L'ISLE DE GILLIGAN Brian Morton The hegemonic discourse of postmodernity valorizes modes of expressive and "aesthetic" praxis which preclude any dialogic articulation (in, of course, the Bakhtinian sense) of the antinomies of consumer capitalism. But some emergent forms of discourse inscribed in popular fictions contain, as a constitutive element, metanarratives wherein the characteristic tropes of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed. A paradigmatic text in this regard is the television series _Gilligan's Island_, whose seventy-two episodes constitute a master-narrative of imprisonment, escape, and reimprisonment which eerily encodes a Lacanian construct of compulsive reenactment within a Foucaultian scenario of a panoptic social order in which resistance to power is merely one of the forms assumed by power itself. [1] The "island" of the title is a pastoral dystopia, but a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a _differance_ (in, of course, the Derridean sense), for this is a dystopia characterized by the free play of signifier and signified. The key figure of "Gilligan" enacts a dialect of absence and presence. In his relations with the Skipper, the Millionaire, and the Professor, Gilligan is the repressed, the excluded. The Other: He is the id to the Skipper's Ego, the proletariat to the Millionaire's bourgeoisie, Caliban to the Professor's Prospero. [2] But the binarism of this duality is deconstructed by Gilligan's relations with Ginger the movie star. Here Gilligan himself is the oppressor: Under the male gaze of Gilligan, Ginger becomes the Feminine-as-Other, the interiorization of a "self" that is wholly constituted by the linguistic conventions of phallocratic desire (keeping in mind, of course, Saussure's _langue/parole_ distinction). That Ginger is identified as a "movie star" even in the technologically barren confines of the desert island foreshadows Debord's concept of the "society of the spectacle," wherein events and "individuals" are reduced to simulacra. [3] Indeed, we find a stunningly prescient example of what Baudrillard as called the "depthlessness" of American in the apparent "stupidity" of Gilligan and, indeed, of the entire series. [4] The eclipse of linearity effectuated by postmodernity, then, necessitates a new approach to the creation of modes of liberatory/expressive praxis. The monologic and repressive dominance of traditional "texts" (i.e., books) has been decentered by a dialogic discourse in which the "texts" of popular culture have assumed their rightful place. This has enormous implications for cultural and social theory. A journal like _Dissent_, instead of exploring the question of whether socialism is really dead, would make a greater contribution to postmodern discourse by exploring the question of whether Elvis is really dead. This I hope to demonstrate in a future study. - --------------------------------------------------------- FOOTNOTES 1. Gilligan himself represents the transgressive potentialities of the decentered ego. See Georges Thibault, _Jouissance et Jalousie dans L'Isle de Gilligan_, unpublished dissertation on file at the Ecole Normale Superieure (St. Cloud). 2. _Gilligan's Island_ may be periodized into an early, Barthean phase, in which most episodes ended with an exhibition of Gilliganian _jouissance_, and a second phase whose main inspiration is apparently that of Nietzsche, via Lyotard. The absence of any influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought. 3. The 1981 television movie _Escape from Gilligan's Island_ represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been theorized in the series as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. The late 1970s influence of the Kristevan semiotic needs no further comment here. 4. Why do the early episodes privilege a discourse of metonymy? And what of the title--_Gilligan's Island_? In what sense is the island "his"? I do not have the space to pursue these questions here, but I hope to do so in a forthcoming book.