"Milk"

An important part of the setting of Melville's "Benito Cereno" is that it takes place in the 1790s, while Melville is writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. I point this out because, from the modern reader's perspective it is easy to overlook, and from the scholar's perspective it is critical to understanding the refractory gaze that Melville means to cast on the institution of slavery in the U.S. It is a kind of condensation of everything that Marxist literary critics, especially of the Jamesonian bent, would insist on in methodology. Always historicize. Critique of the present proceeds through the representations of the past. History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme--wait, that's Twain--I mean, there is a dialectical process that conserves macrostructures and repeats superstructural cycles. "Milk" has that eerie "Benito Cereno" quality of the present existing as more fully itself in a representation of the past.

At a gut level this is simply depressing for me, most of all because I have just moved to California and must bear the albatross of Prop 8. (On the other hand, I moved from Virginia where an equally shameful if less unexpected law was also passed recently). I visited San Francisco the day before I watched "Milk." If some legal battles for gay rights have been won in the intervening years, the sense of a political struggle has faded in contrast to Harvey Milk's clear sightedness. Linking this with a broader historical narrative, it is the sense of political struggle in general that has faded--compare with the incremental erosion of abortion rights.

But what I'm more interested in than a jeremiad on the decline of political thinking is what "Benito Cereno" might mean for its methodological inheritors--not so much Jameson and the critical crowd as for artists and art objects. The premise of "Milk" as somewhat authentic must be that it has political effectivity. (Of course, it might be politically meaningless, bread and circuses--but let's just suspend and disavow that interpretation for the time being). Like "Benito Cereno" we are taken in to an uncertain political milieu (70s San Francisco) through an interlocutor whose allegiances are uncertain. Harvey Milk is the man in the three piece suit when we meet him, and when he becomes the bearded hippy all in denim he is no less knowable by his sartorial signifiers, just as Melville's Babo is knowable because he is small and Black.

But Milk becomes unknowable, even/especially to those around him, when he sees himself as above all a political actor. This is more than his behavior being unpredictable: it is, rather, completely predictable because it is principled, just as the behavior of various establishment figures around him is predictable because it follows certain other principles--essentially, the principle of non-politicization. He is unknowable in the sense that his subjectivity seems to take on its properly philosophical predicates of disconnection from objectivity, but is still in tune with the world of objects. Subjectivity is not hypothetically removed from the world but secretly available through the port of culture, it is really an inaccessible Cartesian subjectivity. This is not proposed as a vindication or reformation of Descartes but as an example of where an eerie dualism seems against all reason to work.

Melville cultivates such an ambiance of eerie dualism in "Cereno" as the narrator and reader are taken on a tour of a fantastic representation of racial power dynamics. In "Milk" the eerie dualism comes in the form of Milk dictating memoirs not long before his death, a death which is announced at the beginning of the film. As an aside that will go unexplored, this leads on to a reading of "Bartleby"'s ghostly attributes in the political terms I have laid out here. The point I really want to make, aside from a de rigueur and empty endorsement of political "thinking," is that if "subjectivity" as philsophy has developed it takes on this meaning through politics, the outward signifiers of subjectivity that scientists and linguists have sought to discover in animals is a dead end. Assume the political significance of animals and their lack of (scientific) "subjectivity" is the condition of subjectivity as we actually find it.