symploke

At the close of Donald Cammell’s last film Wild Side (1995), the female lead Alex (Anne Heche) crosses the Mexican border in the arms of a woman, Virginia (Joan Chen). Having worked as a merchant banker and confronted with the option of having to “turn tricks” with her male clients in order to keep her job, Alex turns hooker of her own accord. She wants her lifestyle and, she says, on her terms. But in the doing she falls into a web of criminal intrigue and she wants out. Succumbing to the wiles of Virginia, the money-laundering pawn of her gangster husband Bruno (Christopher Walken), Alex finds herself stitched into an elaborate scam from which, it appears, there is little chance of escape. But Alex and Virginia hatch a scam of their own, ultimately escaping to the margin Alex had always longed for. Casting a glance over her sleepy new “oriental” lover as they escape over the border into Mexico, Alex comes to the realisation that she belongs at the margin of her own existence; that she belongs in exile. And so goes the closing interior monologue: “Anyway, I’m finally crossing over, into the Third World, where I’ve always known I’ve belonged. I don’t know why.”

While Alex was indeed heading south in the arms of a woman, this was not the film Cammell had in mind. Feigning failure to comprehend the film, arguing it made no apparent structural or commercial sense, financial backers NuImage were already well at work cutting it as a straight-to-video lesbian exploitation flick when Cammell put a gun to his head in 1996. “They were excited by the fact that there was a lot of lesbian sex,” says Frank Mazzola, Cammell’s editor and long-time collaborator. “They were probably thinking, great . . . we’ve just got to get rid of all the extraneous stuff, i.e., the intelligence” (MacNab 26). [End Page 167] Now here’s a scenario: Cammell’s final film, while of some interest if only for the director’s notoriety, especially for his collaboration with Nicolas Roeg on their cult 1970 film Performance (but also for his own taste for young women, drugs, and counter-culture) is itself of little importance here. It does however provide a neat paradigm for the emergence of a new, cynical, and similarly exploitative system or industry in Academe. We have here a narrative—a sort of modernist marginalised verse—an author (here a director, an auteur, even), a subject marginalised in her own homeland and a system of representation (film industry) based on exploitation. We have a nice modernist plot and various interested positions—that is, author, subject, a distributor, a viewer, and a milieu in which all are imbricated in the very same corrupted subject-position. The narrative is calculated to take us away from the hearth and down a course of existential and representative transcendence. The plot points are tied; we are with her all the way. And herein lies the problem.

This very same representative transcendence obtains in near to all cultural and avowedly critical theory in the Humanities today. I want to take a look here at something of a fork in the road of Theory and its various diluted and bastardised forms that have emerged transcendent and even victorious (if lamely so) in the Humanities and social sciences in recent years. Key to this transcendence is a rising chorus of marginalist, minority cant pitched in the (often plausible) discursive manner of its progenitor—that which once was “high” Theory. This move to transcendence, this apparent transgression of the normative—a kind of voluntarist cultural exile—appears in what may be termed the “new marginalism,” a kind of “marginalist verse” that has been emerging with conspicuous faddishness over the past couple of decades or so (viz., cultural studies and its consanguine theoretical “disciplines” born variously of schools of philosophy and comparative literature).

This is, of course, in itself nothing new to the Academy. Philosophical and political posturing have been happy residents here for centuries, their avatars succoured (and now often found preening) in the warm...