5. "Overdetermined." Are Editors Tolerating a Mess?

 

Here's that word "overdetermined" again, in the latest New York Review: "Fontane was at pains to orchestrate a narrative chain of events that would appear neither overdetermined nor random, but achieve naturally an impression of inevitability" (Phillip Lopate, 2-24-11). I think Lopate means "fixed too rigidly by the author," but if so what does Rachel Saltz, writing in the New York Times (4-27-10) mean when she says, "Mr. Gilroy's drama shuttles between the overdetermined and the absorbing"? Then there's a letter-writer saying an editor had "an obsessed, over-determined air" as he struggled with a book's annotation ("Robert Lowell: An Exchange," 9-25-03). And what do any of them have to do with all those other uses over the years in the Review and the Times to so many different things — processes, choices, prejudices, lives, arguments, meanings, readers? Do you know that irony, modernism, Robespierre's fall, an artifact's symbolism, the October Revolution, a politician's defeat, a man's choice of a career, the harmony of every phrase of tonal music, and an ad about Brooklyn can all be called "overdetermined"? Even "the A-bombing of Japan" gets called "overdetermined." That really puts it to me. I can take "overdetermined" to mean "fixed too firmly" and be back with Lopate, but I can't keep from picturing those pilots. Are they concentrating too hard, as the editor is? I'm very confused.

Maybe, friend, you'd be less confused if you looked into the word's origins. You'd find (if you'll permit me) that it was first used by Freud (Überdeterminierung) to discourage simple interpretations of dreams. Dreams were, in his eyes, a product of many features of the dreamer's life and came from many levels in his or her psyche.  For Louis Althusser political situations were like dreams. They had many sources and could not be fitted onto a thesis-antithesis line as some of his fellow Marxist philosophers wanted to do. The October Revolution could not be called a "thesis" because it was "overdetermined." That's the meaning — "having multiple causes or contributory factors" — that most of the dictionaries finally caught up with. Add it to those meanings that are clearer to you ("fixed too rigidly" and "concentrating too hard"), pay close attention to the context, and you'll be able to understand a lot of those expressions you were worried about.

All right then, when Harold Bloom says some readers were "overdetermined" (NYR 4-26-84) I will know by the context that he means "concentrating too hard." And when Jennifer Schuessler (NYR 6-11-09) says a "choice of career" is overdetermined I will know in the same way that it has many contributory factors. 

But wait a minute. Does Schuessler mean that a choosing of a career is often rendered oversimply by people or that choosing itself is complicated? Is the overdetermination in the thing or is it in how people render the thing?  Schuessler seems to be saying that the choice itself is complicated while Freud's word would have her say that people, like the analysts he was trying to discourage, were oversimplifying a complication.  On one side we've got the overterminer and on the other the overdeterminable.  What are we talking about here, dancer or dance?

But wait.  There are all those leftovers — "overdetermined" as the opposite of "absorbing," and describing the ad about Brooklyn, and summing up "our lives." And what will I do with a work of art as a "richly overdetermined compromise formation"?  Over all there's that word "over." Yet you and the dictionary tell me that "overdetermed" is just supposed to say to me "multiple." That's all Freud and Althusser mean by it. I can't see "over," though, without asking. "So what's right on the mark? How many causes? How bad is it to underdetermine?" I'm at a loss. What's happened is that Freud and Althusser have failed to do what we in America and England tell our college writers to do: when you introduce a new word, or a word you think is going to be hard for your reader, give him a sight of the word's old inside, as "experience" is inside "experiential" and "exponent" is inside "exponential." Freud and Althusser didn't do that. They didn't come close. They put next to their word a word that counters their word's meaning. "Over" cancels its neutrality. The reader has to go outside, to you or to a book of psychology or philosophy, to find that it doesn't. Just as he had to do with "existential." That's asking readers to do too much. Especially when what they get is so little. Work your way back to the neutral meaning, "multiple causes," and what do you have? A commonplace. Very few people think events have single causes. So most of the time the word just points to the obvious. The reader's hard work leads to boredom. It's work the writers could have saved them from if they'd been more careful.

I know, maybe it's the translators who needed to be more careful ("uberdeterminierung" and "surdetermination" may not carry quite the same charge) but either way it's depressing. Our intellectuals are teaching our magazine and newspaper editors to tolerate messes.  After our composition teachers have worked so hard to teach their readers what neatness is. 

Would you like to know what that teaching would require here?  It would require, for neatness, sticking with "complicated" for things and "over-simplified" for too simple representations of them until you saw that a special word from psychology or philosophy added something significant.

Violate that teaching and you're going to get a mess.  "Overdetermined" makes a big mess here because it comes with a license, signed by intellectuals: "This word, and words like it in European psychology and philosophy, don't have to meet the standards you count on."  If we American readers honor that license we can expect to get hung up on many more words like this. Or be bored to death.  Even reading our best newspapers and periodicals.