In "Ariel and the Police," Frank Lentricchia searches through the totalizing desires for power that have built and help to maintain tangible and intangible structures of confinement and purification within, and sometimes as, the house of modernism. And what he finds, in his lyrical effort to redeem the subject for history, is that someone lives there, slyly, sometimes even playfully defiant.

In the changed intellectual climate since historical geography emerged as a substantial geographical subfield, issues of power and modernity have come much to the fore. For Michel Foucault, power is less a property than a strategy and is widely distributed in cultural discourses and their settings. For Jurgen Habermas, modernity imposes a distinctive context of communications that undermines the stability of traditional lifeworlds and holds out a largely unfulfilled promise of rationality. For Anthony Giddens, the agency and settings of power cannot be conceptualized separately, nor can the emergence of modernity be understood apart from the changing reach and geographical configuration of power. For Michael Mann, a history of social power turns necessarily on an analysis of power's networks, logistics, and spatial contours. Such ideas about power and modernity emphasize the importance of a historical geography that is both immersed in data and sensitive to general literatures. A growing conversa...

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Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens

Power, Modernity, and Historical Geography

In "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism" Richard Rorty contends that: "For all his genius ... Peirce never made up his mind what he wanted a general theory of signs for, nor what it might look like. ... His contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James" (1982:161). But is it likely that a pragmatic thinker such as Peirce did not design his semeiotic for a purpose or that such an architectonic philosopher had no inkling about the shape of this theory? Part of my task is to suggest just how unlikely this is.

Toward a truly pragmatic theory of signs: Reading Peirce's semeiotic in light of Dewey's gloss

Rhetorical Hermeneutics Revisited

Because of Foucault's many insights on power, we are now better able to understand how discourse plays a central role in social relations and power dynamics. Central to Foucault's theory concerning the power‐knowledge‐discourse dialectic is the idea that for every force there is resistance. However, his notion of “resistance” is very obscure and for the most part neglected in most of his writing. This analysis offers a slightly different genealogy of resistances, a selective history of disobedience which seeks to improve on Foucault's strategy of genealogy at the same time that it fills the gap left by his inattention to what he deems to be an essential aspect of power. By utilizing de Certeau's concept of “textual poaching,” I present a new genealogy, one which better suggests what resistance might look like in the age of postmodern power dynamics.

Answers to the gaze: A genealogical poaching of resistances

Readers have long assumed that the heroic persona in wellknown Wallace Stevens’s poems such as “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937), “Asides on the Oboe” (1940), and “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” (1942) expresses an ideal version of the poet himself without insurance job distractions. The “impossible possible philosophers’ man” in “Asides” is “The man who has had the time to think enough, / The central man” (lines 13– 14). Even during wartime, this thinker aims for transcendence, something the “metal heroes”—soldiers, perhaps—cannot attain (6). He meditates upon the world and mediates between worlds to create brilliant poetic diamonds. “Central man” is no ethereal deity detached from current events but speaks to Stevens’s oft-noted preoccupation with poetry’s role during global crises such as the Depression. As “the glass man,” he transparently embodies “the place in which / He is” (18–19, 38). Yet by the 1940s, Stevens’s figurations of heroism, whether of a central man or a “major man,” are insistently abstract. “The hero is not a person,” the speaker declares in “Examination” (VIII.1), an idea Charles Altieri expands upon: “Major man is our fiction of our own fullest selfsatisfactions . . . abler in the abstract than in his singular” (150). While fascinated with modernist figurations of heroism, masculinity, and sovereignty during World War II, Stevens insists on the hero’s detachment from worldly sources. Central man could never be General Patton.

Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens

Citations

Power, Modernity, and Historical Geography

Toward a truly pragmatic theory of signs: Reading Peirce's semeiotic in light of Dewey's gloss

Rhetorical Hermeneutics Revisited

Answers to the gaze: A genealogical poaching of resistances

Wallace Stevens's Fascist Dilemmas and Free Market Resolutions

Related Papers (5)

Letters of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things

Wallace Stevens and the Actual World

After the new criticism

On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems