in a dominant position politically, legally, or economically over the other; thus their aesthetic judgments may demean and subordinate the other by pronouncing [a] person or his or her cultural production to be inferior, beneath consideration, or objectionable (Elliot 3). Aesthetics in this formal, academic sense thus became a tool of divisiveness, enmity and oppression (3), presupposing universal standards of beauty and thus the ugliness (or more generally abnormality) of whatever does not meet these standards. Therefore in an era of cultural studies, multiculturalism, and glocalization, formal aesthetics has been considered highly suspectat the very least, Eurocentric. A recent revival of aesthetics has thus shifted its focus away from the beautiful to a specific kind of human experience (Farber 2). An aesthetic experience, according to Alan Goldman, is fuelled by the objects (whether manmade or natural) challenge to our perceptual and emotional capacities. To meet these challenges simultaneously is to experience aesthetically (Goldman 188). Therefore what is pre-defined by a given culture as ugly, grotesque or even obscene can still have aesthetic value (Zemach?; not in the Works Cited). Indeed, for Theodor Adorno, beauty cannot be conceptualized without presupposing the ugly. For Adorno, the very fact that there are standards for what is art-worthy already suggests the permanent return of the archaic [that is, the ugly], intertwined with the dialectic of enlightenment in which art participates (Adorno 47).2 In this rather Freudian configurationthe Unheimlich (uncanny) as return of the repressedit seems ugliness is the original site of aesthetics, yet one which must
2 Adorno is not the first theorist to see the mutual dependence of beauty and ugliness. The concept of the sublime in Burke and Kant (to whom Adorno of course refers) addresses the notion that the beautiful and terrible are dialectically intertwined, and that the former is always tinged with a threatening proportion of the latter. The interdependence between beauty and ugliness in aesthetics is not an unfamiliar one in Eastern philosophy. For example, the Tao T Ching (around 600BC) records that the dialectical relationships between binary opposites constitute the Way. Specifically regarding beauty and ugliness, it is written that Since the world points up to beauty as such / There is ugliness too. / If goodness is taken as goodness / Wickedness enters as well (Lao Tzu 54).

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be subsequently repressed by a rationalizing (conscious) Enlightenment thinking in order for the fantasy or spell of the beautiful to unfold: Beauty is not the Platonically pure beginning but rather something that originated in the renunciation of what was once feared, which only as a result of this renunciationretrospectively, so to speak, according to its own telosbecame the ugly. Beauty is the spell over the spell, which devolves upon it. The ambiguousness of the ugly results from the fact that the subject subsumes under the abstract and the formal category of ugliness everything condemned by art: polymorphous sexuality as well as the violently mutilated and lethal. (47)3 Beauty in Adornos view, then, is modern arts struggle for independence from pre-Enlightenment aesthetics. The modern emphasis on rationality and empirical certainty dictates that art, for it to have any worth, must disavow the ambiguity and inchoateness of anything which cannot be explained and classified in order to qualify as art. Anything that suggests the shapeless and the anomalous is immediately relegated to the ugly, and placed outside the domain of modern aesthetics. But as Adorno argues, the ugly can never finally be eschewed: it remains the unacknowledged site of aesthetics, awaiting its moment of return. In this formulation then, an aesthetic experience is not one from which pleasure is derived but one which unnerves and disorients. As a reflection of ugliness, art, Adorno argues, could not disavow remembrance of accumulated horror; otherwise its form would be trivial (Adorno 324).
3 Despite Adornos comment that the psychoanalytical theory of art is superior to idealist aesthetics in that it brings to light what is internal to art and is not itself artistic(Adorno 8-9), he is critical of Freuds stance on art. For Freud, argues Adorno, artworks are not immediate wish fulfillments but transform unsatisfied libido into a socially productive achievement, whereby the social value of art is simply assumed, with uncritical respect for arts public reputation (10). Such a view deprives artworks, according to Adorno, of their antithetic stance to the not-I, which remains unchallenged by the thorniness of artworks. They are exhausted in the psychical performance of gaining mastery over instinctual renunciation and, ultimately, in the achievement of conformity. . . . The conformist psychoanalytical endorsement of the prevailing view of the artwork as a well-meaning cultural commodity corresponds to an aesthetic hedonism that banishes arts negativity to the instinctual conflicts of its genesis and suppresses any negativity in the finished work. (12)

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But Adornos aesthetic theory goes beyond the mere proposition that beauty is always haunted by some ancient ugliness that is ever threatening to return. This tension between the beautiful and the ugly is what, for Adorno, precipitates or explodes into (84) art itself: Even this volatilization of aesthetic transcendence becomes aesthetic, a measure of the degree to which artworks are mythically bound up with their antithesis. In the incineration of appearance, artworks break away in a glare from the empirical world and become the counterfigure of what lives there; art today is scarcely conceivable except as a form of reaction that anticipates the apocalypse. Closely observed, even tranquil works discharge not so much the pent-up emotions of their makers as their works own inwardly antagonistic forces. (85) Thus the return of the ugly is rather the force of the archaic as it disturbs the surface stability of the beautiful than the artists mimetic impulse to free his/her work from the tyranny of established aesthetic standards. Aesthetics for Adorno is an engagement with antithesis, deliberately breaking away from empirical reality to delve into the unspeakable space of the unconscious where perversion, violence, and of course ugliness preside; it entails our experience of the critical tension that a particular artwork represents. Artworks must [strain] towards a synthesis develop[ed] in the form of their irreconcilability (234). In psychoanalytical parlance the perceiving subject, by apprehending this tension, is able to break through the spell of reality to confront what transpires, horribly, beneath its veneer Adornos concept reminds us that the Gothic is in the first place a powerful perceptual or aesthetic experience. Like the mimetic discharge of which Adorno speaks, the Gothic can be construed as a violent defiance of the ideals of Romantic literature, forcing the latter to face its own dark side. Indeed, as Michael Gamer observes, Romantic writers were very often Gothicists themselves (Coleridge and Byron, for example) or at least tended to pick up the conventions and practices of their Gothic contemporaries, a fact which exemplifies something more fundamental about Romantic aesthetic practice itself (Gamer 102). The very qualities which Romantic ideology ostentatiously rejects return through its cracks to haunt the pages of Romantic writings before becoming a low-brow offshoot, one which in time became even more popular and marketable than its host. But more than just a parasitical double of Romantic aesthetics that takes on its own independent

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life, Gothic aesthetics invites a critical tension in the act of apprehending an artwork (in this case literary work): signifiers now proliferate into monstrous proportions and interpretations become ambivalent. As an aesthetic enterprise, then, the Gothic, I would argue, can be both a type of writing and a way of reading, one that is particularly useful in responding to ugliness in its broadest sense (which includes the experiences of trauma, horror, and death). In this sense Gothic literature cannot really be separated from Gothic criticism: together they outline the project of Gothic aesthetics. The critical, extra-literary sense of the Gothic vitally depends on the Gothic texts literariness. Various critics have noted that Gothic literature evokes anxiety in the reader because it disrupts his or her familiarity with her world. Coral Ann Howells, for example, argues that instead of a sense of stability and harmony, what we find in Gothic fiction is a dreadful insecurity in the face of a contingent world which is entirely unpredictable and menacing (Howells 5). There is an affinity here with Adornos theory since Gothic aesthetics, like ugliness, is precisely the tension invoked by a failure to negotiate with an otherness that persistently threatens familiarity.4 What especially marks the Gothic nature of a particular narrative is the accumulation of this threat as the narrative progresses, intensifying rather than muting its element of horror: Rather than canceling the significance of the original event by displacing it, the horror story increases that events significance, multiplying its effect with each repetition. It articulates a paradox of reversibility and irreversibility in the given social shape of death. For while death is irreversible in the nonfictive world, in the horror story it may threaten an infinity of reversibility; it becomes the finale which is not final, whose limits are determined by its narrative possibilities. (Stewart 36) Both critics emphasize that the Gothic-aesthetic effect on the reader is derived from the narrative itself. The sense of ontological disorientation and the
Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall view the horror of the Gothic as lying in its emphasis on anachronism . . . the threat derives from Gothic vestiges which survive into the present and threaten the values of modernity (224). This reading need not (though it could) be taken to circumscribe the Gothic within a particular historical period: perhaps these vestiges are more suggestive of a prehistorical or ahistorical (trans-temporal), primitive or barbarian force that might even recall Adornos reflections on the aesthetic tension and explosion.
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infinite deferral of actual death are experiences that are not just thematically but narratologically grounded. I want to further illuminate Adornos notion of aesthetic tension by focusing on two closely-related elements of Gothic writing, loss and transgression. The return of the repressed (whether historical or psychical) already insinuates the unremitting presence of loss, as well as a boundary violation effected by a recurrence of something which should not recur. Gothic aesthetics is the aesthetics of loss and/or transgression not just as theme but as actual (life and/or narrative) experience. Gothic aesthetics is located at the interstices between the subjects Gothic spirit [and] its Gothic flesh in a way that privileges neither (Bruhm 2). Bruhm specifically traces this tension between, on the one hand, a proliferation of language that borders on obsession-compulsion (page ?) and attempts to make visible what is otherwise hidden, buried, or lost from view, and on the other the slipperiness of otherness that confounds language: such legibility only increases the horror within each novel, as it points even more forcefully to the presence of the supernatural, that which can never be captured in language (2). 5 For in Gothic narratives: loss is a kind of revenance in that the very recognition of loss (or even, some might say, the unconscious experience of loss) is itself an exercise of language or image-making. However, the image or the word which is produced by loss and desire also generates loss and desire in that the word is never fully able to complete the subjects dismembered body [or ruptured psyche, I may add] or to lay his/her ghosts to rest. The Gothic subject is always a subject in excess, desiring more than the signifying systems [especially language] can provide. (Bruhm 3) If as Adorno says the aesthetic quality of an artwork is precisely its own contradictions, then one of these contradictions may be this split in the Gothic subjectwhether taken as author, character and/or reader. In a sense here we are taking the text itself as a body; if in a Gothic narrative authors/narrators/ characters/readers flesh cannot sublimely transcend (Bruhm 3) its corpore5 The problem with this reading, however, is that Bruhm seems to neglect the fact that many Gothic narratives are actually short stories (Bruhms essay heavily privileges the great Gothic novels), and that many contemporary Gothic novels are linguistically rather minimalist (for example, the narratives of Chuck Palahniuk).

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ality to attain the spiritual, then this is true of the body of the text. And here spiritual also means being at one with (in spirit with) a particular ideology or community which the Gothic flesh desires but fails to realize. This failure may result in a violent retaliation by the body against the spirit which renders the body abject or monstrous. If then the narrative text itself is likened to a body, the proliferation of linguistic markers signals its inability to articulate the unspeakable, finally rendering the whole narrative monstrous. The endeavor to mean leaves the text ultimately meaningless. The Gothic quality of a narrative, then, is not derived from specific episodes of trauma or horror but rather a lingering presence of loss which refuses to dissolve, and of which both trauma and horror are effects. The inability of the subject to deal with this loss threatens her sense of coherence and directly relegates her to a liminal space of being. The subject is then left with two alternatives: to embody the liminal and risk becoming a monster or to dissolve the self (as in death) as a mode of resignation or renunciation (Frankensteins creature at the novels end) or strategy of resistance (Dr. Jekyll). This liminality (marginality, in-betweenness) already presupposes that transgression is at work. Whether deliberately or as the result of circumstances, the Gothic subjects experience of loss involves an inevitable act of crossing over into a heterotopic, unheimlich spaceone that is at once familiar and unfamiliar, real and unreal. The heterotopia, according to Foucault, is a placeless place which, like a mirror, exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. . . . [The mirror] makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Of Other Spaces 24) This has a direct relation to Gothic aesthetics. As Fred Botting puts it, the mirror of fiction . . . [not only] transports readers into remote and unreal places, but it is read in a specific place in the present, thereby disturbing a sense of reality along with the aesthetic values supposed to sustain it (In Gothic Darkly 9). Once again, this argument recalls Adornos notion of tension. As noted earlier, the aesthetics of beauty cannot be divorced from uglinessthe former is, in fact, premised on the latterin the same way that realist fiction and its attending aesthetic values cannot be separated from its Gothic countersite and (anti-) aesthetics.

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It is in this sense that Gothic writing is transgressive, not in the sense of challenging or resisting but more in the sense of stretching reality to its limits, and from there fissuring reality with its own limitations. As Foucault argues in his Preface to Transgression: Transgression is an action that involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses. The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line that closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable. But this play is considerably more complex: these elements are situated in an uncertain context, in certainties that are immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them. (73) Although I am decontextualising Foucaults point here, his view that transgression is a form of persistent recurrence (a repeated crossing-and-recrossing of the line, a play of limits at/on the line) suggests the obsessive-compulsive mode that Bruhm observes in Gothic narratives, and is useful for my formulation of Gothic aesthetics.6 The Gothic novel proliferates linguistically in its attempt to utter (or cross over to) the unspeakable, but always in diffrance, because the unspeakable cannot ultimately be apprehendedthus necessitating a return to the horizon of the uncrossable. Transgression presupposes an attempt to breach the limit while ultimately failing to do so: the subject arrives at the limit, momentarily violates it, and then becomes reabsorbed within the limit; this results in her being trapped on the threshold of that very limit. In this sense then, the counter-action of the Gothic is not so much resistive as it is transgressive.7 It brings to the fore certain psychological, social and/or cultural constraints and the ways in which subjects negotiate with and transgress them, often harrowingly.
Foucault is mainly discussing the mutual dependence of transgression and the limit, which has arguably become the normal state of affairs since the Nietzschean declaration that God is dead. 7 After all, many traditional and modern Gothic narratives may seem revolutionary in their challenge of the status quo, but in the end they are, as Baldick and Mighall have noted, rather conservative in their approach and especially in the way they resolve difficult issues (Baldick and Mighall 212). See also Bottings essay, The Gothic Production of Unconsciousness (28-31).
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Foucault further notes that transgression de-stabilizes notions of certainty by revealing the irreconcilability between the subject apprehending and the object apprehended. What results from such a tension is the breakdown of the formers psyche to expose a fundamental void residing within the I. The inability to surmount the object apprehended ruptures the certainty of the self, rendering it ineffectual. Reading this view against Adornos aesthetic theory, we note an interesting correlation between the two theorists with regard to art and how it should work aesthetically. For although Adorno does not use the term transgression in his argument, what he has to say about aesthetic tension, and the straining toward a synthesis of irreconcilability, certainly echoes Foucaults point. From the above discussion we see that transgression and loss are closely related, and that Gothic aesthetics (at least when we approach it via Adorno and Bruhm) lies between or encompasses the two. A subject transgresses because she is confronted with, and attempts to apprehend, an object; but she fundamentally cannot do so, and the result is a collapse of her sense of being-in-the-world. Unsurprisingly, for the subject it is death, or madness, or trauma which ensues.

Psychoanalysis and the Gothic

What I am calling the Gothic aesthetics has much to do with the critical apparatus that has gone into shaping its discourse. Traditional Gothic literature would not have experienced resurgence today if it were not for the collective theories that have given it a new lease on life. The return of the Gothic repressed is occasioned by a reinvestigation of the issues raised by contemporary theoretical perspectives. And certainly these issues and these theories are also instrumental in motivating a new generation of writers to deploy the Gothic in their work, as evidenced in the writings of Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie. Of the various theories, it is psychoanalysis (tampered variously by feminism, postmodernism, and more recently postcolonialism) that has had the most profound influence on contemporary Gothic criticism. And yet, as much as psychoanalysis has helped to rejuvenate Gothic studies, it is also itself a kind of Gothic discourse. In other words psychoanalysis, despite foregrounding itself as a scientific (psychological) enquiry into the unconscious, is in the final analysis an aesthetics (or more precisely, an anti-aesthetics). Terry Eagleton claims that it is perhaps more accurate to characterize Freud as a thinker who, while inheriting something of the great tide of aestheticizing thought which we have followed through the nineteenth-century, receives this legacy in a deeply pessimistic spirit, as a heritage gone sour (268).

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Psychoanalysis disturbs the confidence that traditional aesthetics can represent mankinds unity of spirit and sense, reason and spontaneity (Engleton 265), and instead reveals the self to be fissured by unspeakable desires. At such, it borrows the readily available vocabulary of the Gothic to articulate its inquiry into the uncharted territories of the human mind and body. For like the Gothic, psychoanalysis is a discourse of loss and transgression, [telling] us that the free individual is in fact caught up in an over-determined chain of relations; moreover, the temptation to remain or return to previous stages impedes individual change. Rather than being a tool for explaining the gothic, then, psychoanalysis is a late gothic story which has emerged to help explain a twentieth-century experience of paradoxical detachment from and fear of others and the past (Kilgour 220; see also Castle 237). Thus to argue, like Baldick and Mighall, that the emphasis on a psychological model in recent Gothic criticism is misguided certainly suggests a limited view of Gothic narratives (or any literature, for that matter). Baldick and Mighalls primary concern is that contemporary Gothic criticisms tend to obfuscate Gothic writings historical trajectory by over-emphasizing their psychological significance.8 I agree that much psychoanalytically-inflected Gothic criticism tends to ignore a works historicity as a potential site for theoretical analysis. Yet to argue that Gothic Criticism is condemned to repeat what it has failed to understand and so reproduces in its own discourse what we call the trope of Gothicising the past, typically casting the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in the melodramatic light reserved for the Italian aristocracy or the Spanish Inquisition by Radcliffe and Lewis (Baldick and Mighall 210) is certainly a myopic way of approaching literature; for this is tantamount to saying that the Gothic novels must always be read against their historical moments, which suggests that these works cannot signify beyond those moments. This, according to the two critics, is what current Gothic criticism has failed to understand; they accuse Gothic criticism of falsifying (Gothicising) the texts histories, and directly making the narratives serve the critics analytical ends rather than allowing them to demonstrate their true historical affinities. However, in my view, Baldick and Mighalls historical approach fails to consider
In my view the main shortcoming in Mighall and Baldicks thesis is that, again, they limit their discussion to a very narrow selection of canonical Gothic works. Also, they seem to have missed the point that Freuds work often draws on history. To cite one example, in his The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud notes that his argument has a foundation in the prehistoric view of dreams, especially in classical antiquity (36). He then goes on to discuss, among others, Aristotles understanding of dreams (36-39). Psychoanalysis as theory often considers the historical context of ideas; as practice it looks for the influence of the past and of memories.
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the reciprocal relationship between the Gothic and psychoanalysis, and restricts the number of interpretative possibilities. After all, is not the yardstick of good literature its ability to invite innovative interpretations that go beyond its authorial and historical boundaries? To adhere to these two critics viewpoint is to say that Gothic novels have nothing new to tell us beyond what they reveal at and of their own historical moments. Another problem with this kind of argument is that it does not tell us why and how Gothic (or for that matter any) literature can invite certain emotional responses from the reader. Baldick and Mighalls injunction, useful as a reminder that literature must always be carefully contextualized, falters when it comes to treating a literary work as an aesthetic representation. For Foucault, critical theories, when applied to texts, enable an endless possibility of discourse (What Is an Author? 114). Thus Freud and Marx (whom Foucault calls the founders of discursivity [114]) are very different from the 19thcentury literary authors in that their works produce the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts (114). At one point in What is an Author? Foucault writes: The founders of discursivity (I use Marx and Freud as examples, because I believe them to be both the first and the most important cases) make possible something altogether different from what a novelist makes possible. Ann Radcliffes texts opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or principle in her work. The latter contains characteristic signs, figures, relationships, and structures which could be reused by others. In other words, to say that Ann Radcliffe founded the Gothic horror novel means that in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel one will find, as in Ann Radcliffes works, the theme of the heroine caught in the trap of her own innocence, the hidden castle, the character of the black, cursed hero devoted to making the world expiate the evil done to him, and all the rest of it. On the other hand, when I speak of Marx and Freud as founders of discursivity, I mean that they made possible not only a certain number of analogies, but also (and equally important) a certain number of differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded. (114)

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Although Foucault does not attempt to draw a relationship between psychoanalysis (and Marxism) and the Gothic, it is surely a tacit understanding of their association which leads him to compare Freud and Marx with Ann Radcliffe.9 When a literary text, for instance a Gothic novel, is read against a theoretical discourse (or against several of them), what results is the dual performance of what we might call literary aesthetics and critical aesthetics. The former is what Foucault attributes to Radcliffe: what makes a Gothic novel Gothic are certain characteristics, analogies, models, paradigms that are shared with other Gothic works. This usually occurs on a thematic or imagistic level (such as the barren landscape, the old mansion/castle), but resemblances in deep structures are also useful points of reference. These deep structures, however, can only emerge through the deployment of a critical apparatus such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, and/or poststructuralism. Thus, taking into account Kilgour and Castles claims that Freudianism is itself a kind of Gothic story, we could argue that Gothic narratives and psychoanalytic readings of them share a dialectical relationship, each fostering the others aesthetic force. Having established the aesthetical dimension of psychoanalysis, I want to now address its efficacy as a theoretical framework for reading non-Western narratives. Insofar as psychoanalysis is a Western-centric aesthetic story-theory, its application to non-Western narratives remains problematic because of a potential predilection toward literary-theoretical colonialism. Foucaults view provides a tentative resolution to this dilemma: as important as it is to elicit the deep structures of desires inherent in non-Western literatures when psychoanalyzing them, it is equally important to pay attention to the way in which psychoanalytical principles are reshaped by these literatures. This is (at least partly) what I take Foucault to mean by the otherness that is inherent in any discursive enterprise. Within such a framework, psychoanalysis is no longer used prescriptively but rather reflexively, becoming transformed by the very object which it seeks to illuminate. Such a view is in line with Edward Saids assessment of the endurance of Freud: Freud is a remarkable instance of a thinker for whom scientific work was, as he often said, a kind of archaeological excavation of the buried, forgotten, repressed and denied past . . . . Freud was an explorer of the mind, of course, but also, in the philosophical sense, an overturner and a re-mapper of accepted or settled geographies and
The classic Marxist reading of Gothic writings is now surely Franco Morettis essay, Dialectic of Fear, in his Signs Taken for Wonders.
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genealogies. He thus lends himself especially to rereading in different contexts, since his work is all about how life history offers itself by recollection, research and reflection to endless structuring and restructuring, in both the individual and the collective sense. That we, different readers from different periods of history, with different cultural backgrounds, should continue to do this in our readings of Freud strikes me as nothing less than a vindication of his works power to instigate new thought, as well as to illuminate situations that he himself might never have dreamed of. (Said 27) For Said, then, Freuds theories transcend temporal, cultural and geographic boundaries precisely because they are malleable enough to accommodate the otherness of the other even as they shed light on the way this other functions. In illuminating the Gothicity of non-Western writings, a psychoanalytical reading does not reject their cultural underpinnings but rather carefully negotiates them. This strategy might perhaps satisfy Baldick and Mighalls historical predilections, as well as allowing extra-literary paradigms to operate. Speaking of criticism in general, and Gothic criticism in particular, David Punter writes that there would be no possibility for criticism to isolate a single text, a non-duplicitous textual act; instead criticism would only be able to realize itself by entering into the hall of absence, the clinic for chronic originary doubt. Like a ghost tied to, and doomed to return to, an already inscribed location, criticism itself would be doomed to haunt a site which can never be fully recaptured (Spectral Criticism 261). Here Punter is discussing the proliferation of what he terms spectral criticism which, in his view, seems to characterize much recent theoretical work dealing not just with literature but with cultural studies as well. Interpretation, in the final analysis, occurs only within an encircling horizon of mistranslation, of uninterpretability (264). The tension (Punter uses the term dialogue [264]) between the subject and object of interpretation results in what I am calling critical aestheticswhich in the end cannot be divorced from an artworks inherent aesthestic worth. And it is in Gothic criticism that the spectralization of interpretation is most profoundly realized. Because of the Gothic concern with various forms of repression, the unspeakable (ranging from supernaturalism to psychological fissures), and abjection, to discuss it is always to do so in tremulous abeyance; to interpret its concerns necessarily ghosts them, revealing the fact of their signifiers (or signifiers) irretrievability in the very act of enunciation.

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Interpreting Gothic narratives is always a paradoxical act, at once a criticism in excess and a reading of loss. That psychoanalysis has played such an important role in Gothic criticism is precisely because of their uncanny association. Like the Gothic, psychoanalysis is a discourse which always implies more than it enunciates. Both Foucaults and Saids reading of psychoanalysis suggests that there is something inherently excessive in appropriating it in the act of criticism since what it attempts to articulate is always already in trace, or irretrievable. Psychoanalytic criticism is a performance that in attempt to retrieve will always disappoint. To elaborate this point further, I turn to one of the most important concepts of psychoanalysis, and one which recurs (in one form or another, in more or less spectral forms) in every Gothic novel: the unconscious. In fact, as Botting informs us, while psychoanalysis has helped to unearth the unconscious in Gothic literature it has always been a part of the Gothics repertoire, waiting to be discovered by the penetrating gaze of science [that is, psychoanalysis]: it lies waiting to be glimpsed amongst the condensed association produced in the un-black continent of modernitys literature (The Gothic Production 16).10 For as in most things psychoanalytical and Gothic, the unconscious is not reducible to language. A space of metaphoric substitution, it lies in excess of the final paternal word (The Gothic Production 31). Following Lacan, Botting goes on to associate the unconscious with the un-black, claiming that the latter lies beyond the darkness populated by Gothic images and metaphors, the very space of the Thing, the absence inimical to discourse and constitutive of its reproduction after the fact. The un-black darkness remains to be illuminated and resists all light; it is repeatedly filled by images and yet returns no knowledge. The metaphors around which the double narratives of Gothic fiction are knotted emerge in the unblack but never conceal it. Indeed, the proximity of two chains of signification in Gothic novels, entwining law and transgression, power and desire, disclose a gap that narrative cannot close. (The Gothic Production 32) This double narrative of the Gothic corresponds with its critical trajectory that, perhaps because it plays at the limit (in Foucaults phrase) or on the line,
Interestingly, Botting cannot seem to decide whether psychoanalysis is science or modernitys literature, an ambivalence shared by several theorists.
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is always in excess. Thus it is in the light of psychoanalytic criticism that the manifold significances of the Gothic can best become resonant. However, rather than say (like Botting) that the un-black darkness of the unconscious is filled by images yet returns no knowledge I would suggest that the knowledge it returns is ambivalent and tentative, becoming a trace even as meaning is inscribed upon it.

Multiculturalizing Gothic Aesthetics

The Gothic, in its traditional sense, is fundamentally a Western literary genre, but my recasting of it as an aesthetic mode, one bolstered by the polymorphous trajectory of psychoanalysis (itself an aesthetic story-theory), can significantly broaden it, I would suggest, so that it may function as a critical apparatus for the reading of multicultural literatures. Instead of being territorialized by a distinct historical and cultural heritage (i.e. the West), this re-constellated approach to the Gothic would then significantly open it up so that it might embrace the literatures of other lands, thereby also adding to its own critical sophistication. So what does a multicultural literary aesthetics entail? At the beginning of this essay, I highlighted some views which question the efficacy of aesthetics as a philosophical enterprise. I argued that part of the problem with traditional Western aesthetics is its tendency to inscribe upon the artworks of another culture what are essentially its own local standards. Karatani Kojin, the renowned Japanese literary historian, calls this aestheticentrism. According to Kojin, the Orientalist attitudes of looking down on the other [that is, the East] as an object of scientific analysis and looking up to the other as an aesthetic idol are less contradictory than complicit (147). Drawing on Kants judgment of taste, and especially his theory of disinterestedness in aesthetic experience, 11 Kojin identifies an insidious predilection of the Orientalist gaze even when that gaze is expressing love and respect for another culture (146). The West is able to appreciate Eastern art simply by bracketing various reactions to the object [of the gaze] (151). That is, to deem an Eastern artwork aesthetically worthywhich, for many Orientalist aesthetes amounts, incorrectly, to loving and respecting its culturethe work must be bracketed against its local significance. This is how, according to Kojin, certain Japanese handicrafts were suddenly labeled art despite their lowly status amongst
11 In his third critique Kant defines beauty in relation to the pleasure we naturally get from the perception of certain objects. Thus here there is no question of practical use or value (as in ethics) or of logical, scientific knowledge (epistemology); aesthetics is concerned only with perception in itself, as something detached and disinterested, and with the (beautiful) form of this perception.

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the Japanese people up to the time of Western influence. In other words, aestheticentrism achieves its objective not by neglecting the other but by transforming that other into an aesthetic province; in this way aestheticentrism can appear to be anti-colonialist when, in fact, it is deeply colonialist (153): Aestheticentrism refuses to acknowledge that the other who does not offer any stimulative surprise of a stranger lives a life out there (153). What the Orientalist aesthete cannot aestheticize is ignored or disregarded. As Kojin correctly ascertains, aesthetics is valuable, but it must always involve a conscious effort to bracket it against external, local concernsthat is, to bracket out (as phenomenologists say) those concerns, or to become disinterested. Thus, for instance, to read non-Western literatures from the perspective of Gothic aesthetics as I am now conceiving of it, would be not merely to treat selected narratives as art (detached, disinterested, lart pour lart), reading them against their human, social-cultural-historical context, but also to read them together with or alongside their human concerns: for instance, the personal or collective traumas, the modes of racism and sexism that are expressed in them. Reading these narratives in such a way would not deny them their status as works of art; rather, it would deepen their aesthetic significance. Kojin, using sexual representation as an example, elaborates: For instance if, in a text, a woman is described mainly as an aesthetic representation of desire, the unbracketing of [focusing on] the sexual representation is not a simple denial of the work. If the text is strong enough, it will accommodate different interpretations. And when we commit ourselves to rereading the text from alternative positions, we would again bracket that particular critique. Yet the new reading, of course, is not, and should not be, an erasure of the critique. (154) In other words, when we look at any literary or artistic work from various perspectives (historical, postcolonial and psychoanalytical, for example) we can foreground each perspective in turn by bracketing out the other ones. The reason I am emphasizing psychoanalysis is again the fact that it can itself be taken as both (Gothic) story and aesthetic theory, which gives it a special sort of priority in the formulation of a multicultural aesthetic model like the one I am suggesting, a model that combines the modes of bracketing and unbracketing, one to be used for a new reading of non-Western art, more specifically literary-narrative art. By un/bracketing the various social and national concerns of a work and reading them

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against one another and against the works more purely aesthetic dimensions, the Gothic paradigm comes into play through the notion of the unspeakability of these concerns which now we are trying to speak about, however tentatively. Through this process of bracketing out and unbracketing, then, a more or less universalizing model based on Gothic aesthetics (as I am now defining or conceiving of it) could be a multicultural critical tool, one that could initiate our encounter with the uncanny otherness of cultures as well as of themes, ideas, minds and monstrous supernatural creatures. Indeed, for Hlne Cixous, reading fiction (of whatever sort) is always already a kind of uncanny encounter. In her rereading of Freuds The Uncanny Cixous makes the interesting comment that literature is that which resists analysis and, thus, it attracts it the most (547). For her, fiction confronts the reader with something that cannot be ultimately surmounted even though it invites our attempt to surmount it. Here then the uncanny comes by way of the non-arrival of meaning, since a particular text offers multiple significations. (We might think of Bottings un-black darkness here, which is filled with images but returns no knowledge.) In fiction, the reader enters the world of doubles (547), seeing plural meanings in what is allegedly a single (familiar) work. But if familiar fiction is already uncanny, how much more so would be fiction from another, from a strange culture. Spivak believes such an uncanny engagement is important, even necessary, in a comparative literature that has planetarity as its objective.12 The work of the uncanny in comparative literary study occurs at the interface where the self allows itself to be imagined without guarantees, by and in another [the others] culture (Death 52). It is the pursuit of seeing the self as other
Spivak argues that she is uncomfortable with the term global because it carries connotations of homogeneitythe imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere (72). Therefore she coined the term planetarity as a countersite to the global. Planetarity is more humancentered, familiarizing us with alterity through an encounter with the unfamiliar. Spivak elaborates, To be human is to be intended toward the other. We provide for ourselves transcendental figurations of what we think is the origin of this animating gift: mother, nation, god, nature. These are names of alterity, some more radical than others. Planet-thought opens up to embrace an inexhaustible taxonomy of such names, including but not identical with the whole range of human universals. . . . If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents . . . alterity remains underived from is; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. We must persistently educate ourselves into this peculiar mindset. (73)
12

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without reducing (or homogenizing) the other to the self that should inform the work of comparative literature.13 Reading a variety of non-Western literatures from the aesthetic perspective of the Gothic would open an unfamiliar textual space for the reader, but she would also come to realize that certain kinds of human responses to particular circumstances are not entirely alien to the reader after all, regardless of cultural and ideological variations.14 Undergoing psychic and/or emotional as well as cultural, political and historical disturbances, encountering the (perhaps un-black) unknown, existing liminallythese are in fact experiences familiar to all of us, common to people in every culture. Here, of course, I am not attempting to homogenize what are obviously many very different cultures and literatures into a single one. For Gothic aesthetics to have a productively remembering look (Silverman 183),15 it
This view of literature as an uncanny enterprise and its viability as a multicultural aesthetics also finds support in Heinz Ickstadts argument that despite literatures relation to and connection with the larger contexts of ideology and history, and despite the fact that this interrelation and interaction is constantly up for cultural redefinition, it is primarily aesthetics that marks the literary texts difference: [Aesthetics] is not theoretical, political, documentary, etc. but able, through the specific organization of its functions, to open up and test theoretical or political discourse by pushing it to its limits, by staging it in terms of lived life, i.e. in terms of practice and experience, of the concrete and the particular (269). Ickstadt then views literature as necessarily transgressive (in the Foucauldian sense) because it compels theory and politics to confront their own limitations. By juxtaposing them with everyday practices and intimate experiences, literature reveals the inability of theory and politics to appropriately explain the amazing variations in the way different people respond to different circumstances. This is especially apparent with regard to those excessive moments which can be horrifying. The taboos that surround them result in their being ambiguous at best, and hidden and unspeakable at worse, thus forcing any theoretical articulation of such moments to consider its own limitations as well. If seen as an aesthetics which combines story and theory, the Gothic becomes a form of self-reflexive literature: a story about criticism and a critical reading of a story. Ickstardt also sees literary texts as aesthetically potent in that they can [cross] boundaries, [go] off limits, imaginatively [take] the place of the Other, or [enable one to explore] oneself in the Other. . . . [E]ven though such exploration is inevitably also self-projection and self-invention, it nevertheless opens possibilities of understanding and of sharing (273). Reading non-Western literatures via a framework defined in terms of Gothic aesthetics allows precisely such an exploration. When Ickstardt argues that literature enables us to take the place of the other, or to vicariously experience the other in oneself, this is an indirect way of saying that reading literature through a shared aesthetic paradigm allows us to confront the other as uncanny. And this has the potential to help us re-evaluate our subject positions learn to appreciate otherness as something both different and familiarly strange. 14 I have attempted to put theory to use in my book, Interrogating Interstices: Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial Asian and Asian American Literatures (forthcoming, 2007). Here I deploy the aesthetic enterprise of the Gothic in order to interrogate the deep structures of selected postcolonial and Asian American fiction. 15 Kaja Silvermans productively remembering look is a mode of looking whose imperative is to displace: The remembering look is not truly productive until it effects one final
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must always attend to alterity even as it delineates common threads. And after all, as Spivak writes, recognition begins in differentiation (Death 15), which I take to mean not only that we cannot see what is too close to us (or what we have never really looked at before), but also that only in accepting (not fearing or demonizing) otherness can we come to appreciate our own subjective positions. Indeed, in this sense any cross-cultural reading of literature will be uncanny: it will always mean simultaneously seeing the other in the self and the self in the other.

Conclusion
At the start of this essay, I argued that a careful attention to cultural and historical specificities of particular literatures would help eliminate the possibility of colonial imposition, when for example we attempt to apply Gothic aesthetics to the reading of non-Western writings. Yet iek says that multiculturalism is the ideal form of global capitalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized peopleas natives whose mores are to be carefully studied and respected. He goes on to say: In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, selfreferential form of racism, a racism with a distanceit respects the Others identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed authentic community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive contents but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular culturesthe multiculturalist respect for the Others specificity is the very form of asserting ones own superiority. (44)

displacementthe displacement of the ego. It does not fully triumph over the forces that constrain us to see in predetermined ways until its appetite for alterity prevails, not only over sameness but also over self-sameness (183). For the Gothic to be an aesthetics of such a look it must be mindful of its potential to colonize the other, to absorb otherness into the same (into itself) or to marginalize it. The test of its aesthetic mettle will be shown in the ability of the Gothic not only to negotiate (with) cultural and ideological differences despite its being used to illuminate them, but to respect and accept those alterities which it senses are necessary to itself.

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While there may be some validity to ieks point of view here, it also may seem, following a familiar dynamic of cultural studies, postcolonialism and globalization theory, to collapse the notion of the multicultural too neatly into the universal. But according to the model I am suggesting, the point of using Gothic aesthetics as a framework for reading literatures outside the West would be precisely to dislodge the Gothic from its Euro-Anglo-American centrism: this would mean that the meaning of the Gothic itself would also necessarily undergo a transformation in the course of this aesthetic project, one brought about through the inevitable resistance to this project which it would face from others. Gothic aesthetics seen in this light could hardly remained detached from the texts it was interrogating and interpreting, as a kind of superior mode of reading, one now being imposed upon its textual Others. For this (or for any) aesthetics to function multiculturally, that unbracketing of the realness of the cultural other of which Kojin speaks must involve not only acknowledging the socio-political, cultural, and historical forces that go into the construction of the others (the other, the uncanny, unheimlich, not-at-home) aesthetics, but also those potential monstrous prejudices (for instance ieks racism) that may lurk deep within oneself, within the subject, preventing his/her multiculturalist gaze from looking productively. To see the Gothic as a multicultural aesthetics would be in this sense, then, not to universalize it (which we assume might be ieks fear), but to exploit its vast and labyrinthine potential to problematize universality.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. New York: Continuum, 1997. Baldick, Chris, and Robert Mighall. Gothic Criticism. Punter, ed. 209-28. Botting, Fred. In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture. Punter, ed. 15-26. --. The Gothic Production of the Unconscious. Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography. Ed. David Punter and Glennis Byron. New York: Palgrave, 1999. 11-36. Bruhm, Steven. Introduction: Encrypted Identities. Gothic Studies 2.1 (2000). 1-7. Castle, Terry. The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho. The New Eighteenth Century. Ed. Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum. London: Metheun, 1987. 231-53. Cixous, Hlne. Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freuds Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny.) New Literary History 7.3 (1976): 525-48.

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Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Elliot, Emory. Introduction: Cultural Diversity and the Problem of Aesthetics. Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliot, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne. New York: OUP, 2002. 3-27. Farber, Jerry. What is Literature? What is Art? Integrating Essence and History. Journal of Aesthetic Education 39. 3 (Fall 2005): 1-21. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1913. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon Books, 1965. Foucault, Michel. Of Other Spaces. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-26. ---. A Preface to Transgression. 1963. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology. Ed. James Faubion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. 69-88. ---. What is an Author? The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 101-20. Gamer, Michael. Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2002. 85-104. Goldman, Alan. The Aesthetic. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes. New York: Routledge, 2001. 181-92. Ikstardt, Heinz. Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics. Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliot, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne. New York: OUP, 2002. 263-78. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. 1781. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kojin, Karatani. Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism. Trans. Sabu Kohso. Boundary 2 25. 2 (1998): 145-60. Lang, Berel. The Form of Aesthetics. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 27. 1 (1968): 35-47. Lao Tzu. The Way of Life ( Daodejing). Trans. R. B. Blakney. New York: Signet, 2001. Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Trans. Susan Fisher, David Miller, and David Forgacs. London: Verso, 1983.

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Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. Interrogating Interstices: Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial Asian and Asian American Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. (forthcoming) Punter, David, ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. ---. Spectral Criticism. Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002. 259-78. Said, Edward. Freud and the Non-European. New York: Verso, 2003. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. ---. Translation as Culture. Parallax 6.1 (2000): 13-24. Stewart, Susan. The Epistemology of Horror. The Journal of American Folklore 95. 375 (1982): 33-50. iek, Slavoj. Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism. New Left Review 225 (1997): 28-51.

About the Author

Andrew Hock Soon Ng () teaches contemporary fiction, postcolonial literature, and theories of authorship and writing at Monash University, Malaysia. He is the author of Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives (2004) and Interrogating Interstices: Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial Asian and Asian American Literature (forthcoming 2007). His articles have appeared in journals such as Mosaic, Women Studies, and Commonwealth Essays and Studies. He is currently editing a book on Asian Gothic and another on the double motif in literary and philosophical works. [Received 21 September 2006; accepted 19 January 2007; revised February 15 2007]