Review of: On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
Susan Stewart. 1993 Duke Univerity Press. London

Reviewed by Matt Tomaso TOMASO@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu
Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

(Matt Tomaso is a teaching assistant in archaeology and a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, department of anthropology. His primary interests include the ethnohistory and prehistory of the Caribbean, geoarchaeology, ethnicity, gender and power.)

This essay attempts to describe the metadiscursive construction of an argument presented in Stewart's (1993) _On Longing_. _On Longing_ is an example of a variety of its subjects and my experience of reading _On Longing_ exemplifies of one of Stewart's central themes - recontextualization. My interpretation was developed through application of Stewart's perceptions concerning the Western literary tradition to the text that describes them. I will argue that, through her metadiscourse, Stewart suggests an interpretation of her own text as an example of Western literature. Furthermore, the Western literary tradition is Stewart's context and subject, and _On Longing_ is both critique and example. This essay, then, is an attempt to examine the persuasive self- referential technique with which Stewart constructs the part of her argument that identifies the argument itself as an example of her subject matter, Western literature.

The metadiscursive argument of concern is based on the following set of precepts as they apply to Stewart's text: as Stewart (1993:22) claims, "The printed word always tends toward abstraction, for it escapes the necessity of a material referent and the constraints of an immediate context of origin: it is always quotation." Furthermore, the absence of an immediate context of origin is a state of inauthenticity since ". . . native context is . . . authentic context" (Stewart 1993:150). Authentic or native context is where, she suggests, objects may have use value (Stewart 1993:148). While spoken words may also escape the necessity of material referents and use value, speech might be closer to what Stewart calls an authentic context since speech _can_ have immediate referents. Additionally, speech is generally shared by identifiable referents (interlocutors) in a temporally, culturally, and spatially constrained and authentic context. The longing that Stewart examines is the yearning for authentic or unmediated experience, an experience unaffected by the crisis of the sign, the phenomenological ambiguity of the sign's relationship to its referent. Authentic experience, I assume, can only occur in an authentic context. Stewart's argument is strengthened by the ambiguous context from which she writes. Experiencing her book exemplifies the reader's construction or imagination of a narrative concerning the authentic context within which the text can be legitimately understood. This essay is an explication of my experience with _On Longing_.

Stewart does not wish to create the illusion of an authentic context in her book. Any attempt to do so would detract from her argument. Instead, she characterizes _On Longing_ as a collection, emphasizing, potentially, its lack of use value and its obscured context. However, as I will argue, _On Longing_ is, in its self- referentiality, awarded much use-value. It is a collection of quotations, which are, in Stewart's terms, ". . . disembodied heads" (Stewart 1993:19). As she claims:

"This essay focuses upon a Western tradition because I wanted to limit what is already an interdisciplinary scope and because the modes of exaggeration discussed relate to a particular set of historical developments. Yet the essay itself is a collection and not a chronicle: I am more concerned with representing a display of heterogeneity than with accounting for a model of causality." (Stewart 1993:xiii)

However, her display of heterogeneity is bounded by its consistent and surprisingly conventional reference to themes such as context, exaggeration and appropriation. Despite the diminution of causality, the fact that all of her subjects are united by these themes alludes to some form of common origin or causality.

The collection itself is an assemblage of recontextualized objects. Two photographs decorate _On Longing_ and both depict a model, presumably the author*, with her head/face obscured. If the body is emblematic of the context, scale, or system of indices and referents from which the disembodied head (quotation) draws its authentic meaning, then these photos represent the context from which Stewart's quotation, (essay, book) derives. They also partially obscure its meaning. The body, Stewart insinuates, is both the interior view of culture and the projection that seeks to contextualize its exterior:

"The tradition of the face as book should be placed within the more general tradition of the body as microcosm, the tradition that projects the body upon the universe and the universe upon the body in various ways and thus makes the body, as Levi-Strauss would say, something good to think with." (Stewart 1993:128)

Faces, like books, are, or should be considered, part of their own context. Books and bodies are perceived as models or microcosms of a broader context. The partial absence of Stewart's face in the photographs suggests a partial eclipsing of the context of her work. Photographs erase their author by creating an illusion of omniscience that defines the subject without reference to the camera operator. The erased photographer defines the frame of reference for the audience. Thus, this partial obscurity also shows that the audience cannot identify with the model, but only with the controller of the camera (Stewart 1993:11). Like the photographer, the omniscient author is not to be found within her work. Since the reader's identification is with the author, the reader becomes a collaborator in the construction of context:

"The face is a type of "deep" text, a text whose meaning is complicated by change and by a constant series of alterations between a reader and an author who is strangely disembodied, neither present nor absent, found in neither part nor whole, but, in fact, created by this reading. Because of this convention of interpretation, it is not surprising that one of the great topoi of Western literature has been the notion of the face as book." (Stewart 1993:127)

By suggesting that her book is a collection, Stewart warns the reader that its context will have to be interpreted, or placed in a mediated context. By obscuring her head with objects, she suggests that the book is designed to be experienced outside of its authentic context, the context of Susan Stewart. The reader's act of interpreting, and the author's act of obscuring, decontextualize and recontextualize the topic. Combined, these acts remove the topic from its authentic, native context. The reader is constantly made aware of his or her process of 'reading into', interpreting, or recontextualizing Stewart's words. The 'narratives' of _On Longing_, not explicitly provided by Stewart, is a collaboration enacted by the author and the reader in a mediated context.

If Stewart's photographs and words are signifiers, the book- as-collection is made one of the signified by its own self- referentiality. Yet this is not simply a book about itself, but a book about all Western literature, and much more. It is significant that the preface and conclusion, both of which refer to the book itself, are titled "hyperbole" and, "litotes" respectively. In this choice of words Stewart comments on her own authoreal acts of prefacing and concluding - overstatement and double entendre understatement (with an intention of embellishing). Both hyperbole and litotes are literary forms of exaggeration. Hyperbole suggests a grand scale, the gigantic, while litotes suggests diminution, the miniature. The act of exaggeration always removes its subject from an authentic context.

In her opening photograph, Stewart is depicted standing in front of, or perhaps approaching, the reader. There is an aura of stillness in the photograph. Stewart, her head completely blocked by a bouquet of straw, stands unaffected by her environment. She is adorned by an oversized black dress and shoes. The formality and scale of her attire, her pose, and her lack of affectedness suggest class and gender and also hyperbole and overstatement. Moreover, the photograph is four times as large as the photograph proximal to the conclusions, which has Stewart seated, clothed in a tee-shirt, jeans, and dirty sneakers. In this photograph, the litotes, her face is almost completely obscured by a cloth, which waves with the wind. This is an androgynous, classless, author who has been affected by her environment, whose seated posture and clothing suggest understatement. In this photograph, Stewart is generically American. Both photographs are black and white, so they allude to what Stewart calls the bourgeois denial of color. If the final photo graph is litotes and the first is hyperbole, then Stewart's text must be some-where between and its scope _is_ the bourgeois.

In the following passages from her litotes she refers also to many of the subjects of her examination, including preface and conclusion, the gigantic and the miniature, the hyperbole and the litotes, as well as the book and the collection simultaneously:

"...the system of signification works by means of a rhetoric of significance; to be marginal to that system is to be cast from the center (authenticity, sincerity, consensus), to live the abstraction of the secondhand." (Stewart 1993:173)

"The secondhand" can be interpreted as the out-of-authentic/native- context -book, miniature, collection, quote, giant, and souvenir. The litotes from which this citation derives is, by definition, a rhetoric of significance. She continues:

"It is not enough simply to relativize the normal in this argument; it becomes apparent that exaggeration - that is, the exaggeration of significance - is an eruption in the economy of consciousness, an eruption which acquires the status of the intolerable and thus must be objectified." (Stewart 1993:173)

Thus, in order to avoid ". . . an eruption in the economy of consciousness. . .", she is forced to write conclusions that are Lilliputian litotes, rather than Brobdignagian hyperboles. The effect, however, remains the same. In criticizing the exaggeration of significance, Stewart implies that she has not exaggerated the significance of her work.

And yet,

"Exaggeration is not possible without scale and relativity . . . Microcosmic thought . . . always tends toward theology and the promulgation of a "grand design." In diversity is unity; all phenomena are miniaturizations of the essential features of the universe." (Stewart 1993:128)

If the book is to be considered part of this culture of microcosmic exaggeration, or a microcosm itself, it is the body, the scale or context, which the reader induces to experience _On Longing_ in a meaningful (appropriately mediated) way. The reader constructs a microcosmic projection that shares elements of the author as other and the reader as self. This construction allows Stewart's 'display of heterogeneity' to be subordinated to the rule that 'in diversity is unity'. In the end, Stewart is em powered to construct 'grand designs' in the form of new tropes that allude to causal explanations. Her themes of decontextualization, appropriation, and authenticity are consistent examples.

By explicitly discussing written text, Stewart (1993:ix-xiv, 3-36, 171-173), in effect, objectifies and relativizes her own work. Her subject and object, signifier and signified, are parts of the Western literary tradition. In her text's self- referentiality, she ameliorates the crisis of the sign by diminishing the conceptual distance between signifier and signified. Her argument is made successful by her simultaneous and identical constructions of an object and subject. The absence of the author, here, becomes the author's representation.

Note * The second photograph appears where the Western reader expects to see a photo, and partial biography, of the author.